Y’all take care and be good while I’m gone, k?

We thus have good philosophical and scientific grounds for affirming the second premiss of the cosmological argument. It is noteworthy that this premiss is a religiously neutral statement which can be found in any textbook on astrophysical cosmology, so that facile accusations of “God-of-the gaps” theology find no purchase. Moreover, since a being which exists by a necessity of its own nature must exist either timelessly or sempiternally (otherwise its coming into being or ceasing to be would make it evident that its existence is not necessary), it follows that the universe cannot be metaphysically necessary, which fact closes the final loophole in the contingency argument above.

It follows logically that the universe has a cause. Conceptual analysis of what properties must be possessed by such an ultra-mundane cause enables us to recover a striking number of the traditional divine attributes, revealing that if the universe has a cause, then an uncaused, personal Creator of the universe exists, who sans the universe is beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless, and enormously powerful.

And that’s it! The next paragraph starts a completely different argument. After spending the bulk of his argument belaboring the point—which virtually no skeptic disputes—that the history of the cosmos goes back to a Big Bang, he wraps up his argument by tossing in a breathless “therefore goddidit kthxbai!” and he’s outa here. And just when he was getting to the good part too!

So let’s review. The fulcrum on which the lever of his argument rests is the second point, that the universe began to exist. Since time, however, is an intrinsic property of material reality, his argument isn’t quite accurate. It would be more correct to say that time has a minimum absolute value. But that guts his whole argument, because either time began with the Big Bang (in which case there has never been a time in which the material universe did not exist), or the Big Bang has antecedent natural causes in some larger material context, in which case it is God-of-the-gaps theology to decide that whatever-it-is in that unknown multiverse must necessarily be a sentient, individual, Biblical deity. And even then, we have no reason to conclude that there was ever a time when the larger universe did not exist. It’s time that’s necessarily finite. There’s no reason to believe that the existence of the material cosmos/multiverse cannot be of equal duration.

There is consequently no basis for concluding that the cosmos must have a cause, let alone a supernatural, immaterial one. We may eventually discover, through some advanced inquiry of physics, that this particular space-time continuum arose through the consequences of some larger material context. For such a discovery to be made, however, the properties of that larger n-dimensional context would have to be accessible to material investigation and exploration, since that’s the kind of tools science has to work with. By the time we have a reason to suspect that time extends before the Big Bang, we also have reason to believe that material reality does so also, which moves the “creation” point (so to speak) before the Big Bang as well.

Plus, we already know that this larger material cosmos contains an uncreatable material property (time) without which it cannot chronologically precede the Big Bang. Thus, even if we want to postulate a supernatural Creator to superstitiously attibute things to, we already know there’s at least one aspect of the material cosmos that He could not have created. Thus, He would necessarily be an inadequate explanation for the cosmos as a whole.

None of this, of course, prevents Craig from leaping breathlessly to the conclusion that if the universe has a cause, and scientists aren’t able to spell it out in complete, exhaustive detail, then a Biblical creator God exists, period. Not that it’s a God-of-the-gaps kind of thing. We can tell, because Craig says so himself. “[F]acile accusations of ‘God-of-the gaps’ theology find no purchase,” he says, and if he says so, then it must be true, no matter what it would mean for his conclusion if science were to find a natural process in the n-dimensional metaverse that routinely spits out singularities that Bang into complex life-sustaining space-time continua.

Ah well. It’s a shame really, considering how well he did with his review of the arguments proving that time is finite. If only he weren’t burdened with the superstitious necessity of turning his knowledge into an apologetic, he might have had some interesting insights into what it means that “eternity” isn’t really infinite (as far as the past is concerned, anyway). Instead, he wastes his time trying to make a god-of-the-gaps argument sound like it’s not a god-of-the-gaps argument, and trying to get to his predetermined conclusion without sounding like it’s a predetermined conclusion.

I don’t know who wins this one, because as far as I can see we all lose whenever a good mind is bent to twisted purposes.

Premiss (2), the more controversial premiss [that the universe began to exist], may be supported by both deductive, philosophical arguments and inductive, scientific arguments. Classical proponents of the argument contended that an infinite temporal regress of events cannot exist, since the existence of an actually infinite, as opposed to merely potentially infinite, number of things leads to intolerable absurdities. The best way to support this claim is still by way of thought experiments, like the famous Hilbert’s Hotel, which illustrate the various absurdities that would result if an actual infinite were to be instantiated in the real world.

Unfortunately, this argument does more harm to God than to materialism.

The problem with Craig’s argument is that, while physics seems to indicate that time itself has an absolute minimum value, time is a property of the material universe. The fact that time has an absolute minimum value simply means that there’s a finite amount of time in the past. If you travel to the south pole, you can go no farther south. If you come to an absolute stop, you can no longer slow down. If you travel back in time to the minimum possible value for time, you can go no earlier. It’s not that there’s some barrier between where you are and where you want to go, it’s that the place you want to go does not exist, even conceptually.

This conclusion is supported both by the inductive results of scientific research (e.g. Big Bang theory) and by philosophical deduction. As an example of the latter, consider what it would mean if time extended infinitely far into the past. That which is infinite is that which has no end, by definition. If time extends infinitely far backwards before the Big Bang, therefore, that means that the Big Bang lies at the end of an infinite period of time. An infinite period of time, however, has no end. If an infinite amount of time must pass before the creation of the universe can happen, then the universe can never be created, because an infinite amount of time takes literally forever to pass. Yet in order for there to be an infinite amount of time before creation, that infinite amount of time must pass before the universe can be created, because that’s what it means for infinite time to come before creation. And this is just one of the philosophical examples Craig alludes to.

The problem for Christian apologetics is that this alleged infinite amount of time before creation is not the domain of the material world, but rather is the domain in which God is supposed to have existed and acted before creation. For God to have existed for all eternity, there must have been a prior eternity in which His existence could have taken place. Such an eternity would have the effect of postponing creation for, well, all eternity. If there’s not a whole eternity before creation, then God Himself has not existed for all eternity, since there is no prior eternity in which He could have had this “eternal” existence.

