Imagine, for a moment, that Jesus has been accused of rape, or child molesting, or some other nasty crime. You, as judge, need to decide whether or not Jesus is guilty of the charge, and you ask to see the evidence. The evidence, however, consists of a book written by a man who was not present when the crime occurred, in which the crime is described. You are asked to convict Jesus on the grounds that the man who wrote the book named a couple dozen well-known political and religious leaders, a comparable number of important cities and trade routes, and a few observations about the weather. Since he has spelled all the names right, you are asked to conclude that the man is a meticulous historian who must have been, or had access to, actual eyewitnesses.

Is this enough evidence to convict Jesus of the crime?

Geisler and Turek have been going into great detail about a large number of trivial details that Luke got right in the book of Acts and in his gospel, because they want to convince us that “we have eyewitness testimony about Jesus.” It’s been almost sad, the way they’ve picked out any little thing that wasn’t wrong, and said, “Look! He spelled Agrippa correctly—one g two p’s! He’s right! He got it right! See? He gets lots of things like that right!”

It doesn’t seem to matter that most of what Luke writes about are stories to which he does not even claim to have been an eyewitness. Yes, it’s grand that Luke knows that there are storms on the Mediterranean Sea sometimes, but what does that have to do with whether or not his anonymous sources are telling the literal truth about what they claim to have been eyewitnesses of? There are a number of interesting questions we can raise with regards to the specific things the gospel writers are supposed to have been eyewitnesses of, if G&T would just put down the pompoms long enough to do some serious study. But instead they pad Chapter 10 with an item-by-item list of 84 things that Luke got right—or presumably got right, since some of the items are things like “he might have been correct about how many days the ship was driven by the storm.”

And then we get to John, and another list. If you thought G&T were reaching just a bit in their search for things they could claim Luke got right, wait till you see what they come up with as verification for John’s status as an alleged eyewitness.

Since John describes events confined to the Holy Land, his Gospel doesn’t contain quite as many geographical, topographical, and political items as does Acts. Nevertheless, as we’re about to see, quite an impressive number of historically confirmed or historically probable details are contained in John’s Gospel.

Notice the “or historically probable” in there. I’m not going to list all 59 “corroborations” of John’s gospel, but here are a few excerpts, for a sample:

1. Archeology confirms the use of stone water jars in New Testament times (John 2:6).

2. Given the early Christian tendency towards asceticism, the wine miracle is an unlikely invention…

5. “Come down” accurately describes the topography of western Galilee. (There’s a significant elevation drop from Cana to Capernaum.) (4:46, 49, 51)…

8. Jesus’ own testimony being invalid without the Father is an unlikely Christian invention (5:31); a later redactor would be eager to highlight Jesus’ divinity and would probably make his witness self-authenticating…

14. The charge of Jesus being demon-possessed is an unlikely invention (7:20).

Notice how much of this “evidence” is simply the apologist’s personal incredulity. “It is unlikely that anyone would invent such and such a detail”—and therefore we are supposed to believe that the story must be true. But is that really a sound criterion? It is unlikely that anyone would invent a story about a supernatural clown that murders children, but does that mean that Stephen King’s It is therefore a true story? Part of a storyteller’s art is coming up with convincing details that other storytellers are “unlikely” to have invented.

G&T’s reasons for calling these details “unlikely” are also fairly subjective and biased. Take #8, for example. Would an early Christian really be unlikely to portray Jesus’ as being a meek and suffering Servant who would submit to having John serve as his witness? That might be the case if we were talking about Christians who had not yet heard (or invented) the stories about Jesus going to be baptized by John, but there’s certainly nothing in John 5 that contradicts the gospel stories already being circulated by Matthew, Mark and Luke.

Equally spurious is the claim that Christians would be unlikely to invent the story of the crowd saying that Jesus (whom they had not recognized) was “demon-possessed” (i.e. nuts) for saying that they were trying to kill him. Again, there’s nothing in the context that is inconsistent with the early gospel idea of Jews failing to acknowledge Jesus as their God, and indeed the narrative rather enhances the idea that the unbelieving Jews just “didn’t get it.”

And so it goes. John’s authenticity as an eyewitness is “established,” according to Geisler and Turek, by a combination of trivial details that he got right (as though this would have been difficult at the time!) and a significant number of details that, for whatever reason, Geisler and Turek have decided are “unlikely inventions” (as though that were difficult or uncommon among storytellers).

And when it comes to the bottom line, it’s all basically busy work. Geisler and Turek want to appeal to the principle that the truth is consistent with itself, and want us to believe that we should accept the gospels as true because they consistently get minor details (and debatable interpretations) right. But unfortunately, they don’t apply the principle consistently—they don’t extend the same standard of verifiability and consistency with the truth to everything that the gospel writers tell us.

And above all, with their over-emphasis on trivialities and subjective expectations, they never confront the core issue that this chapter allegedly is supposed to address: what do we have eyewitness testimony of, who are those eyewitnesses, what did they mean by their testimony, and how consistent are their claims with what we know the truth to be?

These are the relevant questions, and Geisler and Turek’s endless irrelevant detail seems designed to distract us from the fact that they never really investigate them.

Each member of the Unholy Trinity demonstrates some level of concern with finding a way to assert that atheism is in no way to blame for the murderous atrocities of Communism, deservedly infamous for committing the worst mass murders in Man’s history. Dawkins and Hitchens are both fully aware of how badly the lethal record of atheists holding absolute power undermines their case against religion and they are eager to find some way of explaining this record in a manner which allows them to separate the actions of the responsible individuals from their denial of the existence of God.

We’re in Chapter 13 of TIA, and it’s a chapter Vox would have done well to skip, not because of any triskadecaphobia, but because it’s such a blatant example of appallingly poor thinking skills. Let’s look at the above paragraph again, with just a slight modification:

Each member of the Unholy Trinity demonstrates some level of concern with finding a way to assert that failure to believe in Santa Claus is in no way to blame for the murderous atrocities of Communism, deservedly infamous for committing the worst mass murders in Man’s history. Dawkins and Hitchens are both fully aware of how badly the lethal record of non-Santa-believers holding absolute power undermines their case against religion and they are eager to find some way of explaining this record in a manner which allows them to separate the actions of the responsible individuals from their denial of the existence of Saint Nick.

In Chapter 5, Vox tried to argue that religion could not be blamed for any atrocities in human history, on the grounds that political, historical, cultural and geological factors contributed to each recorded case, and therefore religion played no role at all in the murderous and inhuman results that transpired. That’s obviously a bogus argument. Religion must be deeply involved in such things, otherwise Vox could not now argue that absence of religion must in some way alter the outcome. If it has no influence when present, then its removal is not going to change things either.

