We’ve reached the part of the chapter where Geisler and Turek pretend to answer the objections of critics, or at least something resembling critics.

Critics may say, “Humans err, so the Bible must err.” But again it’s the critic who is in error. True, humans err, but humans don’t always err. Fallible people write books all the time that have no errors. So fallible people who are guided by the Holy Spirit can write a book without errors.

Geisler and Turek don’t know it, but this brief paragraph—almost a throwaway—brings up a very significant point that will tell against them in their subsequent argument. Maybe it was just an uneasy, guilty feeling: we just got done looking at all 17 “errors” that Dr. Geisler accuses Bible critics of making, but that list came from a different book. In this book, they only looked at four of those “errors,” and the previous section ended with Geisler and Turek accusing critics (yes, critics) of forgetting that the Bible is a human book with human characteristics.

That’s perilously close to admitting that the Bible isn’t really the divinely amazing authority that they think it should be. It’s understandable, then, that they would immediately follow that near-confession with a hurried protest that “of course that doesn’t mean a human book can’t be perfect.” They can’t quite deny that their Scripture has an unmistakably human quality, with all the weaknesses that implies, but they want to assert, regardless, that it is still infallible. So to reassure themselves, they imagine a straw “critic” making the silly argument that the Bible must be wrong because people can be wrong. Easily refuted, but it brings up that one tiny critical point…

Genuine critics, of course, wouldn’t bother arguing that the Bible must be wrong just because people are fallible. They don’t need to: there’s plenty of instances of contradictions and factual errors in the Bible, and those are so much more fun to point out anyway. Geisler and Turek are merely confronting their own uneasy suspicion that the Bible does indeed look like the product of human effort rather than the divine revelation they want it to be. So to buttress their faith, they argue that, even though people can be wrong some times, they can also be right.

That’s a misstep, because what that means is that it’s possible for people to be right about some things and wrong about others at the same time. Humans are fallible: they’re capable of making mistakes even though they don’t always make mistakes. And that means that we can’t assume that a person must be wrong about everything in order to be wrong about anything.

Yet that’s precisely the assumption Geisler and Turek made repeatedly in their discussion of the New Testament manuscripts. Zeroing in on Luke the Evangelist, they pointed out 80-some instances where Luke’s record is consistent with what we know about inconsequential background details like contemporary trade routes, major political figures, and other trivial cultural details. If Luke were going to be wrong about the supernatural stuff, we’re supposed to assume that he would necessarily be wrong about the trivial details as well. We’re supposed to forget that humans can be wrong about some things even when they’re right about others.

Remember, the only truly infallible standard is reality itself, which is why Geisler and Turek appeal to that standard when trying to argue that no detail of Luke’s account can possibly be false or mistaken. Yet even though they use it to judge the reliability of Luke’s mundane account, they mysteriously fail to judge his supernatural claims by the same standard. Even though we know that men are fallible and that all their claims need to be compared to a standard of verifiable objective reality, they treat Luke’s account as though men must either be right about everything, or be wrong about everything. They assume that if Luke got mundane trivialities right, he must have been absolutely infallible about everything he wrote.

They then compound their error by trying to deny that they are reasoning in a circle when it comes to Scriptural infallibility.

“But arent you just arguing in a circle,” the critic might ask, “by using the Bible to prove the Bible?” No, we’re not arguing in a circle, because we’re not starting with the assumption that the Bible is an inspired book.

(Just a quick aside: it’s nice to see Geisler and Turek suddenly remembering, for a change, what their book is supposed to be about. Obviously, they started writing I Don’t Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST under the assumption that “God’s inspired Word” needed some human help, but still, after so many chapters of heedlessly dogmatic apologetic, it’s nice that they occasionally remember the pretense they’re supposed to be putting on.)

We’re starting with several separate documents that have proven beyond a reasonable doubt to be historically reliable. Since those documents reveal that Jesus is God, then we know his teaching on the Old Testament must be true…

And so on and so  on, yada yada yada. Charles Darwin’s observations have been repeatedly verified and validated by thousands of scientists working in fields as diverse as biology, zoology, paleontology, genetics, organic chemistry and even (indirectly) by astronomy, cosmology and nuclear physics, yet that wasn’t enough to establish evolution beyond a reasonable doubt back in Chapter 6. Meanwhile, Luke reports that Paul crossed the Mediterranean Sea by getting into something called a “boat,” and that’s proof beyond a reasonable doubt that all of the claims of the New Testament writers are historically reliable.

And Geisler and Turek want us to believe this, even though they know that the Bible is a human book with human characteristics, written by fallible people who can be wrong about some things even when they’re right about others. And even though the claimed deity of Jesus is based on the things that can’t be shown to be consistent with verifiable reality, details they simply assume are infallible, they deny that they’re assuming the infallibility of the Bible in order to prove the infallibility of the Bible.

They lie.

But maybe that’s not intentional. Maybe, being fallible men themselves, they’re merely mistaken about their own assumptions, and about the fundamental honesty and integrity that ought to be the basis for their book—and isn’t. Maybe they’re simply unaware that their thinking and perceptions are being warped into a fallible and outright deceptive system called a Christian worldview. Maybe they just haven’t realized that if you have to play games with the facts in order to justify your beliefs, it’s a sign that your beliefs aren’t true.

I’m not going to try and second-guess their motives here. The fact remains, though, that by marketing this book they are marketing a seriously malfunctioning and mind-crippling system of thought, as demonstrated by their own inability to recognize and acknowledge the fallacies at the core of their apologetic. Whether or not Geisler and Turek ought to be accused of intentional deception, their product remains a lie, and is worthy of exposure and opposition. And I’m only too happy to oblige.

According to Colson, the DC city council ought to be blamed for the decision freely (if intolerantly) made by the leadership of the Catholic Charities.

On March 3, same-sex “marriage” became legal in the District of Columbia. In connection with the new law, the D.C. Council insisted that, as a city contractor, Catholic Charities had to offer the same benefits to same-sex couples that it did to heterosexual ones.In other words, Catholic Charities had to choose between church teaching and ministering to the city’s neediest residents.

Really, Chuck? Respecting the equality and dignity of all men and women is against church teaching? Because the DC city council isn’t telling anyone in the Catholic Charities that they have to go out and engage in homosexual intercourse. Nor are they denying that the church is legally authorized to preach that homosexuality is a sin, bigoted as that doctrine may be. All they’re saying is that organizations that receive taxpayer dollars must not practice social injustice towards those whose taxes are paying to support them.

It’s really no different than the Biblical teaching of “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s” and “Submit yourselves to those in authority over you”—words that were written in a culture that worshiped Caesar as a god and practiced both homosexual and heterosexual cult prostitution. Yes, you may live in a world whose moral standards are different from your own, but you still need to keep up with your social obligations, of which the first and foremost is your obligation to respect the rights of others.

Sadly, this New Testament attitude is once again completely ignored so that Colson and his fellow false martyrs can wallow in self-pity.

There’s no recognition that what the Washington Post called a “bitter debate” between the District and the Archdiocese was, in fact, a profound infringement of religious freedom–an infringement done at the behest of a tiny minority within a tiny minority.

And it’s so unfair to make people respect the human rights of minorities, isn’t it Chuck? After all, if you can’t oppress a tiny minority, who can you oppress?

Nor was there any acknowledgment that these kinds of infringements aren’t limited to government contractors. Ordinary people are being asked to choose between their livelihood and obedience to their faith-like photographers, landlords, and caterers.

You will also search in vain for mainstream media coverage of the indispensible role played by Christian institutions in caring for the vulnerable and marginalized. Almost 25 percent of the world’s AIDS patients are cared for in Catholic institutions alone. Christian hospitals in the U.S. serve a disproportionate percentage of the urban poor.

All we read about, however, is the Catholic Church’s “stubbornness” or “recalcitrance.”

That’s right, Chuck. Because you guys aren’t just being stubborn and recalcitrant, you’re being dishonest. It’s the Catholic Charities who are using their already underpaid workers as expendable pawns, deliberately mistreating them—voluntarily!—for mere propaganda purposes.

Nobody is denying that Catholic Charities has helped some of the DC area’s poor people. No one is even telling them they can’t continue to do so. The only “infringement” limiting the CC’s outreach is the same sort of “infringement” that disallows human sacrifice as a legal religious practice: our religious freedom is limited to those practices which do not cause material harm to others.

But no respectable religion should find that restriction inconvenient. There are plenty of good deeds that do not require us to practice social injustice, intolerance, or other human rights abuses. The Catholic Charities are perfectly free to continue serving the needy just as they always have. It’s their free choice whether to regard the needs of the poor above their desire for grandstanding and displaying their “righteousness” before men.

It may be that their religion does indeed insist that they display profound bigotry and prejudice towards certain minority groups. Shameful as that may be, it is protected by the Constitution, and they have the right to believe and preach that religion all they want. In many ways, it’s preferable that they do, so that the general public will plainly see the depths of their moral depravity. But should there be any sincere desire to do genuine good, the door remains open, as it always has. They are free to continue to serve.

It’s a black mark against Christianity that believers like Chuck Colson would treat basic respect for human rights as though it were such a terrible attack on the Christian faith. Yet that’s the substance of his long, petulant rant. Boo hoo, Christians aren’t being allowed to harm minorities they disapprove of, how unfair. That makes us so mad we’re going to harm our own people as well. So there.

Jesus must be rolling over in his grave.

Time to wrap up our side-trip into Dr. Norm Geisler’s book When Critics Ask. We’ll pick up today with number 13 on his list of “errors” allegedly made by critics. And 13 seems to be Dr. Geisler’s lucky number because this one is an arguably genuine error:

13. Assuming that round numbers are false.

A good example of this would be the passage about the basin in Solomon’s Temple that, according to the Bible, was ten cubits in diameter and thirty cubits in circumference. As any good geometry student knows, a circle with a 10 cubit diameter would have a circumference of 10 x pi, or roughly 31.416 cubits. Technically speaking, the Bible is “wrong” by about one and a half cubits. But frankly, that’s just being picky. Rounding off awkward numbers is a perfectly normal, acceptable, and understandable practice in ordinary speech (like I did just now with the “one and a half” reference). Besides, there are much more significant errors that disprove Biblical inerrancy much more definitively, so it’s really not worth pressing this particular issue.

The next point isn’t quite so lucky for Dr. Geisler.

14. Neglecting to note that the bible uses different literary devices.

Yeah, the guy who sincerely and with great conviction argues that the creation myths in Genesis 1-10 must be literally true, is accusing Bible critics of failing to recognize the fact that the Bible uses different literary devices to make its points. This is another argument that would be fun to look at in Dr. Geisler’s book itself, because it’s dollars to donuts that he’s using this argument only when the Bible says something he disagrees with. I’ve had similar conversations with creationists, when I pointed out that the Bible uniformly and consistently refers to heaven as a physical location in the sky over Palestine. We know that there’s no throne of God above some “firmament” floating in the sky, and therefore Biblical references to heaven are all metaphor, doncha know. Even when real people allegedly travel, physically, to and from there. Awesome.

15. Forgetting that only the original text, not every copy of scripture, is without error.

Another fun one. Despite the claim that God wants the Bible to be our sole infallible source of moral and spiritual authority, the fact remains that there is nothing magical or supernatural preventing Bibles from containing errors. Even apart from the issue of different translations, not all Bible manuscripts agree, even in the original Greek and Hebrew. There are pieces of the text that have variant readings, and other parts where scholars aren’t sure what the original words and/or meaning were.

Now granted, this amounts to really a very small percentage of the text. Just enough, in fact, to belie the claim that the Bibles we have today are literally infallible. But the discrepancies are there, and consequently Bible scholars have to come up with an excuse to cover the problem. And they have: they assure us that it’s only the original manuscripts that are infallible and without error, and therefore the mistakes we see right in front of us are merely copyists’ errors.

And how do we know that the mistake was not present in the original also? Well, we don’t have the originals, so you can’t prove that the mistake was there, right? Sadly, for some people, that’s all the “proof” they need. But I expect Dr. Geisler would appeal to another argument: textual criticism.

Textual criticism is the art and science of reconstructing the original text by tracing the ancestry of each variant reading. This is exactly the same sort of technique that Drs. Geisler and Turek rejected when discussing the techniques used by evolutionists to trace the ancestry of variant species. Somehow, though, Dr. Geisler has absolutely no qualms about using these same methods to reconstruct the evolution of variant texts in the transmission of the Scriptures.

Nor should he. It’s a perfectly valid technique, and it works just as well and just as reliably whether you’re applying it to uncials or palimpsests or endogenous retroviruses. The problem is that it doesn’t always let you reconstruct the original text exactly and entirely, leaving you with a “preferred reading” that still does not eliminate all the problems and ambiguities. And it doesn’t work for the Old Testament at all, because a group of rabbis called the Masoretes went through and came up with their own OT canon by the simple expedient of destroying all the other variants. Only the Dead Sea scrolls are known to have escaped (and not all of those texts have been released by the Israeli government, which makes you wonder what’s in them that needs to be kept so secret, eh?).

16. Confusing general statements with universal ones.

Aka the “all does not mean all” defense. Jesus said, “With God, all things are possible,” but what he actually meant by that was that with God, all things that are possible are possible. Um, yeah, it would be hard for a statement like that to be false, don’t you think? You could use that slogan to sell a lot of things. “With Smirnoff, all things that are possible, are possible.” Hey, I’ll buy that!

What Dr. Geisler claims is an error made by critics is really a quibble raised by apologists, and it’s based on a fundamental and inescapable weakness of all Scripture-based authority systems: interpretations are debatable. You have to interpret a document, because a text can’t explain itself. It’s not like a living prophet or apostle, whom you could dialog with and who could clarify what he meant by this or that term. If the Bible says that “all Israel will be saved” and some critic points out that not all Israel will be saved, you can quibble over what “all” means, or what “saved” means, or who “Israel” refers to. There’s no objective, external, and unambiguous standard for determining which interpretation is correct. Every believer is free to believe whatever interpretation seems right in his own eyes.

Thus, whenever a critic points out problems with what the Bible says, whether it’s about general/universal statements or anything else a critic might see as a problem, Dr. Geisler can claim that the critic is merely committing an error of interpretation. He does not need to prove, or even define, what the “correct” interpretation should be, and he can even change his own interpretation in midstream as needed to dodge the issue of the moment. There’s no fixed standard for what the correct interpretation must be, and therefore it’s always safe for the apologist to accuse the critic of having a wrong interpretation.

17. Forgetting that latter revelation supersedes previous revelation.

That’s what’s so great about Eternal, Universal and Unchanging Truth—when your side wins the theological debate, you get to pick a new Eternal, Universal and Unchanging Truth. It “supersedes” the old Truth, like magic. And if you call now, we’ll even let you keep your old Truth, absolutely free!

In science, new discoveries supersede old ones because the old ones were fallible and inaccurate, and subject to improvement as we learn more about the real world. Christian apologists, however, have to maintain the myth that the Bible does not contradict itself, and has never been fallible or inaccurate. How do they do it? Easy: when you find a problem with the teachings of the Old Testament, they just say, “Oh, that doesn’t matter, because we have the New Testament now.” The problem has been “superseded,” allowing the apologist to simply gloss over it and ignore it.

But you can’t get rid of a problem just by declaring that the old Infallible Truth has now been superseded. If you’re going to have an Eternal and Unchanging God, with an Eternal and Unchanging Moral Law that dictates what it does and does not take to please Him, then sweeping and significant changes in His alleged True Faith should not happen. There shouldn’t be a need for reforms. God shouldn’t have released a version that He knew was going to need radical changes for the 2.0 release. Poor quality control is a sign of shoddy workmanship.

Ok, that’s a bit facetious. What it’s really a sign of is men taking an old religion and simply adapting it to new purposes (predictably, with themselves as the ones in charge of the new religion).

This goes back to the whole Myth Hypothesis vs Gospel Hypothesis issue. If you begin by knowing that Christianity must be the One True Faith, and you work your way backwards to some plausible-sounding scenario directed at achieving your apologetic goals, then you can sketch out a plot in which some already-established religion lends its “brand recognition” to your new faith just before being “superseded” by it. But that’s rationalization, thinking backwards to achieve a predetermined conclusion.

If we start with the premise that there exists a loving Heavenly Father Who knows how to save His children from Hell, why not just do that first? It’s just as educational, and beneficial, and it rescues untold numbers of innocent animals from being made to suffer so that wicked humans can escape the consequences of their sins. There’s no need to start off with some imperfect Old Religion that would need to be superseded. Just do it the right way first.

So if we think about the logical consequences of each hypothesis, it’s easy to see that the facts are much more consistent with the theory that Christianity is just men essentially vampirizing Judaism. Christianity, being a mere human invention, needs to attach itself to Judaism in order to absorb its established legitimacy—having no life of its own (to start with) it needs a living host to feed from. A genuine religion, ordained by God before the foundation of the world, would not need to take such a parasitic and detrimental approach: it could just as easily bestow the best and most effective religion from the very start.

And we’re done with our little side trip. Seventeen alleged “errors” that Dr. Geisler uses to try and evade the problems in his fallible, erroneous and superstitious Bible, and of these, only a couple of the minor objections are even reasonable. And none of this would be an issue in the first place if it weren’t for his God’s consistent, universal, and undeniable absence from real life.

If Dr. Geisler had a God that was willing and able to behave as though He believed what the Bible says about Him, we wouldn’t need an infallible Word of God because we’d have the actual God Himself. He supposedly loves us enough to die for us so that He could be with us, and supposedly has the power to pull it off, and to eliminate the last obstacle separating us from Him, so He’d be both willing and able to show up to participate, in person, in that relationship He worked so hard to make possible.

In which case, apologists like Dr. Geisler would be out of a job. Makes you think, don’t it?

We’re going a little bit beyond the Geisler and Turek book right now to have a look at the 18 “errors” that Bible critics allegedly make, at least according to Dr. Geisler’s book When Critics Ask. We only made it through the first five last week, so let’s jump right in and get started, shall we?

6. Basing a teaching on an obscure passage

This one seems like Dr. Geisler is padding his list just a bit, since it’s really just a special case of #5, Failing To Let Easy Passages Explain Difficult Ones. Christians, for example, have no problem basing teachings on obscure passages (or even non-existent ones) without any qualms about the legitimacy of this approach. It’s only when they disagree with someone else’s interpretation that “based on an obscure passage” becomes an issue.

From an apologist’s perspective, though, it’s good to plant the suggestion that it’s wrong to base teachings on obscure passages, because then whenever you get in trouble with your Bible text you can just declare the passage to be “obscure” (rather than wrong or self-contradictory), and that allows you to simply dismiss your critics on the grounds that they’re committing Error #6. It’s a good technique for getting rid of hard problems without actually addressing them.

7. Forgetting that the Bible is a human book with human characteristics

Yes, you read that right. While arguing that the Bible is the supernaturally inspired, infallible and authoritative Word of God, Dr. Geisler accuses the Bible’s critics of forgetting that it’s a human book with human characteristics. Word.

8. Assuming that a partial report is a false report

This is actually a fairly clever, if sneaky, rhetorical maneuver. One of the problems with stories that improve with the telling is that, when you have written records of both the original version and the “improved” version, you can see the details that were added. Likewise, when one writer records one “improved” version and another records a slightly different “improved” version, you can see where the two variants have had different details added.

Usually, the embellishment of an urban legend takes place through the adding of details that were not previously in the story, as the re-teller unconsciously tries to fill in the gaps in the original. It’s less common for someone to deliberately contradict a detail that’s already in the story, though it does sometimes happen.

This situation allows Dr. Geisler to claim that, since the later details are, in many cases, not outright contradictions of the earlier versions of the story, Bible critics are committing Error #8 when they notice that later versions of the stories have added embellishments. That way he avoids needing to explain why there’s visible myth-building going on in the Bible accounts, and can dismiss the “difficulty” as being an error on the part of the critics, even if they’re not claiming an explicit contradiction.

The problem (for Dr. Geisler anyway) is that not all of these variations are so easily reconcilable. For example, in Matt. 28:1-10, we are told a version of the Resurrection story in which the women, arriving at the tomb, see an angel who descends from heaven, rolls away the stone, and tells them outright that Jesus has risen from the dead. They immediately run to go tell the disciples, and on the way they meet the risen Jesus himself, who confirms the angel’s message.

Mark’s version of this same story repeats the idea that an angel told them Jesus had risen from the dead, but adds that the women ran away and told no one. Luke, on the other hand, says no, the women did go and tell the disciples, and Peter ran to the tomb and found it empty, but did not believe the women’s stories, and oh by the way there were two angels telling the women about the resurrection.

John’s version agrees that there were two angels, but insists that when Mary Magdalene (and the other women?) came to the disciples, she/they reported nothing about a risen Jesus, but only that the tomb was empty and that she/they did not know where the body had been taken. Also, according to John, Mary Magdalene was the only one who saw the two angels, and she didn’t see them until after Peter and John ran to the tomb and found it empty (John seems to have added himself to the story at this point). And these angels were sitting inside the tomb instead of standing outside it. And so on.

Lots of conflicts and inconsistencies here as far as the participants involved, the order of the events, whether or not Jesus appeared, to whom, and when, and what the women (or woman) told the disciples to get one (or two) of them to check out the tomb. Dr. Geisler’s attempt to deal with all these variations is to point out that if one story says there were two angels and the other mentions only one, then that’s not a contradiction. Here’s the summary Geisler and Turek offer:

As we have seen, it’s not a contradiction if one Gospel writer says he saw one angel at the tomb and another says he saw two. Matthew doesn’t say there was only one. And if there were two, there certainly was (at least) one! So divergence doesn’t always mean contradiction. Instead it often suggest genuine eyewitness testimony.

Isn’t it cool the way you can make all the other inconsistencies just disappear by focusing exclusively on whether seeing two angels is roughly the same as seeing one angel? Matthew wasn’t even there, and yet somehow, by the magic of apologetics, he’s an eyewitness testifying about how many angels he saw. The Bible critics must be committing Error #8, you see, and therefore we don’t have to pay any attention to critics when they point out contradictions in the Bible. Ah well, moving on…

9. Demanding that NT citations of the OT always be exact quotations

Another popular apologetics ploy: blame the critic for being so darn critical. After all, how dare you demand that God’s inspired prophets be familiar enough with His word to quote it accurately? Hmm, well now that you mention it, that doesn’t sound all that unreasonable, so Dr. Geisler changes it to suggest that critics are demanding exact quotations. That sounds a little more nit-picky, doesn’t it?

The problem is that OT passages cited in the NT are sometimes misquoted in ways that change the meaning of the original text. For example, Matthew quotes Isaiah 7:14—part of a prediction of the destruction of the kingdoms of Aram and Samaria—as though it were a prediction of Messianic virgin birth. Thus, Matthew is guilty of Dr. Geisler’s Error #4 (Failure To Consider Context), but more than that, he changes a key pronoun.

Isaiah’s original prophecy was that a virgin (or maiden) would conceive and have a son, and would name him Immanuel. Mary, however, did not name her son Immanuel, she named him Jesus. The Facebook generation would call that a “Prophecy Fail,” so Matthew just changes the pronoun and makes it “they shall call his name ‘Immanuel’ which means ‘God with us’.” One tiny, well-placed change that makes it sound like Isaiah was anticipating a child who would have the reputation of being God Incarnate, even though this is not at all the actual topic in Isaiah 7.

If we want to know whether Jesus is really fulfilling prophecy or if the Gospels merely twist the Scriptures to suit their own purposes, this is an important factor. It’s not that we insist on unreasonably precise quotations, we just want accurate quotes. If we find that OT passages have been distorted in ways that obscure the original meaning and introduce entirely new and foreign ideas, then that’s a problem that needs to be addressed. Simply accusing people of Error #9 doesn’t resolve the issue.

10. Assuming that divergent accounts are false ones

Déjà vu, eh? We covered this one under Error #8. Let’s move on.

11. Presuming that the Bible approves of all its records

This is the “out” that apologists use whenever anyone notices Biblical heroes behaving wickedly and/or immorally. “We’re not saying that it was right for David to have Uriah murdered so he could take Uriah’s wife, the Bible is merely recording the fact that he did.” There is some validity to this argument, and there have been some critics who have used the sins of the patriarchs as evidence that the Bible is not inspired. Such cases can indeed be addressed by pointing out that the Bible does not endorse everything it records.

What’s less amenable to this sort of exoneration, however, are the numerous instances where God is the Biblical hero Who is threatening to punish children for the sins of their parents, or Who is impregnating someone else’s fiancee, or Who is commanding His followers to commit genocide, or Who is condoning and directing slavery and instructing slave-owners in how to get around the rules that ostensibly liberate all slaves every 7 years. It’s one thing to say the Bible merely records man’s sins without approving of them, but God’s? That’s a tough one.

12. Forgetting that the Bible uses non-technical, everyday language

This one is kind of funny. I wish we had time to do the whole book of When Critics Ask, but I’m just guessing that he’s not going to use this one to explain things like the talking snake in Genesis 3!

Error #12 tries to account for the fact that the people who wrote the Bible didn’t know as much as we do now about the real world and how it works. Such ignorance can be embarrassingly obvious at times (like when God doesn’t get around to creating the sun until the 4th day). Dr. Geisler’s excuse is that the Bible is using non-technical, everyday language, so we shouldn’t expect it to meet the rigorous standards of peer-reviewed scientific literature. It’s a variation on the same ploy as in #9: trying to make critics sound unreasonably demanding.

But it’s one thing to use ordinary everyday language, and something else entirely to have a world view in which heaven is a physical place on the other side of a waterproof barrier in the sky above the Palestine. Yet that is an assumption that the Bible refers to routinely in both Old and New Testaments. When we talk about doors opening up in the waterproof barrier so that the rain can come down (or the prophet/Messiah can go up), that’s non-technical everyday language all right. But even describing it in technical terms would fail to address the fact that no such heaven is actually up there! Yet that’s the heaven Christians are waiting for Jesus to come back from, because that’s the heaven the Bible says he went to and is looking down on us from.

I could do a whole series of posts on the Biblical view of heaven as a literal place in the sky (and perhaps I should some day), but the bottom line is that the Bible isn’t just using layman’s terms, it’s expressing the ideas and assumptions of ignorant and superstitious men. Nor is heaven the only example, though it’s arguably the most pervasive. The Bible records the understanding of men who believed myth and reality were the same thing, and you can’t get around that fact by claiming they were “just using non-technical language.”

Twelve down and five to go, so let’s pick this up again next week.

There’s an old quip that’s been reprinted on countless T-shirts, plaques, posters and such. It goes like this:

Rule 1: The boss never makes mistakes.

Rule 2: If the boss makes a mistake, see Rule #1.

Rule 3: Any mistakes not covered by Rule #2, see Rule #1.

It may not sound theological at first glance, but see if anything sounds familiar in Geisler and Turek’s discussion of Bible inerrancy:

So what happens when we think we’ve found an error in the Bible? Augustine had the answer. “If we are perplexed by any apparent contradiction in Scripture,” he wisely noted, “it is not allowable to say, ‘The author of this book is mistaken’; but either the manuscript is faulty, or the translation is wrong, or you have not understood.”

This is rather a significant point, because the it shows that the modern Christian concept of Biblical inerrancy is based on centuries, not to say millennia, of Christian teachers in denial. It is simply “not allowable” to admit that there are contradictions in the Bible. By definition, if we find a mistake in the Bible, it only proves that we—not the Scriptures—are mistaken. See Rule #1.

Small wonder, than, that Christians are unable to find any errors in the Scripture when they’re working under Augustine’s rules.

Of course as Bible scholars have known since before Augustine, there are errors and contradictions in the Bible. If there weren’t, no one would need to make rules disallowing people from noticing them. That’s a problem for Bible-believing Christians, because it shows that the Bible is not the Truth they’re looking for. One man’s problem is another man’s opportunity, though, and for Dr. Geisler it’s a perfect chance to plug one of his other books.

In When Critics Ask, we identify seventeen errors typically made by critics. Here is a summary of just four of them.

And if you like the four you see, you’ll want to run right out and buy the other thirteen rationalizations excuses explanations for why Bible “difficulties” don’t count. But why stop at four? Let’s have a look at Geisler’s complete list of seventeen “errors” allegedly made by Bible critics.

1. Assuming that the unexplained is not explainable
2. Presuming the Bible guilty until proven innocent
3. Confusing our fallible interpretations with God’s infallible revelation
4. Failing to understand the context of the passage.
5. Neglecting to interpret difficult passages in the light of clear ones
6. Basing a teaching on an obscure passage
7. Forgetting that the Bible is a human book with human characteristics
8. Assuming that a partial report is a false report
9. Demanding that NT citations of the OT always be exact quotations
10. Assuming that divergent accounts are false ones
11. Presuming that the Bible approves of all its records
12. Forgetting that the Bible uses non-technical, everyday language
13. Assuming that round numbers are false
14. Neglecting to note that the bible uses different literary devices
15. Forgetting that only the original text, not every copy of scripture, is without error
16. Confusing general statements with universal ones
17. Forgetting that latter revelation supersedes previous revelation

Ironically, point number one pretty much sums up the whole first half of I Don’t Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST. We can’t explain (or at least, Geisler and Turek can’t explain) how this or that feature ended up in the universe, and therefore it’s unexplainable, and therefore supernatural, and therefore there is a single personal intelligent God Who can only communicate with us through an infallible Book. When critics assume that the unexplained is unexplainable, it’s an error. When Geisler and Turek do it, it’s a full seven chapter’s worth of “evidence.”

The problem with presenting this argument as a critical “error” is that it overlooks the distinction between problems due to ignorance and problems due to contradiction. In the first half of their book, Geisler and Turek argue that the mysteries of nature are unexplainable just because science has not yet figured out all the answers. That’s a different problem than trying to explain why one passage of Scripture says that Tyre will cease to exist after Nebuchadnezzar, and other passages that say Paul found it a thriving city of trade centuries later. Problems that stem from our ignorance are not inexplicable; we just need to learn more. Problems that come from outright contradictions, however, are genuine problems. “Error” number one is just Geisler accusing critics of failing to consider the possibility of rationalization.

“Error” number 2 is just as insubstantial. “Presuming the Bible guilty until proven innocent” might just as easily be phrased as “failing to assume that the Bible is correct.” It’s an excuse for believers to retreat behind a presumption of innocence that demands an absurdly high standard of critical evidence to disprove—not just proof beyond a reasonable doubt, but proof beyond all possible conceivable potential for doubt. But that’s backwards. It’s not the critic’s job to explain the difficulties, it’s up to the apologists to show that the Biblical record is consistent with itself, with Christian teaching, and with reality. If they can. Accusing critics of evil assumptions is just an ad hominem red herring.

Number 3, “Confusing our fallible interpretations with God’s infallible revelation,” is the old scam that allows believers to claim infallible authority (because their teachings are based on God’s infallible revelation) while at the same time disclaiming any accountability for mistakes in their teachings (because it’s just “our fallible interpretations”). If you don’t have an infallible interpretation then you don’t have an infallible revelation. Even if the “revelation” were infallible as written, it’s worthless unless it can enter your understanding infallibly. If it can’t, then what you possess in your understanding is not infallible revelation, and thus not a basis for infallible authority.

Number 4 (”Failing to understand the context of the passage”) might actually be valid in some circumstances, so we’d have to consider that one on a case-by-case basis. Number 5, however, is the Golden Loophole, so let’s take a moment to zero in on that one.

According to Geisler and Turek, critics err by “[n]eglecting to interpret difficult passages in the light of clear ones.” This is a reference to the Protestant practice of using the clear and simple passages of the Bible illuminate one’s understanding of the obscure and difficult passages. Buying into this principle, however, guarantees that you will end up with a highly personalized and subjective understanding of the Bible, because different people are going to have a different perception of which passages are “clear” and “simple.”

For example, James 2, in discussing the relationship between faith, good works, and salvation, declares that “man is justified by works and not by faith alone” (v. 24). In Ephesians 2, by contrast, Paul says, “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not as a result of works, that no one may boast.”

The English translation of Eph. 2 doesn’t convey the full grammatical sense of the original, in which the word “that” (in the phrase “and that not of yourselves”) is singular neuter, whereas the word it appears to modify (”faith”) is singular feminine. The pronoun, thus, might be a bit ambiguous, as might the following “it.” Is Paul referring to salvation, or to grace, or to the fact that God graciously chose to save us through faith? What is it that is not “a result of works,” the grace, the salvation, the faith?

In terms of the complexity of the sentence, it would seem that Paul’s statement ought to be the difficult one, and James’ the more clear and easy one. Yet for millions of Protestants, it is the other way around: the “clear” passage is Ephesians 2:8-9, which they use as a guide to the “true” meaning of James 2. And James 2, despite its simple grammar and clear logic is “difficult” because it contradicts the Protestant doctrine of salvation by faith alone. That’s right, you can designate a Bible passage as “difficult” just because fails to teach what you think it should.

That’s why there are so many Protestant sects, divisions, movements, and so on. Each person starts with the passages that seem “clear and obvious” in his own eyes, which naturally will be the passages that appear most consistent with what he already sees as true. These passages then become the foundational concepts upon which he constructs his understanding of the more “difficult” passages—suitably interpreted by the “clear and easy” ones, of course. And the end result is that he builds up a unique, personal network of interpretations that reflect whatever seems right in his own eyes.

“Error” number 5, therefore, boils down to accusing critics of failing to make the mistake that leads believers into ascribing divine authority to their own personal opinions, via the mechanism of using “easy” Bible passages to construct a personal belief system.

By the way, there’s enough commonality in human nature that we can find groups of people with similar initial beliefs (e.g. the Fred Phelps gang, liberal Christians, legalistic Christians, charismatic Christians, and so on), so it’s easy to see why believers might be fooled into thinking they and their peers had really “found it.” You and I are enough alike that the same passages seem “clear” and “obvious,” so in sharing our Bible interpretations, we tend to validate each other. But the real basis of our faith is subjective, i.e. what is it that seems “clear and obvious” to each of us personally. We call it “Bible based,” but it’s actually our own subjective opinions dressed up in chapters and verses. Sounds like spirituality, but smells like ego. Go figure, eh?