There is thus a finite minimum absolute chronological value for the period of God’s existence as well. To the extent that the material universe has a “beginning,” God must also have a beginning, since there’s a point in time beyond which no earlier divine existence is possible. This brings Him under Craig’s point #1, “Whatever begins to exist has a cause,” and thus eliminates God as a contender for the role of First Cause. Or, alternately, we can admit that since time itself is a property of the material universe, the universe neither needs nor allows any prior cause, which also eliminates God as the First Cause.

We could speculate about some other property, let’s call it “tyme,” which measures some other dimension of some other n-dimensional space. And we could suppose, as some physicists are wondering, that our 3+1 dimensional space-time continuum might be the emergent property of some larger material context which would transcend the absolute minimums implied by the Big Bang. It makes for an interesting hypothesis and some very dense mathematical equations, but ultimately it’s irrelevant to the questions Craig is addressing here.

The mechanisms of cause and effect, as we observe them here and now, are dependent upon the chronological order imposed by material time. If some abstract dimension of “tyme” also exists in some larger n-dimensional continuum, it’s a moot point, since it plays no known role in the material cause-and-effect relationships that apologists are trying to exploit as an argument for a Creator. Indeed, it rather defuses the whole apologetic point: if we postulate a larger n-dimensional material context in which dimensions like our unknown “tyme” serve to produce phenomena like the original Big Bang, we have not made God more likely, we’ve made Him less necessary, by proposing contextual conditions sufficient to produce the creation of our cosmos spontaneously, without the need for what we perceive as material cause and effect.

Craig goes on to list a number of really very excellent arguments for why time cannot extend infinitely into the past, and it’s actually worth reading. There’s quite a lot that he gets right here, which makes it all the more ironic that his arguments deprive God of the opportunity to be Creator, without demonstrating any need for the cosmos to be created. The finite duration of Time Past merely makes it easier for the material universe to have existed for all of it. But, as we’ll see tomorrow, Craig is going to have a go at it anyway.

Cosmological Argument. A simple version of this argument might go:

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.

2. The universe began to exist.

3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

Conceptual analysis of what it means to be a cause of the universe then helps to establish some of the theologically significant properties of this being.

As with his first argument for God, the Cosmological Argument suffers from a number of flaws, not the least of which is his naïve assumption that there was once a time when the universe (including time itself) did not exist.

Let’s look at Craig’s detailed analysis.

Premiss (1) seems obviously true—at the least, more so than its negation. It is rooted in the metaphysical intuition that something cannot come into being from nothing. If things could really come into being uncaused out of nothing, then it becomes inexplicable why just anything and everything do not come into existence uncaused from nothing. Moreover, the conviction that an origin of the universe requires a causal explanation seems quite reasonable, for on the atheistic view, if the universe began at the Big Bang, there was not even the potentiality of the universe’s existence prior to the Big Bang, since nothing is prior to the Big Bang. But then how could the universe become actual if there was not even the potentiality of its existence? It makes much more sense to say that the potentiality of the universe lay in the power of God to create it. Finally, the first premiss is constantly confirmed in our experience. Atheists who are scientific naturalists thus have the strongest of motivations to accept it.

His first premise “seems obviously true”—at least to our naïve experience. It’s certainly the most consistent observation we can make at the macroscopic level, even if it’s not necessarily true at the quantum level. Personally, I prefer to state this observation in terms of the truth being consistent with itself. We see certain factors in operation, and we see certain phenomena consistently produced as a result, and therefore we say that the observed factors are the causes of the observed phenomena. This does not guarantee that all phenomena will have observable prior factors in operation beforehand, but our observations (at the non-quantum level) definitely support this overwhelmingly.

Where Craig gets into trouble is when he starts trying apply this line of reasoning to the very atypical case of the entire cosmos, including time itself, coming into being. He assumes that the phrase “origin of the universe” refers to a temporal sequence in which, at time X, no universe exists, and then at time X+1, the universe does exist, because of some factor that was in operation at time X. Since time itself is a property of the material universe, however, the “origin” of the universe is not a reference to a chronological beginning, but more like a geographical term, like the “origin” of a Cartesian graph—a location in space-time, not a process of transformation.

Craig’s math is off by one. The origin of the universe, and of time itself, is X₀, the original moment of time. There is no moment of time X₀ – 1 prior to the beginning of time at X₀. Thus, there has never been any point in time at which the universe did not exist, and therefore it is simply nonsense to argue about whether or not “potentiality” existed during the time prior to the existence of time. Such nonsense can only lead to credulously superstitious conclusions, like saying “it makes more sense that the potential lay in the power of God to create it.” Such thinking makes no sense at all, since it simultaneously asserts that time existed for God to create in, even though time did not exist, because God had not created it yet.

We’ll continue with points 2 and 3 tomorrow.

[Spammer's Service] is a assemblage of get rid of pore toed crush people whose objective is to be dressed a upholster expand profits making investments.

Um, yeah, sounds like just the sort of people I’ve been wanting to do business with.

Back in Chapter 12, Geisler and Turek had this to say about the significance of prophecy, in the context of a hypothetical case of the trees in your back yard moving 5 feet overnight.

[L]et’s suppose that [the] tree moving event occurred in the following context: Two hundred years in advance, someone claiming to be a prophet of God writes down a prediction that all of the trees in one area of Jerusalem would indeed move five feet one night during a particular year. Two hundred years later, a man arrives to tell the townspeople that the tree moving miracle will occur shortly…

Then one morning numerous eyewitnesses claim that the trees…actually moved five feet during the night.

That would certainly be a remarkable prediction, because how could someone 200 years ago have such detailed and specific knowledge about a remarkable event that didn’t occur until a couple centuries after his lifetime, especially when the event in question is not predictable by any known principles of science? Such evidence would indeed be difficult to account for in naturalistic terms. But is that in fact what we are actually dealing with when we look at the “Messianic” prophecies that Christians claim Jesus fulfilled?

We’ve come to the portion of Chapter 13 that Geisler and Turek call “The Box Top of Prophecy,” referring to their earlier analogy of life as a giant jigsaw puzzle and the Bible as (allegedly) the top of the box the puzzle came in, showing the whole picture so we can tell how to put the pieces together. As we’ve seen in preceding weeks, it’s a rather misleading analogy, since they have to rather mangle a lot of the pieces in order to put them together into the picture Geisler and Turek want us to see.