The problem is, if you’re going to assume that absence of religion causes violent atrocities, you need to be able to show that the presence of religion prevents them. Obviously, that’s not the case. Our own born-again Christian president gleefully led us into an unprovoked, unjustified, and ultimately unwise war of conquest against a much smaller country already strangling under a ten-year economic blockade imposed by the president’s father. His Christian faith did nothing to give him any greater insights into the truth about Iraq’s ability to threaten the US, nor did it stir his compassion for the millions of men and women in both countries (and indeed many countries worldwide) who have suffered needlessly and horrifyingly as a result.

But more than that, Vox’s argument is based on an assumption that is merely silly, as we’ve seen before. Lack of belief in God, like a lack of belief in Santa Claus, is an absence of motivation. It’s not a source of evil desires, nor does it promise any kind of reward for doing harm. It suggests no particular course of action, nor does it offer any kind of incentives for pursuing one course over another. It’s simply a lack of belief in God. Or in Santa.

Vox nevertheless proceeds with the assumption that any crime or atrocity committed by any atheist must be blamed on his or her atheism unless and until the atheist can prove otherwise. Atheism is guilty until proven innocent, and the criteria for proving atheism innocent is that it must be shown that, um, well, there isn’t a criterion you could meet, actually, so atheism is guilty no matter what atheists say or what facts they point out.

Here’s Vox being unintentionally ironic when discussing a chapter from Hitchens’ book, entitled “THE ‘CASE’ AGAINST SECULARISM”:

The scare quotes in the chapter’s name would have been much more appropriate had Hitchens entitled it “A ‘DEFENSE’ OF SECULARISM,” as it is not so much an ineffective defense against the argument that secular atheism is a direct cause of the heights of human evil as it is a nonexistent one.

And what, you may wonder, is this “argument that secular atheism is a direct cause of the heights of human evil”? Judging from what Vox writes, the “argument” consists of assuming that atheism is principally if not solely responsible for the acts of Stalin, Lenin, and Mao. Never mind looking at political, geographical, economic, and other causes, as Vox does for religiously-motivated atrocities. They were atheists, they did bad things, therefore atheism causes people to do bad things. The argument for why we should blame atheism is, in Vox’s words, “a nonexistent one.”

The best Vox can do is to cite a number of places in which Hitchens makes reference to various historical events, and to point out that his own (i.e. Vox’s) interpretation is very different, which of course means that Hitchens is wrong, and therefore it must be true that atheism causes atrocities, or some such reasoning. Like I said, appallingly poor thinking skills.

Vox fares no better in attempting to deal with Dawkins. Here he is responding to a quote by Dawkins.

What matters is not whether Hitler and Stalin were atheists, but whether atheism systematically influences people to do bad things. There is not the smallest evidence that it does.

Again Dawkins reveals his historical ignorance, and again, he demonstrates that he is not so much a bad scientist as an atheist propagandist who has abandoned science altogether. For there is not only the smallest evidence that atheism correlates with people doing very bad things, the evidence is so strong that it is almost surely causal.

This, of course, is not at all the same standard Vox used in assessing the correlation between religious beliefs (like “I shall be rewarded forever by God if I blow up these innocent bystanders”) and violent behavior. When it came to pogroms and witch hunts and Christians warring against Christians, the mere existence of other factors was enough to “prove” that religion was completely innocent of playing any role whatsoever in the motivation and enabling of crimes against humanity. But with atheism, a perceived “correlation” between atheism and atrocity is “so strong that it is almost surely causal.”

Vox’s “evidence” is another numbers game, based on statistics that ignore major, significant factors in order to draw a simple comparison that makes it look like atheists are 58% more likely to murder their own subjects than religious leaders are. No attempt is made to compensate for differences in population size, or for the growth of the human population as a whole over the past 2,000 years, or for technological and civil developments that have increased the efficiency with which government can control and influence ever larger areas. Vox has his conclusion already drawn, and is merely pulling in whatever numbers sound like they support that conclusion.

And even if those statistics were valid, do they show actual causation? What is Vox’s proposed mechanism for how this would work, exactly? What is it about atheism that allegedly would cause such callous disregard for human life—more so than a religious leader’s conviction that God was on his side and endorsed and/or forgave his actions whatever they might be? We’ll look at what Vox thinks is the answer next week.

What Vox inadvertently shows, though, is that atheism is unlikely to be the real cause, any more than lack of belief in Santa Claus is. The religious leaders all committed crimes too; presence of belief in God does not produce qualitatively better behavior, and therefore the absence of belief cannot be blamed for qualitatively worse behavior. If more recent despots have been quantitatively better at accomplishing their nefarious goals, then perhaps we ought to look into how and why that happened (e.g. it might be worthwhile looking into the cultural habits engrained into Russian society by centuries of church-state union). But causation? I don’t think so.

If Vox thinks he has conclusive evidence of evil deeds being caused by atheism, he ought to take another look at Santa. Categorize those same statistics according to whether or not the leaders involved were believers in Santa Claus, and you’ll find that there’s a 100% chance of atrocities being committed by someone who was not a friend of Father Christmas. If that 100% correlation is not proof of causation, then Vox’s mere 58% correlation isn’t either.

But it gets better: next week, we look at Vox’s attempt to explain why atheism supposedly turns people into monsters. Stay tuned.

The first time I heard the term chutzpah, it was defined in terms of a man who has just murdered his parents, asking the judge to be lenient on the grounds that he’s just lost his mom and dad. It’s a kind of breathtaking outrageousness that substitutes brash boldness for common sense, and it’s a term that seems almost tailor-made for certain apologetic arguments.

You see, some apologetic arguments are just plain poor. They overlook obvious facts, they beg the listener to jump to credulous and superstitious conclusions, or they just don’t make any sense. Yet despite what might seem like fatal problems, they manage to be quite popular and enduring. They are effective because they have that special chutzpah that makes you want to believe that the apologist must have some kind of valid point to make, because nobody could possibly expect an argument like that to stand on its own.

Unfortunately, the chutzpah is indeed the only thing these arguments have going for them. We saw that last week with Geisler and Turek’s example of Jesus’ “hematohidrosis” that not only was not a self-consistent “eyewitness” account, but that the text itself does not support. There is textual evidence, in fact, that verses 43 and 44, which describe this alleged event, are not even part of Luke’s original gospel. Yet Geisler and Turek, like many other apologists, preachers and evangelists, continue to present it as evidence for the alleged historical accuracy of the New Testament. The argument works because people assume you couldn’t possibly get away with that kind of argument if you didn’t have something more solid to back it up.

Paul makes a similar argument in I Cor. 15.

But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.

Notice, “If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith… If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.” In other words, if you don’t buy this argument, you have to admit that you’re making a fool of yourself. The evidence may be against it. The story may be self-contradictory and unrealistic. But if you admit that there’s anything wrong with it, then you are the one who is going to end up looking stupid.

Apologetics is for the believer, not for the unbeliever, and so this kind of argument works. Nobody wants to look a fool, and nobody wants their vulnerable religious beliefs to be exposed as public embarrassments. Small wonder, then, that chutzpah counts for more than consistency with real world truth. Better to be bold and act like you’ve got your act together than to concede your argument’s weaknesses and have people’s pity.