This looks like a good stopping point for this week. Hmm, 5 down and 12 to go. This may take another post or two. Tune in again next time…

The people most inconvenienced by the blizzards weren’t the residents of this region, or the senators-it was the proponents of man-made global warming. Scientists and activists insisted that people on this side of the Atlantic ignore the evidence in their driveways and, instead, trust their computer models.

According to Colson, you can disprove global warming just by pointing out that it’s still snowing.

10 years ago, they told us that, on account of the same global warming, “snow is starting to disappear from our lives.” We were told that, because of all that nasty CO2, British children “just aren’t going to know what snow is.”

Ten years later, they most certainly do. Not only British children, but children in every state except Hawaii. All of Britain, much of the rest of Europe, and the United States have experienced snowfalls this winter. The data suggests, in fact, that “snow is coming earlier and heavier than it used to.”

Ah yes, “they” told us. Nice to have an unimpeachable source, isn’t it?

Well, first things first: what is global warming? Are we talking about the average temperature going so high that in a mere 10 years snow would stop falling in England entirely? No. Climatologists are concerned about changes in average global temperatures of only a few degrees over many years, not the tens of degrees it would take to prevent frozen precipitation from occurring during England’s winters.

Granted, the original quote seems to have been made by a Dr. David Viner of the University of East Anglia. Colson chose not to cite the article he’s quoting from (perhaps to avoid having people find out that Dr. Viner also predicted occasional heavy snows that “will probably cause chaos” in the next decade or so?), but he is probably right to suggest that such dire predictions are unlikely in the short term. Maybe Dr. Viner was exaggerating or misquoted, but it seems a bit much to claim that global warming will make the snow stop falling any time soon.

But consider what happens if the average global temperature rises only a few degrees, say 3°F. Around where I live that might mean a winter where the temperature hovered around 24°F instead of 21°F (i.e. -4°C instead of -6°C for you metric folks). Too warm to snow? Of course not. But increased warmth can have other consequences…

What Colson is forgetting is that we don’t all have the same seasons at the same time. It’s winter in the northern hemisphere right now, but it’s summer for the other half of the planet. And in the warmer parts of the planet, weather is being driven by a number of factors, including one we call “evaporation.”

Evaporation is what puts water into the atmosphere so that it can return to the surface again as rain or snow. Warmer global temperatures mean increased evaporation, which means more moisture in the atmosphere, which means greater precipitation. If Colson had been watching his weather maps, he might have noticed that these unusually heavy snowfalls did not blow down on the east coast from the frigid reaches of northern Canada. They blew up from warmer regions around the Gulf of Mexico.

Thus, it’s not climatologists who are ignoring the evidence in their driveways, it’s Colson. He even admits it, albeit indirectly and with exaggerated incredulity.

Not only did they tell us that this winter’s weather didn’t disprove their global warming data, they told us that the record snows were caused by global warming. Really!

Um, yes, Chuck, really. As amazing as it may sound to you, people whose experience and expertise lie in areas of science that you don’t understand might just know more about what they’re saying than you on the topic of climatology. One snowstorm doesn’t prove global warming of course, but it’s hardly the refutation of science that Colson makes it out to be!

But Colson’s not stopping there, not by a long shot.

If all of the white stuff hasn’t left you doubting those computer models, maybe Phil Jones can help you. That would be ironic since, until recently, Jones was the director of the Climate Research Unit at Britain’s East Anglia University. He was the keeper of the data upon which the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) based its predictions-data that has been, to put it mildly, called into question.

In an interview with the BBC, Jones acknowledged that there has been no significant warming since 1995. Let me repeat that. One of the world’s leading global warming advocates says there has been no significant warming since 1995. Fifteen years.

That sounds like a pretty damning admission if true. But notice that Colson once again omitted the citation that would let us track down the source of his quote. Could it be that he doesn’t want his readers to find out what Jones really said?

B – Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming

Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.

Notice, the reason Dr. Jones is careful to say that there’s no “statistically significant” warming in the past 15 years is not because he failed to find a warming trend, but because in climatology a 15 year time span is too short. The temperature has been rising at a rate of about a tenth of a degree per decade, but in the interests of accuracy, he’s insisting that we ought to base our conclusions on trends measured over a longer period of time—trends which do show global warming.

That’s rather a different perspective than the spin Colson is trying to put on it, isn’t it? But he’s still not done yet. Here’s Colson’s next observation, based on Jones’ interview:

He also indicated that there is nothing exceptional about the warming the occurred between 1979 and 1995.

Compare this with what Jones actually said:

As for the two periods 1910-40 and 1975-1998 the warming rates are not statistically significantly different (see numbers below).I have also included the trend over the period 1975 to 2009, which has a very similar trend to the period 1975-1998.

So, in answer to the question, the warming rates for all 4 periods are similar and not statistically significantly different from each other.

Here are the trends and significances for each period:

Period Length Trend (Degrees C per decade) Significance 1860-1880 21 0.163 Yes 1910-1940 31 0.15 Yes 1975-1998 24 0.166 Yes 1975-2009 35 0.161 Yes

So what Jones originally said was that there are four sizable time periods during which significant warming can be documented and that these trends are not significantly different from each other. Colson tries to make it sound like Jones is saying that there wasn’t any unusual warming between 1979 and 1998, but that’s not what Jones is saying at all.

One caveat: I’m assuming that Colson was making his claim in connection with the above quote from the original interview, though the dates don’t quite match. But perhaps he was referring to this question instead:

D – Do you agree that natural influences could have contributed significantly to the global warming observed from 1975-1998, and, if so, please could you specify each natural influence and express its radiative forcing over the period in Watts per square metre.

This area is slightly outside my area of expertise. When considering changes over this period we need to consider all possible factors (so human and natural influences as well as natural internal variability of the climate system). Natural influences (from volcanoes and the Sun) over this period could have contributed to the change over this period. Volcanic influences from the two large eruptions (El Chichon in 1982 and Pinatubo in 1991) would exert a negative influence. Solar influence was about flat over this period. Combining only these two natural influences, therefore, we might have expected some cooling over this period.

This, however, isn’t even remotely like the what Colson claims Jones is saying. Jones is saying that, if manmade causes were not contributing to global warming, we ought to have expected a cooling trend between 1975 and 1998, due to the shading effect of volcanic ash in the upper atmosphere from two major volcanic eruptions. That cooling did not happen. Instead we observed a net increase in average global temperature between 1975 and 2009, per the chart above. So what the hell is Colson talking about?

Colson does do something I’ve never heard a denialist do before. Or at least, he tries to. The one thing I’ve never understood about all this global warming denialism is why all these professional climatologists and researchers would allegedly lie about it. Outside of cartoon villains, people don’t just spontaneously do evil things that involve large amounts of time and effort for no tangible reward. So what’s supposed to be motivating the scientists? Here’s Colson’s slanderous guess:

Why? It’s a matter of worldview.

Activists and scientists have too much invested in human-caused global warming. For activists, it’s the threat by which they can create their version of a better world, and scientists have staked their careers and reputations on the accuracy of those computer models.

Um, right. Only the thing is, Chuck, that there are lots of eager young grad students (let alone all the know-it-all denialists) who would just love to kick-start their scientific careers by coming up with an even more accurate model. If the old scientists were, you know, lying about global warming, that would make it easier for someone to come up with a model that worked better. Almost any car will go faster than one that won’t even start.

Real scientists are always checking each other’s work, and engaging in vigorous, (mostly) friendly competition. Anybody who resorts to fudging his or her results in front of the experts is just setting themselves up for failure. If you’re staking your career and reputation on the accuracy of your computer model, the last thing you want to do is get yourself entrenched in defending an obsolete and inadequate model!

Colson isn’t going to understand this, of course. Defending obsolete and inadequate models is what Christian apologetics is all about, so naturally he assumes that scientists must be doing the same thing. He needs a “worldview” to insulate him from facts that might otherwise lead him to reassess his conclusions, so in his mind that’s what scientists must be doing too.

The result is that conservative Christians like Colson are among the foremost of those who boldly and ignorantly declare that the experts must be wrong and that we must not interfere in the profits of the wealthy merely to prevent environmental disaster. Like Bush ignoring repeated warnings about Saddam’s lack of WMD’s, they proudly and smugly turn their backs on the advice of those who know more about it than they do. Anything else would be a failure to walk by faith. Or something.

Sigh.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I still need to go do some more shoveling.

The study followed 662 African American sixth and seventh graders for two years. Some were placed in the abstinence program, others in a comprehensive course that included discussion of abstinence and condom use. Another group participated in a program that dealt only with safer sex, and a final group of control subjects did a workshop on nutrition…

Of 95 students who said they were virgins at the start of the abstinence training, 33 percent reported that they had sex within the next two years.

By comparison, 41 percent of the virgins in the comprehensive course went on to have sex in the two-year window. For the control group, the figure was 47 percent.

In a sample this size, the difference between the comprehensive class and the abstinence class – 33 percent vs. 41 percent – was not statistically significant, said Jemmott, so it is accurate to say they performed comparably.

And here’s Chuck Colson reporting the same story:

A landmark study on sex education draws a surprising conclusion. Well, you and I aren’t surprised, but the media and the educational establishments are. The study found that abstinence-based sex education works better than any other form of sex ed.

He’s right. I’m not surprised at all.

All right, I admit, what fails to surprise me is the disconnect between the facts of the story and the smugly triumphant way Colson tries to spin the story. But Colson wants to make it sound surprising that a scientific study actually produced evidence supporting (or allegedly supporting) abstinence-only sex education. And in a way he’s right: there have been a number of studies done, and they’ve all consistently failed to support the idea that abstinence-only sex ed does much good, if any. So it would be surprising if this study showed a result that was inconsistent with all the others.

What’s “landmark” about this study, then, is the fact that it’s the first time Christians like Colson have found one they can actually twist to suit their own purposes. The sample size is small enough, the margin of error large enough, and the difference in scores has the appearance, at least, of making abstinence ed look better. These days Christians like Colson are desperate enough that they’ll take any excuse they can get, jumping to the conclusions they favor, and ignoring the caveats of the professionals.

And that’s not all they’re ignoring. The author of the study, Penn sociologist John Jemmott, reports that what made his abstinence-ed program unique was that he deliberately removed the sect-friendly elements found in the abstinence programs pushed by evangelicals. According to Jemmott, the abstinence program he followed

would not have qualified for federal funding during the Bush administration. Those programs required an emphasis on abstaining until marriage, whereas Jemmott’s involved no preaching and no denigrating the effectiveness of contraception…

The abstinence class included a number of interactive exercises, Jemmott said. For example, the students were asked to think about their hopes five and 10 years in the future. Then they had to consider the consequences of a pregnancy on their plans.”It’s designed to be fun,” Jemmott said. “There are games where they can win points, and role-playing and other upbeat activities. There’s no preaching, and it’s not moralistic.”

Wow, a reality-based abstinence program? I like it myself (as long as it’s not the only material offered). The program wisely avoids the common evangelical trap of trying to persuade kids that they have to wait for marriage, and focuses instead on the much more realistic goal of convincing kids to merely delay sexual involvement. Not because sex is “sinful” or because some spoilsport deity wants to hold it just out of reach, but because the kids know what the consequences are, and decide for themselves that waiting will make them happier.

Of course, you’ll never hear Colson report that the study found a significant improvement in abstinence classes that eliminate Christian moral preaching! That may be one of the “landmark” distinctives of this particular study, but that’s not anything Colson is going to want just anyone to notice.

The Christian agenda for abstinence-only sex education is part of a bigger agenda for sexual control. Conservative Christians are trying to produce a government-enforced monopoly on sex, with Christians in control of who is and is not allowed to participate. God has decreed that there will be no sex outside of marriage, and He’s the only one Who can bestow the blessing of marriage on those He favors (as determined by…guess who).

The result is that, in the hopes and dreams of conservative Christians, people who want sex will have to submit to Christianity in order to obtain it. Christians control the supply by eliminating the competition of extramarital sex and by maintaining a monopoly on marriage. After all, since their God does not show up in real life, they have to have some motivation for people to turn to their religion!

Chuck Colson’s deceitful promotion of abstinence-only education is in no way motivated by any kind of concern for kids. What he and his cohorts are after is to harness the power of sex, and to use it as a tool to convert people. It may not be a conscious conspiracy, and in fact it’s highly likely that simple greed and selfishness are what motivate believers to want to monopolize sexual power. But there’s no question that they are seeking this monopoly, or that they consider themselves legitimately entitled to decide how, when, and with whom, everybody else is allowed to have sex.

[O]ver at the Disco Institute, resident Legal Eagle Casey Luskin has started posting an eight-part series on how the Kitzmiller case (the legal case concerning the teaching of intelligent design in Dover PA) was decided wrong.

Dr. Chu-Carroll proceeds to disassemble Luskin’s rather pathetic argument (as does Dr. Wesley Elsberry), and I recommend following the links and reading their analyses. What caught my eye, however, was the way Luskin not only bungles his case, but inadvertently pulls the rug out from under one of William Dembski’s main arguments.

Here’s a quick overview of Luskin’s argument:

The plaintiffs’ attorneys, working with the NCSE, successfully convinced Judge Jones to parrot Miller by stating in the Kitzmiller v. Dover ruling that Miller had “pointed to more than three dozen peer-reviewed scientific publications showing the origin of new genetic information by evolutionary processes.”

Virtually all of those “publications” mentioned by Judge Jones came from one single paper Miller discussed at trial, a review article, co-authored by Manyuan Long of the University of Chicago. The article does not even contain the word “information,” much less the phrase “new genetic information”…

But are Judge Jones’s, Ken Miller’s, and the NCSE’s bold proclamations supported? Does Long et al. actually reveal the origin of new biological information? Is Explore Evolution wrong? A closer look shows that the NCSE is equivocating over the meanings of the words “information” and “new,” and that the NCSE’s citations are largely bluffs, revealing little about how new genetic functional information could originate via unguided evolutionary mechanisms.

So Luskin’s chief complaint here is that the peer-reviewed publications surveyed and reported by the Long paper are all scientific publications that do not discuss whatever it is that creationists mean by “new genetic information.” Instead, as Dr. Chu-Carroll and Dr. Elsberry point out, they discuss the evolution of new genes.

In other words, Luskin isn’t objecting to the scientific conclusions reached by these peer-reviewed papers. Given his lack of scientific expertise, he wisely avoids challenging the research that allows us to understand how new genes evolve. Instead, he simply asserts that this research is not studying whatever he means by “new genetic information.” “New genetic information,” whatever that is, does not play any significant role in the evolution of new genes.

Wow.

Just think about that for a minute. One of the core arguments of intelligent design creationism is that new species require “complex specified information” and that evolutionary processes are incapable of producing whatever they mean by “information.” But now here’s Luskin objecting to the evidence used in Kitzmiller on the grounds that “genetic information” is some topic unrelated to the study of how new genes evolved. New genes, it seems, can evolve without “genetic information” (as defined by creationists) playing any significant role.

That whooshing sound you just heard is Luskin pulling the rug out from under William Dembski and all the fine folks at the Disco ‘Tute, because once you can evolve new genes, it’s trivial to evolve new species specified by those genes. And here is Casey Luskin, official spokesweenie of the premier ID publicity and marketing organization, blithely assuring us that the new genes documented by the research in the Long paper were new genes produced without being in any way hindered by the complete absence of the “new genetic information.”

Whatever he means by that.

Geisler and Turek’s gimmick throughout the book has been to pretend that they’re building an iron-clad case, piece-by-piece, each well-documented conclusion building on the proofs that came before. It’s only a pretense, though, and the nearer we get to the end the less they even try to keep pretending. They’ve never intended to do any more than preach to the choir, and it shows.

For example, here’s their “proof” of why the Bible cannot contain any errors.

1. God cannot err.

2. The Bible is the Word of God.

3. Therefore the Bible cannot err.

Notice anything missing in their logic?

The problem is, nowhere in the book have they ever bothered to try and document the claim that God cannot err. They just assume it ought to be true because, well obviously God can’t ever make a mistake (like, for example, doing such a botched-up job of Heavenly-Fathering that He ends up having to wipe out virtually the whole human race and start over with a handful of survivors). Because, well, obviously He’s God and therefore He just can’t make mistakes. You know, uh, obviously.

And besides, the Bible tells us that God cannot err, and the Bible is the inerrant Word of God, doncha know.

Seriously. This is their argument.

Since this is a valid syllogism (form of reasoning), if the premises are true, then the conclusion is true. The Bible clearly declares itself to be the Word of God, and we’ve seen strong evidence that it is. The Bible also informs us several times that God cannot err, and we know this from general revelation as well. So the conclusion is inevitable.

Unfortunately, Geisler and Turek just toss off that reference to “we know this from general revelation,” without any attempt to explain what they mean by it. But don’t worry, it really boils down to just one word: superstition. “General revelation,” in conservative Christian jargon, means “what you can learn about the Creator by observing His Creation.” It’s what apologists appeal to when they don’t have actual Scripture to back up their claims.

Sadly, the Bible itself isn’t quite adequate to the task of providing us with rules for literally everything. Fortunately, however, there are verses that say things like “The heavens declare the glory of God,” and “God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse” (Rom. 1:20). In other words, you can look at the amazing world we live in, notice that the human mind fails to grasp all of its intricate details, and then use that ignorance as a justification for imagining all kinds of wonderful characteristics God must have.

Like I said, “general revelation” is really just an appeal to superstition. You see things in the real world you don’t understand, and you attribute them to an invisible, supernatural force. And then you have carte blanche to imagine whatever characteristics seem right in your own eyes, as far as what or Who this supernatural force might be and/or might want. The trick is that by calling it “general revelation” instead of superstition, you get to imply that your speculations about God have all the infallible authority of the written revelation. Which, ironically, they probably do.

So what have we got left then? Geisler and Turek claim that they have a valid syllogism, and that it’s based on “strong evidence” that the Bible is the Word of God and on “general revelation” that the Creator cannot make mistakes (despite a huge number of genetic defects and less-than-fortuitous designs in His Creation). If we look back through the book, though, we see that Geisler and Turek haven’t actually presented us with a documented case based on strong evidence. Instead, they’ve presented a carefully selected subset of the evidence, which they’ve interpreted one way in the case of, say, Darwin, and quite a different way in the case of, say, Luke. This is what Christians call “worldview.”

What’s behind that selection, though? How do they know they’re supposed to adopt very easily-satisfied standards of evidence in Luke’s case, and impossibly-demanding standards of evidence in Darwin’s? How do they know they need to invent false contradictions to discredit scientific explanations of cosmology, while simultaneously glossing over Biblical contradictions as mere “difficulties”?

The answer is that the Bible tells them so. Or rather, their interpretation of the Bible tells them so. That’s what guides their selection and interpretation of the evidence. Geisler and Turek’s “valid syllogism” is ultimately based on the assumption that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God, and is therefore the key to the correct selection and interpretation of the evidence that allegedly supports it. By the time they reach point 3, they haven’t produced a conclusion, they’ve merely re-iterated the assumptions they made in Step Zero.

And Dr. Norm Geisler and Dr. Frank Turek see nothing wrong with using their conclusion to prove the premises that they use to prove their conclusion. They claim that it’s a valid syllogism even though the fallacy of assuming your conclusion is one of the oldest and best-known fallacies in the study of logic. They try to disguise the problem by pretending that their premises are based on other things besides assuming their conclusion, but that’s mere misdirection, not actually solving the problem. And they see nothing wrong with that.

The fix for this particular fallacy is simple: remove it. Don’t use your conclusion to try and establish the truth of your premises. Leave out the claims that the Bible says your premises are valid. Very simple and easy to do, except that Geisler and Turek know, deep down, that the Bible is all they really have to back up their claims. If you take away what the Bible says about God, and about itself being the Word of God, and if you don’t insist on interpretations of the evidence that have been harmonized with what the Bible teaches, you can’t produce a substantive case for the claim that the Biblical God exists, let alone that He cannot err and that the Bible is His Word.

But that doesn’t matter to Geisler and Turek, because they know that the Bible must be the inerrant Word of God. Yes, ok, technically their reasoning is fallacious, but that doesn’t count because they know their conclusions are true anyway. If I say “All dogs have tails, my pet has a tail, therefore my pet is a dog,” that’s the Converse Fallacy, but it doesn’t matter because it so happens my pet is indeed a dog. So fallacious reasoning like Geisler and Turek’s still convinces Christians because they already “know” that the conclusion must be true, even though (unlike my dog) their God does not show up in real life.

The problem with this approach, of course, is that it successfully “proves” that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God whether or not such a god even exists. Christians may “know” that their God is real and has given them an inerrant Bible, but since they would “know” that whether it were true or not, their “knowledge” means nothing. Geisler and Turek, in their book I Don’t Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST, are actually documenting that Christian faith in Jesus means nothing, as far as actual truth is concerned. And that, being fairly opposed to the conclusion they would like to reach, ought to be conclusive.

6,000 years ago, the remnants of a supernova were swirling away into space.

7,000 years ago, other clouds of dust and gas were very slowly condensing and ultimately giving birth to new stars.

8,000 years ago, the Trumpler 14 star cluster, made up of very young stars only half a million years old, twinkled serenely in the night sky.

9,000 years ago, a huge cluster of stars was shining, barely visible from earth (except in infrared wavelengths), obscured by dust and other interstellar matter.

10,000 years ago, the aging stars in the NGC 2420 cluster were shining calmly, if a bit reddishly, due to their 1-billion-year age.

There’s lot’s more, of course. In fact, if you visit atlasoftheuniverse.com, there’s even a map of all the nebulae and star clusters within 10K light years of Earth—with a companion map out to 20K light years.

Remember, these are not illustrations or artistic renderings of any kind. Light takes time to get from there to here, so by the time we see it here, we’re seeing what was happening in the past. When we look at the parts of the universe pictured above, we’re seeing 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 thousand years into the past, first-hand, eye-witness stuff.

And these sights are visible to everybody. You don’t have to “believe in” Darwin or disbelieve in Genesis. You can even be an ordinary camera, with no beliefs or preferences at all. The same sights are visible and recordable to everybody.

So the next time someone tries to tell you that six days of creation were happening 6 to 10 thousand years ago, ask to see the pictures.

It’s not like we can’t see what’s really out there.

Seventeen years ago, General Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, helped formulate the policy that has come to be known as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” It allows women to serve in the armed forces, provided that they keep their gender to themselves.Today, Powell is in favor of repealing the policy he crafted and advocated. Well, he was right then, but wrong now.

According to Powell, “attitudes and circumstances have changed” since “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was adopted.

Sure, attitudes toward women have changed in the culture at large. But what hasn’t changed is the need for “order and discipline in the ranks,” to use Powell’s own phrase, and the possible impact of allowing openly female people to serve in the armed forces.

That impact was the subject of a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed by Mackubin Thomas Owens, a “marine infantry veteran of Vietnam.” Owens begins by stating what should be obvious: “Military organizations exist to win wars.”

I say “should be,” because the arguments for repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” are all about the status of women in American society and have nothing to do with military necessity.

A big part of winning wars, as Owens writes, is overcoming “the paralyzing effects of fear on the individual soldier.” Military organizations accomplish this through an “ethos that stresses discipline, morale, good order and unit cohesion.” He’s right. These are the things I learned firsthand as a Marine platoon commander myself.

The “cohesion” Owens refers to is strictly non-sexual. Owens says it is the product of what the New Testament calls philia, friendship. In the military, it is the bond “among disparate individuals who have nothing in common but facing death and misery together.”

I might go a step beyond Owens. The bond between men in a sound military unit is more like agape—the love that moves men to sacrifice their lives for their buddies.

When you read accounts of heroism and bravery, what motivated men wasn’t abstract ideals but their love for the man in the next foxhole. They didn’t want to let him down. This bond was beautifully captured in the book Joker One by Donovan Campbell. Campbell, a Christian and a Marine officer, served three tours in Iraq and captured the essential role of philia and agape on the battlefield. He wrote what I discovered when I was a platoon commander: What holds men together is love.

Allowing openly female women threatens this cohesion by raising the possibility of a different kind of love—eros—which is “individual and exclusive.” “All for one and one for all” could give way to “sexual competition, protectiveness and favoritism,” with disastrous military consequences.

Nothing has happened in the last 17 years that makes this less possible or the possible consequences less dire. All that has changed is that many Americans now see everything through the prism of “rights.” For them, sexual rights and personal autonomy trump everything else. Thus, any opposition to changing military policy must be the result of “bigotry” or “misogyny.”

I suspect I’m not alone when I say a military unit which openly celebrates the female lifestyle in the trenches is not a military unit I want to serve in.

Ultimately, the change in circumstances behind the proposed repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” isn’t military necessity, but the weakening of our moral will.

That’s the real difference between then and now.

Well said, Chuck. Clearly, if we want a military that can win wars, we cannot allow openly female soldiers to serve, because once women are admitted into military service (at least, without disguising their gender), then that opens up the possibility that (gasp) eros might taint the pure love that exists between men in a foxhole. And that possibility, of course, will destroy military cohesion and render all soldiers helpless victims to the paralyzing effects of fear.

Of course. Why didn’t I see that before?

Or for that matter, why haven’t we seen it throughout all the decades in which “openly female” women have served in the armed forces?

Geisler and Turek’s program of indoctrination continues:

If Jesus confirmed that the Old Testament was the inerrant Word of God, then his promised New Testament must be part of the inerrant Word of God too. Of course.

Translation: if you’ve been gullible enough to buy our arguments so far, the rest is going to be easy.

We’re up to the section entitled “How Can the Bible Be Inerrant?” If we start from the assumption that the Bible is inerrant, as Geisler and Turek have been doing for the last several chapters, we’re going to find this a pretty easy objection to answer. Jesus said that the New Testament is inerrant (or rather, he claimed fulfillment of an OT passage in which Isaiah claimed to have been anointed to preach good news to the poor, which is the same thing, right?). Since the Bible is inerrant when it tells us that Jesus said something that modern conservative Protestant apologists infallibly know means that the whole Bible is infallible, we don’t have enough FAITH to be ATHEISTS.

Whoops, sorry, got all caught up in the spirit of Christian apologetics for a minute. Let’s read what Geisler and Turek have to offer in the way of evidence to back up their claims, and then let’s think about it.

The Bible does not have errors, but it certainly has alleged errors or difficulties. In fact, I (Norm) and another professor at Southern Evangelical Seminary, Thomas Howe, have written a book titled When Critics Ask, which addresses more than 800 difficulties critics have identified in the Bible…

As I mentioned before, when I was a Christian, I always had the feeling that the good apologetics must be in some other book that I hadn’t read yet. For me (and for a lot of Christians, I suspect), it was enough just to believe that there was an answer out there somewhere. In fact, it’s actually better for the answer to be somewhere out where I can’t quite get to it, because then I don’t run the risk of seeing the answers and finding out that they’re just as poor as the answers I’m reading now. I can just have faith confidence that they’re 800 good answers.

But are they? Let’s take just a quick look at a couple “difficulties” that Dr. Geisler “addresses” in When Critics Ask:

GENESIS 1:1—How could the author of Genesis know what happened at creation before he was even created?

PROBLEM: Traditional Christian scholarship has maintained that the first five books of the Bible were written by Moses. The first two chapters of the Book of Genesis read as an eyewitness account of the events of creation. However, how could Moses, or any man for that matter, write these chapters as if he were an eyewitness since he would not have existed at the time?

SOLUTION: Of course, there was an eyewitness of creation—God, the Creator. These chapters are obviously a record of creation which God specifically reported to Moses by way of special revelation. The tendency to ask questions like, “How did the chronicler know that minerals preceded plants and plants preceded animals?” betrays an antisupernatural bias and a refusal to consider alternative explanations other than those proposed by naturalistic science.

GENESIS 1:14—How could there be light before the sun was made?

PROBLEM: The sun was not created until the fourth day, yet there was light on the first day (1:3)

SOLUTION: The sun is not the only source of light in the universe. Further, the sun may have existed from the first day, but only appeared or became visible (as the mist cleared) on the fourth day. We see light on a cloudy day, even when we can’t see the sun.

Gotta love that first “solution.” God can do anything, therefore God “obviously” must have been the eyewitness telling the Genesis story, and Moses is just taking dictation. Ok, fine, let’s let that one slide because the next one is much more interesting.

Truth is consistent with itself, which means that true answers have a unique property: if you give a true answer to one question, it will be consistent with all other true answers, even if they’re the answers to different questions. Answers that are not the truth have the converse property: even if you give an answer that sounds plausible in the context of one particular question, that answer will have inconsistencies when compared with other answers.

So, the “solution” to light appearing is that (a) the sun is not the only source of light, and (b) the “creation” of the sun on the fourth day is really just the sun burning through the clouds—the sun existed on the first three days, it’s just that the narrator couldn’t see it until the fourth day.

This solution is just a bit amusing in that it completely overlooks the fact that the narrator in Genesis was apparently unaware of the connection between the sun and daylight (or moonlight, for that matter). Saying “there are other light sources” doesn’t solve the problem of what those other light sources might be, or why we can’t see them today. If they’re part of God’s creation, and they’re powerful enough to produce daylight over the whole earth even without a sun, then we can hardly have failed to spot them by now.

So that leads Dr. Geisler to try out his second rationalization of Genesis 1:14. Let’s put that last answer back in context with the first one, which says the narrator was God the Creator. You see the problem? If we accept the first answer as true, that means that the second answer is telling us that the God Who created the sun was somehow unable to see His creation for three days. That’s a bit awkward, isn’t it?

That’s just the first two of the 800 difficulties, and I haven’t even explored all the inconsistencies in just those two answers. Compound those inconsistencies by 798 more difficulties, and I think you begin to see the problem of trying to prove Biblical inerrancy by the give-each-question-an-isolated-answer approach.

There’s quite a bit more in this section, so I think we’ll break here for now and pick it up again next time.

We are deep in Apologeticsland, where strange creatures skitter through the dense underbrush and where normal rules of logic no longer apply…

Isaiah 61 predicts that Messiah will perform healing miracles and preach “good news….to release the oppressed” by the “Spirit of the Lord.” In other words the Messiah will do exactly what Jesus did—provide new revelation and back it up with miracles. Of course, since the Messiah is to provide new revelation, someone has to write it down. That’s why Jesus promised his apostles that the Holy Spirit would bring to their remembrance all of  his words and guide them into “all truth” (John 14:26, 16:13).

Because everybody knows “to preach the good news to the poor” and “to proclaim the year of the LORD’s favor” (as Isaiah originally said) is exactly the same thing as commissioning a bunch of other people to write a new collection of documents which must thereafter be accepted as official canon and used as the ultimate authority over everyone else’s life. Right?

Geisler and Turek are wrestling with a bit of a problem here, which is why their logic seems a bit contorted. Being Protestants, their theological understanding is rooted in the assumption that all revelation must be written. Can you imagine if Jesus came and preached to mortal man, and never wrote any of his preachings down? Well, ok, that’s true: he didn’t. But somebody has to. I mean, obviously. Right?

It’s “obvious” to Geisler and Turek because they’re Protestants, and one of the foundational “solas” of Protestantism is sola Scriptura. You can’t have a faith that’s based solely on written revelation unless the revelations are all written down. So “obviously” when Isaiah said “The spirit of the Lord has sent me to preach the good news,” Geisler and Turek have no choice but to assume Isaiah is predicting that someone must be writing it all down.

Nor is this just an incidental case of Bible scholars reading their own assumptions into a text. It’s the core of their whole argument for a New Testament canon.

The problem here is that even though Protestantism falls apart without a solid, official NT canon, neither Jesus nor any of his apostles ever gave us one. Nobody in the first century ever wrote down the table of contents page for the New Testament, because in New Testament times, there was no revelation of what the canon was.

That’s such an obvious flaw that G&T deal with it up front, before even looking at the traditional Christian arguments for the NT canon.

First, we need to clear up a common misunderstanding about what we call “the canon.” It is this: It’s wrong to say that “the church” or the early church fathers determined what would be in the New Testament. They didn’t determine what would be in the New Testament—they discovered what God intended to be in the New Testament.

This is a line of argument that will smell familiar to anyone who has ever had to muck out a barn full of well-fed male bovines. Jesus did not tell us which books belong in the NT. The apostles did not tell us which books belong in the NT. There is no inspired authority even in their own religion that they can appeal to as verification for the claim that the canon contains the complete, correct, and exclusive list of inspired books. So Geisler and Turek want us to just take their word for it that God did all the canonizing, and that the uninspired and fallible bishops merely “discovered” the canon after God was finished.

In other words, Geisler and Turek are dealing with a significant gap in their evidence by simply assuming that God somehow makes the gap irrelevant. This type of cavalier approach to the facts is what believers mean by the term “world view.” When reality doesn’t line up with your expectations, you just shrug and proceed as though it did. (But remember, they don’t have enough FAITH to be ATHEISTS!)

From here, G&T proceed to list the historical evidence supporting the supposed authenticity of the books currently in the NT canon. I’m not going to be too critical of this approach, since it’s not unreasonable: it’s very likely that the apostles did write a few documents in their time (especially an educated and itinerant apostle like Paul), and it’s very likely that the early church leaders did indeed have a pretty good idea whether or not those documents were authentic. So I don’t have any good reason to doubt that, say, Paul’s epistle to the Galatians was really written by Paul.

What I will point out is the interesting implications of the fact that the canon of the New Testament is an issue in the first place. Though Geisler and Turek make light of the problems, we can see that they’re working very hard to establish some kind of post hoc authority for the New Testament, to the point that they have to bend their own Scriptures in order to achieve the desired results.

For example, let’s look at some of their attempts to build a solid case for New Testament authority.

In other words, the only books that should be part of the New Testament are those that God has inspired. Since Jesus said that his apostles would produce those books, our only questions are historical: 1) Who were the apostles? and 2) What did they write?