The mangling continues in this week’s episode, as Geisler and Turek invite us to consider three possible interpretations of Psalm 22, traditionally attributed to King David and taken by many as a prediction of Jesus’ crucifixion.

First, some Christian scholars agree with the skeptics on verses like this. They say Psalm 22 is not intended to be predictive…

Second, other Christian scholars point out that some biblical prophecies may apply to two different people at two different times. Both David and Jesus certainly had enemies and difficulties in their lives…

The third option—which is the one that seems most plausible to us—is that Psalm 22 is solely predictive of Jesus. After all, the psalm contains several distinct references to Christ’s crucifixion experience. It begins with his cry from the cross…and then describes…the scorn, mocking, and insults of his accusers…his thirst…his pierced hands and feet…his unbroken bones…his divided garments…the fact that his enemies cast lots for his garments…his ultimate rescue by the Lord…and even his public praise of God to his fellow Israelites after his rescue.

There are, of course, a number of problems with this interpretation, even overlooking the fact that we don’t normally apply the term “rescue” to a situation where the “rescuer’s” inaction results in the death of the victim.

Is David speaking of Jesus’ experiences, or are latter-day Christians incorporating the details of Psalm 22 into their narrative about the crucifixion? David doesn’t mention crucifixion, or any of the uniquely distinctive characteristics of death by crucifixion. He speaks in more general terms about persecution, and being forsaken by God, and suffering mistreatment and ridicule at their hands. Christians associate these emotion-laden descriptions with the emotion-laden descriptions of the crucifixion, but the association is sufficiently vague that, as Geisler and Turek admit, even some Christian theologians doubt that Psalm 22 is predicting the cross.

Then there are the inconsistencies. The Hebrew text, as revised by the Masoretes, has verse 16 as “they have pierced my hands and my feet,” but not all ancient texts have the same reading. (If you click on the link above, you’ll see a footnote stating that some texts have “like a lion” instead.) And the text nowhere says anything about all his bones being “unbroken.” The verse says, “I can count all my bones,” a clear reference to the advanced emaciation that comes from extreme and prolonged suffering. Breaking a bone does not render it uncountable!

The psalmist speaks of a man abandoned by God over a long enough period of time that he can complain about how God does not answer even though the psalmist beseeches Him “by day and by night.” Again, this is perfectly consistent with a period of suffering long enough to emaciate someone to the point where they can count all their bones, but not at all consistent with the relatively swift death of crucifixion. If you count the midnight arrest as part of the experience, you could squeeze in one “day” and one “night,” but that’s hardly enough to justify the psalmist’s complaint. Certainly, Christians don’t regard God as having “forsaken” them after less than 24 hours with no answer to their prayers.

Notice too that the psalmist cries out for mercy and for deliverance from the sword, and then ends with the exultant expectation that God will indeed deliver his life from those who seek to kill him. But God did not deliver Jesus—he died at the hands of his enemies (or more precisely, at the hands of the Romans, who weren’t particularly his enemies, but were just carrying out an execution for political expediency). There’s no indication in Psalm 22 of God allowing the psalmist to actually die, and certainly none of Him doing anything so astonishing as bringing anyone back from the dead; the psalmist’s prayer and expectation is that God will step in and rescue him so that his enemies don’t kill him in the first place.

The similarities to crucifixion are vague, superficial, and in some cases coincidental. There is no indication that David had any concept of what death by crucifixion would be like, or that he intended to express the idea that some important future personage would ever experience it, and then subsequently be resurrected from the dead. David’s description of himself as a man who finds himself far from God, and who has trusted in God from his earliest days, at his mother’s breast, is a far cry from the Trinitarian view of God the Son Who can never be separated from God because that would mean being separated from Himself.

So why do Geisler and Turek prefer the interpretation that Psalm 22 refers only to the crucifixion of Jesus? How do they answer all the skeptical criticisms of the Messianic interpretation of this Psalm?

The skeptic may say, “But you’re only interpreting Psalm 22 that way because you now know what happened to Christ. It probably wouldn’t have been apparent to someone living in Old Testament times that Psalm 22 was about Christ.”

To which we reply: even if that is true, so what? It may be true that certain messianic prophecies in the Old Testament become clear only in the light of Christ’s life. But that doesn’t mean those prophecies are any less amazing.

Did you catch that? David, the author of Psalm 22, was an Old Testament king. If you have to know the events of Jesus life in order to interpret Psalm 22 as a Messianic prophecy, and David clearly did not do that, then he never intended his psalm to be taken as a prediction of death by crucifixion. That would certainly explain the nagging inconsistencies between what Psalm 22 says and the events that actually happened in Jesus life. But notice the breathtaking response of Doctor Geisler and Doctor Turek to this problem: “So what? It doesn’t make the prophecies any less amazing.”

Isn’t that mind-boggling? Geisler and Turek don’t care whether their interpretation of Psalm 22 matches what the author was actually trying to say. All that matters is whether they can get an “amazing” prophecy they can use to bolster their claim that Jesus accomplished something remarkable by having his followers report that this, that, and the other unverifiable claim somehow matched, or nearly matched, specific verses and phrases from Psalm 22.

Compare that to the tree-moving event discussed in Chapter 12. The prophet in their scenario clearly knew exactly what he was talking about. He knew specifically what was going to happen, he knew where it was going to happen, he knew when it was going to happen, 200 years in advance, and he wrote down specific, measurable, verifiable details about what the result of the event was going to be. The whole point of issuing the prophecy was to demonstrate that he did indeed know exactly what he was talking about, and that what he wrote was what he meant and what he understood about it, when it was not naturally possible for him to have such accurate foreknowledge.

That’s the kind of standard Geisler and Turek want us to think their interpretation of prophecy lives up to, but if in fact the evidence fails to support the conclusion that David had any clue what their interpretation would someday be, their response is just a shrug and a “Who cares?”.

These guys are doctors of theology. They’re professional, trained apologists. And they don’t care whether or not their interpretation accurately reflects the author’s intended meaning. In their superstitious world view, the fact that they can twist and adapt Psalm 22 to suit a Christian agenda is proof enough that God always meant for them to do so. They’re not distorting the meaning of the texts, they’re revealing its “true,” secret, retroactive meaning, which coincidentally happens to be just what they want it to be, even if the words don’t all quite fit.