Let’s look at another example.

Not only do the apostles claim to be eyewitnesses, on several occasions they tell their audiences that everyone knows what they’re saying is true. These are not offhanded comments but bold proclamations to powerful people.

Perhaps the boldest eyewitness claim comes from Paul as he stands trial before King Agrippa and Governor Festus. Paul has just begun to tell Agrippa and Festus why he has been converted to Christianity and how Christ rose from the dead as predicted by the Old Testament, when suddenly Festus interrupts and calls Paul Insane! The dramatic exchange is recorded by Luke in Acts 26:24-28:

At this point Festus interrupted Paul’s defense. “You are out of your mind, Paul!” he shouted. “Your great learning is driving you insane.”

“I am not insane, most excellent Festus,” Paul replied. “What I am saying is true and reasonable. The king is familiar with these things, and I can speak freely to him. I am convinced that none of this has escaped his notice, because it was not done in a corner. King Agrippa, do you believe the prophets? I know you do.”

Then Agrippa said to Paul, “Do you think that in such a short time you can persuade me to be a Christian?”

Do you see how brave, almost brash, Paul is? He not only boldly witnesses to the king and the governer, but he has the audacity to tell the king that he already knows Paul is telling the truth! Why is Paul so confident of this? Because the events of Christianity were “not done in a corner.” They were common knowledge and surely had not “escaped [the king's] notice.” Imagine a defendant challenging a ruler or judge in that way! Such a witness must know that the events he describes are well known.

Paul’s chutzpah is that he shouldn’t have dared to tell Agrippa that he [Agrippa] already knew the evidence for the Resurrection. After all, what if that evidence didn’t support the Resurrection? Well, obviously, the result would be that he would fail to convince Agrippa that Jesus had really risen. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what did happen. Paul did fail. Agrippa was not convinced, and neither called for Paul’s release nor became a Christian himself. Nor does Paul show any signs of being at all surprised by this outcome.

This is a tremendous flaw in Geisler and Turek’s argument, and shows more than just a little chutzpah of their own in their willingness to propose it. Presenting your arguments forcefully and with great confidence is simply good rhetorical practice, and is something that Paul, being a trained rabbi, would have already have had a lot of experience with. The question is not who presents their case boldly (since both sides in a debate would do so), but who presents convincing evidence. Paul tried, and got the outward show of confidence right, but he failed to provide Agrippa with enough evidence to convince him, as history records.

Paul’s case for the Resurrection was based, not on facts and evidence, but on bold testimony and an appeal to the prophets. Had Paul’s case been a matter of verifiable, real-world facts, he could just as well have presented his evidence to Festus as to Agrippa. But Paul’s conflict with the Jews was not a matter of real-world issues, it was a religious debate, which Festus couldn’t begin to make head nor tail of. So Paul didn’t try. His defense before Agrippa was different, however—so different that when Festus heard what Paul told Agrippa, he thought Paul had lost his mind.

Now think about that: what was different between Festus and Agrippa? They both had access to the witnesses Paul would have called, if he’d had any to call. But Paul didn’t call any, and apparently did not make it clear to Festus that he was even talking about Jesus rising from the dead, since the remark that so startled Festus and led to his interruption was Paul’s statement, “I am saying nothing beyond what the prophets and Moses said would happen—that the Christ would suffer and, as the first to rise from the dead, would proclaim light to his own people and to the Gentiles.”

What we’re dealing with here is not a question of forensic evidence for someone returning from the dead, we’re talking about a religious argument over the fulfillment of prophecies. The reason Paul spoke to Agrippa about resurrection instead of mentioning it to Festus was that he was counting on Agrippa’s faith in the prophets to persuade him that Jesus had fulfilled the prophecies. It was a religious appeal based on religious authority—and bold testimony, of course—and it failed.

What we have in Acts 25 and 26, then, is a case where Paul could have made an appeal based on verifiable fact, and could have given Festus the names of people who could verify having seen Jesus rise from the dead, and could have offered the kind of objective, real-world proof that, in the words of Geisler and Turek, would have made it take more faith to be an atheist. And he didn’t do any of those things, but instead bided his time until he could make a religion-based appeal to a king whom he knew was a believer in the prophets. And we’re supposed to believe that Paul must have been telling the truth, just because he was bold in the claims that he made. Argumentum ad chutzpah.

It’s doubly chutzpah because this is the trial that should have made Geisler and Turek’s book unnecessary. Never mind 2,000 years later when a couple of American evangelical apologists are trying to find some reason to believe that the ancient Middle East really had something, we’re talking about a living apostle speaking to King Agrippa, with many of the alleged eyewitnesses still alive, and the allegedly empty tomb still empty. (And never mind why Paul didn’t call on Jesus himself to show up and testify in his defense.) This should have been the case that would have blown the whole field of apologetics wide open, that settled once and for all whether the apostles really had the goods or not.

And in a way, perhaps it did. Paul’s approach in not calling any material witnesses or citing any material evidence, and in preferring instead to keep things on the level of a religious debate over the words of the prophets, is amazingly consistent with a “resurrection” that took place only in the subjective experience and understanding of the believers, leaving no actual material evidence for Paul to appeal to. Why bring in your fellow Christians, and thus possibly expose them to imprisonment and persecution, if the most they can offer is a “spiritual” experience of Jesus “returning” from the dead spiritually?

Boldness is all well and good, and if you’re already arrested and in danger of execution, why not play the I’m-being-unjustly-persecuted card to the fullest? High-stakes poker games aren’t won by people who look at their cards and visibly wince whenever they’re dealt a poor hand, and poker is certainly not the only place where a good strong bluff is a prudent strategy.

In the end, though, boldness alone is not enough. Paul’s boldness, in the absence of material evidence, was not enough to convince Agrippa, despite Agrippa’s access to the local news, religion and history. Nor does it convince me any more than the boldness of Mohammed, or Joseph Smith, or any other heroic, steely-eyed prophet, apostle or evangelist. What impresses me is consistency with the truth. If you don’t have that, no amount of mere chutzpah will make up the difference.

We’re in the last section of Chapter 12 of TIA, in which Vox tries to deny the charge that Aztec human sacrifices is an example of religion leading to a needless loss of human life. Here he is giving us Step One of the three-step tactic.

If one looks at the history of the world, there are two facts which no reasonable man can deny: first, that people do bad things, and second, that religion has been central to people’s lives for as long as history has been recorded. The centrality of religion in past societies means that it has been a mechanism for an amount of these bad things people have done, which occasionally makes it appear that religion is the source of the evil behavior.

Despite the weasel-words (”occasionally makes it appear that religion is the source…”), this is a fair concession that religion and violence do go hand-in-hand at times, and that, far from being an irrelevant fantasy that has nothing to do with how people behave, religion is actually central to many people’s lives and how they live them. Halfway through the second sentence of this section, however, we’re already easing our way into Step Two.