Notice, the argument here is that New Testament books must be written by the apostles. That is, Geisler and Turek tell us that “Jesus said his apostles would produce those books.” But did he? They’re basing this claim on the verse that says that Jesus told his disciples that the Spirit of truth “will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you.” Not one word about writing any books, let alone collecting books into an official New Testament canon.

Geisler and Turek made a similar argument at the beginning of the section on “Discovering the Canon.” After writing the paragraph at the top of this post, they say:

What does all this mean for the New Testament? It means that, according to Jesus, the only books that should be in the New Testament are those that are authored and/or confirmed by his apostles.

Again, they take a verse that says Isaiah claimed to have been anointed to preach good news to the poor, and say, “This means that Jesus told us the New Testament should contain only those books that were written or confirmed by apostles.” The text they cite as the basis for their claim has almost nothing at all to do with the claim they’re making. What’s more, after straining the text past the breaking point to “prove” that the texts must be written by apostles, they can’t help but go even further in order to allow certain non-apostolic texts to be included also.

Understandable enough, I suppose. Here they are, trying to come up with a post hoc justification for the books they’ve received as Scripture, and the closest they can come to a passage that even remotely resembles the point they want to make is a passage about the disciples having an inspired memory aid, which they magically transform (via the Protestant “world view”) into a stipulation that all books must be written by apostles. Not all NT books were written by apostles, however, so who cares what the first argument was. “Written or confirmed by apostles” seems to be sufficiently broad to cover the books we want to justify, so we’re going to run with that.

Believe it or not, it gets better. How do we know that the apostles “confirmed” the other books, like Luke and Acts? Well, um, because we suppose that the apostles must have known about these other books. Surely they would have objected if they had not wanted them to be written. Right?

There are many ways, I suppose, that you can prove the non-existence of the Christian God, but surely one of the most incontrovertible disproofs is the fact that Geisler and Turek can call their book I Don’t Have Enough FAITH… without their keyboards bursting into spontaneous combustion before they can even send it to their editor.

The reason they have to make such huge leaps of—well, “logic” seems a bit incongruous here, let’s just say “such huge leaps”—is because believers in the New Testament times had no intention or even concept of adding a New Testament to their Bible. Why should they? They had the apostles, who were living, breathing authorities, filled with the Holy Spirit, inspired, infallible, and so on. Jesus himself had promised that the Kingdom would come during their lifetime.

And they believed it. Paul, for instance, automatically included himself in the list of people who would still be alive at the Second Coming, in I Thess. 4. Granted, at a certain point it became clear that he was going to be martyred, there’s still no sign he expected his death to be a lengthy absence. Only John, last of the apostles, writing near the end of his life, seems to have realized that Jesus might not be coming back as soon as they had originally hoped.

Meanwhile, for the bulk of the New Testament period, believers had a real, live authority that was better than some historic, fixed, and ambiguous list of books written (or confirmed by) apostles. If you’ve got enough living apostolic authority to last until the end of the world, why would you need to worry about defining what it would take for a book to replace the apostles?

That’s why Geisler and Turek are having to stretch things way past any reasonable proportion in order to obtain a pseudo-justification for a supposedly “inspired” NT canon that was supposedly “discovered” by fallible and uninspired bishops in the third and fourth centuries. Jesus missed his cue. He wasn’t supposed to be gone long enough for us to develop a need for some book to replace the apostles. They thought he was coming back. No, they knew he was coming back. Soon. Within a generation at most.

And they were wrong.

Based on the Old and New Testaments, the answer is an unmistakable “NO!” God may be a lot of things, but “pro-life” isn’t one of them, by a long shot.

Before we start our survey of the actual texts, there’s one thing we need to be clear about. Which kind of life are pro-lifers supposed to be “pro” about? In Christian theology, a person actually has two lives: their physical, mortal life which ends when the body dies, and the everlasting life of their immortal soul (which by definition never ends). What pro-lifers will tell you is that abortion is wrong because it ends a life, so we’re clearly concerned with life in the materialistic sense here (thus betraying once again the materialistic roots and biases of the pro-life political movement).

How much value, then, does the God of the Bible place on physical, materialistic life? In a conflict between life and free will, to which does He give priority? The first chapter of Genesis does not address the topic, but the second begins to, and the third gives us quite the clearest demonstration possible of God’s preference for free will over pro-life principles.

Here’s Genesis 2:15-17:

The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. And the LORD God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.”

God already knew good and evil, being omniscient. He clearly did not want His children to know, since He explicitly forbade them to eat the fruit. Why, then, did He think there was any need to create a tree of  knowledge of good and evil? This tree does not appear again anywhere else in Christian lore or scripture; it has no other use. Its sole purpose is to create the opportunity for God’s children to make fatal choices.

Not a perfectly clear-cut case of God giving priority to free will over respect for life, I’ll grant you, but it definitely has pronounced inclinations in that direction. Can you imagine a sincere pro-lifer going up to a troubled, unwed pregnant teen, handing her the business card to the local abortion clinic, and saying, “Now you must not go to this clinic between the hours of 8 and 4 on weekdays and 8 to noon on Saturdays, parking in the rear, phone 727-555-1212 for an appointment, bring a photo ID and your insurance card if any, all interactions guaranteed strictly confidential.”? It’s just not pro-life to create the opportunity for fatal choices and then put it right in front of the chooser’s face. But that’s what God did in Genesis 2.

Genesis 3 is even clearer.

Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”

The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’ “

“You will not surely die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.

What’s missing from this picture? How about God? Where’s God in all this? Here is Eve, mother of all women, about to exercise her freedom of choice in a way that will be fatal for her offspring. Allow Eve to exercise her freedom of choice, and it’s certain death, not just for one baby, but for all her offspring, and all their offspring, generation to generation. And it’s not just physical death either: according to Jesus, most of Eve’s offspring will lose their salvation as well. Eve is about to make the ultimate anti-pro-life choice.

The pro-life thing to do at this point, assuming you know what Eve is contemplating, would be for you to intervene, deprive Eve of her freedom to choose, and thus prevent the consequent loss of life—and soul! That’s especially true in this particular case, since there aren’t any issues here about Eve being forced to endure an unwanted pregnancy—this is strictly eat or don’t eat.

And God, being divine, most definitely does know what Eve is thinking, and what the serpent is saying. He’s even known about it in advance, just as He knows everything in advance. He’s had more than enough time to slap some gory pictures on a piece of cardboard and a stick, and to situate Himself at the location where Eve and the snake are going to meet to arrange the termination of her immortal innocence.

If God were pro-life, He would have to be there. Anything less is a betrayal of everything “pro-life” stands for. Eve and the snake are about to commit the Ultimate Abortion, not just of one baby’s life, but of the lives of each and every member of the human species (at least eventually). Preventable deaths, every one. If only there were one pro-lifer around to talk Eve out of it! But there wasn’t, because God is pro-choice. He values the woman’s freedom of choice above the lives of her offspring, above even their immortal souls, and therefore He stayed out of it until after the decision was made.

Let’s look at a few more examples, like Genesis 6-10. Here’s an excerpt:

The LORD saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. The LORD was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain. So the LORD said, “I will wipe mankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth—men and animals, and creatures that move along the ground, and birds of the air—for I am grieved that I have made them.”

This time God isn’t just pro-choice, He’s the abortionist: taking the life of virtually everyone and everything, on account of the choices of man. (Yes, I know Noah and the Ark, but that’s a vanishingly small percentage of those God killed by the Flood, according to the story.) The pro-life thing to do would be to simply prevent man from having the freedom to choose to do all those evil things. Taking away the freedom to choose is what the pro-life movement is all about. But God values freedom of choice too highly to deprive man of it, even though the cost of that freedom is the sudden, violent death of every man, woman, child, baby, beast, and insect on the face of the earth! God is not pro-life.

So God, in the Bible, has a pronounced bias in favor of freedom of choice over respect for life. But does that apply to His followers too? Could this be a case of “Do as I say, not as I do,” a case of God having different moral values than He expects us to? Does God want us to have more respect for life (i.e. fleshly, materialistic life) than He does?

Well, no, not really. There are many cases in the Bible where God calls on His people to impose death penalties for a variety of offenses, from verbal things like cursing the name of God (Lev. 24:16), to things like disobeying your parents (Deut. 21), to picking up sticks on a Saturday (Num. 15). In some cases, God commanded His people to impose the death penalty for things the accused had no control over, like being born (or even just conceived!) as a descendant of the Amalekites (I Sam. 15).

Nor is this absence of respect for life limited to the Old Testament. In Acts 5, for instance, it’s not clear whether God or the Apostle Peter is to be credited (if that’s the word) with immediately slaying an elderly couple who sold some land and donated the proceeds to the church, claiming to have donated the entire sale price when in fact they had kept some for themselves. Granted, Ananias and Saphira were deceptively trying to win some credit they hadn’t earned, but is that sort of thing really a capital offense?  “Respect life” indeed!

Some will say at this point that these examples don’t count. God is wise above all the imaginations of men, and if He did demonstrate a callous disregard for the value of a human life, it’s because it was ultimately destined to bring about the greater good (for values of “good” that are not incompatible with suffering, disease, death, sin, and the eternal damnation of most of God’s children).

But that’s not the point. The point is, what is the real value of fleshly life? Pro-lifers place a much higher value on physical life than God does, if the Bible is correct. Is God wrong about how much a human life should be worth, or are the pro-lifers? Is the pro-life obsession with fleshly life merely a reflection of the materialism at the foundation of their movement?

I’m going to side (roughly) with the pro-lifers on this one. The life of a person should have a much higher value than God gives it in the Bible. That’s not to say that (as materialistic extremists would argue) the person exists from the moment of conception onwards. Far from it: the process of gestation is a process that slowly assembles a person from a large number of component parts, of which the fertilized egg is merely the first and simplest. But once all the pieces are in place, we should value human life too highly to casually toss around death penalties.

The thing that bothered me the most was the emphasis on Christianity. Not that I objected to the faith, of course. I joined in the prayers and the hymns as enthusiastically as anyone else. But I couldn’t help but notice the atmosphere of possessiveness and exclusivity with which the pro-life position was being linked to the religion. It was as if there were a sub-text hiding in the signs and banners people were carrying: “Pro-life is for CHRISTIANS ONLY.”

It bothered me at the time, because the pro-life movement was unlikely to win without the support of a large number of other groups, and yet there was a tangible attitude of not wanting those other groups to join in. There was a certain amount of tolerance for Christian-like religions (Rabbis For Life could be openly accepted for instance), but I didn’t see too many Mormons for Life or (God forbid!) Gays for Life. I even had one pro-lifer tell me frankly and honestly that the only terms on which he would be willing to see America outlaw abortion again would be if the nation first turned to Jesus, so that Jesus could take the credit. Dead babies were something to shout about, but they came in a firm and distant second to the goal of using the pro-life movement to establish the political clout of believers.

Nowadays I see that as a rather more positive aspect of the pro-life movement: their self-righteous exclusivism makes them naturally self-limiting and self-defeating. Considering that they are crusading to dehumanize women, that’s a good thing. And not just women, because if you look at the philosophical basis of the pro-life movement, they’re really dehumanizing us all.

Before I get into that, though, let me just point out in passing that one of the big problems with trying to worship and serve a non-existent God is that you leave yourself open to the political influence of anyone who can do a convincing imitation of what you think the voice of God would sound like if He could talk. And there are any number of people who want your labor, your money, your vote, your military service, and on and on, who are more than willing to tell you what God is urging you to do.

The pro-life movement is a classic example. Back in the early 70’s, Republican strategists hit on the idea of using abortion as a political wedge to drive conservative Christians into the ranks (and coffers) of the party. It was not a particularly Christian issue, but it was a popular superstition, and Christian leaders like Pat Robertson and James Dobson were only to happy to enlist in the Republican crusade and make it a religious issue. In effect, they sold the American Christian church to the Republican party in exchange for some political influence, not realizing that most of the influence was actually flowing the wrong way. (As usual.)

The result is that we have a major Judeo-Christian political movement that manipulates believers into obeying the directives of Republican strategists, and that incidentally dehumanizes humankind in general and women in particular. It’s an unbiblical position, and flows contrary to a lot of what we might call the “spirit” of Christianity, but because God does not show up in real life and the Republicans are willing to take the lead in “relaying” God’s voice in His absence, Christians willingly embrace it as a part of their faith.

Ok, let’s get into the details. The root of the problem here, as in so many other cases, is that we all know that murder is wrong and surgery is ok, but it’s not clear at what point abortion switches from being the latter to being the former. That kind of ambiguity is not the sort of banner the average Joe can rally around. If you’re going to draw a line in the sand, it needs to be a clear, definite line, not a bunch of people sitting around wondering who, if anyone, might have crossed it. So how do you turn this into a black-and-white issue to use as a political tool?

Well, that’s easy, we’ll just say that “life begins at conception.” Sperm + egg = human life and therefore it’s murder if you take that life. The Bible never says anything about life beginning at conception (and in fact declares in Genesis 2 that Man first became “a living soul” when God breathed the breath of life into his nostrils, so there’s reason to believe that breathing marks the point at which God regards us as human souls). But modern Republican leaders of the pro-life movement have declared that conception is what makes us people, and that’s good enough for the rank-and-file pro-lifer.

Notice what we’re saying, though. The nucleic acids of the sperm penetrate the cell wall of the egg, migrate to the nucleus, and recombine in an mundane biochemical reaction just like in every other organism from bacteria on up. There are as yet none of the attributes we normally associate with “soul,” like mind or emotion or will or perception. Nature has just begun construction of the physical, material housing into which these human (and dare I say “spiritual”) characteristics will later take root. But they’re not present yet, at conception.

What we have here, in other words, is an extremely materialistic reduction of what it means to be a person. We’re not beings of soul or spirit, let alone any image of God. We’re fundamentally a mere collection of proteins and amino acids and other materialistic chemicals. Kudos to pro-lifers for acknowledging the materialistic nature of man, and the fact that our true essence and worth is rooted in the physical and material substances of which we are composed. But this takes materialism too far.

The material universe is not just a universe of substances, it is a universe of substances and processes—nouns and verbs. And the verbs are no less important than the nouns. The reason human beings have value and dignity is not just because of the bare physical substances that interact biochemically at conception, as they do in all species. What makes us truly human, in the personal and spiritual sense, are the unique material processes that develop within our bodies once development advances beyond a certain point, the thoughts and emotions and goals and, yes, even the temptations.

These post-conception attributes are what make us human, not the mere substances of the single-celled organism. Philosophically, the pro-life movement is based on a heartless materialism that ignores the verbs and reduces people in general and women in particular to mere nouns. The fertilized egg lacks the processes and capacities that make us uniquely human persons—no mind, no thought, no feeling, no will, no perception, no desire, nothing more than a lowly bacterium would have. And that, pro-lifers tell us, is what it means to be a real, true human being.

This New Materialism flies in the face of the spirituality that pro-lifers allegedly believe in. Ok, not allegedly, they really do believe in it. It’s just that they’re following political leaders who don’t believe, and who could care less about the contradictions you produce in a believer’s testimony when you force him to reduce humanity to a mere chemical formula, and to call that “the whole person.”

But that’s what happen when you try to obey the voice of a God Who isn’t there, and is easily imitated. You become a pawn, a tool, to be deployed and used at will by whoever has the ambition and lack of scruples to pull it off.

I have to admit that it’s getting harder and harder to write interesting blog posts about Geisler and Turek’s book when they keep making the same blissfully oblivious and ironic arguments, week after week, all boiling down to them believing whatever certain men say, just because they say it, no matter how inconsistent it may be with reality and with itself.

Jesus is promising his apostles that the Holy Spirit would lead them to author what we now know as the New Testament…

But did the apostles really get the message from the Holy Spirit as Jesus promised? They certainly claim as much.

Yep. How do we know the apostles were really inspired to write Scripture? Because they told us so themselves. Men said it, we believe it, and that settles it. Sigh.

Ok, that can’t be all there is to the argument, is it? I mean, that wouldn’t even be faith at this point. That would be mere gullibility. But aha, Geisler and Turek have some incontrovertible evidence that backs up the apostles’ claim. Or does it?

But the apostles didn’t just claim to be getting messages from God. Anyone can do that. They gave evidence that their words were inspired by performing miraculous signs.

And how do we know that they performed miracles? Because they say they performed miracles. Sigh again.

Interestingly, the book of Deuteronomy warns us that performing signs and wonders does not necessarily confirm that you are a genuine prophet of God.

If a prophet, or one who foretells by dreams, appears among you and announces to you a miraculous sign or wonder, and if the sign or wonder of which he has spoken takes place, and he says, “Let us follow other gods” (gods you have not known) “and let us worship them,” you must not listen to the words of that prophet or dreamer. The LORD your God is testing you to find out whether you love him with all your heart and with all your soul.

It might be interesting to explore the question of whether or not the Israelites under Moses ever knew of any gods who were three distinct Persons united in one godhood, but that’s a side issue.

The point I want to make here is that Geisler and Turek, in their book I Don’t Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST, are telling us that we should believe that the New Testament record is authoritative and infallible because the men who wrote it claim it was authenticated by miracles. That’s not just gullible, it’s a theological minefield, and Geisler and Turek have to step very carefully when advancing this claim.

Or rather, they should tread very carefully, but in fact, they don’t seem to show much care at all. To be perfectly honest they rather clomp around.

Recall from chapter 8 that this is the way God authenticates his prophets—through miracles. The miracle confirms the message.

Right. So where are our miracles then? It’s all well and good to say the miracle confirms the message, but in this case the message is that the miracles allegedly happened. The New Testament story is a story about miracles happening—a story that’s not consistent with what we see in real life. The miracle would confirm the message, if only it were there. But it isn’t.

In fact, Geisler and Turek themselves tried to rationalize this absence of miracles by claiming, in chapter 8, that God cannot make His presence felt “in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree” without being guilty of trying to “ravish” our free will. There can’t be any miracles, there can only be a book (i.e. a message) that people can read and then choose to either believe or disbelieve. Such is the argument that opens chapter 8, anyway.

So on the one hand, the miracle confirms the message, but on the other, there can be no miracles, according to Geisler and Turek (and CS Lewis, whom they are quoting). The message, for us, must necessarily remain unconfirmed. Geisler and Turek are accepting the message without the miracles, simply on the say-so of the men who wrote miracles into the text of the message. They’re taking it “on faith” (i.e. gullibly), in the absence of the kind of miracles (e.g. Jesus still living in Jerusalem) that would have confirmed it for real.

They do make a rather half-hearted attempt to justify their uncritical trust in the New Testament writers.

The skeptic may say, “Oh, they were just making up the miracle stories.” Nonsense. We’ve already seen in chapters 10, 11, and 12 that they were incredibly accurate historians and had no motive to make up miracle stories. In fact, they had every motive not to make up such stories because they were tortured, beaten, and killed for affirming them.

G&T call them “incredibly accurate historians” because Luke was correct about such minor and uncontroversial details as the names of some famous government figures, major cities, and established trade routes. But the mere fact that a writer can be correct about trivial background details, incidental to his argument, is hardly sufficient to establish him as an unbiased and accurate source of information about the religion he is actively proselytizing for!

G&T would never apply this same low standard of “accuracy” to any other group. Just look at the history of the early Mormons, for example. The trail they took to Utah actually exists! Hallelujah! The Mormons must be “incredibly accurate historians” regarding their claim that God declared traditional Christianity irretrievably corrupt and that Joseph Smith and Brigham Young were divinely appointed to restore the True Gospel. After all, by this standard they’re as reliable as Luke. But will Geisler and Turek see it that way?

Look at Geisler and Turek themselves. They’ve named quite a few people who actually have existed, yet they claim that Christians were tortured, beaten and killed for affirming that miracle stories were true. That’s not an accurate rendition of the historical facts. No Christian was ever put on trial and asked to carefully distinguish between, say, Jesus literally returning from the dead in his original physical body versus Jesus “rising” in some spiritual sense akin to the way he supposedly “lives in” the believer’s heart.

Christians were persecuted on account of their group membership, and their refusal to renounce that membership. Sometimes they were persecuted even after they renounced that membership. They were a minority, and people pick on minorities (as Christians themselves do with gays). Geisler and Turek, like Luke, are accurate when reporting incidental details, but highly biased when reporting the “facts” that support their religious claims.

And as for the motives of the early believers, religious believers in any religion are prone to take persecution or threatened retaliation as evidence that their beliefs are true, so martyrdom is hardly a motive for denying miracle stories. Quite the contrary! Believers may be as anxious as anyone to avoid suffering for their beliefs, but that doesn’t make them believe any less, nor does it stop them from “sharing” those beliefs with any sympathetic ear.

In fact, early Christians had the most powerful motive imaginable for making up miracle stories: such stories would vindicate their faith, and prove that they weren’t just being the gullible dupes of a holy con man. Believers know that their beliefs are inconsistent with the facts. Geisler and Turek know that there’s a contradiction between saying “miracles ravish free will” and “the miracle confirms the message.” But it’s a subconscious knowledge, the constant pricking of cognitive dissonance, a relentless itch too deep to reach or to ignore.

And miracle stories scratch that itch. Geisler and Turek believe that the New Testament was confirmed by miracles, even though they have no miracles to confirm the miraculous NT claims, because they desperately want that message to be confirmed. They’re smart enough, and well-educated enough, to understand how fallacious it is to use the New Testament stories as evidence proving the truth of the New Testament stories, but they’re willing to suspend that understanding on the flimsiest of excuses (”Luke knew the governor’s real name! Woot!”), because they have no other basis for their gullible faith.

So they tiptoe around the problem. They are uncomfortably aware of the fact that miracles are absent from real life. They can’t account for it. They can’t even admit that, without the real-life miracles to confirm the Gospel, their faith is necessarily reduced to being a gullible trust in the words of men. All they can do is suggest that for some inexplicable reason, miracles used to happen, and then mysteriously stopped.

[T]he apostles appear to have lost the ability to perform miracles sometime in the mid-60’s A. D. The writer of Hebrews, writing in the late 60s, referred to these special sign gifts of an apostle in the past tense (Heb. 2:3-4). And later in his ministry, Paul apparently could not heal some of his own trusted helpers (Phil. 2:26; 2 Tim. 4:20). If he still possessed the power to perform miracles, then why was he asking for prayer and recommending that his helpers take medicine (1 Tim. 5:23)?

…Miracles were done for a specific purpose, which was usually to confirm some new messenger or new revelation.

This is probably why there is no record of apostolic miracles in Paul’s letters after about A. D. 62—the latest date Acts could have been composed. By this time, Paul and the other apostles had been proven as true messengers of God, and there was no need for further confirmation.

Or at least, that’s how believers and apologists like Geisler and Turek rationalize the problem in their own minds. They believe the Gospel, and they speak and act as though they believed it to be true, but God does not speak and act as though He believed it to be true. God does not show up in real life to manifest the divine glory that would and should continue to confirm the Gospel. And the only excuse Geisler and Turek can offer is, “Well, He usta, and then He kinda, you know, quit all of a sudden.”

It’s pretty sad when the best argument you have to offer is to claim that nobody after AD62 needs to have the Gospel message confirmed. How do any of the rest of us know it’s not just a bunch of gullible and superstitious believers deceiving themselves into thinking they’ve experienced things that really just happened in their own minds? Why are Geisler and Turek writing books of apologetics if there’s no longer any need to confirm the Gospel?

I think we can know that, in fact, the Gospel was the product of gullible and superstitious believers, using the same self-deceptive techniques and rationalizations we commonly see today among evangelists and apologists like Geisler and Turek. Their persistent need to appeal to circular reasoning and credulous hearsay—all the while pretending to be offering genuine evidence that unbelievers somehow ignore—betrays the internal and external inconsistencies that make their beliefs incompatible with real-world truth. Apologetics, no matter how ill-conceived or poorly argued, sells well because believers are hungry for some way to rationalize the inescapable inconsistencies of Christianity. And that, mirabile dictu, confirms the message that the Gospel is untrue.

• Non-Believers Giving Aid
• Doctors Without Borders
• International Red Cross

Thank you.

Monday

[Phone ringing]

Hello?

Hi, my name is Morgan, and I’m from the Pascal’s Wager Insurance Company. Do you believe in giant tarantulas 30 feet tall?

Well, no, not really.

What about 50, or even 60 feet tall?

Never really thought about it, actu—

Ever think what one of those things would do if it stepped on your house?

Oh, I don’t—

How much would you say your house is worth right now? Just roughly, including all the contents and valuables and other things that would be DESTROYED if they got stepped on by a 60-foot-tall giant tarantula. Don’t forget the car or cars in your garage, too. Would you say about $200,000? $400,000? Half a million dollars? Imagine what it would take to replace your valuable house and possessions if they were stepped on by a giant tarantula. Could you afford to replace it all, instantly?

But there’s no such thing as—

Sir, sir, let’s be honest, nobody knows everything, right?

Well, I—

YOU PERSONALLY do not know everything, right?

Heh, no, not hardly. But I—

In this vast universe of ours, there could be countless worlds we would never see or hear about where giant tarantulas might exist.

Well, if you put it that way, I suppose it might be—

So there MIGHT be giant tarantulas that you don’t know about, right?

I suppose there COULD be some kind of alien—

So giant tarangulas COULD exist. Now sir, all I’m asking you to do is to make a simple risk assessment. Even though you don’t believe there are giant tarantulas, the cost to you if they DO exist could be very high. Hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, of dollars. Money you don’t have and can’t afford to lose. That’s why we’re offering, right now, for only $75 a month, our very special Stepped On By Giant Tarantulas homeowner’s policy.

Well, I—

That’s only $75 a month. Practically nothing at all. If I’m wrong, and no giant tarantula ever steps on your home, then you won’t even miss it. But if I’m right, and your house DOES get stepped on, you could be facing financial disaster. Financial ruin! And living out of a cardboard box, too! A crushed cardboard box, with spider footprints on it. What do you say, sir? Will you do the prudent thing and accept one of our policies?

Well, it IS practically nothing, and the consequences if I’m wrong… [shudder]. How do I sign up?

[boring business discussion snipped.]

Thank you so much, sir. You’ll never be sorry as long as you remember what the risks are, and how much protection you’re getting for practically nothing. Have a nice day.

Thanks, you too.

[*click*]

Tuesday

[Phone ringing]

Hello?

Hello again, sir. It’s Morgan from Pascal’s Wager Insurance Company. Do you believe in giant, carnivorous underground worms more than 100 feet long?

Uhhhhhh…

So far, Geisler and Turek have spent chapter 14 trying to prove that Jesus thought the Old Testament was infallible and inerrant (even though it doesn’t quite match the facts of history and even though Christians themselves have largely abandoned the moral standards set by Moses and friends). But what about the New Testament? Can G&T show, from the Bible, that Jesus believed the authority of the New Testament was equal to that of the old?

Jesus taught that the Old Testament is inerrant, but what could he say about the New Testament? After all, it was not written until after the end of Christ’s earthly life.

While Jesus confirmed the Old Testament, he promised the New Testament. He said the New Testament would come through his apostles because the Holy Spirit would remind them what Jesus had said and would lead them into “all truth.”

Gotta love the way they tiptoe around the fact that “the end of Christ’s earthly life” pretty much ended his personal teaching and authority. It’s almost like he was, you know, dead or something. Pretty strange behavior for someone who allegedly loved us so much that he was willing to die for us so that we could be together forever (or until the end of 40 days, whichever came first).

But what about Jesus “promising” the New Testament? Does the Bible really say what Geisler and Turek say it says? And why would God send a Holy Spirit instead of a loving Savior, to be our leader and teacher?

Let’s look at the two passages that Geisler and Turek offer as documentation for their claim that Jesus promised us a New Testament canon, in John 14 and John 16:

All this I have spoken while still with you. But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you.

I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear. But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come.

You might notice, from these two passages, that there is nothing whatsoever in what Jesus actually said that expresses the idea “You guys will write the New Testament, and it will be the ultimate and only infallible authority for Christian faith and practice.” That particular idea was expressed, retroactively, by Martin Luther a millennium and a half later.

What Geisler and Turek are trying to pull here is the old Bible teacher’s trick of attaching extrabiblical doctrines to specific texts by the handy expedient of simply reading a passage of Scripture, then saying, “in other words, the Bible tells us that…” and then insert whatever dogma you want people to think of as scriptural. It’s a remarkably effective approach, because it’s easier for your followers to simply take your word for it than to actually parse out what the text is really saying.

Don’t believe me? Watch it in action. Here is what Geisler and Turek say, after quoting the above two passages.

In other words, Jesus is promising his apostles that the Holy Spirit would lead them to author what we now know as the New Testament. Paul would later echo this teaching of Jesus by asserting that the church is “built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone” (Eph.2:20). The early church recognized this as well because they “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching” (Acts 2:42).

The reason Geisler and Turek have to use “other words” is because the Lutheran doctrines they are attaching to these passages are not actually written in the passages themselves. That is, these sola scriptura dogmas are not a mere paraphrase of the original NT text, they are literally other words—ideas that John did not record Jesus as having expressed. We can see this by comparing Geisler and Turek’s Protestantized interpretation of John 14 and 16 with the interpretation these passages had before the Reformation.

The traditional/historical interpretation of these passages was that Jesus was indicating that special inspiration and authority would pass on to living people, i.e. the apostles themselves. There is nothing in this passage about writing anything down, or about collecting various apostolic (or nearly apostolic) documents, and winnowing through them to discover, hundreds of years later, which had genuine apostolic authority, thus leading a gathering of non-apostles to officially declare, as sacred Church canon, that there was now a New Testament. That’s the connection between apostolic authority and the New Testament, but Jesus makes no mention of any of it (nor does Paul, for that matter).

If you ask Roman Catholics, or Eastern Orthodox Christians, or any of the other non-Protestant branches of the Christian faith, they will tell you that Jesus’ words were fulfilled exactly as he spoke them: the authority passed on to living, mortal men, who then passed it on to their successors, just as Paul taught in 2 Tim. 2:2. The writings of these men also possessed authority, as mentioned in 2 Thess. 1:15, but it was a derived authority, an authority based on the men who wrote it, not on any inherent status as a “New Testament.” It was certainly no more authoritative than the spoken tradition Paul recommended to the Thessalonians.

We’re not going to get into whether the Catholics or Protestants were right (since they’re both wrong), but it’s worth noticing that in this case, Geisler and Turek are rather blatantly inserting Protestant dogmas into a text where no such ideas are actually written down. Jesus, according to the text, is merely declaring that living people will have some kind of extra inspiration. He says nothing at all about the significant, additional steps that need to be taken in order to take that authority away from living, thinking people and restrict it to a fixed document that people can interpret according to whatever seems right in their own eyes.

But there’s a much deeper and more significant issue here, and one that exposes a very fundamental inconsistency in the Christian Gospel. According to post-Nicene Christian theology, the Gospel is referring to the Trinity when it says that the Father will send the Holy Spirit in Jesus’ name. In other words, Jesus is saying that one member of the Trinity, who is fully divine, is going to be taken away and replaced by another member of the Trinity, who is also fully divine.

Does anything about that strike you as odd?

Why would Jesus, being God, need to be taken away from us? Is it because the presence of God would be a problem somehow? But if that’s the case, why replace him with a Person who was just as divine as the Person who had to leave because he was God? Wouldn’t that still cause the same problem? And if it does not cause the same problems, is that not because this other God Person failed to show up in the sense that He was intended to appear?

What we have here is a fundamental and somewhat subtle issue that arises from the fact that Christianity originally evolved as a psychological denial of Jesus’ death. Common post-traumatic hallucinations can only go so far in convincing people that “he’s not really dead.” Some excuse must be made for the fact that he no longer shows up in real life, an excuse that takes the form of assuming that there must be some deep and inscrutable reason why he has to go away.

In other words, we don’t start with some solid, reasonable, verifiable fact that leads logically to the necessity of Jesus going away. We start with the solid, verifiable fact of Jesus’ consistent and universal absence, which creates the psychological necessity for some kind of reason for his absence. Hence we have John reporting that Jesus “revealed” that the Holy Spirit could not come unless the Son departed.

Logically it doesn’t make any sense at all. What, did they have a fight and they’re not speaking to each other now? There’s no reason we couldn’t have the Son and the Spirit, as many Christians today claim to have. But psychologically there’s a need to say the Son has to leave before the Spirit can arrive, because that “explains” why Jesus can’t show up any more. Or should I say, it explains his absence without the uncomfortable acknowledgment of the fact of his death.

Deep down, the first century Christians knew that Jesus was really dead. Their denial was so strong that they convinced even themselves, but their suppressed awareness leaks out in a number of subtle betrayals like this one. If you start from the facts and work your way forward, there’s really no rational and self-consistent reason for Jesus to go away at all, and in fact there’s an overwhelming number of cogent and compelling reasons for him to stay, not the least of which is his own alleged desire and ability to do so. But the undeniable fact that Jesus is gone compels believers to grasp for any rationalization they can to explain it without admitting the truth.

Notice that suffering in Hell is not part of paying for your sins. Jesus did not suffer eternally or even for a mere few thousand years in the torments of Hell, according to the Bible, yet he allegedly paid for our sins in full on the cross. Not in Hell, mind you, but on earth, which is where he was when he died. And it was not his allegedly immortal soul that died, but only his physical, mortal body. This physical, mortal death, of his physical, mortal body, was sufficient to pay the penalty for ALL sins for all time.

Now, Jerry Falwell, like so many Christians before him, has died. That means he has met the same requirements for payment of sins that Jesus did. His physical body has perished and ceased to function—the same fate as awaits every other so-called sinner. Even though Jesus supposedly took Falwell’s sin and paid the penalty so that Falwell would not have to, Falwell still had to.

This leaves us with yet another inconsistency in the Christian Gospel. If mere physical death (and temporary “death” at that!) is sufficient to pay for sins, then there’s no need for a cross, since our sins are eventually going to be paid for when we die. And if mere physical death is not enough to pay for our sins, then Jesus’ physical death was not sufficient, and could not have purchased forgiveness for us. Plus of course it puts the Bible in the position of lying to us when it says that death is the penalty for sin.