And they named their book I Don’t Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST. And neither one has been struck by lightning. Need we any further proof that their God does not exist?

The Heckler’s Defense has two goals: disruptive censorship, and scapegoating. The heckler’s primary goal is to silence criticisms of his beliefs, and he accomplishes this by using whatever means he can to divert the discussion onto tangential or irrelevant topics. For example, he might make an argument with an obvious fallacy, to divert the discussion into an argument over whether or not his statement was fallacious. Or he might try and goad other people into personal attacks, and then make a few attacks of his own, in order to drag everyone into a big flame fest. He might even contradict himself and then deny the contradiction, in order to keep everyone talking about himself and whether or not he really said what he said.

The beauty (if that’s the term) of the Heckler’s Defense is that it really doesn’t matter what the heckler says as long as he shuts down the main discussion by saying it. It doesn’t matter if what he says is wrong, and it doesn’t matter if other people can document that what he says is wrong, because the goal is to get people talking about himself, and thus not talking about the things that are wrong with his beliefs.

A telltale sign of the Heckler’s Defense is that the heckler will be very cagy about revealing what his own beliefs are. He’s not in the discussion to let his beliefs go head-to-head with a competing conclusion in the kind of debate that forces both parties to put up or shut up. He already knows he’s the one that would end up having to shut up, due to the lack of factual support for his beliefs. So he plays mind games with his critics instead, offering tantalizing hints about what his beliefs might be, in order to be able to say, “That’s not what I said!” whenever anyone points out the flaws in the belief he’s suggesting.

Thus, instead of an honest debate over honestly-expressed ideas and the evidence that supports them, the heckler merely creates another diversion, baiting his opponents with the implication that this time he might just commit to a direct expression of his true beliefs, only to dance away at the last minute, laughing at them—which naturally frustrates his opponents, tempting them to question his motives, and opening the gates to yet another diversionary flamefest.

Such flamefests also serve to promote the secondary goal of the Heckler’s Defense, which is to provide the heckler with a pretext for rejecting his critics. By provoking accusations and insults, the heckler makes it possible to view his critics as enemies, and thus naturally inferior folk. It’s a self-reinforcing cycle, because the heckler can fill his comments with all sorts of explicit and implicit accusations and insinuations, thus directly attacking the character of his opponents and taunting them to respond in kind, which in turn diverts the discussion into a flamefest, which reinforces the heckler’s conviction that his enemies are unfair, unkind, and by implication, wrong, etc., etc.

It’s a rather nasty maladaptive response to finding out the facts aren’t consistent with your beliefs, promoting divisions and strife, and driving the heckler deeper and deeper into rationalizations and self-justifications based on hostility and defensiveness. I have a particularly hard time dealing with this particular defense because I tend to feel sorry for the person who has been driven to such desperate measures (not that I don’t also find them every bit as annoying as they’re trying to be, of course).

It’s interesting to indulge Hecklers once in a while, just to see how they twist and distort things. It’s a fascinating, if macabre, glimpse into human psychology and maladaptive responses. But ultimately, we have to admit that there’s no real hope the Heckler will ever make an honest and sincere contribution to the discussion. That’s not his goal. His goal is to disrupt any discussion of the evidence, and to slander everyone who disagrees with him. There’s no point in encouraging or enabling him to achieve those goals.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Loathesome indeed.

I think we did that rather well, but one commenter disagrees.

No, what we’ve achieved is another silly, impertinent scenario, if nothing else, simply because a single sample is seldom sufficient. Here, you offer two hypotheses each with a single consequence that both permit. So, of course I agree with you that “there’s no reasonable basis for concluding, even provisionally, that we’re being secretly controlled by a one-horned oligarchy.”

It’s a classic example of misdirection and dodging the issue, so I thought it would be worth a bit of attention.

The commenter would like to disagree with the point I am making, but to do that he needs to deal directly with the facts I’ve presented. That’s a bit of a problem, because my facts don’t really give him any grounds for complaint. The Unicorn Hypothesis does indeed imply the same consequences as the Autonomy Hypothesis, and makes it very clear, even to him, that merely predicting a similar set of consequences gives us no grounds for calling the conclusion justified. Rather than admit that it’s a good example of the flaw, therefore, he tries to make it sound like a flawed example. He does this by making a stink about an issue that isn’t even part of the topic under discussion.

Your UH differs very, very significantly from your GH. Think about the GH for a moment – my intense distaste for it aside – its depth of scope and definition at least theoretically allows for a decent subset of nuanced consequences in more than one area of reality – you have lists of things we’d expect to see in several different areas of reality were the subject of your GH to exist in actuality. OTOH, think about this UH for moment. The only consequence we can reliably deduce is that if the subjects of your UH exist, we should see tensions and crises. Problem is, the singular prediction of the UH is an absurdly high-order abstraction, nothing near the nuanced, myriad abstractions of your GH in predictive or explanatory power.

We’ve been discussion what it takes for a conclusion to be “justified,” and in particular whether it’s reasonable to call a conclusion “justified” on the grounds that (in one’s opinion) the evidence is consistent with the belief. There has been no debate on the topic of whether there’s a requirement for the hypothesis to predict “nuanced” conclusions, or to make predictions in more than one area of reality, or to have “lists” of a certain minimum number of items. These are purely ad hoc, spur-of-the-moment requirements made up for the sole purpose of giving the Unicorn Hypothesis something to fail.

The reason I call this a classic example of misdirection is because the commenter is essentially arguing that, in order to lead to valid conclusions, a hypothesis needs to meet a certain number of other criteria besides or in addition to the criterion of c0nsistency with the evidence. In other words, the commenter is actually conceding the point that we can’t justify our conclusions solely on the grounds that we’ve managed to make them predict the same consequences as some other hypothesis. Yet, perversely, though he reinforces my point, he phrases his concession in such a way as to make it sound like he’s actually proved me wrong.

Notice, he calls it “another silly, impertinent scenario,” even though he has to grudgingly concede that “of course I agree with you.” He does not like the conclusion he is forced to agree with, so he tries to make it sound like an outlier, a special case that does not apply to any other circumstance. If you can’t beat it, isolate it! And, when we look at his arguments, it’s easy to see that he’s straining for pretexts on which to base his rejection.