The centrality of religion in past societies means that it has been a mechanism for an amount of these bad things people have done, which occasionally makes it appear that religion is the source of the evil behavior. And while it pains me to make use of a much overused expression, in this case, it is absolutely true that correlation is not causation.

The Unholy Trinity makes no effort to provide any evidence of a causal relationship between religion and the various evils they cite as proof of religion’s historically deadly and venomous nature.

You might think that, since Vox accuses the New Atheists of neglecting to take a detailed look at the relationship between religion and bad behavior, he would rectify the problem by exploring the relationship between religion and bad behavior, in order to see if it was indeed a causal relationship. Instead, what he does is to offer us the fallacious assumption that things only have one cause, and therefore if anything else exists which can be called “the cause,” then religion is not the cause. For example, he excuses Aztec religion from any responsibility for human sacrifice (that is, from causing the practice) by suggesting that it was necessary in order for the minority rulers to keep the majority subjects under control.

A ruling people surrounded and outnumbered by their subjects require a mechanism to enable them to maintain their position of primacy. There is a need to prevent the ratio of the population delta between rulers and ruled from getting out of hand as well as a necessity to inspire enough fear in the subjected populace to prevent it from rebelling on a regular basis.

As in Chapter 5 of TIA, he presents the secular aspects of the situation as though their mere existence proved that religion played no causative role in fact that hundreds of thousands of innocent people were ritually slain by priests in order to secure the favor of the gods. No mention is made of the influence exerted by the religious beliefs of the people (whether they were watching, performing, or being the sacrifices), nor is there any consideration of the question of whether the secular factors would have been sufficient, in the absence of religious support, to enable the deaths. Vox wants us to jump to the conclusion that complex sociological phenomena only have one cause, and that cause was, well, government.

There is an institution that has caused great harm to humanity, which is responsible for nearly all of the wars, all of the mass atrocities and untold human suffering throughout history, but it is not religion. That institution is government. And regardless of whether you consider government to be a necessary evil or the source of all that is good in society, it cannot be denied that it is the institution of government which bears the direct responsibility for every tangible evil that the New Atheists have accused religion of committing.

Forgive me, but I can’t help comparing Vox’s opinions to those of the Apostle Paul:

Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and he will commend you. For he is God’s servant to do you good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword for nothing. He is God’s servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer. Therefore, it is necessary to submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also because of conscience. This is also why you pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s servants, who give their full time to governing. Give everyone what you owe him: If you owe taxes, pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect; if honor, then honor.

This is one of those aspects of religion that Vox studiously ignores: the way religion encourages people to do what this allegedly evil government tells them. If it is true, as he has already conceded, that religion is central to most people’s lives, and if this central, influential religion is telling people to go along with the institution that Vox has identified as being responsible for the evils, then the causal relationship Vox is trying to obscure does indeed exist.

This, of course, is only the tip of the iceberg, as far as religion’s political influence is concerned. How many states so far have passed democratically-engineered, Christian-sponsored laws and constitutional amendments designed to deny gays the right to marry their true loves? How many Christians based their presidential votes on their perception of God’s will (and the need to show the heathen God’s wrath on anyone who would dare attack a “Christian nation”?) How many terrorists turn to Allah for the strength and courage they need in order to risk and/or sacrifice their lives in the name of their brothers and sisters in the faith?

Even the most obvious modern example of religion-inspired harm is ultimately a matter of secular power. Bin Laden and the al-Qaeda terrorists have attacked the West to achieve a specific military goal, the withdrawal of Western troops from Saudi Arabia and Iraq. And the Muslims now inhabiting the former Christendom are not agitating for the right to practice their religion, but rather to achieve greater political influence in those countries to which they have immigrated.

Once again, if bin Ladin stands to achieve any secular benefits, then Islam has nothing whatsoever to do with why he pursues terrorism, because complex sociological phenomena only have one cause. Or so Vox would have us believe, because he never bothers to explore the deeper question of why bin Ladin finds it so objectionable to have non-Muslim armies on Muslim soil. Bin Ladin is not a government, he is (pardon the expression) a crusader for Islam, and his goal is the glory of God. Even if he could achieve secular dominance in any particular area, he would be pursuing it in order to give Allah the dominion. Vox’s detailed exposition of all the secular aspects of the situation is merely a hand-waving exercise, attempting to distract attention from the religious factors driving bin Ladin’s agenda.

I’ve quoted you step one and step two, but I’m going to spare you the irrelevant details of step three. Vox jumps from the Aztecs to the Mongols to Caesar to the French Huguenots to Sargon II to Alexander the Great to Sherman’s March through Georgia, in a vain attempt to dazzle us with how many secular circumstances he can appeal to. And of course there are a good number, but it’s all a red herring, a way of not looking too closely at the real-world relationship between religion and loss of life. Religious and secular factors do often combine to produce a given result, and where those results are evil, it would be to our benefit to understand the real role religion has played, especially if religion is contributing that extra little something that makes it all happen.

Vox closes with a repetition of Step Two, the fallacious assumption that bad things only have one cause, and therefore that cause was not religion.

Whether God exists or not, whether people believe in the concept of a deity or not, religion is simply incapable of causing great harm to humanity. It can only be a scapegoat, because it does not provide the primary motivation or the means for crime, for war, or for repression and massacre. One might as reasonably blame plate tectonics for creating the physical geography that has played such a significant role in determining historical patterns of conflict. Even on the rare occasions when religion can be positively correlated with the incidence of great harm, a closer examination will usually show that it is neither the controlling nor the causal factor. The individual will to power does not exist because of religion, nor does the institution of government. In neither case is religious motivation required to inspire them to murderous action and there are more historical examples of religion acting as a mitigating force on their lethal proclivities than as an exacerbating one.

Just last week we were looking at Vox’s claim that the Crusades offer Western civilization its only hope of surviving the Muslim onslaught. Whether he meant that in military terms, or whether he meant that the West needs to change the religion of the Muslims, it’s clear that he really does know better than to pretend that “religion is simply incapable of causing great harm.” The existence of secular tools, and secular resources, and secular motivations, does not imply that all religious contributions are insignificant or non-existent. Vox is simply putting on his faith-based blinders, and not allowing himself to see the actual connections between religion and evil. And some would say that that sort of thing, in itself, is an example of religion “causing great harm.”

Here’s the trick: you can’t embarrass people into admitting that they’re wrong. People who are embarrassed become defensive, and even irrational at times, in order to protect their self-esteem. That’s why the Bush-Quayle ticket did so well after Quayle’s famous “potato/potatoe” gaffe. The press and the media had so much fun mocking Quayle’s apparent ignorance and subsequent ineptitude that people actually started to feel sorry for him. Pity for Quayle became antipathy towards the liberals, who were perceived as being cruel, and Americans, who always tend to root for the underdog, voted their support for poor persecuted bumbler. People make mistakes, and are more sympathetic to others who also make mistakes (other things being equal).