Either way, it’s a problem, and it’s just the sort of thing you’d expect to find in a fictional Gospel invented by superstitious men.

Today we look at a section entitled “Other Evidence Supporting the Old Testament.” I expect you won’t be too surprised to find out that it’s a very short section. In fact, you could sum up the whole thing by the last two sentences in the section:

Our friend Andy Stanley put it well: “My high school science teacher once told me that much of Genesis is false. But since my high school science teacher did not prove he was God by rising from the dead, I’m going to believe Jesus instead.” Wise move.

Just let me double check here… nope, didn’t pick up a different book by accident. This is the argument Geisler and Turek are making in the book they call I Don’t Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST. Genesis can’t even pass a high school science test? No problem. Just ignore the scientific evidence and believe whatever Jesus told you was “truth.” Or at least, whatever people say that Jesus said. That’ll show those old atheists who the faith-based believers really are.

Geisler and Turek claim that, besides the testimony of Jesus, they have lots of other good reasons for believing that the Old Testament is literally true, even in the supernatural parts of Genesis. “For example,” they tell us, “the Old Testament has many of the same characteristics that make the New Testament believable: strong manuscript support, confirmation by archeology, and a storyline that its authors would not invent.”

They document this claim with a one-two punch.

Let’s consider that last point for just a minute. Who would invent the Old Testament storyline? A story invented by Hebrews probably would depict the Israelites as noble and upright people. But the Old Testament writers don’t say this. Instead they depict their own people as sinful and fickle slaves who, time after time, are miraculously rescued by God, but who abandon Him every chance they get.

That’s part one of the one-two punch. We know that every word of the Old Testament is true, because the Old Testament writers fail to make the Israelites look as good as they “probably” would have had the tale been a deliberate fantasy. Geisler and Turek flesh out this argument by citing examples of sins by Moses, Saul and David, and even go so far as to observe that one of the people mentioned in the OT was a prostitute! Horrors! “This is clearly not an invented storyline,” they assure us, secure in the knowledge that if a story is full of sex and violence, it can’t possibly be untrue.

Well, unless of course it was invented by priests. Priests, you see, aren’t supposed to flatter people with false assurances (or even true ones) about how good and noble and righteous they’ve always been. The righteous are rather an embarrassment to priests, since they don’t need to pay anybody to go ask God to forgive them. Guilty sinners are what priests have by way of job security. Telling people that they’re the descendants of sinners is the priestly equivalent of Verizon saying, “Can you hear me now?”

Making the sacred history of a nation into a history of sin and rebelliousness is exactly the sort of story priests would like to write, because it hammers home lesson after lesson about how wrong it is not to do what the priests tell you. If you see stories about how even the kings screwed up and caused major problems, that just goes to show that even kings ought to be listening to the priests and doing things the way the priests want them done.

Geisler and Turek’s argument, that a patriotic Jewish layman “probably” would have invented a story that made the Israelites look better, is a red herring. Even if it’s true that a layman might have written a more flattering “history,” the fact remains that the laymen didn’t write the Old Testament. Priests and prophets did. But if you think Punch One went sailing through empty air, wait till you see Punch Two:

While the Old Testament tells of one embarrassing gaffe after another, most other ancient historians avoid even mentioning unflattering historical events. For example, there’s been nothing found in the records of Egypt about the Exodus, leading some critics to suggest the event never occurred.

Gee, ya think?

In this short, page-and-a-half section, Geisler and Turek have calmly assured us that the Old Testament is supported by “strong manuscript support, confirmation by archeology, and a storyline that its authors would not invent.” Their one reference to actual archeological evidence, however, consists of pointing out the absence of verifiable evidence of the Exodus. And in their mind, this constitutes proof that the Exodus did happen, because it shows that ancient historians did not report “unflattering” circumstances.

Let me just check that book title again…yep, still the same book. Hmm.

For all their confident smugness, Geisler and Turek are offering us an argument that is as poorly thought-out as it is spurious. The question is not whether simple pride prevented the pharoahs from acknowledging that they’d been supernaturally defeated by the god(s) of their slaves, the question is how is it that none of these pharoahs even noticed that they and their entire chariot army had suddenly died, leaving the wealthiest and most fertile territory in the eastern Mediterranean leaderless and undefended? Why are we not reading the flattering boasts of any of Egypt’s militant and opportunistic neighbors, about how their gods had opened the door for them to expand their own empires at Egyptian expense?

And this brings us to the sentiment Geisler and Turek used as the capstone on this particular section. I did not rise from the dead, so they will simply ignore my questions, and believe Jesus.

[T]he strongest argument for the Old Testament comes from Jesus himself. As God, he holds the trump card. If the New Testament documents are reliable, then the Old Testament is without error because Jesus said it is.

You might have thought you had a hand full of aces, in the form of self-consistent and verifiable facts that don’t add up the way Geisler and Turek want them to. But they trumped your aces by the simple expedient of believing (against all evidence) that Jesus is God, and therefore the Old Testament is never wrong even when it contradicts reality. Gods can do that, you see. Or at least, people believe that they can. If they don’t have enough “faith” to be atheists.

But wait. Didn’t Jesus voluntarily lay down his life, in a heroic self-sacrifice to save the souls of sinners? Didn’t he freely give all to save all, and doesn’t the moral virtue of that humble service outweigh the moral liabilities of the negotiable guilt system?

Well, no, though I can understand the powerful emotional appeal that makes people think the answer ought to be “yes.” We admire the drama, the heroics, the self-sacrifice (and of course the ultimate vindication and happy ending when, the story says, Jesus triumphed over death). But having warm feelings about an idea is not the same as “examining everything carefully” so that we can “hold fast to what is good.” So let’s consider this aspect of the Christian moral system.

First of all, let’s notice that even if Jesus did voluntarily lay down his life for the benefit of the wicked, we’re still making the assumption that the suffering of the innocent does indeed have some kind of magic mojo to make the sinner’s guilt disappear. In other words, we’re still basing our moral values on the kind of bizarre voodoo in which the suffering of the innocent creates some kind of force or power that can be applied to the benefit of the wicked.

This is a rather nasty, black-magic sort of concept, but it’s absolutely essential to make the Gospel work. If the sufferings of the innocent are merely an injustice or an evil turn of events, with no magical benefits for the wicked, then when Jesus goads the Sanhedrin into a lethal fury, all he’s really accomplishing is a rather exotic and elaborate form of suicide.

Technically, of course, suicide is itself a sin, so had Jesus deliberately and intentionally created the circumstances of his own death, he would be sinning, and thus would lose the innocence that is supposed to make the mojo happen. The Gospels, however, portray Jesus as submitting—reluctantly—to the will of the Father. “Not my will but Thine be done” means it was not Jesus’ will to die, but someone else put him in a situation where he could not refuse. As Hebrews tells us, he “learned obedience” through what he suffered. His Dad made him do it.

This kind of coerced submission puts Jesus into rather a grey area, under any moral system. Did he really seek his own death, or was he just obeying with a gun, as it were, pointed at his head? It’s an interesting question, but it’s a moot point. The benefit his death supposedly creates for sinners is not drawn in any sense from his willingness to die, but merely from the fact that he suffered and shed his blood, as the New Testament emphasizes over and over again. For example, in Hebrews 9 we read:

In fact, the law requires that nearly everything be cleansed with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness. It was necessary, then, for the copies of the heavenly things to be purified with these sacrifices, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these. For Christ did not enter a man-made sanctuary that was only a copy of the true one; he entered heaven itself, now to appear for us in God’s presence. Nor did he enter heaven to offer himself again and again, the way the high priest enters the Most Holy Place every year with blood that is not his own. Then Christ would have had to suffer many times since the creation of the world. But now he has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to do away with sin by the sacrifice of himself.

Notice, it’s the blood—the emblem of the suffering and death of the innocent victim—that produces the magical benefits for the wicked. Much as we might admire Jesus for being willing to go to his death for the benefit of sinners, the whole premise of such a “benefit” is that guilt can be transferred from the wicked to the innocent, such that the subsequent abuse of the innocent somehow rewards the wicked. Voluntary or not, what Jesus was pursuing was not noble. Though our feelings may say otherwise after the relentless indoctrination of countless hymns and sermons, there’s a nasty bit of blood magic at the core of the Cross.

I’m not saying, of course, that mercy is immoral, or that it’s never right to forgive sin. If you’re going to forgive sin, though, then just forgive it. Making innocent people suffer for things they never did is injustice, not forgiveness. If it’s your intention for the truly guilty to escape the consequences of their offenses, then just don’t punish anyone at all, duh! That would be a moral form of forgiveness.

Notice that the “negotiable guilt” system of morality actually makes mercy impossible. Under the classical Christian system of transactional morals, it’s not that sin was ever forgiven, or ever could be forgiven. Over and over the New Testament writers inform us that all sin was punished. The punishment was diverted onto Jesus instead of onto those who were actually guilty, but the full punishment was meted out. No sin was ever actually forgiven. Our “merciful” heavenly Father has never actually shown any real mercy. Under the Christian moral system, He can’t.

You see what I mean when I say the Christian moral system is hopelessly corrupt. Christians sing God’s praises for His alleged grace and mercy, yet the Gospel itself is founded on the premise that God never has and never could show any real mercy. A truly forgiven sin is a sin for which no punishment is ever meted out, which means no innocent sacrificial victim is needed to endure the suffering and death that the punishment requires. If God is capable of that kind of forgiveness, then the whole Gospel falls apart.

Unfortunately, that leaves us with a moral system in which God cannot ever actually forgive sin. He must necessarily pour out retribution on someone, even if (or rather, especially if) they never actually committed the sin He’s punishing. That’s what it means to be “forgiven” in the New Testament. But a system in which you say, “I forgive you,” and then dish out the punishment anyway, is a very perverse and immoral system!

Imagine for a moment if real people actually practiced such a system. Let’s say we show up at a party, and the host greets us at the door, holding a small, cute, adorable puppy. “Oh how cute,” we say, “you’ve adopted a new pet?”

“Oh no,” says the host, “I’m just borrowing this puppy so that if any guest says or does anything that offends me, I can just torture this puppy until I’m satisfied that the guest is forgiven.”

Superior moral system or batshit crazy?

It’s the same principle of negotiable guilt that the Judeo-Christian sacrificial system is built on, and it’s no more moral or admirable there than it is at the party of our puppy-punishing host. That Jesus would volunteer to perpetuate such a system is hardly a demonstration of virtue, and is evidence of a seriously flawed sense of moral judgment.

My first point, that Christians do not actually get their morality from the ancient moral codes of the Jews and early Christians, can be easily demonstrated by comparing the moral standards of today to the moral standards that were normal and normative in the major Biblical periods. Despite denouncing moral relativism, and claiming to have an eternal and absolute standard of morality in the Bible, we can see from Scripture itself that believers’ moral standards have changed quite a bit over the years.

In the days of Moses, for instance, not only was it morally acceptable to own slaves and beat them, God’s Law even provided for the sale of one’s daughters as sexual slaves that the buyer could keep for himself and/or pass on to his son. Though God’s Law speaks of the girl’s “conjugal rights” being protected, this is not a marriage: if the man tires of the slave, he needs no writ of divorce, he needs only to emancipate her free of charge.

And speaking of divorce, the Law of Moses not only permitted divorce, but actually called for the death of the wife if she could not prove she was a virgin on her wedding night. Similarly lethal punishments were stipulated for sins like blasphemy, working on Saturday (even if it’s just gathering firewood), hitting your parents, and worshiping other gods. Christians don’t live according to those standards of right and wrong any more, and few of them would even call such standards morally acceptable in any enduring and absolute sense.

Judeo-Christian morality is not an eternal moral absolute. It has changed over the years. Even in the Bible itself, the morality of divorce changed from being acceptable in Moses’ day to being questionable and even unacceptable in New Testament times. Jesus went so far as to make divorce the moral equivalent of adultery (thus inadvertently putting the Law of Moses, aka “God’s Perfect Law,” in the position of legalizing the equivalent of adultery!). And the changes in moral standards didn’t stop there, as can be seen by comparing today’s attitudes towards slavery and polygamy with the corresponding attitudes of Biblical patriarchs, prophets, and kings.

That’s a good thing, because Biblical morality, at its heart, is built on a moral framework that is both flawed and barbaric.

” ‘If a member of the community sins unintentionally and does what is forbidden in any of the LORD’s commands, he is guilty. When he is made aware of the sin he committed, he must bring as his offering for the sin he committed a female goat without defect. He is to lay his hand on the head of the sin offering and slaughter it at the place of the burnt offering. Then the priest is to take some of the blood with his finger and put it on the horns of the altar of burnt offering and pour out the rest of the blood at the base of the altar. He shall remove all the fat, just as the fat is removed from the fellowship offering, and the priest shall burn it on the altar as an aroma pleasing to the LORD. In this way the priest will make atonement for him, and he will be forgiven. (Lev. 4:27-31)

There’s no one single place where this moral flaw resides, but the above passage is a fair sample of the kind of corruption that permeates the Old Testament Law and the Gospel that springs from it. The problem lies in the concept of sin as something that exists as an independent entity, almost a commodity, that can be materially transferred from one being to another.

If you’ve been raised in a Christian culture, as I was, you may be so accustomed to this principle that it seems natural and unremarkable. Habit, however, is no justification for moral turpitude, and this idea of sin as negotiable commodity is an appallingly bad principle on which to base a moral system. Think about it: if you have done something wrong, if you’ve committed some crime that demands retribution or at least accountability, the doctrine of negotiable guilt says that you can morally get off scott free by transferring your guilt to some other party. And then they have to suffer the consequences for what you did!

In other words, it is moral, under this system, for the innocent to be punished for sins they did not commit, so that the guilty can sin with impunity. Not only is this doubly unjust (for punishing the innocent and for leaving the guilty unpunished), it’s an open invitation to abuse. It’s bad enough that the rich and powerful exploit and neglect the poor and weak, but under this kind of moral system, it’s even possible for the wicked to add to the trials of the saints by transferring to them the guilt for sins they did not commit.

If that seems a bit extreme, just re-read the quote from Leviticus 4 above. If the goat were somehow guilty of a sin deserving of death, that goat would not be an acceptable sin offering to the Lord. The innocence (and helplessness) of the animal are what make it a suitable recipient onto which the guilt of the sinner can be transferred. The suffering and death of the innocent is what magically puts the sinner back into a state in which he needs never again fear any retribution for his misdeeds.

And that, my friends, is the heart of the Christian Gospel: that Jesus Christ, the innocent lamb of God, received all the guilt for all of our sins past, present and future, that we committed and that he did not; he was punished for those sins so that we would not be. Negotiable guilt, freely transferable from the wicked to any weak and/or innocent victim who can be cajoled, coerced or otherwise induced to assume it.

This. Is. Not. Moral.

If someone wants to debate whether morality demands punishment and retribution for evil deeds, then we can have that discussion another time. What cannot be disputed is that if punishment is to be meted out for evil deeds, then genuine, valid, uncorrupted morality demands that the punishment fall on the person who committed the deed. The question of guilt is not a question of transactions or of the power of the wicked over the innocent, it’s a question of historical fact. “Guilty” means “at such and such a point in time, when the evil deed was done, this is the person that did it.” No subsequent “transaction” will alter the true historical facts of what happened in the past.

The doctrine of negotiable guilt lies at the heart of the Old Testament sacrifices and the New Testament Gospel, and it’s a poisonously immoral doctrine that explicitly provides for the punishment of the innocent and the impunity of the wicked. It is the very opposite of what a sound moral system ought to be based on. It is not, and cannot be, the source of any modern morals worthy of our respect and endorsement. We do not obtain our modern moral values from such a corrupt source, and nobody with a conscience should ever want to.

I have mentioned before that books on apologetics are written to persuade believers, and not skeptics, that their beliefs are really true. As we get deeper and deeper into Chapter 14, it becomes painfully obvious that Geisler and Turek are writing under the assumption that no skeptic in his right mind would have stuck with them this far, and that it is therefore safe to trot out some old and moldy chestnuts that would be downright embarrassing to have displayed in public. Right mind or not, though, we’ve stuck with them this far, and we’ll see it through to the bitter end!

They start off promisingly enough, raising the question of whether or not Jesus could possibly have been wrong in his beliefs about the “ultimate supremacy” of the Old Testament Scriptures.

Perhaps he wasn’t saying that those events in the Old Testament really happened, but just that the Jews believed that they did. In other words, maybe he was just accommodating to the beliefs of the Jews, in effect saying, “just as you believe in Jonah, you ought to believe in my resurrection.”

The good news is that Geisler and Turek can see the flaws in this sort of wishy-washy “he-didn’t-really-mean-it” approach.

This accommodation theory doesn’t work. As we have seen, Jesus did not tolerate error. He wasn’t accommodating to the beliefs of the Jews, as some skeptics have suggested. He rebuked and corrected them repeatedly, from scathing public tongue-lashings (like Matthew 23) to correcting their false interpretations of the Old Testament (Matthew 21; Mark 11; John 2). Jesus didn’t back down on anything, and he certainly didn’t back down on the truth of the Old Testament.

That’s certainly a very valid and well-documented point. Call Jesus what you will, the Gospels most certainly do not portray him as the sort of person who would give in to the popular errors, misconceptions, and false doctrines of his culture, contrary to his own firmly-held beliefs, just to beg for some kind of false popularity.

We can be sure, therefore, that when Jesus speaks of the heart as being the part of the body where lustful thoughts and fantasies occur, and where the words we speak have their source, and where various other sinful thoughts and mental processes take place, it is because he himself believed, along with other primitive people, that thoughts and feelings and desires and so on are functions of the heart. It’s an understandable conclusion, since we can feel our pulse beat faster when we’re thinking of certain things. But it means Jesus did not know what the brain does, or what the actual function of the heart is.

Jesus, in short, can be wrong about things. But Geisler and Turek don’t believe it, and because they don’t believe it, they make an argument that, seriously, you wouldn’t ever share with anyone you thought might take a hard, critical look at it.

The skeptic may say, “But couldn’t Jesus have erred because of his human limitations? After all, if he didn’t know when he was coming back, maybe he didn’t know about errors in the Old Testament.”

That’s actually a very good point: men are not infallible, and therefore in order to make their “dual nature” theory work, Geisler and Turek ought to be saying that Jesus, while infallible in his so-called “god nature”, would also have to be fallible in his “man nature.” Trouble is, if you say Jesus could possibly be wrong, then that means you have to think about what Jesus says, and that you have both the right and the duty to question practices (like persecuting gays) that Christians advocate based on Jesus’ ideas. That’s not going to give believers like Geisler and Turek the desired absolute and unquestioned authority over other people’s morality that they’re after, so obviously that argument has to go.

No, this limitation theory doesn’t work either. Limits on understanding are different from misunderstanding. As a man, there were some things Jesus didn’t know. But that doesn’t mean he was wrong on what he did know. What Jesus did know was true because he only taught what the Father told him to teach (John 8:28; 17:8, 14). So to charge Jesus with an error is to charge God the Father with an error.

In other words, we know Jesus was never wrong, because he specifically told us that his source was infallible. He only taught what the Father told him to teach. And we know that he was not wrong about that because, well, he was Jesus and Jesus was never wrong. Right?

Furthermore, Jesus affirmed the truth of his teaching when he declared, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will not pass away.”

Yes, Geisler and Turek did just argue that we can know Jesus was never wrong because he told us so himself.

So where does that leave us? We need to ask only one question: Who knew more about the Old Testament, Christ or the critics? If Jesus is God, then whatever he teaches is true. If he teaches that the old Testament is divinely authoritative, imperishable, infallible, inerrant, historically reliable, scientifically accurate, and has ultimate supremacy, then those things are true. His credentials trump those of any fallible critic (especially those whose criticisms are not grounded in evidence but in an illegitimate anti-supernatural bias).

In a book entitled I Don’t Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST, immediately after telling us we should believe that Jesus was infallible just because he told us he was, Geisler and Turek are chastising those awful, horrible, reality-based critics for daring to match their years of consistent, scholarly, and well-documented research against the “credentials” Jesus presumably has if we assume that he’s God (despite his mistakes).

Wow.

And the icing on the cake? Those critics, they’ve got an illegitimate anti-supernatural bias, doncha know. As opposed to a legitimate anti-supernatural bias, I guess. So they’re doubly wrong.

Sigh. What’s really sad about this embarrassingly bad argument is that Geisler and Turek expect Christians fall for it. I’d consider my intelligence mortally insulted if someone thought so little of my reasoning ability that they would seriously propose this kind of gullible rationalization as though it were legitimate evidence for the Bible. But I’m not G&T’s intended audience. Christians are. Ouch, talk about friendly fire!

You know what would be even worse though? If this were the best argument Geisler and Turek could think of for the infallibility of Jesus’ teachings. I’d gladly go on and look at their other arguments, only they don’t offer any. I realize that it’s getting towards the end of the book, and paper costs money. I can understand if they’d only want to publish one or two arguments here. But this was the argument they picked for publication?

I used to read books of apologetics when I was a Christian. I remember being rather disappointed, underneath my requisite feeling of edification. I thought to myself, “They must be keeping the good arguments in some other book.” I think now I know why I never could find that other book.

We’re in chapter 14, out of 15 chapters, in a book entitled I Don’t Have Enough FAITH to Be and ATHEIST, by Drs. Norm Geisler and Frank Turek. For the last few chapters, Geisler and Turek have been citing “the Scriptures” as reliable, historical, and primary sources of information about what God has allegedly been doing in the real world, and now, in the next to last chapter of the book, they’re finally getting around to defining what “the Scriptures” are. Hey, if you bought the first 13 chapters…

Up to now, G&T have been trying to establish the authority of the Bible by blithely appealing to what the Bible says Jesus says about the Bible. But even a theologian gets tired of going around in circles eventually, so for a change of pace they head us off in the general direction of the canonicity of Scripture, or in other words, “How do we know which books are divinely inspired and which are not?”

It’s a bit of a trouble spot for believers, because for all that they may strut and brag about the “ultimate supremacy” of Scripture, they have no passage anywhere in the Bible that declares which books are officially Scripture. Nor do they have any official list of books handed down to them from God, or from Jesus, or from any apostle, or from any prophet, saying “These are the books chosen by God to become His Word.” So what’s a Christian to do?

There’s only one possible answer of course: when God fails to do something you need Him to do, you just do it yourself and then give Him the credit. This then become God having done it. You were just the tool God used, you see. He even “inspired” you (without putting you under the constraints of Deut. 18) to have the idea to do His work so that He wouldn’t have to. Ahem.

Yes, well, that doesn’t sound very good, so Geisler and Turek take us on a tour of some of the thought processes that uninspired men used in deciding which books were inspired, in hopes that this overview will inspire some sort of confidence that they picked the right books. This presumes that there are a certain number of books that are genuinely divinely inspired, so there’s always a risk that we’ll inevitably end up with a list of canonical Scriptures regardless. Maybe none of them are really inspired, and all we’re doing is compiling a list of most convincing non-inspired books we can find?

Regardless, let’s have a look. True to form, Geisler and Turek’s first appeal is to Old Testament books that are mentioned in the New Testament (whatever the “New Testament” is, since we haven’t defined that yet).

In his rebuke of the Pharisees in Matthew 23, Jesus covered every book in the Jewish Old Testament, first to last when he declared, “Upon you will come all the righteous blood that has been shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah son of Berekiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar” (v. 35). Abel was killed in the first book of the Jewish Old Testament (Genesis), and Zechariah was killed in the last (Chronicles).

Bit of a peculiar thought pattern there. Granted, Geisler and Turek are talking about Chronicles as being the last book of the Old Testament in the sense that it contains the record of the events which occurred latest in chronological order. But seriously? We’re supposed to take Jesus’ rebuke as being a validation of every book of the Old Testament, just because he mentions both an early murder and a late one?

If this is supposed to inspire my confidence, they’re off to a bad start. Are we supposed to assume that because Jesus mentioned two righteous people being murdered, one at the dawn of (alleged) history and one in the early post-Exilic period, that therefore any book that refers to righteous people being murdered in the intervening history is necessarily valid Scripture? Doesn’t the Book of Mormon have some righteous people dying during that time frame?

But let’s not give them too much grief. I’m sure they’re doing the best they can. And to give them the benefit of the doubt, I would suspect that in its original form, this was not so much an argument in favor of the canonicity of the Old Testament, but an argument against the canonicity of the Apocrypha, which describe events occurring after Zechariah. Geisler and Turek are Protestants, after all, and it wouldn’t do to go including certain “undesirable” sacred writings in the so-called canon of Scripture.

Their next confidence-inspiring citation is to talk about how many times the New Testament cites books from the Old.

Jesus and the New Testament writers cited every section of the Old Testament as authoritative as they referenced events in 18 of the 22 books of the Jewish Old Testament. The historicity of many of the events listed in table 14.1 have been disputed by critics. But Jesus and the apostles reference them as if they are historically true.

Notice the subtle weasel words there. The New Testament cites “every section” of the Old. Not every book, every “section.” Geisler and Turek don’t say what they mean by “section” but they probably mean the Law, the historical books, the poetic books, the major prophets, and the minor prophets. In other words, five sections (or six, if you break the poetic books into poetic books and wisdom literature). How do we know that the people who picked the books for each section picked the right books? They don’t say.

Maybe there’s some hope in table 14.1? I’m not going to reproduce it here (sorry), but it’s a list of 32 places where the New Testament cites some OT passage as though it were authoritative. Of these 32 references, 22 are references to Genesis, 3 refer to Exodus, 2 to Daniel, and one each for Joshua, Numbers, Kings, Chronicles and Jonah, for a total of eight Old Testament books mentioned in 32 New Testament citations.

Conspicuously missing from this list, of course, is Jude 1:9. “But even the archangel Michael, when he was disputing with the devil about the body of Moses, did not dare to bring a slanderous accusation against him, but said, ‘The Lord rebuke you!’”. This is an example of a New Testament author directly and authoritatively citing a book called “The Assumption of Moses”—a book you won’t find in any of our modern Bibles.

So ok, New Testament writers cited at least 8 of the 39 books of the Old Testament, plus at least one book that Geisler and Turek do not regard as being genuine Scripture. So what conclusion should we draw when a New Testament writer cites another book authoritatively? Does that mean the other book should be regarded as Scripture? Hmmm, it seems that New Testament writers cited other “sacred” writings even when we can be pretty sure that these other writings were not genuinely inspired.

It doesn’t help, of course, that we’re using New Testament authors as reliable witnesses even though Geisler and Turek themselves admit that these writers took a lot of their “authoritative” citations from stories whose historicity is doubtful. Remember back when Geisler and Turek were telling us how reliable Luke was and how we should never doubt his accounts because he mentioned real cities like Damascus and real people like Caesar? Shouldn’t they also have mentioned how Luke and other NT authors also uncritically accepted stories that these same experts now know to be of doubtful historicity?

These are considerations that raise valid concerns about whether we should be putting our faith in Christianity based on the testimony of the New Testament writers. We ought to have settled that question before we even approached the question of what conclusions we ought to draw if we have faith in the testimony of the NT witnesses.

And that’s really what it all boils down to. Geisler and Turek are trying to get us to have faith in what the New Testament writers tell us, regardless of how consistent these things are with observable and verifiable reality, and despite the explicit denial, in the title of their book, that they are basing their conclusions purely on their faith in the words and superstitions and subjective experiences of men. It’s the kind of inverted and perverted thinking that inevitably happens when you try to make God real in a world in which He does not exist.

• Jesus is God, therefore Jesus is never wrong.
• Therefore if Jesus ever appears to be wrong, we must have misunderstood what he was saying.
• Therefore if we can find a context in which Jesus’ words are understandable, we have solved the problem.

This is a subtle form of straw man argument that takes a potentially dangerous question—was Jesus wrong?—and replaces it with the far less threatening question of whether or not we can understand what Jesus meant. Notice I did not say easier question. Jesus, at times, made assumptions and referred to contemporary social, cultural, and theological traditions that nowadays can only be discovered by diligent historical research by highly trained and experienced specialists.

At times the work of discovery can be so challenging that by the time we figure out what Jesus meant, we want to heave a celebratory sigh and shout, “We’ve done it, we’ve solved the problem.” It was so much work to figure out what Jesus meant, and we did such a good job of documenting that this is in fact what he must have been referring to, that we completely overlook the fact that we’ve been pursuing this non-threatening question instead of dealing with the more dangerous question of whether Jesus’ meaning was really correct.

Or, in 25 words or less, finding out the correct context is not the same thing as finding out that the context itself is correct.

This is the trap that Jayman and JP Meier have fallen into with regards to Jesus use of Exodus 3, as reported in Matthew 22. I’m going to criticize Jayman’s argument and his conclusion, but before I do I’d like to take a moment to express my respect and appreciation for the approach he’s taking here. He’s not beating around the bush, or trying to divert us into pointless distractions from the topic at hand. He’s giving us and honest and sincere report of how an intelligent believer looks at the issues in Matt. 22 and makes sense of them, and for that I salute him.

I said Jesus and the Sadducees shared a belief that, if the afterlife exists, it will eventually take the form of resurrection. At the beginning of the discussion the Sadducees could have made an argument that takes the following form:

1) If the afterlife exists, then the resurrection will occur.

2) The afterlife does not exist.

3) Therefore the resurrection will not occur.

Jesus agrees with the Sadducees regarding point 1. He merely needs to convince the Sadducees that the afterlife does exist and he will have succeeded in convincing them that the resurrection will occur. If you don’t share a belief in 1, then Jesus’ argument may not persuade you. That’s fine. His argument was with the Sadducees, not you. We all tailor our arguments for our audience.

Not a bad argument, rhetorically speaking. You don’t find Jesus’ argument persuasive? No problem, he wasn’t tailoring his argument to persuade you, he was targeting his remarks to his specific audience, the Sadducees. That sounds plausible, and possibly convincing, as a way out of the problems I’ve already pointed out. But let’s look at it a bit more closely.

First of all, this approach requires assuming that the Pharisees have given us a fair and accurate report of the teachings of the Sadducees. Is that a valid assumption? Let’s look at what one contemporary observer tells us about the reliability with which the Pharisees of his day handled the writings and teachings of others.

Then some Pharisees and scribes came to Jesus from Jerusalem and said, “Why do Your disciples break the tradition of the elders? For they do not wash their hands when they eat bread.”

And He answered and said to them, “Why do you yourselves transgress the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition? For God said, ‘HONOR YOUR FATHER AND MOTHER,’ and, ‘HE WHO SPEAKS EVIL OF FATHER OR MOTHER IS TO BE PUT TO DEATH.’ But you say, ‘Whoever says to his father or mother, “Whatever I have that would help you has been given to God,” he is not to honor his father or his mother.’ And by this you invalidated the word of God for the sake of your tradition. You hypocrites, rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you:

‘THIS PEOPLE HONORS ME WITH THEIR LIPS,
BUT THEIR HEART IS FAR AWAY FROM ME.
BUT IN VAIN DO THEY WORSHIP ME,
TEACHING AS DOCTRINES THE PRECEPTS OF MEN.’”

So according to Jesus, the Pharisees couldn’t be trusted to give a fair report of their own Scriptures, let alone the doctrines of their enemies. Let’s remember, too, that in the early years of the church, those who opposed Christianity described Christians as being atheistic in their beliefs, and cannibalistic in their practices, with suspicions of orgies and/or sacrificing babies in their secret rituals in the catacombs. Is it really wise to assume that whatever your enemies say about you is necessarily what you really do believe and practice?

As far as I know we have only two remaining records of what the Sadducees believed: we have what the Pharisees said about them, and we have their original Scriptures, the books of Genesis through Deuteronomy. Personally, I think we’re more likely to get an accurate picture of what the Sadducees really believed if we examine what their Scriptures actually say, instead of just taking their enemies’ word for it. If someone can prove to me that the books of Genesis through Deuteronomy explicitly deny the possibility of life after death, then I’ll be more than happy to take that as confirmation that the Pharisees correctly described Sadducean belief.

Meanwhile, for the sake of argument, let’s assume that the Sadducees did deny life after death, and that Jesus was indeed targeting his remarks towards that belief. This is where we get into the point I opened this post with: JP Meier has gone to a lot of work to define for us the underlying assumptions on which Jesus based his argument, but he (and Jayman) would seem to be using the hard work of discovering and documenting these assumptions instead of addressing the more interesting (and dangerous) question of whether these assumptions were valid and correct.

Let’s look again at the three points of the Sadducean argument, as paraphrased by Jayman. Point number 1 says, “If the afterlife exists, then the resurrection will occur.” That’s a non-sequitur. You might argue that if there is no afterlife, then there can be no resurrection, but it’s a logical fallacy to turn that around and say that if there is an afterlife then there must be a resurrection. I might say, “I cannot purchase a new car because I don’t even have $5,” and that might be perfectly true. But that, of course, does not mean that if I get $5 I can buy a new car.

Necessity is not sufficiency: an afterlife can be necessary for a resurrection without being sufficient for a resurrection. Jesus, however, does not say the Sadducees are wrong because their logic is faulty, he accuses them of being wrong because they do not know their own Scriptures. And to this day Christians are reading Jesus’ words and believing that Exodus 3 teaches doctrines that, as Meier has ably documented for us, are merely the precepts of men (and flawed logic at that!).

There’s much, much more I could say about this topic, but I think perhaps I’ve presented enough material to document my point. Let me just give one last example and then perhaps we can move on to other things: As I’ve mentioned before, the statement “I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” does not express the idea that God was involved in any kind of living relationship with the patriarchs at the time. God is merely identifying Himself as being one particular God, as distinct from all the other possible gods Moses might have mistaken Him for. He is just saying, “You know the God of the patriarchs? That’s the God that I am.”

This does not in any sense convey the idea that there will be a resurrection, Meier’s glorious assumptions notwithstanding. To see this, let’s suppose for a moment that God changes His mind and decides that His children would be more godly if they were spirits, like He was. So that’s it then, no bodily resurrection, the dead are spirits and are going to stay spirits for all eternity, because that’s the way God now wants it.