Consider his initial claim that “a single sample is seldom sufficient.” That’s generally a true principle, but it applies to the actual evidence you collect in order to evaluate your hypothesis, not to the hypothesis itself. The scope of evidence for the Unicorn Hypothesis is the whole human history of world affairs, at the local, regional, national and international level. That’s way more than one sample: entire encyclopedias have been written on the history of politics. Even the relatively short history of the United States, from the 13 colonies to the present day, would take multiple semesters to cover in high school or college.

So we’re far from dealing with a mere “single sample” in the case of the Unicorn Hypothesis. There’s a huge body of evidence that it’s consistent with. But our commenter has an alternative way to try and make the same objection apply: he says the Unicorn Hypothesis is capable of only a single prediction. “The only consequence we can reliably deduce is that if the subjects of your UH exist, we should see tensions and crises,” he writes. But once again, this is a spurious objection.

First of all, there’s no rule that says a valid hypothesis has to make more than one prediction. Let’s compare the Uniform Acceleration Hypothesis (which says that gravity accelerates all masses equally) with the Proportional Acceleration Hypothesis (which says that gravity accelerates objects in proportion to their mass). The Uniform Hypothesis makes one prediction: that a heavy object and a light object will fall at the same speed (apart from friction or air resistance) and the Proportional Hypothesis makes the equally singular prediction that the heavier object will fall faster than the lighter one (again, apart from friction and air resistance).

You don’t need for either hypothesis to make more than one prediction in order to test which of the two is closer to the truth. I remember watching a film in my high school science class showing a feather and a hardball being dropped inside a giant, airless glass cylinder. They both fell at the same speed, consistent with the Uniform Acceleration Hypothesis (and incidently confirming Galileo’s experiment on the Tower of Pisa). A single predicted consequence is just fine, provided it predicts different results for different hypotheses.

Secondly, the Unicorn Hypothesis does indeed make several “nuanced” predictions. For example, in the hypothesis, the unicorns do not hate us, nor have any particular desire to inflict undue suffering on us. They simply want to keep us too distracted to look for unicorns. This implies that world affairs will sometimes produce results that benefit mankind, like emancipating and enfranchising slaves and women. Too much bad news might arouse human suspicions, you see. But they have no particular love for mankind either, so they have no qualms about letting us endure atrocities and disasters, as long as it keeps our minds preoccupied with world affairs.

Another consequence is that the unicorns can’t be too obvious about how they exert their control, so the real causes for wars and conflicts will have to be complex and subtle, with humans believing that they are freely exercising their own sovereignty and control. The best institution for creating this kind of situation is democracy, where people can be influenced in subtle ways, and manipulated politically, all while wholeheartedly believing that they are free and are governing themselves. Thus, we can predict, based on the Unicorn Hypothesis, that democracy will tend to spread and gain power (at least in areas that are less subject to traditional, tyrannical forms of rule).

Further examples are left as an exercise for the reader, but the point is that our commenter accused the Unicorn Hypothesis of implying only a single consequence simply because he didn’t want to find more than one. There are plenty there to be found if we’re willing to look, but what he was looking for was an excuse to reject the whole scenario. It led to a conclusion he could not adequately deny, so he sought to find some pretext for discrediting it.

But the real genius of this argument is the way it opens up whole new cans of worms for us to argue about, like whether or not the Unicorn Hypothesis is really similar enough to the Gospel Hypothesis to make this example applicable. How similar does it need to be? How do we measure similarity? What constitutes a “nuanced” prediction? How much nuance is needed? How many different areas of reality need to be covered? What constitutes “covering” an area of reality? What constitutes an “area” of reality?

We could argue for months, or years, about these and a host of other tangential topics, and never get back to the main point of the post, which was that we can’t justify our beliefs solely on the grounds that they seem “consistent” (to us) with the evidence. And that, I think, was at least the subconscious goal of the tactic of “agreeing” while simultaneously trying to make it sound like he was disproving my point.

My point is that rationalization—the art of convincing ourselves that the evidence is consistent with our beliefs—is not a valid means of justifying what we believe in. It is too easy for us to be satisfied with low expectations regarding what supports our beliefs, and unreasonably high standards regarding what contradicts our beliefs. We’re to prone to believe, with little justification, that the evidence matches what we want to believe in. We need to test our beliefs, using techniques like comparing the Myth Hypothesis with competing hypotheses to see which matches the facts better than the alternatives.

We can know the truth, but we have to want to know the truth. If we don’t want to know the truth, then the Loser’s Compromise is waiting to serve us. And we can make whatever bogus objections we like in order to defend it.

So far we’ve watched Geisler and Turek mining prophetic “fulfillments” with a traditional yet reckless abandon that would make a Mormon blush, but we’re not quite finished yet. For some reason, they feel the need to throw in a couple more prophecies, this time from Zechariah.

The prophetic case for Christ is strengthened even further when you realize that the Old Testament predicted that God himself would be pierced, as happened when Jesus was crucified. As recorded by the Old Testament prophet Zechariah (also written well before Christ), God says, “I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and supplication. They will look on me, the one they have pierced, and they will mourn for him as one mourns for an only child, and grieve bitterly for him as one grieves for a firstborn son” (Zech. 12:10).

And of course, we all know how bitterly the Jews (”house of David”) and the inhabitants of Jerusalem have been mourning God since the crucifixion.

Let’s take a look at what Geisler and Turek, as usual, have left out: the context of Zechariah 12.

The LORD… declares: “I am going to make Jerusalem a cup that sends all the surrounding peoples reeling. Judah will be besieged as well as Jerusalem. On that day, when all the nations of the earth are gathered against her, I will make Jerusalem an immovable rock for all the nations. All who try to move it will injure themselves… On that day I will make the leaders of Judah like a firepot in a woodpile, like a flaming torch among sheaves. They will consume right and left all the surrounding peoples, but Jerusalem will remain intact in her place. The LORD will save the dwellings of Judah first, so that the honor of the house of David and of Jerusalem’s inhabitants may not be greater than that of Judah… And I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and supplication. They will look on me, the one they have pierced, and they will mourn for him as one mourns for an only child, and grieve bitterly for him as one grieves for a firstborn son. On that day the weeping in Jerusalem will be great, like the weeping of Hadad Rimmon in the plain of Megiddo. The land will mourn, each clan by itself, with their wives by themselves: the clan of the house of David and their wives, the clan of the house of Nathan and their wives, the clan of the house of Levi and their wives, the clan of Shimei and their wives, and all the rest of the clans and their wives.