There have been bloggers who have looked forward rather gleefully to the VP candidates debate coming up shortly, anticipating that Palin will babble and say dumb things. Paradoxically, however, she can only improve her party’s chances of victory by coming across as a complete moron, especially if the liberals follow up with prolonged mockery and ridicule. Many people will empathize with Palin, whether because she’s a woman, or because she’s a conservative, or because she’s a Christian, and will see the attacks on Palin as attacks by “them” against “us.” This could win Palin a sympathy vote as well as a defensive us-vs-them vote.

I’m not saying that it’s impossible for Palin to blow it. A mistake that was really bad might do it, but it would have to be a mistake that actually alienates people as opposed to merely being stupid about things most people don’t care about. If she blurted out something about charismatics being the only real Christians, or said that people are poor because they’re too lazy to deserve an income, or something similarly bigoted, then just maybe Mr. and Mrs. Average American would turn against her.

But chances are pretty good that she won’t, and if she is merely incompetent and ignorant, then open mockery of her lack of expertise is likely to produce a backlash of support for the Republican ticket. It has happened before.

We’re continuing to look at Geisler and Turek’s argument that Luke and other New Testament writers ought to be believed uncritically because of such feats of historical accuracy as spelling the names of local cities and political leaders correctly. As we saw last week, God’s failure to show up in real life means that all of our faith must be based on trusting men, and Chapter 10 works hard to establish the claim that we shouldn’t entertain any doubts or suspicions about what Luke and other NT writers tell us, no matter what they tell us, because they are “eyewitnesses” (or at least have some sort of access to eyewitnesses), even if it’s not always clear what they’re supposed to be eyewitnesses of.

Geisler and Turek make the same argument with respect to Luke’s gospel as for the book of Acts: Luke correctly identified specific historical figures, and therefore we should accept, without any doubt or skepticism, all of his other claims as well. In a way, they are to be commended: they are basing their argument on the principle that the truth is consistent with itself, and that a witness, even an eyewitness, should be judged in terms of how consistent their testimony is with the real-world facts. That’s a good, reliable standard of evidence, but if we apply it equally to all of Luke’s testimony, we find that there are some problems.

Let’s take, for a specific example, the argument Geisler and Turek make from Luke’s account of the night of Jesus’ betrayal.

Another historically accurate detail can be found in Luke 22:44. That’s where Luke records that Jesus was in agony and sweat drops of blood the night before his crucifixion. Apparently, Jesus was experiencing a rare stress-induced condition we know today as hematohidrosis. That’s when tiny blood vessels rupture due to extreme stress, thus allowing blood to mix with sweat. Since Luke probably didn’t know of this medical condition 2,000 years ago, he could not have recorded it unless he had access to someone who saw it.

Unfortunately, if Luke’s gospel account is correct, it is very unlikely that he could have had access to anyone who saw it, because according to the gospel, it happened when Jesus was off by himself, and his disciples were all sleeping.

Jesus went out as usual to the Mount of Olives, and his disciples followed him. On reaching the place, he said to them, “Pray that you will not fall into temptation.” He withdrew about a stone’s throw beyond them, knelt down and prayed, “Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done.” An angel from heaven appeared to him and strengthened him. And being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground.

When he rose from prayer and went back to the disciples, he found them asleep, exhausted from sorrow. “Why are you sleeping?” he asked them. “Get up and pray so that you will not fall into temptation.”

Parallel passages in Matthew and Mark embellish this story by having Jesus pray and return and find the disciples asleep three times, and none of them seem to notice anything unusual about Jesus’ appearance after he’s been praying (nor do any of them seem to see the angel Luke reports as having appeared to comfort Jesus in his hour of suffering).

Now, put yourself in the disciples’ sandals for a moment. Jesus is in Jerusalem (or at least within a short walk of the city). The Sanhedrin is furious with Jesus, and you know they want him arrested, or worse. You’re off by yourselves in a secluded spot, your Master goes a short distance away, by himself, in the dark. The next thing you know, he’s waking you up, with blood streaming down his face. What happened!? Have the Sanhedrin sent assassins to eliminate Jesus on the sly? Are robbers attacking in the dark? Is Jesus badly hurt? Are you next?

Just taken at face value, Luke’s version of the story seems a bit implausible, especially if we add in the two lather-rinse-repeats from Matthew and Mark. A bloodied Master in the middle of the night, in hostile territory, is not something you’re going to respond to by yawning and rolling over and going back to sleep again. Either the sweating blood didn’t happen, or it was too dark to see. Either way, there are no eyewitnesses to report to Luke that Jesus was sweating actual drops of blood.

Then again, Luke (a physician himself) didn’t actually say that Jesus sweat actual drops of blood. Though this apologetic has been circulating for a long time, the Greek text actually says only that Jesus’ sweat became like (Greek “wsei“) clots of blood. Incredibly, the Bible itself has been plainly stating, for the past 19 centuries, that Luke was only comparing drops of Jesus’ sweat to clots of blood, and not actually claiming that real blood was leaking out of Jesus’ pores—and yet Christian apologists, and even relatively reputable apologists like Dr. Geisler and Dr. Turek, still try to wave around the $2 word hematohidrosis and awe the sheep into believing that Luke or some other eyewitness actually saw Jesus manifest a rare, stress-related condition that medical science has only recently found a name for.

You might say, “Oh, surely not. Surely no Christian would ever make a bold and confident assertion, and offer it as proof of the reliability of the Gospel, when it was so trivial to demonstrate as false.” But there it is, in the original Greek and pretty much every translation since then. Luke says that Jesus’ sweat became like clots (”thromboi“) of blood, and Christian apologists claim, in writing, that Luke got eyewitness testimony (from disciples who were asleep at the time) of Jesus experiencing hematohidrosis, and that’s how we can trust that the gospel is true.

Now, if faith can lead even such careful scholars as Dr. Geisler and Dr. Turek to commit such an obvious and easily-detected error, is it not possible that early Christian apologists like Luke, in more credulous and superstitious times, and with the fervency of first-century faith, might also have had a few significant slip-ups here and there? Especially when the end result is a claim to have seen God behaving in ways that consistently and universally fail to correspond to the divine behavior we see in real life?

This is Vox Day we’re talking about, of course, so even this relatively mild discussion has its own special character. He manages to avoid blaming Hitler on the atheists, but he spends far more time trying to convince us that Hitler was a non-Christian than he spends acknowledging that Hitler was, indeed, a theist, albeit a neopagan one. And yes, the Spanish Inquisition did torture and kill people, but not nearly as many as you might suppose, and in fact was such a model of restraint and objectivity (for the time) that it almost seems that Vox wouldn’t mind seeing it revived again. There is no doubt that he thinks we need to revive the Crusades, since he comes right out and says it’s the West’s only real hope of resisting the Muslim onslaught.