Suppose that God did make such a decision, and there was not going to be a literal, physical, bodily resurrection after all. How would the text of Exodus 3:6 have to change in order to reflect the fact that there was no longer going to be a raising of the bodies of the dead?

Obviously, since Exodus 3 says nothing about raising the dead, there’s nothing at all in the verse that you could change in order to change the meaning from “there will be a resurrection of the dead” to “there won’t be a resurrection of the dead.” The concept of resurrection is completely absent from the text, so there’s no way to change what it says about resurrection (short of inserting a completely new topic into the text, of course).

Suppose that the spirits of the patriarchs somehow committed a sin so bad that God became enraged at them and smote them with a mighty zot that completely destroyed them, before the burning bush. How would the text of Exodus 3 need to change then? Again, there’s no way to change the text to make it deny the continued existence of the patriarchs, because there’s nothing in the text that affirms their continued existence. Whether or not the patriarchs exist, God would still have the right to identify Himself as being the same God as the God the patriarchs worshiped.

So what Jesus is doing here is that he is really presenting, as Biblical doctrines, the precepts and traditions and flawed logic of the Pharisees—the people he himself called “hypocrites” and condemned for teaching the traditions of men as though they were the word of God!

I’m sorry, did I forget to warn you to put your irony meters in standby mode?

All of my original critiques still stand. Jesus publicly defended the doctrine of the resurrection, after accusing the Sadducees of not knowing the Scriptures, by citing a verse that says nothing about resurrection, and that doesn’t even have any relevance to the question unless you smuggle in a whole raft of illogical and extrabiblical assumptions that Farsi Jews brought back with them from the lands of Zoroastrianism and Mithraism.

JP Meier has done a good job of digging through the debris of theological history in order to discover these extrabiblical traditions, but the fact that he even needs this kind of scholarship to find the source of these ideas is itself proof that the Bible itself is not the original source. If it were, Meier (or Jesus!) could have gone straight to the source just by quoting the verses where these ideas were written. But if Jesus himself could not find a clear, valid, self-contained reference in the Law of Moses to some future Zoroastrian-style resurrection, it’s because Moses never put any such teaching there in the first place. And that means Jesus was misusing Exodus 3.

It works like this: So-and-so teaches some doctrine or tradition that refers to a particular passage of Scripture, and therefore that passage of Scripture is referring to the doctrine or tradition that So-and-so teaches. Amazingly, this sort of reasoning holds true even when we’re talking about a doctrine or tradition that arose centuries after the writing of the Scripture that supposedly refers to it! It sounds almost ridiculously easy to recognize as a fallacy when we lay it out in those terms, but in actual practice a lot of believers find it a great deal harder.

Sadly, there are a huge number of practical examples we can choose from. For example, let’s take the idea of papal supremacy. According to Roman Catholic tradition, Jesus established the office of the Pope, and bestowed that office on the apostle Peter, in Matthew 16:18.

[Jesus said] “And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.”

Most Protestants can read that verse and realize that there is nothing written in that verse about the creation of a successible papal office that would serve as Christ’s personal representative on earth, in a position of supreme authority over all other earthly church offices. The words needed to express such an idea are simply not present in the text that the Catholic tradition refers to. Because Catholics agree with the tradition, however, they see Matthew 16:18 as a reference to the tradition of papal supremacy, and therefore the absence of the relevant words doesn’t matter. The tradition refers to the Scripture, and therefore that Scripture refers to that tradition, at least in Catholic eyes.

Protestants can’t understand why Catholics would make such a mistake, but it’s one they readily make themselves, under slightly different circumstances. For example, the Protestant doctrine of salvation by faith alone refers to Ephesians 2:8-9, “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast.” Because the tradition of salvation by faith alone refers to Eph. 2:8-9, Protestants see Eph. 2:8-9 as a reference to the doctrine of salvation by faith alone, even though the crucial word “alone” is not actually in the text (and even though James 2:24, the only direct reference to “faith alone” in the Bible, says explicitly that “man is justified by works and not by faith alone”).

The Reverse Reference fallacy is one of the most powerful tools believers use to make the Bible say whatever they want. Because the desired doctrine does not need to be actually, literally written in the Bible text itself, you can attach virtually any idea you want, just by having it refer to a passage of Scripture and then pulling a Reverse Reference. Creationists, for example, teach that Biblical “kinds” are fixed, and cannot evolve over time, and then they quote Genesis 1:24, where God says “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: livestock, creatures that move along the ground, and wild animals, each according to its kind.”

There’s nowhere in Genesis 1 where it is actually written that the kinds themselves cannot change over time, nor does evolution say that one “kind” of organism ever gives birth to a different “kind.” Each species reproduces according to its own kind, even in evolution. It’s just that the “kind” itself changes, over many generations, into different, descendant “kinds.” Genesis 1:24 says absolutely nothing that would make evolution wrong, yet because the creationist traditions refer to Genesis 1:24, then by Reverse Reference, Genesis 1:24 must be a reference to creationist traditions. It’s a fallacy, but try and show that to a creationist. They know, and they know that they know, that Genesis 1:24, the most ancient of texts, is a reference to a tradition that, historically, is a fairly recent addition even to creationist dogma.

Or look at the Rapture. In the early 1800’s, a rumor began to spread among Pentecostal Christians that there was going to be a literal Great Tribulation, but that Jesus would return before these dreadful events to carry good and faithful Christians safely out of harm’s way. This new tradition refers to I Thessalonians 4:13-17, a passage which says absolutely nothing about Jesus coming back before any Great Tribulation, but ask any fan of the Left Behind series (shudder), and they can tell you: pretribulationist tradition refers to I Thess. 4, and therefore I Thess. 4 refers to pretribulational traditions.

That’s not even going into all the permutations and variations that the so-called “cults” exploit in order to convince people that the Bible teaches ideas that no one in the first century ever even heard of. The Reverse Reference fallacy is extremely widespread because it so effectively exploits the Bible’s main strength, which is that you can easily read into it whatever you think it should say, and then claim divine authority for the ideas you “found” in its pages. Given that kind of power, it’s no wonder people are so eager to promote it, for their own ends.

The quotes from Meier come from his book A Marginal Jew, part of Meier’s attempt to discover the actual, historical Jesus, as distinct from the Jesus of Christian myth and tradition. It’s a tall task, and one that Meier himself would be the first to classify as claiming only what is probable, not what is certain. His goal is to discover what Jesus meant, not whether Jesus was correct. As such, he brings in much helpful historical context, but leaves open the question of how we are to judge Jesus’ meaning once we know it. Never fear, we’ll pick up where Meier left off!

According to Jayman, here is how Meier summarizes Jesus’ use of Exodus 3:

1. Major Premise: According to God’s self-chosen definition, the very being of God involves being the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. This is his permanent self-definition.

2. Minor Premise: But, as the whole of the OT proclaims, God is God only of the living, not of the defiling, unclean dead, with whom he has no relation.

3. Unspoken Conclusion: Therefore, if God’s being is truly defined by his permanent relationship to the three patriarchs, the three patriarchs must be (now or in the future) living and in living relationship to God.

Of course, what Jesus actually said was, “But about the resurrection of the dead—have you not read what God said to you, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not the God of the dead but of the living.” Meier was able to read those two short sentences and to know that Jesus was thinking about all that extra stuff about “permanent self-definition” and so on. Cool, huh?

His second premise seems a bit strange to me: it sounds like he’s taking Levitical prohibitions against touching corpses and conflating them with some kind of presumed divine revulsion for the immaterial souls of the dead. The former is indeed part of the Old Testament, but it strikes me as odd that Meier—or Jesus, for that matter—would identify “the dead” with mere corpses. The Pentateuch contains numerous references to Sheol as the abode of departed souls, so it seems a bit unlikely that the Sadducees would have rejected the idea of immaterial souls in Sheol. But if “the dead” refers to the “surviving” people and not just their lifeless corpses, whence this notion that “God is not the God of the defiling, unclean dead”?

But now let’s go back to that first premise, that God’s “self-chosen definition” requires a “permanent” relationship to the three patriarchs. That’s kind of a lot of extra information to pull out of the words, “I am the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.” If He had said, “I am the God of the Ten Plagues of Egypt,” would that require that from now on and forever more His identity would depend on Egypt existing under a cloud of darkness, gnats, frogs, dead babies and so on? And if not, why not? Would it be wrong to call God the God of the Ten Plagues, and not intend to claim a perpetual curse on Egypt?

According to Jayman, all this extra information comes from the arguments Pharisaic rabbis were using, in their commentaries, to try and promote the idea of (Zoroastrian-style) resurrection and judgment as being valid Judaism.

We see these shared presuppositions at work in b. Sanhedrin 90b-91a. There the later rabbis make arguments for the resurrection that, at first glance to us moderns, appear as strange as Jesus’ reference to Exodus 3:6. We need to place ourselves in the ancient Jewish community if we are going to understand Jesus or the rabbis. The fact that the average modern person is ignorant of ancient Jewish culture does not mean the ancient Jews were making poor arguments.

The problem, of course, is that Exodus 3 was not written in the context of the post-Exilic presuppositions that Jesus and the Pharisees shared many centuries later. To say that Jesus proved the Sadducees wrong by appealing to the latter-day arguments of the Pharisees is to concede the main point that I was trying to make: that Jesus is citing Exodus 3 in order to prove a point that Exodus 3 does not make. The commentaries are the source of the doctrine, not the Scripture itself.

If Exodus 3 declared that the dead were to be raised, then we could read about it in Exodus 3, and would not need to look up the opinions of the Pharisees. But it doesn’t, and therefore the doctrine is dependent on the Pharisees’ opinions rather than on the Scripture. But Jesus deceptively makes it sound like Exodus 3 is the source of the doctrine (thus setting an example for generations of Christian expositors to come, sad to say).

But the biggest problem is that even granting that Jesus was trying to use this Scripture to make the point that the patriarchs were still living, and even assuming that Exodus 3 itself were trying to make the point that Abraham and offspring were living, we still haven’t addressed the inherent and inescapable contradiction that makes it impossible for Jesus’ argument to be valid. These are:

1. That we’re supposed to be proving the resurrection of the dead.
2. That God is the God of the patriarchs,
3. That God is not the God of the dead.

Are the patriarchs members of that group, “the dead,” whose resurrection is the question at hand and whose God is not God? By Meier’s analysis, they cannot be, since God is their God. According to Meier, the patriarchs are living, and not dead, which is how things must be in order for God to exist according to His own permanent self-definition.

Since the patriarchs do not belong to “the dead” whose resurrection is at issue, however, then their relationship with God is entirely irrelevant to the question of whether or not the dead are raised. Indeed, since they are “living” (according to Meier), then even if the patriarchs were to be resurrected, it would still not be a resurrection of the dead, but only a resurrection of the living!

What’s more, as Exodus 13 tells us, the patriarchs, and specifically Jacob, were as dead as it is possible for a person to be. As Jacob made them swear in Genesis 50, the Hebrews still kept Jacob’s lifeless remains with them, so that they could return them to Palestine and not leave them in Egypt. These bones had not been knit back together and given fresh sinews and flesh, as in Ezekiel’s vision. These were unresurrected bones, and the Hebrews still had them, ten chapters after the burning bush passage Jesus was referring to. So if Jacob was not among “the dead,” then it’s a fair bet no one else is either, and where there are no dead, there is no resurrection of the dead.

Notice how Meier tiptoes around this problem with some vague hand-waving about how “life beyond death in God’s presence” must be understood “in terms of resurrection” (whatever that means).

In the concrete arena set up by the Sadducees and accepted by Jesus, this life beyond death in God’s presence is understood in terms of resurrection. Moreover, since the formula “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” has as its precise purpose in Exodus 3 the proclamation of the continuation of God’s saving action to the patriarchs’ descendants, this hope of resurrection is held out to all their faithful offspring. Jesus thus grounds the hope of resurrection firmly in the primordial revelation of God to Moses and the chosen people — and ultimately in the very being of the God who, by definition, is related to the people he saves. To understand the God of Israel correctly is to accept the resurrection. To reject resurrection is to misunderstand God’s primordial revelation to Israel and ultimately God himself.

Seems to me I was just reading somewhere that someone said, “I don’t know about you, but for me, red flags go up whenever I see anybody attributing motives to people still living, let alone people thousands of years dead.” No doubt the author of that particular post will be along shortly to tell us how outrageous it is for Meier to think he knows what God’s motives were! But I digress.

My original point was twofold: first to show that Jesus did indeed misuse Exodus 3 by claiming it proved something it did not say, and second to show that even under the most charitable interpretation, Jesus’ argument has serious logical flaws that are inconsistent with Jesus being God the Son Incarnate. Meier’s remarks, while informative, only reinforce the points I’ve been making all along.

Geisler and Turek, as you recall, have been spending the first part of their next to last chapter using Jesus to validate the Bible’s authority, which they had previously used to validate Jesus’ authority. Sadly, though, their choice of examples so far has done more to discredit Jesus than to validate Bible (as understood by conservative Christians). And their final attempt fares no better:

7. Has Ultimate Supremacy—Since Jesus taught that the Old Testament is divinely authoritative, imperishable, infallible, inerrant, historically reliable and scientifically accurate, you would expect him to assert that it has ultimate supremacy over any teaching of man. This is exactly what Jesus said. He corrected the Pharisees and the teachers of the law by claiming that they should be obeying the Old Testament Scriptures instead of their own man-made traditions.

Right. And these same Old Testament Scriptures, remember, are the “inspired” writings that upheld selling your daughter as a sex object, keeping a man’s wife and kids as slaves to induce him to “voluntarily” become permanently enslaved to the owner, committing genocide against an entire people including the children, babies and livestock, death by stoning for anyone caught gathering firewood on Saturday, and of course ritual mutilation of the genitals of babies. This is what Jesus gave “ultimate supremacy” to. Not the New Testament, which men had not written yet. This.

That’s actually rather a problem for Christians, because Christians would like us to believe that a very different set of moral, spiritual, and ethical guidelines—those of the New Testament—have ultimate supremacy for this day and age. And yet the New Testament is merely the written record of the new traditions which the early Church leaders began to teach after Jesus’ death. As Paul instructs the Thessalonians, “So then, brethren, stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught, whether by word of mouth or by letter from us.”

Modern Christians, of course, have another tradition that wasn’t around at the time of Jesus: the tradition of regarding the books of the so-called New Testament as Scripture themselves. Yet Geisler and Turek would have us believe that Jesus presented the Old Testament as the imperishable, infallible and inerrant Scriptures that ought to be obeyed instead of the traditions of men. That’s rather a catch-22, however, because Geisler and Turek are making their claim of Old Testament supremacy based on what is written in the New Testament, so if their claim is correct, then they’re making it on the basis of traditions that do not have the ultimate supremacy, and thus should not be used in asserting the supremacy of the Old.

The Christian rationalization, naturally, is that Jesus was God, and therefore had the right to change things if he wanted to. And that’s fine as far as it goes. But is it too much to ask a God not to be so darn hypocritical about it? If you’re getting ready to replace the “ultimate supremacy” of the Old Testament Scriptures with a new set of traditions, it’s a bit inconsistent, to say the least, for you to go around condemning the Pharisees on the grounds that we should reject new traditions and stick exclusively to the Old Testament Scriptures. Condemn them for following wrong traditions if that’s how you feel, or declare yourself to be a prophet with exclusive rights to create new traditions that must be obeyed, but don’t just make a blanket statement that it’s wrong to do the very thing you yourself are about to do.

But that’s probably a side issue, because despite what they actually wrote, I rather doubt that Geisler and Turek really intended to bestow ultimate supremacy on the Old Testament rather than the New. If they’re like most conservative Christians, Geisler and Turek believe that the whole Bible, in both Old and New Testaments, is the inerrant, infallible, and imperishable authority, the “ultimate supremacy,” that Jesus allegedly upheld. Only even there, they’ve got problems.

The most obvious problem is why ultimate supremacy should be given to a book written and canonized by men, rather than to God Himself. Granted that giving ultimate authority to God wouldn’t work either, since He so consistently fails to show up in real life, it still seems to me as though He ought to be at least the titular supreme authority, instead of some collection of old scrolls.

The book, however, has one major advantage that God does not (besides the advantage of actually being a visible part of the real world), and that is the fact that the Bible does not and cannot contradict the reader’s interpretation of it. This is why the Protestant doctrine of sola Scriptura led to an immediate explosion in the number of divisions and sects within the Christian faith. By placing the ultimate authority in a book that has to be read in order to be obeyed, the Protestants effectively placed the ultimate authority in whatever interpretation seems right in the reader’s own eyes. And that’s the doctrine that Geisler and Turek are trying to push!

If you think about it, this argument makes Jesus look pretty bad. As I’ve mentioned before, a truly wise and good God would never make a mere book the ultimate authority over anything He actually cared about. As history documents with almost embarrassingly excessive detail, when you give people a book whose words are supposed to control their lives, the first thing people do is try and use that book to control other people’s lives. And if anyone disagrees with their interpretation of the book, all they have to do is invoke the rule that God gave ultimate supremacy to the book, and not to the critics, and therefore it is good and right and just for them to follow their own interpretation instead of listening to the critics.

But this intellectual invulnerability goes beyond just giving believers a pretext for dismissing their critics out of hand. By diverting the supposed authority into a book, rather than claiming divine inspiration for themselves, the believers have an ingenious trick for maintaining their claimed authority even when circumstances prove them to be wrong. Pharyngula has been “blessed” with a repeated example of this phenomena recently: some guy has been writing in with predictions of imminent Rapture. It keeps failing to come true, not surprisingly, but does that mean his source of authority has diminished? Nope: the blame all goes to the guy, and the authority goes to the book, which the guy then turns around and uses as the authority for his next prediction.

A wise and good God would know—or would figure out after the first few centuries of abuse—that if you try to build a “kingdom of heaven” by giving people a collection of ambiguous and inert written statements, you merely create a context within which religious frauds can manipulate the credulous and gullible, or worse, within which the credulous and gullible can delude themselves. A book just doesn’t do the job.

Walter Martin used to have a radio show that I loved when I was a Christian. It was called The Bible Answer Man, and it was a show where Martin would take call-in questions about the Bible and answer them, usually in response to doctrines being taught by Mormonism and other so-called “cults.” It’s gotten a lot more commercialized since Hank Hanegraaf took over, but the basic format is the same. But there’s one question I’ve never heard asked or answered on that program. Why does the Bible need an answer man?

Why do we need preachers talking to us if we already have God’s word? Why do we need missionaries, evangelists, witnesses, if the Bible is God Himself speaking to us? Because we all know, even believers know, that a book all by itself is not enough. You can pretend that you’re investing ultimate supremacy in the book, but it’s the men and women who interpret that book who actually exercise that supremacy, and believers are submitting to that authority every time they let a preacher, a friend, or a tract or commentary, tell them what the Bible says.

Scriptural supremacy is a scam that gives believers an excuse to reject the people they don’t like (on the grounds that their opinions are merely “the traditions of men”) while ascribing divine authority to the people whose teachings they do like (on the grounds that they’re Bible-based), even when these teachers teach things that turn out later to be completely wrong. Each believer follows whatever interpretation seems right in their own eyes, which is why there are so many divisions and conflicts within the Church. The Bible has been powerless to prevent the rise of competing religions like Islam, Mormonism, and the Unification Church. The Bible is a bad foundation for Christian living.

If, as Geisler and Turek claim, Jesus really was trying to establish the idea that the Bible is the ultimate authority, then it just goes to show he’s not a wise and/or good God.

He begins, rather inauspiciously, with a very peculiar argument.

I believe that DD’s overlooked some fundamental points here. I’ll grant him a technicality: Exodus 3:6 does not literally contain the word “resurrection,” but then again, the fossil record doesn’t literally contain the words “evolution by natural selection,” either. So I opine that in both cases, we must rely on inferences from facts.

Did you catch that? Because we do not find literally “words” written in the fossil record, therefore it doesn’t matter that Exodus 3:6 fails to contain the words needed to express the idea that Jesus attributed to the passage. No, seriously!

It’s hard to tell why cl thought this would be some kind of valid reasoning. It’s not exactly an analogy (let alone a properly parallel analogy) because if we were looking for something in the fossil record that was analogous to the words in the written record, it would be the fossils. But cl doesn’t make an analogy based on what conclusions we would draw if certain fossils were missing from the fossil record, he seems to be arguing that there is some kind of applicable significance to the fact that certain words are “missing” from something that’s not even literature!

A better parallel would be for me to claim that the fossil record proved the existence of unicorns. The absence of unicorns from the fossil record, in that case, would be directly parallel to Exodus 3’s lack of any of the terms needed to refer to a future resurrection of the dead. Such a parallel, however, would only be more accurate, and would not do anything to advance cl’s case. We should not shrink from drawing inferences based on fact, of course, but the first step in drawing valid inferences is to correctly identify the relevant facts, and the words of a text are the relevant facts regarding its meaning.

The most cogent fact on which we ought to base our inferences about Jesus’ use of Exodus 3, therefore, is the absence of the terms needed to express the idea that Jesus said it expressed. And cl seems to agree that these terms are missing, though he fails to follow through with the obvious inference. If the text does not contain any of the terms needed to express the idea, then the idea is not being expressed by the text, and is necessarily being added by the mind of the reader (hence perhaps the desire to supply “inferences” in place of the missing text?).

Let’s move on to the core of cl’s rebuttal, which he lists in the form of a syllogism.

For some background context, at the time of Exodus 3:6, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob had already met their physical deaths. Let’s state the undeniable premises and conclusion we end up with if we take the account at face value:

P1 God is not the God of the dead, but of the living;

P2 God is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob;

P3 Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are dead;

C  If God is to be their God, then Abraham, Isaac and Jacob must live again.

Curiously, he calls these “undeniable premises” even though, as given, each pair of the three premises denies the third. If God is not the God of the dead but of the living (P1) and God is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (P2), then Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are living, which denies P3. If God is not the God of the dead (P1) and Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are dead (P3), then God is not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, which contradicts P2. And of course, if God is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (P2), and Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are dead (P3), then that contradicts the claim in P1 that God is not the God of the dead.

What’s particularly fascinating about this argument is the fact that cl sincerely believes that you can reach a valid and even compelling conclusion by starting from these three mutually-contradictory premises. It never even occurs to him that Jesus is capable of presenting us with flawed logic—and therefore it’s not flawed! It must be correct, by definition, and therefore the question is not whether Jesus’ logic leads to a valid conclusion, but only what conclusion seems to make the most sense.

Unfortunately, not only are the premises mutually refuting, but cl’s preferred conclusion also fails, even when he tries to reinforce it.

Honestly, taking it at face value, I don’t see how the logic could be any more straightforward; I even broke it down to syllogism form in my first responses. Here’s a version amended for absolute clarity:

P1 God is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; (I’ll grant that ‘is‘ as used in Exodus 3:6 may or may not denote a present relationship)

P2 God is not the God of the dead, but of the living; (Jesus’ emendation removes any possibility that ‘is‘ referred to a past relationship)

P3 Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are dead; (undeniable premise that was true at the time both Exodus 3:6 and Jesus’ emendation were spoken)

The problem is twofold: first, if we’re going to focus on the fact that the text uses the present tense “is” instead of the past tense “was” or the future tense “will be,” then cl’s argument becomes an argument against the possibility of a future resurrection. Exodus 3 does not say “I will be the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” it says “I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” Nor does Jesus say “God will be the God of the living and not the dead,” he says “God is (etc.)”. To the extent that the present tense “is” eliminates the possibility of a past relationship, it eliminates the prospect of a future association as well. Even if we assume that Abraham & Co. will someday stop being dead, that does not change the fact that they are dead now, no matter what Jesus said about God not being the God of the dead in the present tense.

This is a moot point, though, because the intransitive verb “is” refers to the nature of the identity of God, not to any past, present, or future relationship between God and anyone else. The statement in Exodus 3 is “I am the God.” The same is true of Jesus’ declaration, “God is the God.” Which God? The text identifies which God by specifying a relationship with known personalities of the past, but the word which links God to those personalities is the word “of,” not the word “is.” Which God? “The God of Abraham, and of Isaac and of Jacob.” “The God, not of the dead but of the living.”

This is why the text Jesus used to “prove” the resurrection is actually no such thing. He claimed to be citing a passage about a future resurrection, but what he quoted was merely a story of a God identifying His present-tense identity (”yep, that’s who I am all right”) relative to a trio of personalities whose known association with Him was in the past, even though the language used contains absolutely nothing, linguistically, grammatically, or historically, to tie that relationship to any particular point in the past, present or future.

I think cl is trying to make the case that his conclusion must be true because if it’s not true, then the argument becomes absurd. Unfortunately, Christians are doomed to reach absurd conclusions no matter what they conclude here, since they’re starting from premises that already contradict one another. And there’s no way to remove the contradiction unless we agree that the Bible itself, if not Jesus as well, is wrong. Since that’s not an option for believers, they have no way out.

It’s a textbook case study in how faith can interfere with someone’s thinking. Jesus’ argument is clearly irretrievably flawed, not only because the premises contradict themselves, but because trying to fix it only makes it worse. If you try and solve the dilemma by insisting that Abraham & Co. are not dead, for instance, then you’ve only dug yourself in deeper, because you can’t be resurrected if you’re not dead, and that blows Jesus’ whole point. Yet believers cannot acknowledge, even to themselves, that their Lord and Savior could have goofed so badly, and so their only alternative is to hobble their own minds to the point that they believe in contradictory premises leading to valid and even undeniable conclusions.

Terrible waste of a perfectly good intellect if you ask me.

There’s a famous quote from the movie The Princess Bride in which Inigo Montoya tells Fezzig Vizzini, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” See if you can see why today’s installment from I Don’t Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST reminds me of that quote:

When asked if divorce was acceptable, Jesus cited a scientific fact out of Genesis. … (Matt. 19:4-6). In other words, the nature of marriage is bound up in the scientific fact that Adam and Eve were created for a purpose.

Geisler and Turek are trying to make the argument that the Bible must be scientifically accurate because Jesus treated it as though it were scientifically accurate. Apparently, the Garden of Eden story must be a “scientific fact” because otherwise Jesus’ argument would fail. And we can’t have that now, can we!

In making this argument, Geisler and Turek tell us a lot about how Christian apologists define what “scientific facts” are. In the world of Christian apologetics, the phrase “scientific fact” does not mean “that which can be objectively verified either by direct observation or by the distinctive, verifiable consequences it produces.” No, the term “scientific fact” means only “you can’t argue with it.” Christian dogma is based on authority, and by calling something a scientific fact, all Geisler and Turek are really doing is trying to establish a claim of unquestionable authority to declare the truth.

To Geisler and Turek, the Garden of Eden is a “scientific fact” simply because Jesus appealed to it as though it had the unquestionable authority to declare the truth about marriage. Unlike genuine scientific facts, which encourage further investigation and deeper understanding, the Christianized “scientific fact” is intended to end the discussion and eliminate any further questions. God said it, I believe it, that settles it, end of story. To even ask for some kind of verification that Eden ever existed would be to admit a fatal weakness in one’s personal faith.

The end result, of course, is that Geisler and Turek turn the phrase “scientific fact” into a synonym for “dogma,” and give it a meaning that is the exact opposite of what a genuine scientific fact would actually be. Instead of verifying whether any objective, real-world evidence actually exists for the events described in Genesis 3, Geisler and Turek want us to take their word for it that we can take the Bible’s word for it that we can take Jesus’ word for it that we can take the Bible’s word for it. That, according to G&T, constitutes “scientific fact.”

Perhaps to atone for the shoddy quality of this argument, Geisler and Turek follow up with some of the most clear and logical writing in the entire book.

Jesus taught that if the Bible does not speak truthfully about the physical world that you can see, then it cannot be trusted when it speaks about the spiritual world that you cannot see…  Truth about the universe cannot be contradictory. Since all truth is God’s truth, religious beliefs must agree with scientific facts. If they do not, then either there is an error in our scientific understanding, or our religious beliefs are wrong.

Ok, I did elide a bit in the middle there where they insist that “yes of course Christianity is based on fact.” But that bit of revisionist propaganda aside, the argument they are making here is possibly the most rational and clear-headed thinking in the entire book. It is somewhat ironic that they intend this as a kind of spiritual blackmail to be used against wishy-washy Christians tempted by genuine scientific facts. But the threat is clear: “You must defend the scientific accuracy of the Bible, or else deny the Bible entirely!”

It’s not that belief in the Bible must be contingent on its scientific accuracy, it’s that the scientific accuracy of the Bible is contingent on one’s faith in it. We’ve seen that time and again in the book up to now. Geisler and Turek reject evolution because Darwin’s theory does not provide an answer to the question “What caused the Big Bang?” As we saw before, that’s a common but nonsensical question to even ask, and it has nothing to do with the mechanisms that cause the evolution of biological species. Yet Geisler and Turek find that quibble a sufficient pretext to discard pretty much all of the scientific evidence which supports evolution.

Conversely, when examining the evidence relating to the historical accuracy of the New Testament, they were satisfied that everything Luke wrote must be literal, historical truth just because he happened to mention a few people and places that actually existed. Imagine if I were to swap those two standards of evidence and insist that evolution must be true because Darwin mentioned the Galapagos Islands, and lo and behold, those islands actually exist! Would that be enough to convince them? Or if I point out that the resurrection story fails to give a complete and detailed explanation of the mechanics of reanimating dead and decaying flesh, you think that would be enough to get them to abandon the Gospel as eagerly as they discarded evolutionary theory?

There is a consistent and pervasive pattern in Geisler and Turek’s apologetic, in that they persistently define “fact” in terms of what does or does not support the conclusion they want to reach, based on how badly they want to reach it. We see that here in their argument that the Bible must be “scientifically accurate.” Their argument has nothing to do with providing objective verification of the various significant and unrealistic elements of the story, and everything to do with how the Christian reader feels about the likely consequences of a given claim being true or false. “The Bible must be consistent with science, or else you must suffer the painful, soul-shattering loss of your most cherished beliefs. We report, you decide.”

This is the worst possible approach a sincere seeker of truth could take. It guarantees that one will remain forever enslaved to their own preconceived ideas, to social pressures, to superstitions, and to gullibility. As Geisler and Turek themselves wrote, “Truth about the universe cannot be contradictory.” To discover and understand the truth, therefore, we must adopt a consistent approach to seeking the truth, and must insist that our conclusions be consistent both with themselves and with objective reality. Paying hollow and deceptive lip-service to “scientific accuracy” is not part of the equation.

Scott Adams is at it again, trying to defend Pascal’s Wager, which he defines as follows:

In a nutshell, Pascal was a dude who argued you should consider Christianity because if it’s true, the downside of not believing is eternal Hell. But if you become a Christian and there’s no God, all you’ve lost is your Sunday mornings. (Here I am simplifying.)

What follows is his response to the standard critiques of Pascal’s gambit, conveniently summarized on Wikipedia.

Chief among the alleged flaws in Pascal’s argument is that you still have to pick the correct religion among many, or else you go to Hell anyway.

Sure. But picking any religion that promises salvation slightly improves your odds over picking an option that doesn’t. You’re still probably doomed, given your bad religion-picking skills, but a one-in-a-million chance of reducing the risk of eternal Hell is a move worth taking, mathmatically speaking.

Where to begin. I suppose we could start with the fact that this is a blatant appeal to gullibility. Reducing the risk of what Hell? Has Adams ever been to Hell? Has he ever met anyone who has been there, maybe brought back some lovely vacation photos? Of course not. Hell is a place that people believe in for no other reason than that certain other people have said so. Believing what people tell you, just because they tell it to you, is gullibility.

Secondly, not only does Adams assume that Hell really exists, he also assumes that faith in God will save you from going there. That’s a bit of a problem, because faith in God is not even a possibility.

For example, suppose I tell you that God has spoken to me, and has promised that in 5 minutes, a $100 bill will miraculously appear in your pocket, as a gift. Or suppose I say God has revealed to me that you should call all your loved ones and say goodbye because in 5 minutes a blood vessel is going to burst inside your brain and cause you to die in about 60 seconds. In other words, suppose I claim to speak to you on God’s behalf, whether I’m promising something good or something bad. If you believe what I say, who are you putting your faith in–God or me?

Ok, it’s 10 minutes later, and you’re not dead, nor is there an extra $100 bill in your pocket. Who lied to you, me or God? If you called your family to say goodbye, whom did you put your faith in, me or God? When you call them back to let them know you didn’t die after all, will you blame God or blame me?

The point is, God does not show up in real life, and thus we have no interaction with God that could possibly result in our having faith in Him. Everything we know about Christian doctrine (or Islamic or Jewish or Hindu, etc) are things we obtain by paying attention to the stories, superstitions, and subjective feelings of men. We can put our faith in men, but we cannot put our faith in God, because He does not show up to give us anything to believe in . That means we have no alternative but to believe what men tell us, just because they say so. And that, again, is gullibility, not faith.

This leads to a third point: why would God consider faith to be such an important quality that He would decide our eternal destiny based on whether or not we’ve got it? Most Christians take the biblical reference to “walk by faith, not by sight” as meaning that there is some special virtue in believing that for which there is no real world evidence. If we could find things in the real world that were consistent with God’s existence, then our belief in God would be based on the evidence rather than on faith alone, you see. But what is it that we’re believing? We’re believing the things that men tell us, knowing that they do not fit the real-world truth, just because men tell us we ought to believe them.

So the thing that supposedly makes faith into a virtue that deserves to be rewarded is our willingness to believe what men tell us despite the fact that the things they say are clearly not consistent with real world truth. In other words, our gullibility. But if there are things in the real world that are evidence consistent with God’s existence, then shouldn’t we be deciding the issue of God’s existence based on the evidence, instead of on silly appeals to gullibility like Pascal’s Wager?

Adams actually tries to address something like this last point in his post:

Another noted “flaw” in Pascal’s wager is that you can’t rule out the possibility that only skeptics are spared from Hell. Perhaps, it is argued, God loves the spunky fact-loving personality of skeptics and saves them alone, or saves them in the greatest percentage.