Let’s ignore, for the moment, the fact that the clans of David and Nathan and Levi and Shimei have all ceased to exist without fulfilling this prophecy. Let’s look at the specific reference to piercing. The first thing we ought to ask is whether we’re talking about literal, physical piercing, or whether we’re speaking in metaphorical terms, as in causing someone great emotional pain. So what does the text say? “The house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem…will look on me, the one they have pierced.” Was Jesus pierced literally by the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem? Oops, that was the Romans.

The house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem are not literally the ones who literally pierced Jesus, nor is it accurate to say that they even delivered Jesus to the Romans to be pierced. The Sanhedrin, not the house of David, drove the demand to crucify him, and a common mob, not the whole city, let themselves be goaded into demanding Barabbas instead of Jesus. The “fulfillment” doesn’t quite line up with what the prediction actually says. Geisler and Turek, as is traditional among Christians, have seized on that one word “pierced” in that little out-of-context snippet, and have built upon it a detailed prediction that goes way beyond anything the text actually says.

Let’s move on, it gets better.

Later Zechariah predicts that the Lord’s “feet will stand on the Mount of Olives, east of Jerusalem” (Zech. 14:4) These predictions refer to Christ’s second coming, but the reference to God having been “pierced” (i.e. crucified) by the “house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem” obviously refers to his first coming. In fact, the apostle John quotes Zechariah 12:10 as prophetic of the crucifixion (John 19:37).

Gotta love that first sentence, eh? If you’re quoting verses to prove that Jesus fulfills Old Testament prophecies, why deny yourself a claimed fulfillment just because of picky little details like the fact that the prophecy has never been fulfilled? Here’s the prophecy:

A day of the LORD is coming when your plunder will be divided among you. I will gather all the nations to Jerusalem to fight against it; the city will be captured, the houses ransacked, and the women raped. Half of the city will go into exile, but the rest of the people will not be taken from the city. Then the LORD will go out and fight against those nations, as he fights in the day of battle. On that day his feet will stand on the Mount of Olives, east of Jerusalem, and the Mount of Olives will be split in two from east to west, forming a great valley, with half of the mountain moving north and half moving south. You will flee by my mountain valley, for it will extend to Azel. You will flee as you fled from the earthquake in the days of Uzziah king of Judah. Then the LORD my God will come, and all the holy ones with him. On that day there will be no light, no cold or frost. It will be a unique day, without daytime or nighttime—a day known to the LORD. When evening comes, there will be light. On that day living water will flow out from Jerusalem, half to the eastern sea and half to the western sea, in summer and in winter. The LORD will be king over the whole earth. On that day there will be one LORD, and his name the only name.

Yeah, Jesus sure fulfilled that one all right.

Having wrapped up their prophetic tour de force, Geisler and Turek drop the scholarship (such as it was) to return to the evangelistic testimony of Barry, the Jewish athlete who started out hostile to Jesus but had a dramatic and inspiring conversion, apparently based on bad advice and a combination of gullibility and lack of critical thinking that prevented him from noticing the flaws in the strained “fulfillments” Christians have been using since the days of John the Apostle. Barry was convinced, and he was a Jew, so that proves everything, as far as Geisler and Turek are concerned.

Next week, Geisler and Turek will try to answer critical objections to their claims. Stay tuned.

Let’s recap. In “Victoria and Holmes,” we looked at how the Loser’s Compromise worked, and why it would not be an advantage to anyone who was arguing a point that was clearly supported by the evidence. When the facts are on your side already, there’s no need to appeal to the idea that all points of view can be seen as equally consistent with the facts. Thus, the Loser’s Compromise appeals to us primarily when the evidence is not in our favor. Hence the name.

In “A Quick Preview,” we mentioned the Loser’s Compromise in passing, noting that the Myth Hypothesis is already 100% consistent with the verifiable evidence, and therefore the best a competing hypothesis could hope for is to predict the exact same consequences as the Myth Hypothesis. Anything less, and the Myth Hypothesis is the one best supported by the evidence. Under the circumstances, it would be easy to understand the temptation to raise a Loser’s Compromise in defense against the superior consistency of the Myth Hypothesis.

In “The Loser’s Compromise (cont),” we explored the further ramifications of the Loser’s Compromise, and how it makes us “losers” by causing us to lose the ability to distinguish between false alternatives and the true one. Indeed, the whole point of the Loser’s Compromise is to blur the distinction between true conclusions and false ones so as to protect us from having our false beliefs exposed as error, defending our pride at the expense of our intellectual integrity.

“Why ‘Loser’s’ Compromise?” explored the difference between a laudable open-mindedness that admits its own fallibility, and the Loser’s Compromise, which seeks to avoid acknowledging its mistakes. Honest inquirers admit the possibility that new information might change their conclusions, but they still distinguish between conclusions that are consistent with the evidence and those that aren’t. The Loser’s Compromise, by contrast, seeks to avoid discovering which conclusions are most consistent with the truth, so as to avoid being proven wrong. That’s the exact opposite of an open-minded, skeptical admission of fallibility.

“Our unicorn overlords” looked a specific example of creating a situation where two conflicting hypotheses predicted the exact same real-world consequences (of which there are a huge number by the way: virtually all of the worlds political developments throughout history!). By taking a step away from the specific topic of Myth Hypothesis versus Gospel Hypothesis, it demonstrated with a bit more objectivity the manner in which the Loser’s Compromise really offers no justification for believing in powerful, invisible beings.

And most recently, “How great a loss!” pointed out that, fundamentally, the Loser’s Compromise is necessarily a self-deception, since conflicting hypotheses can only be equally (in)consistent with the truth if they are both false. Granted, lack of information can sometimes produce an inability to determine which hypothesis is most consistent with the facts (in which case agnosticism is the only justified conclusion), but where the available information is readily available, and is clearly more consistent with one hypothesis than another, it is mere self-deception to pretend to be unable to reach a reasonable determination of the truth.