There are a few details that Vox rather glosses over. Concerning Hitler, for example, Vox alludes briefly to the fact that some writers see a link between Christianity and the German death camps, but avoids any overt mention of Luther’s notorious anti-Semitism or the role of the German churches in helping to foster a general attitude of antipathy and suspicion towards Jews (and atheists, homosexuals, and other minorities as well). While it would be nice to say that these things are mere cultural and even secular manifestations, one does not need to skim very far through the New Testament before one discovers a certain deeply-rooted and enduring animosity between those who followed Jesus and those who (the Bible tells us) rejected him. Nor can it be denied that historic Judaism, rooted in the Old Testament, is a large part of what gave the Jews their distinctive, exclusionary ethnic identity. While many secular and political factors were also involved, one cannot reasonably deny that, in the Nazi concentration camps, the chasm between guards and prisoners was a canyon eroded away by centuries of religious tradition.

Vox is conscientious enough to concede that Christians can learn certain lessons from the Holocaust, not the least of which is that Christians can be fooled, even to the point of supporting atrocities (in case the past seven years hadn’t made that clear already). The larger question, though, is why this particular weakness should exist among Christians who allegedly possess not only God’s eternal and absolute moral standards, but the wisdom, strength, and guidance of His indwelling Holy Spirit as well. If the moral quality of Christians’ real life behavior is truly dependent on the individual moral strength and wisdom of the (mortal) Christians themselves, why should credit for their good deeds (and only their good deeds) go to God? It is their own moral strength that makes the difference, and their own wisdom which lends them as much or as little insight as they manage to possess. Is it so wrong, then, to conclude that Christians are only human, and are not some special class of supernaturally inspired and enabled servants of an Almighty?

But I digress. On to that splendid and wonderful era known as The Spanish Inquisition. Vox has discovered that this infamous period of Spanish history is actually not as bad as has traditionally been thought. The people running the show were actually surprisingly even-handed, honest, and objective jurists and investigators, who acquitted more people than they executed. And, though it’s true that the Inquisitors did use torture, Vox excuses them on the grounds that everybody was using torture back then (which is quite a statement coming from a guy who calls atheists “moral parasites” just because they live lives as upright as their godly neighbors).

Vox found out all these good things about the Inquisition because he read an article in The Guardian about some research that has recently been released by the Vatican. Yes, if you want accurate, first-hand information about abuses and atrocities, who better to ask than the successors of the ones responsible for committing the abuses and atrocities? Everybody always believes the sob-stories the victims tell, but what about giving the perpetrators a chance to tell their side, eh? As other Catholic sites will tell you, the “Black Legend” of Inquisition atrocities was just so much Protestant propaganda, spread by poorer and less-powerful neighbors of Spain who were jealous of Spanish prosperity (and who, by the way, were cruelly toasting tens of thousands of “witches” in sham trials that never would have stood up to the rigorous judicial standards of a real Inquisition).

Well, seriously, I expect that legends of Inquisition atrocities may indeed be exaggerated, though I suspect an impartial investigation will find the real Inquisition was not nearly as mild and rosy as Vox and the Vatican would want to paint it either. Reducing the Inquisition to a mere body count, however, fails to truly convey what was so fundamentally wrong about the government putting people on trial for not being sincere enough about the beliefs they professed to have. It’s bad enough that you could be condemned to death for not being Christian enough, but one of the documented abuses of the Inquisition was the ease with which you could be sent up for trial without even any evidence against you.

The atmosphere of fear and—dare I say it?—terrorism was so bad that many Christian converts would simply flee rather than stay in the same town as the Inquisition, regardless of the lost of property, profession, and personal connections. And this is how Christians were treating each other, in the Body of Christ. Small wonder that critics would indeed use the Inquisition as evidence against the claim that Christianity was somehow uniquely distinguished as a superior and/or divinely-enabled religion.

That said, though, the witch trials were very likely much worse, and were certainly more widespread, and it’s rather surprising that Vox forgot to mention them. Instead, he turns next to the Crusades, the textbook case of why mixing church and state is bad for the state and even worse for the church. Here is where Vox really shines, and if you read no other part of TIA, you might want to take a quick look at Vox’s historical review of the sad, sordid story of the Christian war against the Muslims (and/or each other). It’s a very good, if cursory summary, and manages to convey the tremendous irony of the tragedies that resulted from the “noble” effort to “free” the land where Jesus’ feet once trod.

It is indeed a gloomy and almost absurd history, but what is even more astonishing than the obstinate and derelict maraudings of the Crusades is the fact that Vox seriously proposes that we should bring them back.

But although the Crusades will likely remain the model of Christian holy war for the foreseeable future, the reason that they are no longer at the forefront of atheist attacks on Christianity is because it is difficult, and growing increasingly harder, to shake a disapproving finger at the actions of men who were faced with the challenge of a militant and expanding Ummah at their borders. Overconfident due to its success in running roughshod over a wealth-sapped Western Christianity, modern secular society is simply not conceptually suited to dealing with a faith of the sword…

A better answer can be found in the Crusades, in the very failures pinpointed by Runciman. It is faith, but combined with wisdom this time, that can provide what was once Christendom with the spirit that it needs to survive and allow the civilization that it spawned centuries ago to thrive again.

Vox doesn’t have a specific plan for eliminating the Muslim threat to Western civilization, but it seems to involve converting all Muslims to Christianity (since Christians never have wars against each other).

The battle is already being waged, by men such as Peter Akinola, the Archbishop of Nigeria, who leads the fast-growing Anglican Church in Africa, and whose answer to the violent and unprovoked attacks on Christians in his country is as simple as it is astonishingly effective: “Make the church grow.”

Speaking of not being “conceptually suited to dealing with a faith of the sword”…

It should go without saying that Vox’s “solution” is really just a shallow attempt to claim that Christianity is the solution to all the world’s problems, without actually grappling with the problems themselves. As even a casual student of Islam knows, converting Muslims to Christianity is itself a provocation, in Muslim eyes at least. Calling their reprisals “unprovoked attacks” merely demonstrates an unwillingness to acknowledge the issues involved and to admit responsibility for one’s own role in the conflict. Nor does Vox spell out exactly what role the military would play in his Crusades.

In Chapter 5, Vox spends a good bit of time exploring all the secular factors that also contribute to wars between religious groups—factors such as poverty, competition for resources, threats to national and ethnic identity, and plain old ambition. These factors also play a significant role in the conflict between the Islamic nations and the Western world, and would not go away just by converting everybody to Roman Catholicism, I mean Lutheranism, I mean Anglicanism, I mean Mormonism, erm, well you get the idea.

Vox’s answer to the Muslim “problem” is simply a matter of burying his head in the sand of his own wishful fantasies about a world where God really does show up to make a difference in people’s lives. That’s not the world we live in, however, because if it were, there wouldn’t even be any Muslims to worry about. A God who really and truly interacted with His people would, by that very interaction, give His religion an advantage that other, non-divine religions would not be able to compete with. Ongoing competition between religions requires that they all be about equally matched, which means they must all be equally the product of human superstition, imagination, and politics. For this reason, it is unrealistic (and possibly suicidal) to launch a new Crusade whose success would depend on the power of a non-existent God.