That argument passes the math test, but does it pass the sniff test? It’s a viewpoint that exists only as a debate tool. While we can’t rule it out, surely it is the worst bet if you must pick a theory of God. No rational person on earth, including skeptics, has concluded that God prefers skeptics over believers.

That’s an odd claim to make, especially considering that Adams gave a link to the Wikipedia entry on Pascal’s Wager, in which the following quote appears:

Suppose there is a god who is watching us and choosing which souls of the deceased to bring to heaven, and this god really does want only the morally good to populate heaven. He will probably select from only those who made a significant and responsible effort to discover the truth. For all others are untrustworthy, being cognitively or morally inferior, or both. They will also be less likely ever to discover and commit to true beliefs about right and wrong. That is, if they have a significant and trustworthy concern for doing right and avoiding wrong, it follows necessarily that they must have a significant and trustworthy concern for knowing right and wrong. Since this knowledge requires knowledge about many fundamental facts of the universe (such as whether there is a god), it follows necessarily that such people must have a significant and trustworthy concern for always seeking out, testing, and confirming that their beliefs about such things are probably correct. Therefore, only such people can be sufficiently moral and trustworthy to deserve a place in heaven — unless god wishes to fill heaven with the morally lazy, irresponsible, or untrustworthy.

—Richard Carrier, The End of Pascal’s Wager: Only Nontheists Go to Heaven

In other words, yes, it is entirely plausible to suppose that God might prefer to reward those who made a reasonable and determined effort to uncover the truth, as opposed to blindly indulging in deliberate gullibility. What’s more, when we look at the real world, we find that God, or whatever supreme power may exist, does indeed seem to give preferential rewards to those who reject gullibility in favor of a more rigorous and objective pursuit of truth. Skepticism, remember, does not mean wantonly refusing to believe in anything at all. Rather, skepticism means requiring verifiable evidence before accepting some idea as true. In other words, taking the scientific approach that has lead to modern medical advances, improved engineering, longer lifespans, better crop yields, and so on.

Adams seems almost aware of the absurdity of his position:

I realize it’s unscientific to try and compare one absurdity to another. But if you assume our perceptions are often flawed, you have to allow the possibility that some apparent absurdities are due to our limited powers of perception. So, for example, while the notion of a loving God who allows eternal damnation seems absurd, it is less absurd than assuming the world is run by invisible unicorns, or that God discriminates against those who believe in him.

This is a common apologetics gambit called the Charlatan’s Excuse, or Blame the Pigeon. When you find out the snake oil doesn’t actually cure gout or grow hair or whatever the salesman promised, he avoids giving you your money back by insisting that it’s your fault somehow–you didn’t rub it on right, or you used too much or too little or you left the bottle in the sun, or whatever. But the problem does not lie with you. The reason the snake oil doesn’t work is because it’s bogus, not because you lack the skills needed to use it properly.

Likewise, when “comparing absurdities,” we should not overlook the possibility that Hell is absurdly inconsistent with the idea of a loving God precisely because it is an absurd idea. We’re not talking about quantum mechanics or obscure technical jargon here. If the idea of an all-powerful, all-wise, and all-loving God seems inconsistent with the existence of a realm created by God for the purpose of causing most of His children to suffer eternal agony, it’s just possible that this is because the two ideas are inconsistent. And certainly it is far less absurd to suppose that God might prefer to reward those who diligently seek the truth over those who lazily and irresponsibly indulge in (and promote) blind gullibility.

Adams nevertheless continues trying to put the shoe on the other foot:

But what’s the reasonable explanation for God preferring skeptics? If God appreciates reasoning skills, he can’t be too impressed by the fact he created the entire Universe and skeptics still can’t find any good clues he exists. God would only be impressed by skeptics if God did NOT exist. You can’t top that for absurdity.

But remember, God is supposedly rewarding believers for their faith–i.e. for believing despite the universal absence of any supporting, verifiable evidence. If the evidence existed, then not only should we be using it to address the question of God, but it is the skeptics, and not the gullible believers, who are to be praised for insisting on finding it. The whole reason why believers resort to Pascal’s Wager is precisely because no “good clues” exist. And again, if all the skeptics are doing is pointing out the non-existence of these clues, and it’s true that they don’t exist, then the skeptics’ only “crime” is that they are telling the truth. Why would God not prefer the truthful skeptic over the gullible believer?

Picking the “right” religion is a long shot no matter how hard you try. But if rational thought has any value at all, it’s in narrowing down options and improving our odds of making good choices. Rational thought hasn’t led anyone to conclude that there’s a God who only saves people who don’t believe he exists. We can’t rule it out, but can’t we rate its likelihood compared to a God who prefers that his lumps of clay hold him in higher esteem than their own eye crud?

The problem with rational thought is that its conclusions are only as valid as the data you give it to work with. Adams is clearly working from gullible premises, such as the assumption that there’s a Hell to be saved from, that God will send you there if you don’t have faith, and that you can have faith in God by blindly and gullibly swallowing whatever men say about Him, just because they say so. If there exists any God who is reasonable and just, He will be more likely to prefer those who diligently seek the triumph of truth over gullibility. And if there exists a God who, by contrast, is unreasonable and unjust, then there’s no reason to suppose He would give any kind of fair and reasonable reward to believers. Any way you look at it, the odds are stacked in favor of skepticism and against blind gullibility.

A blogger at passionateamerica.com has a bit of Monday Morning “humor” that (perhaps without meaning to) gives us a good hard look at how God really “works”:

A United States Marine was attending some college courses between assignments. He had completed missions in Iraq and Afghanistan . One of the courses had a professor who was a vowed atheist and a member of the ACLU.

One day the professor shocked the class when he came in. He looked to the ceiling and flatly stated, “God, if you are real, then I want you to knock me off this platform. I’ll give you exactly 15 minutes.” The lecture room fell silent. You could hear a pin drop.

Ten minutes went by and the professor proclaimed, “Here I am God. I’m still waiting.” It got down to the last couple of minutes when the Marine got out of his chair, went up to the professor, and cold-cocked him; knocking him off the platform.

The professor was out cold. The Marine went back to his seat and sat there, silently. The other students were shocked and stunned and sat there looking on in silence. The professor eventually came to, noticeably shaken, looked at the Marine and asked, “What the hell is the matter with you? Why did you do that?”

The Marine calmly replied, “God was too busy today protecting America ’s soldiers who are protecting your right to say stupid stuff and act like an a$$. So, He sent me.”

Funny stuff, eh? I mean, what’s not to love? The assault victim was not only a college professor (i.e. educated and thus automatically evil), he was also a “vowed atheist” (gasp!) and if that weren’t bad enough, he was even a member of the ACLU (swoon!). The author left out “Darwinist,” but that was probably just an oversight. Wouldn’t every passionate American just love to go around punching out liberals, atheists, and educated people? This isn’t just a joke, it’s a wish-fulfillment fantasy.

Like all good fantasy, this one draws its power from making the setting seem as realistic as possible. What makes the joke really work, especially on the wish-fulfillment level, is the faithfulness with which it reproduces the way God behaves in the real world. Notice, for example, that at no point does God ever actually show up anywhere in the real world. He does not show up in response to the professor’s challenge, nor does He show up to tell the Marine, in the sight and hearing of the other students, to go up and punch out the professor.

Nor, in fact, does He show up in the war zone to genuinely protect the soldiers. If God did show up in Iraq, for example, to point out where the insurgents were hiding and where the IED’s were planted, not only would our troops be in a lot less danger, but the Marine would be able to point to God’s visible and verifiable activity in Iraq as a satisfactory answer to the professor’s challenge.

But God does not, in fact, show up in the real world, an absence that the Marine finds frustrating and infuriating. He seethes with inner rage and helplessness, because God consistently fails to behave as though He believed the same things the Marine does, and yet the Marine cannot confront God about this nor can he admit, even to himself, that there’s anything wrong with God’s behavior. To do so would be to cast doubts on his own faith and his own personal sense of salvation.

This frustrated and impotent inner tension is what drives the joke, of course. The author, and his intended readers, all know first-hand how the Marine feels. God’s behavior is clearly inconsistent with what they believe about Him, and there’s not a damn thing they can do about it. They can’t even complain about it, because to complain about it, they’d first have to admit that it’s true, and that would be a denial of their faith. So they’ve got all this anger and frustration building up, and nowhere for it to go. What are they to do?

The Marine, in the story, takes the only available outlet: he makes the poor professor the scapegoat for his own inner turmoil, and lashes out violently against him. Many Christians feel the same way, though most of them (fortunately) are more self-restrained than the Marine in this story, contenting themselves with name-calling and nasty jokes (like this one) directed against whoever they decide should be the scapegoat this week. Ironically, after violently assaulting the professor for what he said, the Marine then self-righteously admits that the professor has a legitimate right to free speech, which his fellow troops are fighting to protect even as he, the Marine, is busy violating it.

But I digress. The main point is that the professor gets knocked off his platform–but notice, it took a real person do actually do it. Had the Marine not acted, the “work” (knocking off the professor) would not have gotten done. The real person did the work, and then tried to claim that God deserved credit for what was done.

This is the secret. This is how God really “works” in the real world: somebody thinks they know what God ought to be doing, then they sit there stewing about it because God’s obviously not taking care of the matter, then they jump up and do it themselves, then they claim that God ought to be given credit for having gotten the job done. A classic case of sock-puppet deity. Rather pitiful, really, but so long as God persists in failing to show up in the real world it’s the best Christians have to offer.

Mr. Anonymous And Probably Fictitious Marine, I salute you. You may have acted violently, ignorantly, and unjustly, but you at least gave us a clear demonstration of how Christians perpetuate the delusion that God actually does things in the real world.

A commenter writes:

Belief in the existence of God or belief that there is no god requires faith.

Yes, and I’ll take it a step further: belief in reality requires a stronger and better faith than belief in superstition. And those who embrace the truth have a stronger and better faith than Christians do, because Christian faith is mere gullibility, whereas genuine faith is based on real-world truth.

The commenter is writing from a perspective of Universal Agnosticism (see? I told you it would come up):

The term ‘reality’ is relative…

Again, truth is not really known. You cannot prove that God isn’t there. If you could, this conversation wouldn’t be happening because there would be nothing to discuss. Therefore, truth is not defined. I do love truth and BELIEVE or HAVE FAITH that the God that I call on IS TRUTH. You apparently BELIEVE or HAVE FAITH that TRUTH is something else. I’m not disputing the fact that you believe something. But, neither of us will be able to truly claim that we know until we’re both dead.

His viewpoint, of course, is suffering from a serious defect, which is that according to his definitions, the truth about God is not humanly knowable. In order for that to be true, however, it would necessarily have to be equally true that none of the things he believes about God, and none of the things the Bible says about God, are actually based on any knowledge of the truth. By his own definitions, the meaningful content of his faith cannot be anything more than pure, unfounded fantasy. He manages to escape from the inevitable conflict between his faith and the real world, but he does so at the expense of abandoning reality and thus rendering his own believes irrelevant to the truth.

Hence the quick change of subject:

Rather than just participating in pointless tit-for-tat…lets get back to the idea that I originally posted: Belief in the existence of God or belief that there is no god requires faith.

I suppose he would be a bit surprised to find that I agree, and I also agree with the title of the book by Geisler and Turek which is the current subject of XFiles Friday: I Don’t Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST. What’s interesting is that both the commenter and the authors are trying to prove the same point: they are trying to weaken the case for a reality-based view by implying that it is a matter of faith rather than a matter of fact and knowledge. In making this appeal, they reveal the weaknesses of their own concept of faith, and their lack of familiarity with reality-based faith.

Reality-based faith has three elements. First and foremost, reality-based faith is based on a broad experience of reality. Our experiences in the real world give us a solid foundation on which to base our faith. For example, we have faith that the sun will rise tomorrow because we have a broad, solid experience of seeing the sun rise every morning (or for some of us, at least seeing that the sun has managed to make it up above the horizon again while we were sleeping). The “confidence quotient” of our faith is based on having seen and experienced that which we are putting our trust in.

Secondly, reality-based faith is built on embracing the real-world truth. Experiencing reality is not always enough. We must also embrace it, which means that, in the negative sense, we must not try to deny reality, and in the positive sense, we must accept it and understand it as best we can. We want a solid, well-founded faith, and that means that the intellectual content of our faith needs to match the reality that it is based on. Otherwise, our faith will be out of step with reality, and thus ill-founded and unlikely to bring us the benefits that come from having a well-founded faith.

Lastly, reality-based faith must positively affirm that which we believe. This is perhaps the most obvious aspect of faith, but it is not the sole aspect of genuine faith. Genuine faith means you experience the real-world truth, then you embrace the real-world truth, and lastly you affirm the real-world truth. This is a strong, well-founded, and reliable faith.

Superstitious faiths, like Christianity for instance, have a much weaker faith that’s built upside down. In Christianity, someone first affirms a dogma. Then the believer embraces the dogma. Then lastly, the believer tries to get his real-world experience to match the content of his beliefs. It’s a lot of work, and the results are often frustrating and confusing. When the believer is intelligent and intellectually honest, like the commenter, very often the result is that they clearly see the need to make a choice between denying reality and denying Christianity–the conflicts between the two are simply too pervasive and too irreconcilable to embrace them both. And far too often, the believer will choose to deny reality, as the commenter does, rather than give up their superstitious and ill-founded “faith.”

Before we get into a detailed analysis of I Don’t Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST, I wanted to take a minute and look at the most fundamental and important principle for effective refutation of Christian apologetics. Debating apologetics can be a tricky matter: Christians have 2,000 years of experience in rationalizing their beliefs, and generally know better than to allow themselves to be pinned down to anything that would settle the matter fairly and objectively. There is, however, one inescapable fact, with one inevitable consequence, which can be used to force Christians to face reality no matter how much they would like to twist away from it.

The inescapable fact is this: God does not show up in the real world, not visibly, not audibly, not tangibly, not for you, not for me, not for saint or for sinner or for seeker. Many people, of course, have already pointed out this fact, and tried to use it against Christianity, with little or no effect. For 2,000 years, believers have been rationalizing their way around that one. That’s why, for maximum effectiveness, we need to combine the inescapable fact with the inevitable consequence.

If God does not show up outside the stories, superstitions and subjective feelings of men, the inevitable consequence is that we have no alternative but to put our faith in men rather than in God. If I promise you that God will put ten solid gold coins under your pillow tomorrow morning, and you believe that this is true, who are you believing, me or God? If those coins are not there tomorrow morning, who lied, me or God? When men say things on God’s behalf, and make promises that God is supposed to keep, you can either believe them or disbelieve them, but the word is the word of men, even if men attribute it to God. You can believe in what men tell you about God, but if you do, you are putting your faith in men. There is no alternative, since God does not show up to give you anything else to believe in.

This is an important point, because Christians tend to believe that they are doing something noble and spiritual when they believe Christian teachings. Because they believe that the Bible is the word of God and that Christian teachings in general are the teachings of God, they count their belief in these teachings as a mark of loyalty towards God. God does not show up in the real world, however, which means that when they put their faith in these teachings, they are not putting their faith in God, they are putting their faith in the fallible men who brought them these teachings and told them they were from God.

Psychologically, it makes a big difference to the Christian whether he is defending faith in God, or only defending faith in men. The most effective approach to unapologetics, therefore, is to keep directing the believer’s attention to the inescapable fact that God does not show up in the real world, and that the inevitable consequence of God’s universal absence is that all these apologetics for God are the words of men. Believe in them and defend them if you want, but you’ll be defending men, and not God, if you do.

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.

Take care.

Why do you say that? I realize we don’t have a lot to go on, but I thought it was pretty well established that the Sadducees didn’t believe in life after death.

I was only able to give a cursory reply in the comments, and indeed my early research did more to raise my own doubts than to confirm my initial statement (hence the edit to my original post). Now that I’ve looked into it a bit more, though, I’m a bit more confident in my initial assessment, and so I thought I’d take some time to share my findings.

One of the first sources I found online (for easier sharing) was the book Pharisees, Scribes and Sadducees in Palestinian Society, by Anthony Saldarini. Saldarini says,

The testimony of all the sources that the Sadducees did not believe in resurrection, afterlife and judgment fits the other things we know about them and is historically reliable and convincing. The Sadducees’ belief is the traditional Biblical view; ideas of resurrection, immortality and afterlife entered Judaism in the second century B. C. E. and only gradually dominated Judaism over the next four or five centuries. [footnote: See George W. E. Nicklesburg, Resurrection, Immortality, and Eternal Life in Intertestamental Judaism (HThSt 26; Cambridge: HUP, 1972). Mishnah Sanhedrin 10:1, from about 200 C. E. still has a stricture against those who deny resurrection of the dead; later talmudic comments on this passage speak not of those who deny resurrection of the dead, but who deny that it can be proved from Scripture.]

This is clearly not fundamentalist Christian propaganda, since it alludes to new doctrines being introduced into Judaism in the second century BC (and used the secular “BCE” instead of the Christian “BC”). If this is the case, and “the testimony of all the sources” says that the Sadducees did not believe in an afterlife, then it certainly sounds like my initial claim was wrong. But let’s keep digging.

One site I visited brought up an important point about our sources of information regarding the Sadducees.

The most reliable information about the Sadducees is found in three bodies of ancient literature: the writings of Flavius Josephus…; the NT, particularly the Synoptic Gospels and Acts…; and the rabbinic compilations… Two observations about these sources should be made. First, with the possible exception of Josephus’ War, all these sources are decidedly hostile towards the Sadducees. Second, many of the rabbinic references, especially those found in the Talmud and later works, are of doubtful historical reliability. Thus, our knowledge of the Sadducees is perforce severely limited and one-sided.

In other words, all of the reports we have today about Sadducean beliefs were written by people who wanted to discredit those beliefs. A similar example from modern culture might be the way the pro-life movement habitually refers to their opponents, not as “pro-choice”, but as “pro-abortion.” Or if you prefer, you could use the example of pro-choice supporters referring to pro-lifers as “anti-abortion,” though of course that’s a bit less of a distortion.

The point is, belief in life after death is one of the most ancient and pervasive beliefs that the human species (and possibly some near-human species) have ever possessed. If the Pharisees could plausibly accuse the Sadducees of denying one of the most fundamental and widespread of human religious beliefs, it would create a significant popular prejudice against them. Considering that the Pharisees settled their theological debate with Jesus by having him put to death, it’s not unreasonable to suppose that they might indulge in a little old-fashioned politicking as a means to achieving their ends. But could they get away with it?

In fact, it’s not all that difficult. All you need to do is create a definition of “afterlife” that’s different from what the Sadducees believe, get them to agree that they don’t accept that definition, and hey-ho, you can now claim that they don’t believe in the afterlife. If they say, “Yes we do, we believe in X,” you can reply, “Well, X is not the real afterlife, so you still don’t believe in the real afterlife.”

That’s my hypothesis anyway. Let’s check the evidence and if it’s consistent. Here’s a quote from the book Christian Beliefs and Teachings, by John C. Meyer.

[The Sadducees] did not believe in the resurrection of the dead nor the existence of angels. They embraced the traditional Jewish idea of Sheol for those who had died. Sheol was the gloomy and shadowy underworld for departed spirits.

Notice, the Sadducees did believe in an afterlife: they believed that when you died, your spirit departed into a place called Sheol, where it remained forever in the gloom and darkness. Next, from the book Body, Soul and Life Everlasting, by John W. Cooper, we have these observations.

The Israelites believed that identifiable though truncated human persons continue to exist after death. True to their holism, they thought of the dead as ethereal bodily beings who remain in Sheol. Whether they are in any sense conscious and active is unclear. Though Sheol is the gathering place of all human dead, there are hints that the lot of the faithful and the wicked is not the same. Hope is expressed that the Lord will rescue his beloved from death itself. At least two texts refer to bodily resurrection. But the predominant picture is of the rephaim in Sheol…

Consider first the most austere view, that even the believing dead remain forever in the silence of Sheol. Like the Psalmist and the Preacher, Sirach laments: “Who will sing praises to the Most High in Hades, as do those who are alive and give thanks? From the dead, as from one who does not exist, thanksgiving has ceased…” (Sir. 17:27-28a, RSV). Even if a strict nonexistence is not what is envisioned here, those who inhabit Sheol are so cut off from life and from God that they might as well be extinct.

This is most likely also the position of the Sadducees, whom we meet in the New Testament. There they are best known for their denial of the resurrection. But they are also supposed to have affirmed annihilation or ontological nothingness after death. This interpretation is confirmed by Josephus, who likens the Sadducees to Epicurean materialists in denying existence after death. The claim that they adopted materialist Greek philosophy is certainly consistent with their reputation as promoters of Greco-Roman political and cultural values. But Russell considers them to be faithful adherents of the Old Testament conception of Sheol, which does not include annihilation, strictly speaking. Perhaps there were Sadducees of both sorts, Hebrew and Greek, or a synthesis of traditions.

Interestingly, C. S. Lewis also presents the Sadducees as believing in a rather diminished existence in Sheol after death. That’s sufficiently different from the Pharisaic view of  afterlife, in which the good go to Abraham’s bosom and the evil (and wealthy) go to a place of torment, awaiting resurrection and God’s final judgment (as in the story of Lazarus). Sure, the dead go to Sheol, but you call that an afterlife? That’s not the kind of afterlife the Pharisees preached, and therefore you could say that they “did not believe in the afterlife [in the Pharisaic sense].” Just leave the parenthetical remark as a silent implication, and you have the report that the Sadducees did not believe in the afterlife, period.

Another interesting point I found in my reading was that those who say the Sadducees denied the afterlife claim that they did so because it was not written in the Torah (i.e. the Law, the first 5 books of the Old Testament). Here’s blogger James Prather:

The Sadducees only held that the Torah was inspired, and rejected the prophets and the writings as God-breathed inspired scripture (the Pharisees held that it was all inspired, as do Christians today. And yes, I know that’s an oversimplification, but there’s no need to get into the canonical debate of the first century in this post).  Furthermore the Sadducees did not believe in the resurrection or life after death because it’s not explicitly stated in the Torah.  And so in order to discuss topics such as the afterlife with the Sadducees, the Pharisees tried to prove the concept from the Torah itself.

This, of course, would explain why Jesus skipped over more explicit references to resurrection in the Prophets, and tried to prove the resurrection of the dead to the Sadducees using Exodus 3:6. But notice what we’re saying here. We’re saying that not only did the original Hebrew religion lack any kind of doctrine of bodily resurrection, but it even failed to mention what the Pharisees called “afterlife!” It’s not just the Sadducees who lacked any teaching of the afterlife, it’s Moses as well!

And yet, belief in Sheol is even older than Moses, and is mentioned explicitly in the Torah seven times. Thus, even if the Sadducees did reject what the Pharisees called “afterlife,” on the grounds that it was not explicitly taught by the Torah, the same cannot be said for their belief in the older, more traditional view of Sheol as the abode of the spirits of the dead.

At this point, I’m prepared to stand by my original claim that the Sadducees in general did indeed believe that at death, the soul continues to exist, and departs to an afterlife (of sorts) in Sheol, despite Pharisaic attempts to portray them as annihilationists, and despite the possibility that individual Sadducees may indeed have absorbed Greek philosophical materialism into their personal religion. I’d discount the latter group, because if you’re going to become a Greek materialist, you’ve got no particular interest in books of laws supposedly dictated by immaterial gods, and therefore you’re not really part of the debate between Jesus and the Sadducees. What we’ve got in Matthew 22 are a bunch of Sadducees who already believed that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were in Sheol, and in that context, the only way Jesus’ answer even remotely makes sense is if they also believed that Sheol was ruled over by a different god than Yahweh.

Christian apologists Dr. Norm Geisler and Dr. Frank Turek are putting the finishing touches on their argument that it takes more faith not to believe the Gospel than to be an evangelical, Trinitarian Christian. Let’s see what objective, verifiable and irrefutable evidence they have to share with us today.

In addition to declaring that the Old Testament is divinely authoritative, imperishable, infallible, and inerrant, Jesus affirmed two of the most historically disputed stories in the Old Testament: Noah (Matt. 24:37-28) and Jonah (Matt. 12:40). Jesus spoke of those stories as being historically true.

Sometimes these posts almost write themselves, don’t they?

As has been their strategy throughout much of the book, Geisler and Turek use the assumption that a miracle-working God exists, in order to “prove” that it’s possible for the supernatural events of the Bible to have occurred.

And why shouldn’t they be true? The miracles associated with Noah and Jonah are child’s play for the all-powerful God who created the universe. With our limited intelligence, we build great ships and keep people alive for months underwater. Why couldn’t God do the same?

When examining the evidence for evolution, Geisler and Turek demanded that scientists provide a detailed account of pretty much every cause-and-effect chain of events all the way back to the Big Bang (and before!) as being the minimum evidence that would be needed to avoid jumping to the superstitious conclusion that God did it all. For Bible stories, however, it’s sufficient to shrug your shoulders and say, “Well, why not?” This is called “needing more FAITH to be an ATHEIST.”

Let me mention in passing that if it is indeed “child’s play” for God to destroy almost all life on the entire planet, and then completely repopulate it with the tremendous number and variety of organisms that we see today, all within recorded human history, then He ought to find it far, far easier to show up in real life to participate in the kind of in-person, tangible, objectively-real relationship that the Gospel tells us He wanted badly enough to die for (literally!). And conversely, if we do not see God demonstrating any willingness and ability to show up in real life to do what the Bible says He wants to do, then why should we believe the more incredible and unrealistic legends it ascribes to Him?

There are, of course, numerous problems and inconsistencies in the Noah’s Ark story, as has been well-documented elsewhere. If, as Geisler and Turek assert, Jesus naively accepted this legend as historical fact, that’s a point that should have been considered when they were assessing the evidence for and against his alleged deity, and not saved until now. Of course, they could have claimed that this was just another instance of Jesus’ human nature interfering with his alleged divine omniscience, as it did when he admitted not knowing when the Second Coming was supposed to happen, eh? Maybe he thought the Flood story was true, but he also had a human nature, and human nature is fallible! Right?

I’m not going to spend a whole lot of time rehashing the evidence against the historicity of the Flood. I’ll just mention the two or three things that convinced me, when I was a Christian creationist, that maybe it was best not to be to literal about the early chapters in Genesis. The ice layers in the polar ice cap were one point I couldn’t really explain away without resorting to some kind of divine tampering intended to deliberately deceive those who were looking for the facts. Had there been a truly global flood, all that water covering the poles would have left a substantial mark on the ice caps!

The other kind of evidence was the abundance of geological strata that could not have been formed by a consecutive series of depositions during a single, global inundation. You just don’t have a lot of wind-swept sand dunes forming at the bottom of the ocean, nor do you have land animals walking across mud flats that were subsequently sun-baked and hardened in the middle of a stack of sediments above and below that were all laid down by the same flood. The biggest thing that turned me away from creationism, however, was the dishonesty of the creationists. I like to check my facts and go back to original sources, and time and again I found that creationists were taking quotes out of context, suppressing important data, and outright lying.

But that’s a whole field in and of itself, and I want to keep this blog-lengthed, so let’s move on and have a look at the story of Jonah.

At first glance, it might seem like Geisler and Turek were on safe ground here. After all, if one man were swallowed by a “great fish” thousands of years ago, there wouldn’t be a whole lot of physical evidence we could review to determine whether or not the incident really happened. But what we can do is take a look at the story itself in a broader context, and see if it’s really reasonable and self-consistent. Even assuming that an almighty God could miraculously cause a person to survive being swallowed by a fish, is that the most reasonable and effective approach a wise God would choose?

The book of Jonah is the story of how God wanted to send someone to Nineveh to tell them to stop sinning, so He called Jonah. Jonah, however, did not want to go, and took the nearest ship heading the opposite direction, whereupon God sent a great storm that threatened to sink the ship. Jonah took the blame, and the sailors pitched him in the drink, and the storm abruptly stopped. Whoa! Then a big fish came and swallowed Jonah, took him to the beach closest to Nineveh, and Jonah reluctantly went into the city and proclaimed God’s impending judgment. The Assyrians repented, God spared them, and Jonah complained that this was exactly what he was afraid of, because he’d have been happier seeing Assyria wiped out. And then there’s this tiny epilogue where God makes a tree, and then kills it, and Jonah misses the shade, and God says, “You care about trees, I care about all the people, and besides, they have a lot of cows.”

They just don’t write stories like that these days.

Now, certain stories have certain conventions—unwritten rules that can be completely arbitrary and even senseless, but the story teller can never break them. Superheroes can’t reveal their secret identities. Wizards never use their magic wands to simply poof piles of money. The bad guy never just shoots the hero in the back when he has the chance. And God never shows up to speak directly to the people He wants to talk to.

We see that in the story of Jonah. God has something He wants to say to the capital of Assyria. But He can’t just, you know, go there and say it, because that would break The Rules. He has to pick someone to go in His place. Naturally, He’d pick someone who could be trusted to carry out the mission, right? Someone who understood the importance, or who was at least willing to trust God’s judgment in the matter, eh? Whoops, no, out of all the potential prophets He could have chosen, He picked the guy that didn’t even want to go. Does this make any sense at all so far?

As history, it seems a bit strange, but it does make a certain kind of sense if you look at it from a literary perspective. If we take Jonah’s tale as a story written to accomplish a specific narrative intention, we can see that the characters in the story, and the twists in the plot, all work to create a theme expressing the idea that God’s dealings with Israel (personified by Jonah) and the surrounding nations (exemplified by Nineveh) were complex, and not necessarily to Israel’s liking. As history, it seems convoluted and unnatural, but as a fable it works well, especially if the target audience were Jewish exiles in Babylon and elsewhere.

At the Christian college I graduated from, the faculty explained that Jonah tells us how God has a purpose for everything. Had He destroyed Nineveh in Jonah’s day, they wouldn’t have been around a few years later to come in and slaughter the Israelites as punishment for Jewish polytheism and idolatry. And wouldn’t that have been a shame. What they failed to explain, of course, is why God didn’t just show up in the first place so that His chosen people could see the difference between a real God and the false ones. Then they wouldn’t fall into idolatry, and God wouldn’t need to keep a bunch of murderers and rapists around to make His beloved children suffer and die violent deaths.

But hey, that would break The Rules, right? God’s not allowed to show up in real life, except in a very few isolated (and unverifiable!) cases, and even then most people can only hear about it second- or third-hand. God can’t just show up in real life and tell people what He wants to communicate to them because the conventions of religious narrative insist that prophetic/miraculous authority has to be given to real people, who will then serve as God’s visible representative. And God will go to extreme and even absurd lengths, like transporting someone in the belly of a fish for three days, in order to avoid violating those narrative conventions.

Like most Bible stories, God’s actions in the book of Jonah are dictated not by what would be the most reasonable and effective way for a genuine God to accomplish His goals, but by the needs and desires of the person telling the story. Stories about God have to take place in a world where we all can see first-hand that God does not show up in real life. This absence must therefore be incorporated into the Bible stories, in the form of an unwritten Rule that forces God to go through any number of contortions rather than following the simple and direct path that would achieve His goals at the cost of exposing His existence to ordinary people.

Believers don’t understand why God fails to show up in person in the real world, but they know it’s a fact of life, and their stories necessarily reflect that awareness, and befuddlement. They read tales like Jonah, and it doesn’t occur to them that a real God would act any other way, because they know that in the real world you don’t see God preaching to the Assyrians, you see people claiming to have been sent by God. The bizarre convolutions in the story merely reflect the kind of twists and turns you have to go through to keep believing in divine intervention when reality is so visibly God-free.

Jesus seems to have gone through those same kinds of convolutions, as Geisler and Turek proudly agree. But that’s not a point in Jesus’ favor. Jonah’s story is an obvious fiction, whose characters and plot complications exist primarily to solve problems that would not exist if there were a real God Who simply showed up and interacted with us the way the Gospel claims He wants to do. That true not just for the story of Jonah, but for the whole Old Testament, and all of human history. We live in a reality characterized by the absence of the Biblical God, and all the interesting quirks of the Bible story are merely attempts to rationalize the believer’s faith with that unrelenting fact.

You have a misunderstanding of what death really is. Death is the separation of the body from the mind and spirit. Being made in God’s image consists of three parts. The Mind (God the Father), the body (Jesus) and the spirit (Holy Spirit). These three parts make One whole person. The resurrection is the rejoining of the body to the mind and spirit. Therefore, when Jesus says that God is the God of the living, he is telling the truth, because the mind and spirit are not dead, only the body is.

I can’t help but feel just a twinge of nostalgia, reading Joe’s defense of Jesus, because I had very much the same interpretation when I was a believer. Looking back on this rather simplistic interpretation, though, I can’t help but notice that it not only fails to effectively address the problems with Jesus’ argument, but also does a fair job of demonstrating why a smart god would never make a mere book the ultimate authority for his believers’ faith and practice.

Let’s have a quick review of Jesus’ allegedly Scripture-based argument for a future, bodily resurrection, which the Pharisees believed and the Sadducees rejected. Here it is in its entirety:

But about the resurrection of the dead—have you not read what God said to you, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not the God of the dead but of the living.”

Like Joe, I used to think that Jesus was making the point that the soul continues to live, in a spiritual state, after death. As we’ll see in a moment, that’s probably not true, for a number of reasons. But before we get to the problems with this interpretation, let’s think for a minute about what this means for Biblical inerrancy. This is one of the more obscure verses in Scripture, meaning that Jesus does not come right out and say what it is that he’s referring to. He starts off saying that he’s talking “about the resurrection of the dead,” but he ends up with a declaration that says nothing at all about resurrection. There’s a considerable gap there, and it’s left up to the reader to try and fill it in.

The danger for the believer is that there’s no answer key in the back of the book. You can read that passage, and puzzle over it, and try and think of some way the beginning of the verse connects to the end. If you think of something that sounds plausible to you, and you can’t think of anything else that fits what you know about it, you’re probably going to conclude that your best guess about the meaning must be the intended meaning, by a process of elimination. Nothing else seems to fit, therefore your interpretation must be the correct one, and therefore anyone who has a different interpretation must be wrong.