Seven posts, and none of them have been attacks on any one person. I have focused on the issues themselves, and on the reasons why a Loser’s Compromise is a bad idea. And that’s a tremendous advantage for my case. If I had tried to attack someone personally, and to prove that they were guilty of promoting a Loser’s Compromise, I would have set myself up for failure, because the person I attacked would only need to deny that they believed in any Loser’s Compromise. The burden of proof would be on me to establish someone’s guilt, to prove their thoughts in contradiction of their claims, and that’s a difficult burden to bear. Plus, even if I won, what would be the point? One person would be embarrassed, and 50 years from now (or even 10, or 2), who would care?

It is so much better to focus on the issues, because if someone comes along and says, “I reject the idea that the evidence could support some conflicting hypothesis as well as it supports the Myth Hypothesis,” then I haven’t lost an argument and/or made an enemy, I’ve added one more to the number of people who reject the Loser’s Compromise. That’s a win for both of us, because we’ve both rejected a flawed idea that impedes the search for truth.

Granted, there may be some out there who do indeed want to promote the Loser’s Compromise (for instance, by arguing that some other hypothesis is just as consistent with the real-world facts as the Myth Hypothesis, and is therefore “justified” whether or not it is true). And granted, my posts on the Loser’s Compromise may indeed make such people very uncomfortable. Good. Embracing flawed ideas and self-deceptions should make us uncomfortable. It should bother us so much that we can no longer continue defending the errors in our thinking. Ideally, it should drive us to reconsider our assumptions, and seek out new beliefs with a stronger foundation in real-world fact.

A hundred years from now, it won’t matter whether one person “scored a point” against some other luckless individual. But the difference between sound thinking and self-deception will still matter. People will come and people will go, but ideas and their consequences will endure—for good (sound thinking) or ill (self-deception). And that’s why it’s so satisfying to focus on the issues, rather than on petty personal squabbles.

I do notice, DD, that you’ve moved away from the “both are equally UNjustified” stance a bit… though I think the usage of parsimony covers your bases on that one, don’t be surprised if SOMEONE mentions the shift.

It’s not actually a shift, per se. What I’m saying is that IF two theories predict exactly the same real-world consequences, then we are equally UNjustified in preferring one over the other. (We’re free to do so if we wish, there’s just no justification for it.) But if we take a step back, and take a critical look at that big IF, we find that, in fact, there is good reason to believe we’ll never have that problem.

A true hypothesis, by definition, is one that is consistent with the truth. A false hypothesis, by definition, is not consistent with the truth. That’s what “true” and “false” mean. Two hypotheses that contradict one another are not going to both be true, because truth is consistent with itself. At most one of them is going to be consistent with the truth. Thus, the only way two hypotheses can contradict each other AND both be equally consistent with the facts is if they’re both false and are equally INconsistent with the facts. Hence my remarks about why we are equally UNjustified in believing either one.

Now, if we have insufficient information about the real-world truth, we may encounter individual scenarios where we cannot determine which hypothesis is indeed more consistent with the evidence. That’s not the case with the Myth Hypothesis versus the Gospel Hypothesis, of course: we’ve got more evidence that directly pertains to the real-vs-expected consequences of MH vs GH than for almost any other scientifically-approachable question. Plus, if we lacked enough real-world information to be able to tell the difference between a Myth and a genuine Gospel, that would mean the authors of Scripture themselves would have no valid basis for the claims they make about God. So we can pretty much dispense with that line of inquiry. Such a pervasive and consistent lack of factual information about God would itself be a fairly conclusive proof of the Myth and disproof of the Gospel.

The other way that we can have “equal” evidence for conflicting hypotheses is by the sad, simple expedient of deceiving ourselves about the evidence. It’s not that the evidence really is equally consistent with both hypotheses, it’s that we rationalize away the inconsistencies, filtering them out via our worldview. It’s not that our preferred hypothesis really would result in consequences consistent with the truth, it’s that we know what consequences it needs to predict, and simply deceive ourselves into believing that they predict the right ones.

A false hypothesis is, by definition, inconsistent with the truth. No matter how we try to deceive ourselves, the inconsistencies are going to be there, and covering up one is only going to create one or more new inconsistencies. We can deal with this, self-deceptively, by compartmentalizing our thinking and thus preventing ourselves from noticing that our rationalizations only create new problems to replace the old. But the inconsistencies will always be there.

For example, we can try to deny the undeniable fact that we do not see God showing up in real life, outside the minds, words, and feelings of men. But this denial is going to be inconsistent with the real world evidence. If we try to contrive a Biblical Hypothesis that accounts for the real-world evidence, we end up with a hypothesis that necessarily predicts that we should not see God showing up in real life. That’s an inconsistency: we started by denying the fact that we don’t see God showing up in real life, and end up proclaiming that God’s absence is exactly what we ought to expect. Now it’s undeniable not just because the evidence is overwhelmingly consistent with the Myth Hypothesis, but because it would falsify our “Biblical” Hypothesis for Him to show up.

And how will we explain this absence from real life? We could say that He is hiding Himself in order to force us to live by faith, but then we run into the inescapable consequence of the undeniable fact: God’s absence means we have no opportunity to trust Him. Our faith is in the person whose teachings we believe, and in God’s absence, our only option is to believe the teachings of men. Worse, our only option is to believe men who contradict the Myth Hypothesis (and each other), in a world that is overwhelmingly consistent with the conclusion that the Myth Hypothesis is true. Believing the inconsistent things men say, in the face of evidence that contradicts them, is not faith, but merely gullibility. Thus the inconsistency: God’s absence makes it impossible for us to have the genuine, valid, theocentric faith that His absence is allegedly intended to produce.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg, of course. Inconsistencies are everywhere, and new ones spring up every time we try to bury the old ones. Self-deception, once begun, becomes a habit, an addiction. More is never enough.

That’s why I use the term Loser’s Compromise. When we deceive ourselves into believing that our preferred hypothesis predicts, and matches, exactly the same consequences as the hypothesis that contradicts us, we lose so many things: intellectual integrity, credibility, self-respect, and on and on. We become irritable, accusatory, suspicious. Rather than admit that the facts are against us, we become paranoid, scapegoat hunters, driven by the need to find someone to blame, someone else to be wrong for us so that we don’t have to.