Most of us have been badly shaken by the tumultuous events of the last 48 hours in Wall Street. If you have an IRA or some kind of retirement plan, no doubt you’re licking your wounds. You may even be fearful. I understand. I’ve experienced those apprehensions myself.

As an influential Christian leader, however, Colson has to remain focused on the really important issues, like “How can I use this crisis to persuade even more people to trust Christianity?”…

But as I told a worried young man on our team today, we need to remember that fear is always the enemy of faith. A few months ago, in the midst of fervent prayer during my devotions, I had an especially strong realization that my life was completely in God’s hands. To live is Christ, to die is gain. I’ve known that intellectually, but for the first time in my life, it is now engraved in my soul. Now, when things go wrong, I turn to God, pray, trust Him, and feel an amazing peace. I’m His.

Don’t think of it as a major economic crisis brought about through greed, gullibility, and failure of government oversight. Think of it as a clever technique God uses to help us grow more trusting and to be less concerned with real-world consequences. After all, if we worried too much about preventing such crises, we might deprive God of valuable opportunities to lead us into disasters that will force us to cry, “God help us all, because sure as hell nobody else can!”

Colson seems to realize, at least, Who is ultimately responsible for the current mess.

And you know what else? The financial markets are His. The world is His. I don’t know why it took me 35 years to get this, but I finally have.

Ok, sure, to those of us who aren’t in on God’s wonderful and mysterious plan, it looks like God’s management of His financial markets has led to wealth for a few greedy individuals and major financial hardships (to say nothing of financial ruin) for many others. At least He means well, right?

But wait, even though the markets are supposedly in God’s control, their current state is not really God’s fault after all:

What’s more, there’s a great opportunity for you to explain the importance of a biblical worldview to your friends. Because these financial troubles are the direct result of our nation turning its back on God.

No, Chuck, these financial troubles are the result of a lot of people gullibly believing whatever men tell them, just like you want them to merely take your word for it that God is in control and is making everything good no matter how bad the real world evidence shows it to be. And of course this crisis is also the result of government policies that emphasize promoting the profits of big business even at the cost of important consumer safeguards. That’s something our born-again conservative Christian president is real big on, isn’t it?

Colson ignores the financial and legal factors that led to this crisis in favor of blaming one of his favorite scapegoats: “moral relativism.”

Simply put, the rise of relativism in postmodern Western life has led to the collapse of a moral consensus. With everyone making up his own rules when it comes to right and wrong, is it any wonder our economic system is under stress?

The problem isn’t that everyone is making up their own rules, it’s that too many people (and people in high places no less) are making up their own facts, so-called, and are using the power of talking points to push an alternative “worldview” that doesn’t match reality. Any time this happens, there are going to be consequences. You can stretch the truth only so far before it snaps back into place. And woe betide those who get caught in the backlash.

Colson’s “solution” to the financial crisis is to work even harder to reinforce the same absence of skepticism, the same focus on spiritual (i.e. subjective) values, and the same “God is in control” fatalism that gave business the green light to inflate their own profits at the expense of consumer safety. For all that Colson complains about an alleged loss of “moral concensus,” he only treats greed as “immoral” when it leads to (yet another) major crisis. And this moral ambivalence about greed is also a contributing factor in the current financial mess, and not a solution to it.

My wife and I were talking about finances a few years ago, and she was telling me about what great deals all her friends were getting (some as low as only $200/month payments on a 4-bedroom single-family home). It sounded too good to be true, and my Skept-a-larm was clanging like crazy. “There’s no way the banks can be making a profit at those rates,” I said, and we decided not to refinance. Because of that, our home is still on a fixed-rate, low-interest mortgage, and our payments are fairly constant (plus or minus property taxes and what-not). The same skepticism that makes me suspicious of Colson’s bland don’t-worry-be-happy faith in Jesus also made me suspicious of these too-good financial promises.

So to all you faithful, financially-troubled Christians out there, who followed your born-again administration’s policies into financial ruin, I have a small word of hope: it’s not too late to begin to exercise a little less gullibility and a little more healthy skepticism. Really, it’s in your own best interests to take a grain of salt when men start making unsubstantiated promises that offer too much while showing too little. And that’s true whether we’re talking mammon or God.

God’s consistent and universal failure to show up in real life is an undeniable fact with an inescapable consequence: we have no choice but to rely upon men to tell us about God, in His absence. For this reason, Christian apologists like Geisler and Turek have to put a lot of effort into making sure we’re willing to believe what men tell us. Chapter 10 gives us the full treatment.

Do the New Testament documents contain eyewitness testimony? Let’s begin by taking a look at the eyewitness claims of the New Testament writers.

If you accept the plain reading of the text, the New Testament certainly contains eyewitness testimony. Notice how many times various apostles claim to be eyewitnesses:

G&T follow this with a list of NT verses where the speaker or writer claims to be a witness or to have seen and heard something. But notice how this particular argument begins: “If you accept the plain reading of the text…” As I’ve mentioned before, the field of apologetics is not intended to convince unbelievers, it’s intended primarily to convince believers. The conservative, evangelical Christian, upon reading these words, will be encouraged to embrace the conclusion because conservative evangelical Christians are committed to what they see as the “plain reading” of the text. In a way, it’s a sort of rallying cry, a way of saying, “Everybody on our side, get over here.” Given what follows, it’s not surprising that G&T would want to make sure their target audience is rooting for the right side from the very beginning.

The bulk of Chapter 10 is centered on the word “eyewitness,” meaning “someone whose testimony is unimpeachable, because they’re an eyewitness.” You might think that’s not a very good definition (and you’d be right), but that’s the definition G&T are working with. In the real world, there’s no such thing as being just “an eyewitness”—you are an eyewitness of something, and the thing you saw is what defines what it means for you to be an eyewitness of it.

Geisler and Turek, however, seem to avoid making this distinction, putting forth pages and pages of “evidence” that New Testament writers were “eyewitnesses” (of something, doesn’t really matter what) in order to be able to argue that we should accept their testimony uncritically and at face value. For example, after the paragraph quoted above, G&T cite a number of Bible verses in which various apostles and NT writers claim (a) to be witnesses of a risen Jesus, (b) to have seen and heard certain unspecified things, (c) to have seen Jesus exalted to the right hand of God (which the Acts 1 account contradicts, saying Jesus disappeared into the clouds before reaching God’s heaven), (d) to have witnessed everything Jesus did during his ministry, (e) to have witnessed Jesus’ suffering, and so on. They even include passages like 1 Cor. 15, where Paul says Jesus “appeared” to a number of people, and 1 John 1:1-2, where John makes a couple vague references to having seen and heard and touched a “Word of life.”

Geisler and Turek’s argument is that, because Paul and various others were “eyewitnesses”—never mind “eyewitnesses of what,” just eyewitnesses—therefore we ought to believe what these men tell us, even when it runs contrary to what we see in real life.

The risk Paul, Peter and the other apostles took to claim that they were providing eyewitness testimony certainly suggests that they were telling the truth. If these accounts are true, the apostles’ unwavering testimony and provocative challenges demonstrate that they were eyewitnesses who really believed Jesus rose from the dead.