We see this in the very first words of Joe’s comment: “You have a misunderstanding of what death really is.” My interpretation is different than his, therefore mine must be based on error. But (as I hope to demonstrate) Joe himself is neither inerrant nor infallible. Even though he thinks his interpretation must be right and mine must be wrong, he could have misunderstood what Jesus was trying to say. The Bible, like any other book, has an inherent limit: it contains only those words which are written in it, and if you make a mistake in how you read those words, then you’re going to draw the wrong conclusions, even if you start from an infallible and inerrant source.

Joe, for example, is overlooking the fact that the Sadducees already believed that the soul survived after death. [Edit: on further research, I'm not sure I want to use the phrase "overlooking the fact" here. I think it's likely true, but there are conflicting accounts, and it's possible that my original understanding might be in error.] In fact, virtually all the significant religions in that era had a similar notion. To try and prove that there was a resurrection by pointing to the idea of life after death would be like trying to prove the validity of the Papacy by pointing to the fact that Jesus had disciples. This would not have been an astonishing teaching, and in fact would have left the crowds wondering when he was going to get to the point. Well of course there’s life after death, they would have said. Everybody knows that. But not everyone believes in a future bodily resurrection as a result!

The Sadducees, as you may recall, held to a pre-Captivity form of Judaism, such as the Judaism of David and Solomon. We see this in the story of the first son born of David’s adulterous (and murderous) relationship with Bathsheba. According to the story, when God saw that David had arranged Uriah’s death in order to obtain Bathsheba, He punished their first son for David’s sin by striking him with a fatal disease. But notice David’s reaction to the baby’s death:

David noticed that his servants were whispering among themselves and he realized the child was dead. “Is the child dead?” he asked. “Yes,” they replied, “he is dead.” Then David got up from the ground. After he had washed, put on lotions and changed his clothes, he went into the house of the LORD and worshiped. Then he went to his own house, and at his request they served him food, and he ate.

His servants asked him, “Why are you acting this way? While the child was alive, you fasted and wept, but now that the child is dead, you get up and eat!” He answered, “While the child was still alive, I fasted and wept. I thought, ‘Who knows? The LORD may be gracious to me and let the child live.’ But now that he is dead, why should I fast? Can I bring him back again? I will go to him, but he will not return to me.”

A classic example of Sadducean (pre-Exilic) Jewish belief. “I will go to him” (i.e. I will die and go to Sheol where my son is), “but he will not return to me” (i.e. he will not rise from the dead). David believed that the dead went to Sheol after being separated from their bodies, but this did not mean he believed that his son would rise from the dead again. Solomon expressed similar thoughts in the book of Ecclesiastes.

I saw that wisdom is better than folly,
just as light is better than darkness.The wise man has eyes in his head,
while the fool walks in the darkness;
but I came to realize
that the same fate overtakes them both.

Then I thought in my heart,
“The fate of the fool will overtake me also.
What then do I gain by being wise?”
I said in my heart,
“This too is meaningless.”

For the wise man, like the fool, will not be long remembered;
in days to come both will be forgotten.
Like the fool, the wise man too must die!

…A man may have a hundred children and live many years; yet no matter how long he lives, if he cannot enjoy his prosperity and does not receive proper burial, I say that a stillborn child is better off than he. It comes without meaning, it departs in darkness, and in darkness its name is shrouded. Though it never saw the sun or knew anything, it has more rest than does that man-even if he lives a thousand years twice over but fails to enjoy his prosperity. Do not all go to the same place?

Modern Christians, of course, follow in the traditions of the Pharisees, as Jesus did, so you’ll never hear them complain that life is meaningless because everyone dies and goes to the same place. In fact, they’re gladly tell you that their belief in the eternal blessings of heaven is what gives their life meaning. But that’s because they’re not Sadducees! Like David and Solomon, the Sadducees believed in the idea that the dead continued to exist as disembodied spirits, just as Joe does. If Jesus’ only point was to argue that ghosts are real, he really had no point at all, since nobody at the time would have disagreed with that concept.

Even if the Sadducees had disagreed, however, and even if they had not already believed in an afterlife, Jesus’ argument still would not have come close to proving that there was a future bodily resurrection. As I mentioned before, belief in an afterlife was part of virtually all ancient religions, very few of which included any kind of doctrine of future resurrection and judgment. The Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians, all had the idea that after you died, your soul/spirit went to a “realm of the dead,” and that was where you stayed. You might face a judgment of some sort, but there was no resurrection first, and the outcome determined only where your spirit went, not where your resurrected physical body ended up.

There are other problems with the common Christian interpretation of Matthew 22 as well. For instance, Jesus’ argument emphasizes the difference between the dead and the living: the whole point that astonished the Sadducees and the crowds was the idea that God was the God of the living and NOT of the dead. Kinda spoils the point if the dead ARE the living, as Joe’s interpretation would have it. And of course, there are all the problems we’ve mentioned before, like the bizarre and unchristian idea that God is not the God of the dead, and the fact that Abraham and sons can’t be raised from the dead if they’re not dead!

This is a fair sample of the kind of problem an authoritative Bible has that an authoritative God would not have, if He were willing and able to show up in real life to interact with us in person, outside of our feelings and imaginations. Since He does not, however, the Christians have to make do as best they can, and they do so by hyping the authority and reliability of some ancient, man-made documents, ignoring the difficulties and their own internal disagreements about how to correctly understand it. In God’s absence, they are inevitably guided by their own biases, preferences, and prejudices, and end up concluding that the Bible must be teaching whatever seems right in their own eyes.

Geisler and Turek continue their attempts to prove that it takes more faith to be an atheist, and this week their argument centers on the claim that the Bible is without error. We know this because the Bible says that Jesus says that the Bible is without error. Wellll, that is, he doesn’t come right out and actually say it. It’s more like he sorta implies it.

When the Sadducees tried to trap Jesus with a question, Jesus said to them, “You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God” (Matt. 22:29). The implication, of course, is that the Scriptures are inerrant. It wouldn’t make any sense for Jesus to say, “You are in error because you don’t know the Scriptures, which also err!”

That pretty much wraps up their argument for Biblical inerrancy, at least as far as this book is concerned. But since they raise the topic, let’s think about it a bit more.

I have a bad habit of looking up Bible references, especially when they’re just tossed in as an offhand debate-ender like this. So let’s take a quick look at Matthew 22 and get the whole story.

That same day the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to him with a question. “Teacher,” they said, “Moses told us that if a man dies without having children, his brother must marry the widow and have children for him. Now there were seven brothers among us. The first one married and died, and since he had no children, he left his wife to his brother. The same thing happened to the second and third brother, right on down to the seventh. Finally, the woman died. Now then, at the resurrection, whose wife will she be of the seven, since all of them were married to her?”Jesus replied, “You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God. At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven. But about the resurrection of the dead—have you not read what God said to you, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not the God of the dead but of the living.”

When the crowds heard this, they were astonished at his teaching.

The first thing worth noticing about this passage is that, as Geisler and Turek point out, Jesus tells the Sadducees that they are wrong because they do not know the Scriptures (or the power of God). That’s interesting right there, considering that he’s talking to priests. But what’s even more interesting is that he then proceeds to “correct” them by declaring that “at the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven”—which is not written anywhere in the Old Testament Scriptures!

Neat, isn’t it? He accuses them of having missed an important point in the Scriptures, and then teaches something you wouldn’t find even if you read every verse. The net effect is that the “astonished” crowds immediately assume that what Jesus said was part of Scripture somewhere. Jesus has just taken advantage of their ignorance and illiteracy to deceive them regarding what the Old Testament actually taught, and he did it to elevate his own perceived authority above that of the established Bible scholars of his day. He never told his disciples, “Go thou and do likewise,” but it’s a fairly common practice in Christian theology. If someone raises a point that contradicts your dogmas, just make something up and present it as though it had been in the Bible all along.

But it gets even more interesting. Having scored his “point” against the Sadducees, he tries to make it a shut-out by turning the tables on them. Unlike the Pharisees, the Sadducees accepted only the first five books (aka “The Law”) as canonical Scriptures. Jesus, however, is determined to beat them at their own game by proving the Pharisaic doctrine of resurrection out of their own Mosaic Pentateuch.

The trouble is, the Pentateuch does not teach Pharisaism (which, as we’ve discussed elsewhere, was basically a pagan idea that the Farsi/Pharisee Jews brought back with them from Persia/Farsia). Jesus, allegedly a prophet, allegedly God Incarnate, draws on his allegedly first-hand knowledge of the Law to try and find some passage which justifies belief in a future resurrection of the dead. And the best he can come up with is the verse in Exodus where God tells Moses, “I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”

Once again, Jesus is appealing to the idea that the Sadducees do not know their own Scriptures, and once again he does so by appealing to ideas that are not written in the text. There’s nothing in the passage he quotes that says anything about death or resurrection or the future. There’s nothing in the verse that requires Abraham, Isaac and Jacob to be alive in order for God to be their God. God can be Lord of the Sabbath even when it’s not the sabbath, He can be God of Creation even though Creation already happened, He can be the God of the Exodus even after the Exodus is ancient history. Jesus’ argument is simply not well-founded, even taking the Bible at face value.

But then Jesus ups the ante by plunging ahead with the idea that God is not the God of the dead. This idea is not only unscriptural (relative to the Old Testament anyway), it’s counter-productive. Why would God raise the dead if they’re no longer His once they die? And if Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are not dead, as Jesus argues, then what does that prove about resurrection? You can’t be raised from the dead if you’re not dead, so even if God were saying that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are not dead, that proves nothing about some future resurrection of those who are dead. Jesus is utterly blowing away his own argument!

If you think about it, Jesus’ teaching about God not being the God of the dead is a doctrine that is grossly unchristian, and tantamount to an explicit denial of all the eternal blessings that the Gospel promises to believers. Oh, sure, God will raise His own and give them eternal bliss in His Heavenly Kingdom, but read the fine print: if you’ve died, you’re not “His own” any more, and therefore you’re not covered by the promise of resurrection. Gotcha! Hahahaha!

But wait. Matthew’s account is written in the context of a particular time and a particular culture. It’s entirely possible, and consistent with the Scriptural and historical record, for the Sadducees to have been henotheists: people who believe that many gods exist, but who worship and serve only one of them. In that context, it’s entirely possible that the Sadducees believed that Yahweh was the god of Israel, but someone else was the god of the dead. Thus, the real gist of Jesus’ argument would be that the Sadducees had a problem because they couldn’t explain how God could still be the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob after they were dead. That might be what was really happening here, but we can’t know for sure, even if we assume the Gospel is inerrant.

In other words, even when we do read an “inerrant” document, we can’t be sure we’re developing an inerrant understanding of what it wants to say. We can think up a plausible sounding interpretation for some of the more difficult passages (but even then, Jesus’ argument still fails, because Abraham, Isaac and Jacob do not need to belong to God today in order for God to call Himself their God, just like Jesus does not need to be physically suffering on a cross right now today in order for Christians to call him their crucified Savior).

But this brings us to the real point I want to make about inerrancy, and that is that it is essentially meaningless. Oh, sure, it’s supposed to impress people, and to prove that they can’t contradict you (because you’re quoting from “inerrant” Scripture). But it’s a worthless endorsement, because the act of quoting and applying the Scripture is not necessarily inerrant. Even if we assume that the Bible contains no errors (despite ample documentation elsewhere), there’s no certainty that the person quoting the Bible is actually understanding and applying it correctly.

We see this very clearly in the Gospel passage that Geisler and Turek refer to. Jesus himself, implicitly appealing to Biblical inerrancy, uses it to bolster the perceived authority of opinions that are not in the Scriptures he’s appealing to. And what’s more, he’s appealing to the Scriptures to refute the teachers of the Law, whose professional study of the Scriptures has somehow failed to impart this magical inerrancy to their own religious beliefs. Biblical inerrancy is a purely theoretical concept with no practical consequences, because it does not infallibly transfer itself to those who read the allegedly infallible documents. Jesus himself pointed out this failure by denying that the teachers of the Law really knew the Scriptures.

In fact, any document can be declared “infallible” with the same practical implications as the Bible’s alleged infallibility has. Entire books have been written attempting to explain (i.e. rationalize away) the errors that have been discovered in Biblical texts so far. Excuses range from “that’s not an accurate copy of the original” to “the Bible hasn’t really failed, we’ve just failed to understand it correctly,” to “I deny the facts and claim that the Bible was correct despite the evidence.” But you could offer those excuses for any canonized document: the Qur’an, Dianetics, Science and Health with a Key to the Scriptures, the Book of Mormon, and on and on.

Biblical inerrancy is basically the old con-man’s shell game: distract the pigeon by shuffling things around so fast that he doesn’t notice there’s nothing under any of them. Jesus appealed to the Bible’s presumed-inerrant authority and then quickly slipped in some rather shady arguments not contained in the texts he appealed to. His followers, as he intended, jumped to the conclusion that his teachings had the full authority of divinely-inspired revelations. And to this very day they still play the same shell game, on each other, and on any likely looking non-Christian pigeon.

We continue with Geisler and Turek’s attempt to validate the authority and reliability of the Bible through the testimony of Jesus, whose own authority and reliability is derived from that of the Scriptures. As we saw last time, these attempts actually raise some serious problems for the claim that Jesus is God Incarnate, and the next two points on G&T’s list only dig the hole deeper. According to the good doctors, Jesus taught that the Old Testament is the Word of God (despite being written by men) because it:

2. Is Imperishable—In the Sermon on the Mount, a passage loved by conservatives and liberals alike, Jesus claimed that not even the smallest little mark in the Scriptures—the equivalent of a dot on an “i” or a cross on a “t”—will ever perish: “Do not think that I came to destroy the Law or the Prophets,” he declared. “I did not come to destroy but to fulfill. For assuredly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law until all is fulfilled” (Matt. 5:17, NKJV). Jesus could not express the imperishability of the Scriptures more forcefully.

3. Is Infallible—In John 10, Jesus was about to be stoned for blasphemy. To get himself out of this jam, Jesus cited the Old Testament and declared, “The Scripture cannot be broken” (John 10:35, NKJV). In other words, when his life was on the line, Jesus referred to an infallible authority that cannot be broken—the Scripture. Furthermore, he later affirmed the truth of the Scriptures when he prayed for the disciples, “Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth” (John 17:17).

Let’s start with point 2. According to Jesus, not the smallest little mark in the Scriptures can be nullified or revoked “until all is fulfilled.” Since Christians assure us that there are a number of Scriptural predictions and requirements that have not yet been fulfilled (like the Second Coming, the Last Judgment, and the millennial reign of God over the whole earth), that means that all precepts and commandments of the Law of Moses, plus the Prophets, are still in effect today.

This is the sort of argument that forms the foundation of the claim that all morality comes from God and is absolute. Geisler and Turek and a host of other Christian apologists and preachers make a big show out of denouncing “moral relativism” and situational ethics, and that claim is based, at least partially, on the fact that Jesus taught God’s moral precepts and requirements as laid out in the Old Testament, which cannot be altered or broken, ever, because they are God’s absolute and eternal moral law.

The only trouble is, this sort of teaching flies directly in the face of a very Christian sort of situational ethics and moral relativism, which they use all the time when confronted with the fact that the Old Testament blesses and/or advocates things like genocide (including babies and animals), ritual mutilation of infant genitals (without anesthetics or antiseptics!), selling one’s daughters for sexual purposes, having sex with your brother’s widow, killing babies, and of course animal sacrifice as a means of “soothing” God. It also condemns such things as eating pork, picking up sticks on Saturday, having sex with one’s wife during her period, and homosexuality. What’s more, in most of these cases, the penalty for these “sins” is to be death!

This is the sort of thing that, according to Jesus, cannot be set aside even in the smallest detail (the dot of an “i” or the cross on a “t”, as Geisler and Turek put it), yet how many Christians today are willing to boldly declare that such practices and punishments set a lofty moral standard that our society ought to emulate? Outside of Fred Phelps’s church, not too many, eh? These are brutal, barbaric moral standards, and we’ve done well to outgrow them. Yet these are the kind of commandments and precepts that Jesus assumed were not just good morality, but God’s eternally perfect morality.

Now, honestly, what does that tell us about Jesus, and his worldview? Was he the incarnation of a perfect and morally pure deity, unstained by sin nature or other ethical defect? Was he not rather an ordinary man, the product of his own cultural biases and limitations, appealing to the primitive yet popular worldview of his own society? What could be more thoroughly human than to blithely assume that one’s own values are the epitome of moral perfection, regardless of what they condone and condemn?

And remember, Jesus isn’t just saying that the Old Testament’s precepts and commandments are good “for that culture and at that time.” He’s not preaching moral relativism and situational ethics. He’s saying that these moral standards apply to all of time. They never expire, or at least not until the universe itself does. And even then, if this is what God tells us morality is, it would be highly inconsistent for Him to suddenly decide, at the Last Judgment, to swap in a completely different and incompatible moral standard instead.

As for being an infallible authority for believers, the same thing applies. Jesus may have said that the Old Testament was eternally binding and authoritative, but that really tells us more about Jesus’s biases and limitations than it does about genuine moral and spiritual authority. Even his own disciples and apostles, in the first generation of the Church, quickly sought out loopholes (based on a dream no less) by which the requirements of the entire Old Testament could be set aside for the vast majority of modern Christians. Not one jot or tittle? Ha!

And what happened as a result of this decision to set aside the Old Testament requirements? Did God look down from heaven, notice that His holy apostles were divorcing the Christian faith from the “eternal” requirements of the (OT) Scripture, and punish them? Were the apostles suddenly struck by plagues? Did the Holy Spirit forsake their evangelistic efforts and leave them without a “harvest” of souls?

Ha! again. Church growth among the Gentiles exploded. Freed from these barbaric and nonsensical superstitions, which even the Jewish apostles admitted were an unbearable “yoke,” the Gentile Church experienced what Christians often describe as a great blessing. Why? Because the Father was so happy that they were finally abandoning what the Son called the imperishable and infallible authority of the Old Testament? Or was it rather that the Old Testament had accumulated so many irrational phobias, superstitions, and demands, that even believers were beginning to resent it?

By anyone’s standards, the Church was far better off without being bound to the Law and the Prophets. And again, what does that tell us about Jesus, who expressed such admiration and respect for them? He called them imperishable, and predicted that whoever set aside the least of the commandments would be called least in the Kingdom, yet when his own apostles did set aside the commandments, from the least to the greatest, it did the Church so much good that today the men who did it are revered as saints—literally!

How could Jesus be so out of touch with reality that he would take something the Church was better off without, and treat it like it was the best that could ever be? Sure, we see this sort of thing all the time among ordinary, fallible, biased, and self-centered men. Was Jesus really all that different? Apparently not. This would be surprising if we thought he was some kind of God, but if we realize that he was just an ordinary guy (well, in the sense that televangelists today are just ordinary guys), then it all makes sense.

So rather than establish the authority of the Old Testament Scriptures (which even Geisler and Turek have gladly dispensed with in terms of the dictates of their own lives), Chapter 14 really shows us a human Jesus, a fallible Jesus, a Jesus who was unable to transcend the biases, superstitions, and brutal “morality” of his own environment. G&T have done a great job of linking Jesus’ moral and spiritual authority to that of the Old Testament, and that kind of sucks for poor Jesus. Sorry Jesus!

By the way, did you notice the way Geisler and Turek tap-danced around John 10? In point 2, when referring to the Sermon on the Mount, they gave us the full quotation, so that we could appreciate the full impact of Jesus’ words. In point 3, by contrast, they mention only that he said the words, “the Scripture cannot be broken,” with a very sketchy outline of what was going on at the time. Let’s take a quick look at what they left out, shall we?

Again the Jews picked up stones to stone him, but Jesus said to them, “I have shown you many great miracles from the Father. For which of these do you stone me?”"We are not stoning you for any of these,” replied the Jews, “but for blasphemy, because you, a mere man, claim to be God.”

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

So the Scripture that cannot be broken is the Scripture that said it was ok to refer to mortal men as “gods,” and Jesus used this verse as though it were the basis for his own claim to be “god” (in some sense). Kind of complicates the Liar, Lord or Lunatic argument that Geisler and Turek appealed to in Chapter 13, eh? So was Jesus deceiving them when he pretended that this OT passage was relevant to his claims to be God? That means he is dishonest and deceitful, about his own true identity no less! Or is this passage the key to understanding that Jesus did not really think of himself as a literal God, any more than the OT “man/god” types were? But that shoots down all of Chapter 13, and Chapter 14 as well, since it builds on the earlier chapter.

Small wonder that Geisler and Turek tiptoed around this passage, trying to appeal to it without revealing too much about what it actually says. But wait: next week they’re going to explain how Jesus taught that the Old Testament was also inerrant. Should be fun.

Next up on Geisler and Turek’s agenda, the Seven Things Jesus taught about the Bible (i.e. the Old Testament). As I said before, they’ve strayed pretty far from their thematic declaration that it takes more faith to be an atheist: this section could have been preached from any conservative Christian pulpit on any given Sunday morning without even mentioning apologetics.

Let’s begin with the first Thing or two. According to G&T, Jesus taught that the Old Testament:

1. Is Divinely Authoritative—When tempted by Satan, Jesus corrected him by quoting from the Old Testament… Why would Jesus so confidently quote from the Old Testament if the Old Testament was not authoritative? He must have considered the Old Testament to be a source of truth in order to dismiss his most powerful enemy with it.

In fact, on ninety-two occasions Jesus and his apostles supported their position by saying, “it is written” (or the equivalent) and then quoting the Old Testament. Why? Because Jesus and his apostles considered the Old Testament Scriptures to be the written word of God, and thus the ultimate authority for life.

For once, I agree with Geisler and Turek. Jesus did indeed teach that the Old Testament was the ultimate authority for life. What Geisler and Turek fail to realize, however, is that this is not a good thing.

If you were raised in a Christian environment like I was, it may not be as obvious that there’s a problem here. But think about it. Why would the Bible—a book written by men—be the ultimate authority for life? Why wouldn’t God be an even higher authority? Or even Jesus for that matter?

The Bible is called “God’s Word,” even though it was written by men like Moses and David and Paul, because it was supposedly “inspired” by God. That is, it derives its authority from the relationship it is supposed to have with God. Thus, God should have an even higher authority than the Bible, because the Bible’s authority is only supposed to be derived from His. Yet here is Jesus, who supposedly is God (according to Chapter 13, anyway), attempting to derive his authority from the derived authority of the Bible? Something’s not quite right here.

Let’s back up a minute, and consider two families. One family has a father named Jamal, who is a vital part of the family. He shows up on a frequent and regular basis to interact with the other family members, and in fact he lives in the same home with the rest of the family, apart from when he has to go off to work and so on. The children know what he is like, and what he wants them to do and to value and to believe, because he is continually, tangibly, and personally present interacting with them.

The other family has a father named Frank. The children have never actually seen him, but they have a book about him, or at least a book about people who say they’ve known him and can tell the story of what he’s like and how he wants his children to be raised. The stories don’t all fit together quite as well as might be hoped, and his kids disagree on what the stories mean even when they do seem to say the same thing, so there’s a certain margin of error inherent in the fact that their closest connection to Frank is through their personal interpretation of what other people have said about what Frank thinks and wants and values.

Obviously, the book about the father is a poor substitute for having the father around in person. No matter how much authority you vest in a book about the father, it can never equal the actual, tangible presence and involvement of the father himself, in person. Given a choice, you would never choose the book over the actual father (unless of course your goal was to avoid doing what your father wanted).

As we look through the Old Testament, we see a God Who not only grows progressively less powerful as time goes by, but Who also becomes more and more distant, aloof, and absent. In the Garden of Eden, God (allegedly) shows up personally and interacts directly with His children, without intermediaries, and likewise with later generations like Noah and Lot and Abraham. Around Abraham’s time, though, we start to see some changes. God doesn’t always show up in person; sometimes He sends angels instead.

By the time of Moses, there’s a definite shift. God still shows up in person, but only to a select few, on a few special occasions. Most of the people, like the Israelites and the Egyptians, have to resort to a human representative (Moses), who is the only person that gets to interact directly with God. Some of them can see God from a distance, as it were, but the two-way conversations are much, much more restricted. It’s the dawn of the Age of the Prophets.

Later generations see a lot more of the prophet and a lot less of God, and even the prophets very often get less than a personal appearance of God—just a voice, or a feeling, or even less. By the time of the Babylonians, God is pretty much not showing up in person at all any more, and hordes of prophets have taken His place in declaring “Thus Saith The Lord” to the people. The problem is, most of them are saying that God is going to protect Israel against the Assyrians and Babylonians, so when the defeated Jews are led away into exile, it’s not only a major blow against the prophets, it’s a crushing blow against God Himself and people’s faith in His power.

What happened next, during the exile, was both inevitable and incredible: deprived of their Temple and the traditional worship of their God, the Jews consoled themselves by turning to their holy books. And here’s where they made their remarkable, serendipitous, and (some might say) fatal discovery. By transferring their faith from God and His prophets, into a book, they could stop the cycle of failures that was threatening their faith.

God doesn’t show up in real life? No problem, He’s left us His Word to guide us. The Book is all that matters. The prophets consistently turn out to be wrong? Who cares, only the Scripture is genuinely correct. Things don’t turn out the way the Bible said? Heck, that’s easy, some uninspired reader just misunderstood what it was trying to say. Put your faith in God, or in prophets, and you’ll be disappointed by their inevitable failures; put it in an easily misunderstood book, though, and there’s always a good excuse that doesn’t threaten your faith in the least.

The Bible, in other words, is Plan B, the universal rationalization for God’s consistent failure to behave like a real, loving Heavenly Father. Sure, it would be nice if God actually behaved as though He believed what men wrote about Him in the Bible, but in His absence, we can use a book, suitably canonized and authorized (by men!) as a substitute. And yes, it would have been better to have even genuine living prophets who could dialog with us and with God and bring us specific answers to contemporary questions, but in their absence we can still maintain our faith by basing it on a book whose “true meaning” is unverifiable and thus unfalsifiable.

That’s what’s so odd about Jesus, who supposedly is God Incarnate, appealing for his authority to books written by men to compensate for God’s absence from real life. Incarnation should have given Jesus an authority that even prophets could only dream about, yet here he is resorting to the same inferior substitute for God’s presence that the losers in Babylon came up with. Authoritative Scripture is a way to compensate for God’s failures, and here’s Jesus, aka “God the Son,” not only endorsing it, but depending on it.

This is exactly the sort of outcome that would have to happen if the Myth Hypothesis were true. There is no God for Jesus to be the incarnation of, so to make himself something special, he has to somehow acquire some godly authority. The Jews, or at least the Pharisees, have very conveniently invested the Old Testament with divine authority in God’s absence, and therefore Jesus can tap that authority by presenting himself as someone who knows the OT and can quote it. A God Who actually existed, of course, wouldn’t need to appeal to the authority of books written about Him by men claiming to speak on His behalf. He’d be God: hear and obey, or else.

Geisler and Turek, of course, would explain this by appealing to the doctrine of the dual nature of Christ: he both is, and is not, God, therefore he both does, and does not, need to behave as though he were God. In other words, yes, the truth about Jesus directly contradicts itself, but that’s ok, because he’s God and that makes everything all right. As we saw before, that’s a dishonest reaction to the irreconcilable contradictions in what the Bible teaches about Jesus. But we’re just getting started. Next week, Geisler and Turek explain what Jesus meant when he taught that the Old Testament is “imperishable.” Stay tuned.

It’s been a long time since Geisler and Turek have even attempted to pretend they’re proving that atheists have more faith than Christians, and by Chapter 14 they seem to have forgotten their theme completely. We’re in full-on Sunday sermon mode now as they devote an entire chapter to telling us that we should take their word for it that we should take the Bible’s word for it that we should take Jesus’ word for it that we should take the Bible’s word for it. There’s not the slightest tinge of any consciousness of the circular reasoning involved in using Biblical accounts of Jesus’ alleged endorsement of Scripture as the basis for claiming the reliability and authority of the Bible. God said it, they believe it, that settles it—and therefore it takes more faith to be an atheist. QED.

They begin with an unintentionally funny hypothetical scenario, in which a 7th generation descendant of George Washington addresses Congress and denounces them as a gang of hypocrites and evil-doers, using language taken from Jesus’ attacks on the Pharisees, as recorded in Matthew 23. Bear with me here, but you guys need to read this:

Woe to you, egotistical hypocrites! You are full of greed and self-indulgence. Everything you do is done for appearances. You make pompous speeches and grandstand before these TV cameras. You demand the place of honor at banquets and the most important seats everywhere you go. You love to be greeted in your districts and have everyone call you “Senator” or “Congressman.” On the outside you appear to people as righteous, but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness! You say you want to clean up Washington, but as soon as you get here you become twice as much a son of hell as the one you replaced!

Woe to you, makers of the law, you hypocrites! You do not practice what you preach. You put heavy burdens on the citizens, but then opt out of your own laws!

Woe to you, federal fools! You take an oath to support and defend the Constitution, but then you nullify the Constitution by allowing judges to make up their own laws.

Woe to you, blind hypocrites! You say that if you had lived in the days of the Founding Fathers, you never would have taken part with them in slavery. You say that you never would have agreed that slaves were the property of their masters but would have insisted that they were human beings with unalienable rights. But you testify against yourselves because today you say that unborn children are the property of their mothers and have no rights at all! Upon you will come all the righteous blood that has been shed in this country. You snakes! You brood of vipers! You have left this great chamber desolate! How will you escape being condemned to hell!

Their point is that if some descendant of Washington made such a speech to Congress, it would cause national outrage—and yet, that’s exactly how Jesus talked to the leaders of his own day.

What? Sweet and gentle Jesus? Absolutely… Contrary to the spineless Jesus invented today by those who want to be spineless themselves, the real Jesus taught with authority and did not tolerate error. When religious people were wrong, he made righteous judgments and let everyone know what those judgments were.

Right. All that stuff about “lamb of God” and “Prince of Peace” and “a bruised reed he will not break“—that’s just the modern invention of a bunch of spineless liberals. And, just as an aside to anyone who thinks I sometimes speak too harshly to those who preach falsehoods, here’s the precedent I’m following. If it’s wrong to follow Jesus’ example, then just say so, otherwise let’s not pretend I’m out of line.

There’s lots of unintentional irony in Geisler and Turek’s opening to chapter 14, not the least of which is the number of congressmen and women who were voted into office by conservative, evangelical Christians like Geisler and Turek. Hey, if you don’t like hypocrites who smooth talk their way into office by paying lip service to Christian vocabulary while passing laws that oppress the poor and helpless (i.e. minorities), then stop voting for them so damn much! If you want to deliver a rant to a real hypocrite, find a mirror.

Then there’s the part about swearing to uphold the Constitution and then nullifying it by allowing judges to make their own laws. Speaking of hypocrisy! Evidently their Jesus surrogate isn’t any more honest than the politicians he’s denouncing, and is just as prone to thoughtless demagoguery. Yes, judges do issue rulings on laws, and nullify the ones that violate the Constitution. Read the document: that’s their job. It doesn’t nullify the Constitution for judges to fulfill their Constitutionally appointed role as reviewers and arbiters of the laws.

If you want to rail about politicians nullifying the Constitution, how about taking them to task for using the so-called “Patriot” Act to castrate the civil protections of the Fourth Amendment? Or the huge number of relentless attempts to establish Christianity as the official religion of the United States, in blatant violation of the First Amendment?

A much greater irony lies in how far conservative Christians have come since the days of Jesus, in terms of reversing their political priorities. Where the first century Christians believed and practiced Jesus’ teachings regarding paying taxes (”render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s”) and giving priority to caring for the poor, the widowed, and the helpless, including tolerance and benevolence towards social pariahs, the modern American Christian has become a pawn of the Republican National Convention, bought and paid for by support for Robertson’s and Falwell’s “Moral Majority” and similar political ministries.

In the modern conservative Christian lexicon, the poor widow is no longer the saintly giver who dropped a small coin in the church offering, she’s a “welfare queen,” a parasite, an undeserving drain on the resources of honest, hard working folk. The poor are no longer especially beloved by God, as Jesus taught, they’re lazy, wicked, and un-American. Helping the poor is no longer a service to God, it’s an apostasy, a reversion to socialism or communism, or an outright attempt to destroy America.

Wealthy businessmen and industrialists have their own news outlets, which Christians flock to, unaided by any spiritual wisdom from above. By paying more hypocritical lip service to Christian teachings (without actually practicing what Jesus taught), these propaganda channels spread rumors and slanders and falsehoods that Christians unquestioningly absorb and spread, thus thwarting laws, policies, and candidates that might otherwise threaten the flow of money and power away from the common people and into the assets of the privileged few.

Geisler and Turek had to do some extensive editing of Jesus’ remarks in order to make them fit their conservative Christian political agenda. What’s ultimately the most ironic about this whole section of their book is how little of Jesus’ original speech would need to be changed, were he to suddenly appear before the leaders of the National Association of Evangelicals, or the Trinity Broadcasting Network, or any other organization of conservative Christian leaders in America today. Read what Jesus actually said, as recorded by Matthew, and ask yourself, is he really speaking only to the Pharisees of 2,000 years ago? Or are his words just as relevant and appropriate when applied to the religious leaders of today?

[You] do not practice what [you] preach. [You] tie up heavy loads and put them on men’s shoulders, but [you yourselves] are not willing to lift a finger to move them.

Everything [you] do is done for men to see: [You] … love the place of honor at banquets and the most important seats in the [churches]; [you] love to be greeted in the marketplaces and to have men call [you] ‘Teacher.’ …

Woe to you, teachers of the law and [evangelicals], you hypocrites! You shut the kingdom of heaven in men’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to.

Woe to you, teachers of the law and [evangelicals], you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as you are.