According to all four Gospels, nobody was actually an eyewitness of the resurrection. Many men claimed to have seen a post-burial “appearance” of Jesus (in stories that have a striking resemblance to canonical ghost story themes, like magical appearances and disappearances, walking through locked doors, not being recognized by close friends until after the “punch line” of the story, etc). But the resurrection itself, the main thing that the apostles are supposed to be “eyewitnesses” of, is an event that allegedly took place inside a sealed tomb. The closest we have to that particular event are some guards, who the Bible tells us testified that the disciples took the body, plus some women, who allegedly supported the Christian version.

You see the problem? G&T are arguing that the apostles were “eyewitnesses”—and notice, it’s eyewitnesses, and never just “witnesses” as far as G&T are concerned—and therefore we should believe what they say. If we start looking at the specifics, however, we find that the truth claims they make don’t exactly line up with the specific things they claim to be eyewitnesses of. They’re “eyewitnesses who believed Jesus rose,” not “eyewitnesses who saw Jesus rise.”

As an even better example, G&T spend 3 and a half pages spelling out 84 historical details that Luke got right in the book of Acts. 84 things, such as the fact that he spelled the names of cities correctly, and mentioned Greeks believing in gods named Zeus and Hermes, and used the correct names of local officials and VIP’s. They conclude the list by asking, “Is there any doubt that Luke was an eyewitness to those events or at least had access to reliable eyewitness testimony?”

Well, yes there could be. Obviously. If the only way a person could know such things is by being an eyewitness to Paul’s missionary journeys, then there would be no way scholars today could know that Luke got any of them right. The fact that G&T are bragging about Luke’s historical accuracy demonstrates that this information does not require eyewitness participation and/or access. They are inflating Luke’s credentials as an eyewitness by citing trivialities that don’t actually demonstrate he personally witnessed anything.

Nor is it necessarily the case that we do know that Luke got all of these details right. A few items on the list, for example, have to do with a specific shipwreck during a specific Mediterranean storm. Scholars can verify that Luke’s account is not inconsistent with typical weather patterns for that part of the world, but it would hardly take a great feat of storytelling to imagine a dramatic shipwreck in a seafaring region known for sudden dangerous storms.

Geisler and Turek also ask, “What more could [Luke] have done to prove his authenticity as a historian?” I’m glad they asked that question, because it really gets to the heart of the matter. What establishes the authenticity and reliability of your historical account is not whether you’ve been an eyewitness to the correct spelling of some provincial capital city’s name. Authenticity and reliability are a matter first and foremost of consistency with the verifiable facts. To paraphrase an example G&T use in this chapter, if a man told you a story about your own hometown, and he got all the street names right, and described all the buildings just the way you remember them, and mentioned all the people you knew, and got their mannerisms and appearance down to a T, and then told you he saw the Easter Bunny murder Santa Claus (i.e. the “real” Easter Bunny and the “real” Santa, not just people in costumes), would his “authenticity” as an eyewitness of your hometown justify concluding that the Easter Bunny was real and that Santa Claus used to be?

Geisler and Turek’s whole argument here is that Luke mentions 84 things we can check, and since he got those all right, we should believe him about the things we can’t check.

[W]hy would Luke be so accurate with trivial details like wind directions, water depths, and peculiar town names, but not be accurate when it comes to important events like miracles? In light of the fact that Luke has proven accurate with so many trivial details, it is nothing but pure anti-supernatural bias to say he’s not telling the truth about the miracles he records. As we have seen, such a bias is illegitimate. This is a theistic world where miracles are possible. So it makes much more sense to believe Luke’s miracle accounts than to discount them. In other words, Luke’s credentials as a historian have been proven on so many points that it takes more faith not to believe his miracle accounts than to believe them.

Geisler and Turek inadvertently answer their own question: trivial details are less subject to biased reporting precisely because they are trivial details. If Luke had said the water off Malta was a fathom or two deeper or shallower than what he reported, would that make it any less likely that Jesus rose from the dead? Who cares whether you know the major shipping lanes in the eastern Mediterranean? Does claiming to have come ashore at a particular port make the Gospel sound fake in some way?

Luke’s point, in writing Acts, is to show that God did a number of amazing things. The trivial details neither help nor hinder that objective; it’s nice if they’re there, but if he’d messed anything up, rest assured that Christian apologists would reconcile the difficulties the same way they reconcile the variant accounts in the four Gospels that don’t add up. There’s simply no reason why Luke would be motivated to distort or “improve” the kind of trivial details that Geisler and Turek cite as proof that he is an “eyewitness” (or an “authentic historian” with access to eyewitnesses).

What a genuine historian is going to be most concerned about is whether or not the stories Luke tells are consistent with the verifiable facts. But there’s no carry-over rule. If we can confirm that Luke spelled “Malta” correctly, then we can know that he was right about how to spell Malta. If he correctly names all 50 US states and their capitals, then we can know he was right about the states and state capitals. But no matter how high his score in Trivial Pursuit, if he starts telling us that Zeus came down and arm-wrestled Thor, we’re entitled to make the observation that his claims don’t match what we find in the real world.

Geisler and Turek do not want to subject Luke’s complete testimony to the same standards of consistency and verification they use for the trivial details. They want to use one standard for the trivial details, and then judge the really important claims by simply taking Luke’s word for it, on the grounds that he’s an “eyewitness.” That’s why they try to dismiss any critical look at the important parts of Luke’s testimony, claiming that it is an “illegitimate” anti-supernatural bias to try and hold the entirety of Luke’s testimony to the same evidentiary standards.

What Geisler and Turek forget is that we are eyewitnesses as well. Every day we live, we are eyewitnesses of a world in which God’s behavior is dramatically different from the sort of behavior Luke ascribes to Him. We witness a self-consistent world, an infallibly true world, in which God does not do any of the things Luke claims to have seen (or heard of). And even though the alleged reasons for God’s past behavior are just as real and just as compelling today as they were back then, we see an unmistakable lack of divine response to those needs and priorities.

So what we have here is really two sets of eyewitness testimony—and our testimony is verifiable. God does not behave the way Luke claims He did, and while the trivialities of Luke’s account may pass muster, that’s no guarantee that he’s giving us an accurate and reliable account about the claims he makes that do not match our observations. It boils down to Geisler and Turek telling us that we should believe the incredible things men tell us, just because they used good spelling and grammar, and knew who the local government officials were.

In short, it’s a defense of gullibility. Pay no attention to whether the important parts of Luke’s story are consistent with what we find in real life. Just believe whatever he tells you. He’s an eyewitness, or an authentic historian with access to eyewitnesses. He has the authority to say things that don’t quite fit in with real life. And you, dear gullible reader, need only believe whatever he says. After all, any attempt to actually verify Luke’s non-trivial claims is purely an illegitimate, anti-supernatural bias. You don’t want to be biased, do you?