Woe to you, blind guides! You say, ‘[We believe in religious freedom and women's rights, but if a woman becomes pregnant against her will, she is less than a slave, having no right to decide what is to be done with her own body, because of the fetus].’ You blind fools! Which is greater: [the fleshly body which is being prepared to become a living soul, or the soul one who is already a child of God? You also say, "Thus saith the Lord," yet nowhere in the Scriptures is it written that a woman may not choose to end an unwanted pregnancy, nor is it written that the fertilized egg, the zygote, and the fetus are all human souls. You unrepentant materialists, who reduce human spirits to the mere flesh of a body that is not yet even formed!]

Woe to you, teachers of the law and [evangelicals], you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your [luxuries]. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.

Woe to you, teachers of the law and [evangelicals], you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. Blind [evangelicals]! First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean.

Woe to you, teachers of the law and [evangelicals], you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men’s bones and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.

Woe to you, teachers of the law and [evangelicals], you hypocrites! …[Y]ou say, ‘If we had lived in the days of [religious wars/the Inquisition/the Salem witch trials/the Holocaust], we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the [innocents].’ So you testify against yourselves that you are the descendants of those who murdered the [innocent]. Fill up, then, the measure of the sin of your forefathers!

You snakes! You brood of vipers! How will you escape being condemned to hell?

Yeah, like Geisler and Turek I did update the middle part with a more current debate. I think my portrayal is a bit more consistent with Jesus’ views on the dichotomy between (and relative priority of) the spiritual versus the material, don’t you? Plus my Jesus is more truthful than Geisler and Turek’s Republican Jesusoid.

It’s not entirely clear what any of this has to do with the title of Chapter 14, which is “What Did Jesus Teach About the Bible?” But it was kind of a fun diversion. Next week, we’ll watch Geisler and Turek dig themselves a hole, and jump into it. Stay tuned.

One of the tricks that trinitarians use to try and mask the flaws in their theology is to claim that the doctrine is so mind-bogglingly complex that we shouldn’t even try to understand it, let alone reconcile it with itself. As Geisler and Turek were saying about the Trinity last week,

It may be beyond reason, but it’s not against reason.

That doesn’t mean the Trinity can be completely understood. After all, no finite being can completely comprehend an infinite God. But we can apprehend the Trinity just like we apprehend but do not completely comprehend the ocean. When we’re standing on the beach, we can apprehend that there’s an ocean in front of us, even though we  can’t completely comprehend its vast magnitude.

Some Muslims charge that the Trinity is too complex. But who said that truth must always be simple?

I personally have not heard any Muslim arguments alleging that the Trinity is too complex to understand, but Geisler and Turek certainly are trying to make that allegation. And it’s false. The problems with the Trinity are not due to complexity, but due to the fact that the doctrine makes several simple statements that are supposedly all true even though they plainly contradict one another.

Remember, we’re not dealing here with a God Who can be approached and observed in the real world the way you can approach and observe a real ocean. The contradictions and inconsistencies of the Trinity are not anomalies that can be observed outside the words and thoughts of men. What we are dealing with here is not a God whose verifiable characteristics puzzle us. We are dealing with men saying things about God, in His absence, that don’t add up.

Now, let’s pause for a minute to ask ourselves: if someone were to lie to us about God, how would we go about discovering the falsehood? Would we not test the words of men against real-world truth, and against each other, to see if they demonstrated the same flawless self-consistency that defines genuine real-world truth? If we were going to oppose these teachers, and accuse them of preaching false doctrines, would we not base our claim on some contradiction between what the teachers said and what we held as being genuine truth? Even if we were believers, and were going to denounce them based on some supposed contradiction of the Bible, wouldn’t we be arguing that the contradiction is what proves their teaching to be false?

We’re not saying that truth must always be simple. What we’re saying is that truth is always self-consistent. It does not contradict itself. When we hear men making claims about God, in God’s absence, the only way we have to determine whether those claims are true or not is to examine whether those claims contradict each other and/or the real-world truth.

Thus, it’s not really a question of whether finite minds can comprehend an infinite amount of knowledge about God. The question is, when we look at the part we can comprehend, considering that it is the words of men and not an actual observation of an actual God, do we find the perfect self-consistency that is required for truthfulness, or do we find a mish-mosh of inconsistencies and self-contradictions, such as must necessarily result when telling falsehoods?

There is a certain simplicity in genuine truth: because it is already perfectly consistent with itself, there’s no need for us to invent complicated rationalizations to try and account for all the conflicts and contradictions that arise whenever you try to assert a falsehood as though it were really true. To paraphrase Mark Twain, the truth is easier because there’s less to remember. But this is a relative simplicity: the actual truth can be fairly complex, as we find when studying biology, for example. Even a complex truth, however, is going to be simpler than the kind of lies you have to tell to contradict it (as many creationists have discovered to their chagrin).

Geisler and Turek give us a fairly good example of this principle in action. Genuine truth is relatively less complex than trying to make the corresponding lie sound more truthful, but watch C. S. Lewis (quoted by G&T) try to convince us that the problems with Trinitarianism are actually a sign that the doctrine must be correct:

If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could make it easier. But it is not. We cannot compete, in simplicity, with persons who are inventing religions. How could we? We are dealing with fact. Of course anyone can be simple if he has no facts to bother about.

Lewis is dead wrong: you can’t invent a lie that is more consistent with real-world truth than the truth is. You can tell a lie that fools people. You can ignore or gloss over the inconsistencies that inevitably result when you pass off a falsehood as the truth. But acknowledged or not, addressed or not, the lie raises issues and contradictions that genuine truth does not suffer from, so you can never make a lie that addresses all the relevant issues and still ends up being simpler than the truth.

And, by the way, Christians can and do try to make the Trinity simpler: G&T started off their chapter with a nice, homey “three who’s and one what” that was an attempt to do exactly that, as was their triangle analogy. There’s no shortage of Christian approaches to making the Trinity simpler. But again, the problem is not lack of simplicity, it’s lack of self-consistency. The simple ideas expressed by the Trinity are ideas that contradict one another, and one thing you can never do, when you’re making up a lie, is to invent enough complex rationalizations to solve all of the lie’s inconsistencies with genuine truth. Thus, Lewis fails to rationalize away the problems with Trinitarian doctrine.

Geisler and Turek next turn to historical revisionism to try and justify the Trinity.

Some critics and cult leaders have suggested that the Trinity is a later invention of the church. But this simply isn’t true. The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are all referred to as God in the Scriptures.

The doctrine of the Trinity was hammered out, via  long, political process, in a series of church councils convened by the Roman Emperor and various church leaders, in order to try and resolve some of the long-standing contradictions that had been causing controversy and division (and even violence) among Christians since the first century. It is exceedingly disingenous, if not outright deceitful, for Geisler and Turek to equate the centuries-old existence of the problem with an equally-old existence of the Trinitarian response.

Obviously, if Trinitarian doctrine were the answer to these problems, then the problems themselves would not have arisen in the church in the first place, assuming the doctrine dated back as far as the New Testament writings. Nor would there been such a lengthy and difficult debate centuries later, had the answer already been 300 years old by the time the first councils were convened. The conflicting polytheistic and monotheistic streams in Christian thought do indeed date back to the first century, but that does not mean the Trinitarian answer to that problem was any less a product of the third century (and later) councils. Geisler and Turek are simply lying in order to hide the purely human (and non-apostolic) origins of Trinitarian dogma.

By far the longest paragraph in G&T’s attempt to answer objections to the Trinity is a rather feeble attempt to make the Trinity sound like it actually gives us some genuine insights into spiritual mysteries. I’ll spare you the long quotation, but the gist of it is that the Trinity explains how I John 4:16 can say that God is love. You can’t have love unless you have someone to be the object of your love, therefore God needed someone else to exist prior to creation so that He could have someone to love. Apparently Geisler and Turek are unfamiliar with the concept of loving oneself, as well as being a bit weak on the distinction between being something and doing something.

And that about wraps up Chapter 13. Not to be superstitious, but I have to admit that one was pretty unlucky for our two erstwhile apologists. Next week, having used the Bible to “prove” that Jesus must be God (!), they’re going to turn around, without any self-consciousness, and use Jesus, as reported in the Bible, to prove the reliability and authority of the Bible. Here’s an excerpt:

My high school science teacher once told me that much of Genesis is false. But since my high school science teacher did not prove he was God by rising from the dead, I’m going to believe Jesus instead.

—Andy Stanley

Stay tuned…

It’s time to dig into the Trinity itself, and Geisler and Turek want us to know up front that we’re most certainly not dealing with an unreasonable dogma here.

Despite what some skeptics may say, the Trinity is not illogical or against reason. Saying that there is one God and three Gods would be illogical. But saying that there is one God who has three persons is not illogical. It may be beyond reason, but it’s not against reason.

Gotta love the bit where they say the Trinity is beyond reason rather than against reason. In other words, if trinitarians contradict themselves, that doesn’t mean they’re actually wrong, it just means we’re too stupid to figure out a way to resolve the contradiction. It’s an IOU for the rationalization they’d like to be able to come up with, but can’t. And God’s the one that’s supposed to pick up the tab!

G&T are partly correct: depending on how you define “God” and “person,” it might not necessarily be illogical to say that one God can have three persons. If God is a category, or a species, or an organization, He/They/It could have any number of persons as members. There is one humanity that has many persons, one Republican party that has many persons, and so on. The illogical stuff doesn’t kick in until you start trying to claim that this is anything other than frank polytheism.

Geisler and Turek haven’t really started yet, though unfortunately those four short sentences constitute their entire exposition of the argument that the Trinity is not illogical. No additional evidence or rationale is provided, just the wistful appeal to the notion that perhaps there’s a logical explanation somewhere just beyond the reach of human intellect.

And yet, even though they’ve barely introduced the topic of the logic of the Trinity, they’re already in deep trouble. Notice that they’ve defined God as “one God who has three persons.” So right away we’ve abandoned the idea of a personal God. The concept of “person” does not describe what God is, it describes what God has, and He’s got more than one of them. That means God Himself is not a person (singular), making it technically incorrect to refer to Him using third-person plural pronouns like He and His and Him. He has plural persons, so He is a Them, not a Him.

That’s contrary to the Scriptures, however.

I am the LORD, and there is no other; apart from me there is no God. (Isa. 45:5)

For this is what the LORD says— he who created the heavens, he is God; he who fashioned and made the earth, he founded it; he did not create it to be empty, but formed it to be inhabited— he says: “I am the LORD, and there is no other.(Isa. 45:18)

That’s just a sample, of course, but notice that God is speaking in the first person singular. Not, “We are God and there are no others,” but “apart from Me there is no God.” The Bible portrays God speaking of Himself as though He were indeed a person (as in person singular).  If God were some kind of collective or composite made up of multiple persons, then it would be incorrect and even misleading for the Bible to refer to Him as a singular person. And yet, all of the Bible verses which form the basis for Christian monotheism do just that: they refer to God as a singular person, and designate Him with third person singular (or first person singular) pronouns.

What Geisler and Turek have done, and what the Christian Church has been doing for centuries, is to sneak in a polytheistic conceptual framework, in which the term “God” refers to a kind of “essence” that can be shared among multiple distinct individuals. “Human” is a similar sort of characteristic: we’re each distinct individuals, yet we’re all fully and 100% human. God ceases to be a unique, individual, personal identity, and becomes a type or a category. But that’s just what “deity” is for Zeus and Apollo and Artemis as well: a shared condition of being divine.

And yet, though they have changed “God” from being a person to being a collective of multiple divine persons, they still maintain, monotheistically, that God is a person. They pray to Him, speak of Him in singular pronouns, try to understand His will. They wish to obey His desires, to hear His voice, to see His face—everything you would expect to find among monotheists relating to a deity who was the only person to be an honest-to-goodness God.

If there’s only one Person who is really God, however, then Jesus cannot both be God and be the Son of God. So they slip with practiced ease back into the polytheistic framework that changes God from a character into a category, an impersonal essence that is somehow mystically shared amongst many divine persons. It all depends on the conceptual need of the moment. Are we arguing against polytheism? Then God IS a person. Are we arguing for the deity of Jesus? Then it’s no longer that God IS a person, but rather that He HAS a person, and has a few in fact.

This is what Geisler and Turek refer to as the aspect of the Trinity that is “beyond” reason. It’s not beyond reason, it’s just two contradictory conceptual frameworks inhabiting the same skulls at the same time. They can’t figure out how to fit the two frameworks together because they are fundamentally and inherently contradictions of one another.

And with due respect to Drs. Geisler and Turek, it’s not our fault that two conflicting and contradictory systems fail to fit together nicely. The problems are a direct result of the fact that they conflict. Being smarter won’t give us some magical ability to reconcile the mutual contradictions. Being smarter would merely make it easier to recognize that the system can’t be fixed, because it isn’t broken. It’s just manifesting the fundamental flaws in the original concept.

[D]id Jesus know the time of his second coming? As God, yes; as man, no. Did Jesus know all things? As God, yes; as man, no… Did Jesus get hungry? As God, no; as man, yes. Did Jesus get tired? As God, no; as man, yes.

In other words, the whole point of the “dual nature” Christology is to make it possible to make true statements about Jesus having the characteristics of being God, and at the same time make equally true statements about Jesus not having the characteristics of being God. That is, Geisler and Turek think that you can truthfully say that Jesus did know the time of his second coming, even though you can also truthfully say that Jesus did not know the time of his second coming. That’s important (to Christians) because Jesus himself claimed ignorance of the date, so if he did know, then he was lying to us.

The point I want to emphasize is that, according to this system, it doesn’t matter whether the statement about Jesus having non-divine characteristics is a contradiction of the claim that he was God. His human nature is supposed to allow us to say anything we like about him lacking the traits of deity, and these things are still true despite the fact that they contradict his dogmatically asserted deity.

The fun part starts when we use Geisler and Turek’s framework to ask the simple question, Is Jesus God? You know the formula, right? The answer is, “As God, yes; as man, no.” In other words, the same principle that allows trinitarians to claim that Jesus was both fully God and fully man also allows us to declare, as Biblical truth, that Jesus was not God. As man, Jesus did not possess omniscience, even though God is supposedly omnscient. As man, Jesus became hungry and weak and tired, even though God is supposedly omnipotent. Thus, as man, Jesus possessed the traits of not being God, because as man Jesus was not God.

The thing is, when the Bible talks about Jesus’ weaknesses and limitations, it does not qualify the claim with the magic formula “as man.” Jesus didn’t say, “As man, the Son does not know the day nor the hour.” You don’t state the “as man” part, you just say that Jesus had the non-divine trait. So the true, Biblical, undeniable statement is, “Jesus was not God.”

I think Christians might have a hard time dealing with this. It’s one thing to say, “Yes, Jesus was as human as me,” but it’s another thing to come right out and say “Jesus was not God.” The contradiction is easier to ignore when you can tell yourself that Jesus just had a dual nature, but when you come right out and say the words “Jesus was not God,” it puts the contradiction right in front of your nose.

The trouble is, Christians can’t deny the truth of the statement “Jesus is not God,” according to dual nature Christology. They can assert the contradictory premise that Jesus is God, but the whole point of dual nature Christology is to sustain the conclusion that both contradictory claims are equally true. If you can’t declare that it is absolutely true that Jesus is not God, then neither can you claim that it’s true Jesus lacked the attributes of deity, like omniscience and omnipotence. And that brings the clear statements of the New Testament in direct conflict with the idea that Jesus was God.

For skeptics, this may seem like no big deal, because we don’t buy into the whole God-can-contradict-Himself notion in the first place. For the believer, though, this might prove to be a serious problem, because it speaks the unspeakable. Christians have been indoctrinating each other for centuries with the idea that it’s heresy to say that Jesus is not God, yet the very Church dogmas that make it heretical to deny the deity of Christ also make it inevitable that Christians must not deny the statement “Jesus is not God.” It’s inherent in dual-nature Christology itself.

The only way we have to detect when men are lying to us about God is by looking for the contradictions that are characteristic of untruth. Only genuine truth is fully consistent with itself; the falsehoods men tell always contain contradictions, either self-contradictions or contradictions of real-world fact. There is a fundamental and inescapable self-contradiction in Christian theology regarding the so-called deity of Jesus, a whopper of a contradiction, a Big Clue that this doctrine of men is not genuine truth. If we cannot recognize this as a human-invented falsehood, then we can never detect any lie at all.

Gullibility is when you believe whatever people tell you even though common sense ought to expose their words as false because they conflict with reality and/or contradict themselves. This week, Geisler and Turek are going to tell us that Christianity contradicts itself, but we should believe whatever they tell us anyway.

[I]n Matthew 24:36, Jesus claims he doesn’t know the date of his own return when he declares, “No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” Now how can Jesus be God if he… is limited in knowledge?

The answer… lies in a proper understanding of the Trinity. First, let’s state clearly what the Trinity is not: the Trinity is not three Gods, three modes of one God, or three divine essences. The Trinity is three persons in one divine essence. In other words, there are three persons—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—who share one divine essence.

We’ve talked before about how Christianity substitutes the ritual for the rational in discussing the Trinity, and this is a pretty typical example. The words don’t have to mean anything—you could call Jesus “an unmarried spouse whose biological mother was never pregnant,” for example—and as long as the ritual formula has an officially sanctioned “correct” form, you can mentally substitute the concept of a correct expression of the doctrine in place of the concept of correct substance in what the doctrine teaches. So Geisler and Turek are very concerned with making sure we’re dealing with a correct expression of the doctrine of the Trinity, as though that were the key issue.

Once you start trying to make the formula express some non-nonsensical meaning, however, you get into trouble. G&T close the above paragraph by adding, “The Trinity is like a triangle: a triangle has three corners, but it is still one triangle.” And just in case we’re unclear on what a triangle is, they include a picture of a triangle, with one corner labeled “Father,” one labeled “Son,” and one labeled “Holy Spirit,” and with “Divine Nature” in the middle of the triangle.

Trouble is, each corner is only part of the triangle, and is not wholly triangular in and of itself. That’s another thing the Trinity is not: it is not the doctrine that the three Persons are each only part of God. If we were to apply the triangle analogy to the Trinity, we would say “Jesus is not God, he’s only part of God, just like one corner of the triangle is only part of the triangle.” That’s a direct denial of trinitarian teaching, because we would also have to say that the Father and the Holy Spirit are not God either. G&T’s simple, homey illustration is a heretical contradiction of the primary point they’re trying to make.

At this point, however, they veer away from discussing the Trinity, and turn to a similarly murky discussion of the muddy waters of Christology.

Jesus shares in the one divine nature, but he also has a distinct human nature. Jesus is one “who” with two “what’s” (a divine “what” and a human “what”); God is three “who’s” (Father “who,” Son “who,” and Holy Spirit “who”) in one “what,” that is three persons in one divine nature.

And we’re back to the ritual formula again. Don’t let the side trip into Whoville distract you; all they’re really doing is rephrasing the official formula using a more folksy-sounding vocabulary. (”See, the Trinity isn’t hard, it’s just pronouns!”) But once again, as soon as you start trying to tease out some non-nonsensical meaning from the formulaic expression, you get into trouble.

[D]id Jesus know the time of his second coming? As God, yes; as man, no. Did Jesus know all things? As God, yes; as man, no… Did Jesus get hungry? As God, no; as man, yes. Did Jesus get tired? As God, no; as man, yes.

In other words, the Trinitarian/Christological formula gives simultaneous, contradictory answers to simple questions like “Did Jesus know X?”. Geisler and Turek know this. They realize that if you answer “Yes, he did know,” that’s a contradiction of the answer “No, he did not know.” They know that Christianity, by asserting the truth of both answers, is contradicting itself. But here’s the catch: they know that they’re reciting the trinitarian formula correctly, and therefore the self-contradictory answer must be correct. Right?

What Geisler and Turek overlook is the fact that it is entirely possible to be entirely 100% correct in how you repeat the official, canonized doctrine, and for that doctrine to nevertheless be 100% bullshit. You can compartmentalize your thinking, you can simply shut out the implications of what “being God” means when answering the question in terms of what “being man” means, but that does not eliminate the contradiction. The Church Fathers published a canonized formula that gives blatantly contradictory answers when applied to simple, straightforward cases, and Geisler and Turek know the answers are contradictory, and they believe what the Church Fathers said anyway.

We could stop there, but let’s dig a little deeper, and see why the Christological formula is unable to come up with straightforward self-consistent answers to simple questions. The formula states that Jesus is one “person” with two “natures.” A “person” in this context is a unique individual identity that is aware of itself. Self-awareness, uniqueness, and individuality, in turn, are part of the nature of this person: “nature” is the set of all qualities that define the characteristics, abilities, and limitations of a thing.

The problem that the Church Fathers got into is that once you describe the set of all qualities that define the characteristics, abilities and limitations of something, you’ve only got one set of qualities. If you take a man whose nature consists of the set of all human qualities, and you add omniscience to that set, you still end up with one set of qualities that describe his characteristics, abilities, and limitations, it’s just that this single set of qualities now happens to include the quality of omniscience.

“Nature” thus describes the complete set of properties possessed by something, and there’s only one complete set, because for any given property, it’s either in the set or it isn’t. And within that set of properties, if one property has one value, it would be a contradiction to assert that it also had some contradictory value at the same time. You might, perhaps, observe a change in the set of properties, or a change in the value of the properties, over time, but at any given moment the singular nature of a thing is the complete set of self-consistent properties that describe the thing. And there’s only one set.

Since a thing can have only one complete set of properties that define its nature, you can’t ascribe two contradictory natures to the same thing at the same time. If you say that “the nature of something is X,” you’re contradicting the claim that “its nature is not X, but Y.” And that’s the root of the problem Geisler and Turek are running into. The Christological formula is necessarily going to give contradictory answers to simple questions because it explicitly incorporates the inherently contradictory assumptions that Jesus both is divine rather than human, and is human rather than divine.

There is one caveat here: it’s also possible to talk about “categorical natures” that are subsets of the complete set of characteristics that define a thing. For example, you can combine the “nature of a husband,” the “nature of a college professor,” and the “nature of a liberal” in the same man, because these are only subsets of the complete set of qualities that make up the person. Besides, the qualities in “nature of a husband” do not overlap with the qualities of “nature of a liberal,” so the two sets can be merged without causing conflicts.

That caveat doesn’t work for the Christological formula, though, because the “divine nature” and the “human nature” do directly overlap and contradict one another across a wide range of properties. That’s why the formula, even when correctly stated, cannot give consistent, non-self-contradictory answers to straightforward questions.

This is a point worth emphasizing: the problem is inherent in the formula as correctly stated. We’re not getting wrong answers because we’re applying the wrong formula, or because we’re applying it incorrectly. The original, authentic, Christian formula is self-contradicting and therefore gives self-contradictory answers even when correctly stated and applied. It’s a flaw in Christianity itself, and not a problem in how we’re using it.

Geisler and Turek know this. They know that what the early Christian Fathers said was self-contradicting, they even list a number of examples of cases where the same formula returns both “Yes” and “No” for the same simple questions. But they believe what the Christian founders said anyway, even though common sense would recommend otherwise. And that, as I mentioned before, is the very definition of gullibility.

Geisler and Turek have spent Chapter 13 trying to convince us that Jesus flat out claimed to be God, thus leaving us with no choice but to embrace him as Lord, or else to denounce him as a liar and/or lunatic. Their preferred response, of course, is to proclaim him as God, and today they take some time to deal with various objections to the deity of Christ.

The first objection they take up, ironically, is the question many skeptics ask: if Jesus is God, why didn’t he come right out and say so. Geisler and Turek have been trying to persuade us that Jesus did come right out and say so, but if that were the case, then the best answer to this question would be to simply quote the words of Jesus in which he directly said, “Yes, I am God the Son, second Person of the Trinity, eternal deity incarnate in the flesh of man.” But they can’t. So they give us four other answers instead, and the first one is rather a beaut.

Are you ready for this? Are you sitting down? Coffee or other beverage swallowed and put to one side? Ok then. The question is, Why wasn’t Jesus more overt in declaring himself to be the eternal God come down in human flesh?

First, Jesus didn’t want interference from the Jews.

Yep, that must be it. Good old Under-The-Radar Jesus, tiptoe-ing around trying to keep from stirring up any trouble with the Jews! I’m sure the reason he called them a “viper’s brood” and denounced them as “hypocrites” and “whitewashed tombs” is because he wanted to be sure they didn’t interfere in his earthly ministry. I mean, that makes sense, right?

And the reason he went around allegedly working miracles and preaching and generally stirring up the crowds is because he didn’t want a bunch of fans mobbing him and getting underfoot either. He couldn’t have been trying too hard, though, because as Geisler and Turek point out, the crowds got so worked up that he almost was abducted and forcibly made king. He tried to avoid stirring up trouble, but I guess nobody’s perfect, eh? Next reason.

Second, Jesus could not be our supreme human example if he pulled rank every time he got into any earthly trouble.

This is a fairly stereotypical example of a classic apologist’s trick: try and make it sound like the skeptic is making unreasonable demands. But nobody is demanding that Jesus “pull rank” every time he gets into any earthly trouble. There were plenty of times when he and his disciples were off somewhere private, not bothering anybody, when he could have said, “Oh, by the way guys…”

Not to mention he kind of sucks in the “supreme human example” department anyway, since he was not supposed to be afflicted with the sin nature that Christians claim is our biggest handicap. Even without the alleged divine nature to draw on, he couldn’t possibly be “tempted like as we are,” because we’re allegedly tempted and enticed “when we are carried away by our own lusts“—sinful and corrupted lusts that Jesus didn’t have to deal with. And even without them, he wasn’t such a great example, popular legend and Sunday school piety notwithstanding.

Third, Jesus had to be very careful about when and where he revealed his deity so that he could accomplish his mission of sacrificial atonement. If he had been too overt with his claims and miraculous proof, they might not have killed him.

Here’s an argument with a superficial ring of plausibility, at least until you start comparing notes. For instance, just a few pages ago, Geisler and Turek were not only claiming that Jesus did “reveal his deity,” they were arguing that his crucifixion was provoked precisely because he claimed divinity. They even quote the passage where the Pharisees demand the death penalty on a charge of blasphemy. So “revealing his deity” isn’t likely to present a significant obstacle to bringing him to an untimely end.

The thing is, Geisler and Turek are trying to push to contradictory arguments: that Jesus could not openly declare himself to be God, and that Jesus did openly declare himself to be God. You might make a case for either point, but the two contradict each other, so you can’t argue both (at least not consistently).

Their final answer is to appeal to the free will excuse.

He gave them enough evidence to convince the open-minded, but not enough to overwhelm the free will of those wishing to cling to their own traditions.

You gotta love the way they use “open-minded” to mean “anyone who agrees with US.” Apparently, if you acquire too many facts, and have too accurate an understanding of the truth, it causes you to become less “open-minded.”

This is the kind of argument that really bugged me when I was a Christian. Why not just come right out and declare, “Jesus wants you ignorant, because if you ever learn the real truth and the whole truth, you’ll lose your faith in Christ!” That’s really what they’re saying here. Too much truth is a bad thing. It harms you in some way that’s related to believing in Jesus. Jesus had to suppress the truth and confuse people, because honesty just isn’t compatible with salvation. Really?

Four arguments, and not a sound one in the bunch. But that’s just the warm-up. Next week, Geisler and Turek tackle the question, “How can Jesus be God?” And their answer is to explain it all with that wonderfully clear and intellectually-appealing doctrine called The Trinity. Stay tuned.

It’s almost time for Geisler and Turek to do their “answering the critics” schtick, but before we get to that, there’s just one or two loose ends they’d like to tie up. According to G&T, Jesus proved his deity by “three unparalleled proofs,” namely fulfilled prophecy, a sinless life, and resurrection.

We’ve already given evidence regarding the messianic prophecies, Jesus’ miracles, and his resurrection. But what about the idea of Jesus being sinless? Jesus himself said, “Which one of you convicts Me of sin” (John 8:46, NASB)? Moreover, his disciples, who spent three years with him day and night, claimed that Jesus was sinless…

Because of course it would never have occurred to those disciples that their own authority was derived from Jesus’ perceived authority, and therefore it was in their own best interests to make Jesus sound as virtuous and authoritative as possible. Right?

I can’t help thinking back to the early parts of this book, when Geisler and Turek were examining the scientific evidence for evolution, how high and strict their standards of proof were. Apparently, no conclusion is to be believed unless each and every premise, prediction, and principle were rigorously and exhaustively documented, such that no question remained and no alternative explanation were conceivable.

But those standards only apply to verifiable, real-world facts, of course. When it comes to the stories told by early Christian evangelists, the merest suggestion, once committed to ink and paper, is sufficient to establish the Gospel beyond all possibility of critical refutation, even if it doesn’t actually say what the apologists claim it says. Geisler and Turek, in a fit of scholarly diligence, go far beyond these minimum requirements, though, citing a whole four different places where different NT writers claimed that Jesus had no sin (I Pet. 2:22, I John 3:5, 2 Cor. 5:21 and Heb. 4:15). Way to show Darwin how it’s done, guys!

It turns out, however, that Jesus did not pull off this feat of sinless living by abstaining from behaviors like cursing, violence, taking things that did not belong to him, and saying things that turned out to be untrue. Rather, because he was assumed to be God by his followers, all of his behaviors became, by definition, “not sin.” Even when he did things that violated the Law of Moses, like teaching his disciples that they were permitted to harvest grain on the sabbath, the Christian interpretation of his actions was that they were not sinful.

In this, Jesus is actually rather following in God’s footsteps, as the Old Testament records. If anyone else had commanded the utter genocide of the Amalekites, Jews and Christians alike would agree that it was a sinful act, but because God allegedly did it, it somehow does not count as a sin. Likewise if anyone other than Jesus were to pick up a whip of cords, and go into a church, and start beating and attacking the ushers when they tried to take up the collection, they’d be accounted a criminal and a sinner, but because Jesus was supposed to be holy, he could walk into the temple yard and launch a violent attack on unsuspecting money changers, and somehow it just doesn’t count as being sinful.

Now, I know that Christian tradition teaches that “they deserved it” (though the only evidence of their guilt is the accusation itself), but that’s rather beside the point. Even if the money-changers were charging “too much” for their services, you can’t go around taking the law into your own hands and just beating people because you don’t approve of their business practices. What kind of society would that be, if you couldn’t go to work in retail without having to worry about being physically assaulted any time someone thought your services weren’t worth what you were charging?

Jesus’ allegedly sinless life is really an artifact of the Christian assumption that Jesus cannot sin, and therefore even his violent and misleading actions were not sinful. I can live a sinless life too, as long as you assume that everything I do is holy and virtuous and sinless regardless of whether or not they would be sinful for anyone else to imitate. That’s a piece of cake. Heck, pay me, and I’ll gladly do it for a living!

Meanwhile, Geisler and Turek try to bolster their case by claiming that even non-Christians called Jesus sinless.

But it wasn’t just his friends who affirmed his supreme character. Christ’s enemies couldn’t find fault with him either. The Pharisees, who were actively searching for dirt on Jesus, could find none (Mark 14:55).

You see what I mean about Geisler and Turek’s dramatically lowered standards of academic rigor. Sure, Mark’s gospel does say that the Pharisees could find no evidence against Jesus, but that’s Mark’s claim, not the Pharisees’. Mark was one of the four Christian evangelists; of course he is going to say there was no evidence against Jesus. Mark also records that the Pharisees brought in many witnesses to testify against Jesus, so it wasn’t the Pharisees who were claiming that there was no evidence against him. This is strictly a Christian claim of Jesus’ alleged innocence.

Even after all the efforts of the Pharisees to pin some charge on Jesus, Pilate found him innocent of any wrongdoing (Luke 23:22).

Of course, just to put this in perspective, a jury also found OJ Simpson innocent. Will Geisler and Turek now tell us that OJ must also have lived a sinless life, since the result of the trial said he was innocent?

Pilate was not charged with determining whether or not Jesus was sinless, he was holding the hearing in order to determine whether or not Jesus was guilty of any crime deserving capital punishment. But under Geisler and Turek’s incredibly lax academic standards, that counts as Jesus’ enemies testifying that he lived a sinless life.

Of course, the elephant in the bedroom here is the question of whether or not Jesus claimed to be God. Geisler and Turek just spent the whole chapter arguing that Jesus did explicitly make claims to possess personal deity, which was technically blasphemy according to the Law of Moses, especially as interpreted by the Pharisees. It wasn’t until the third century that the councils of the Christian Church put together a (failed) justification for claiming that Jesus and Jehovah could both be God at the same time. Calling that interpretation “retroactive” doesn’t change the fact that, at the time Jesus actually spoke, his pronouncements would necessarily have to be classified as the sin of blasphemy.

According to the Law of Moses, it was a sin deserving of death for anyone to urge people to worship other gods. You could try and get around this by saying that Jesus was God, but in these pre-Trinitarian times, you’d have to end up saying that Jesus must therefore have been the God Who declared it a capital offense to urge the worship of other gods. Jesus, however, urged the people to worship “the Father,” whom he treated as being someone other than himself. Thus, this other worship, centuries before the development of Trinitarianism, would have to violate the Mosaic prohibition against worshipping other gods. You can build an explanation (or rather, a rationalization) on top of the prior foundation of Trinitarianism, but that was still far future from where Jesus was. At the time he spoke, it was blasphemy for Jesus to endorse worship for both himself and some other divine person.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: it’s not fair to judge Jesus according to the Law of Moses. After all, how could Moses possibly have anticipated the theological developments of Christian church councils in the third century AD? It’s not like he could have gone up on Mt. Sinai and come down with a Jewish Law that would have had the proper provisions for letting an incarnate deity announce Himself without sinning against His own commandments. Give the guy a break!

Sure, if we’re going to declare that Jesus was sinless because, by definition, nothing he did was sin, then it would at least have a certain self-consistency to also claim that there was nothing wrong with claiming to be a God himself, separate and distinct from the One God of Jewish/Pharisaic worship. But stickler that I am, I do have to point out that if Jesus was indeed God, then he is necessarily guilty of issuing a definition of blasphemy that would make him a sinner when he violated it. Count the score however you will, Jesus still comes up short.

Next week, Geisler and Turek take on what they would like us to believe are the skeptical objections to the deity of Jesus. Stay tuned.