It’s easy to find people afflicted with this problem, because they’re prone to write letters to the editor, or issue press releases, or even form national movements and organizations dedicated to “defending the truth” (as they define it). They have the support of others who are also deceiving themselves, and who are willing to overlook (or are no longer able to perceive) the tortured logic, the self-contradictions, and the downright embarrassing behavior.

We don’t have to be losers, of course. We can admit our fallibilities, and allow ourselves to seriously consider that our beliefs, yes, even our beliefs about God, aren’t necessarily infallible. We can let the facts drive our conclusions about faith, instead of making faith the rule by which we mentally manipulate the facts. It’s not necessarily a comfortable experience, but it’s a good and valuable one.

I did it a few years ago, and I survived. I’m even better off for it. Yes, it’s hard, but it’s worth it. Buy the truth at any price, and you will not be ashamed. Shame comes from compromising with gullibility, and losing our intellectual integrity. No faith is worth that loss.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Note that this policy applies to all commenters, no exceptions. We will discuss facts and issues here, and we’ll discuss personalities, insinuations, recriminations, and other diversionary tactics on the forums.

Yours for a more static-free connection to the truth.

DD

Well, I’m back, sort of, and from the looks of things you guys didn’t miss me too much. I don’t suppose I’ll ever catch up on the comments backlog, but I’m sure you will let me know if there are any important points I’ve missed in my quick skim.

Meanwhile, I did notice this interesting comment (stuck in the moderation queue) from a commenter by the handle of “Lifeguard.”

I guess what I’m struggling with here is what the exact difference is between the Loser’s Compromise and simply acknowledging the very real possibility that despite the certainty of your beliefs you may be mistaken about which conclusion is the most justified, the best of the bunch, to say nothing of absolutely proven to be true?

That’s an excellent question, and I’m happy to have the opportunity to explain this further.

There’s a big difference between the Loser’s Compromise and the reasonable practice of acknowledging a certain margin for error in one’s conclusions. In the latter, the goal is to keep one’s mind open in order to be receptive to receiving new information that might change one’s conclusions. The goal of the Loser’s Compromise, by contrast, is to deprive us of the ability to benefit from new information, or even already existing information. The loss of this ability to distinguish between truth and falsehood is precisely what makes it a “Loser’s” Compromise—we’re trying to lose a faculty we could otherwise use to learn that our beliefs are already false.

The Loser’s Compromise is, in effect, the exact opposite of admitting that there’s a real possibility we could be wrong. If we are wrong, the only way we’ll ever find out is by noticing that the evidence is inconsistent with the conclusions we wish to believe. The whole point of the Loser’s Compromise, however, is to make the evidence sound equally consistent with all conclusions, thus causing us to lose the ability to identify incorrect conclusions.

The feature that makes the Loser’s Compromise stand out as a rationalization, and that betrays the compromiser’s motives, is when we try to use the Loser’s Compromise to claim that we have a justification for our beliefs, despite the fact no such justification exists. If the evidence fails to favor one conclusion over the others, then they are all equally UNjustified, not equally justified. That’s an important distinction, because when the evidence is uniformly ambiguous, the only position that can be legitimately justified is agnosticism, not belief.

Now, there may indeed be circumstances in which the available evidence is insufficient to distinguish between different possible conclusions. I would not use the term “Loser’s Compromise” in such situations, provided that we were openly agnostic about our conclusions and that we were actively seeking more evidence and information with the goal of ultimately discovering which answers were right and which were wrong. The term “Loser’s Compromise” only applies to the specific case of trying to make the existing evidence sound inconclusive, via arguments intended to deny or distort the facts, in order to avoid acknowledging a clear inconsistency between the available facts and a particular conclusion.

So yes, I endorse the practice of acknowledging the possibility that one’s conclusions might be incorrect, and that new information might invalidate previously-held beliefs. I myself could be wrong about heliocentrism, or about God, though at this point I’d say the odds would appear to be about equal in either case. Acknowledging the possibility of error is a good thing, but it’s the exact opposite of what the Loser’s Compromise attempts to accomplish—lip service to human fallibility notwithstanding.

There’s a particular approach to the truth that I call the Loser’s Compromise, and it goes like this: “We can’t know the truth about X, so let’s just agree that different people are equally justified in believing whatever they like about it.” Considered superficially, it sounds open-minded and fair, because it appeals to a certain live-and-let-live quality that avoids putting anyone in the wrong. In reality, though, it’s a deceptive rationalization, and an excuse for avoiding the truth instead of embracing it.

The rest of the post explained this and gave some illustrations, but there’s just a point or two more that I’d like to add to try and clarify why this is indeed a Loser’s Compromise.

The heart of the Loser’s Compromise is that the person making the argument is trying to claim that he is “justified” in believing any conclusion he wishes to accept. The idea is that, since we can’t know which conclusion is true, the justification for any of them is the same.

That’s almost true: if indeed we cannot know which conclusion is the correct one, then all conclusions are equally UNjustified. This is the crux of the matter, because there’s a difference between all conclusions being equally justified, and all being equally UNjustified. The term “justified” implies that the believer has valid reasons for his beliefs, but in the case of the Loser’s Compromise, nobody has any valid reason to prefer one conclusion over the others.

What the Loser’s Compromise does is to try and remove the social stigma that comes from advocating beliefs that we don’t have any valid reason to believe. The believer wants to claim the social status that comes from having “justified” beliefs, and therefore uses the Compromise to claim that his beliefs are just as justified as anyone else’s.

But let’s go back to the conclusions themselves. Where we have a body of conflicting and mutually contradictory conclusions, at most one of them is going to be consistent with the real-world truth. If we say that all conclusions are equally “justified” when we know that they cannot all be equally true, what we’ve done is to redefine the meaning of “justified” so that it no longer has any relevance to the question of whether or not a particular conclusion is true.

But there’s a reason why we attach a certain social stigma to the practice of believing things when you have no valid reason for concluding that they are true. Self-deception has practical consequences that often include harm to the believer and/or those around them. Why would you want to listen to someone who was deliberately impeding their own ability to distinguish between truth and falsehoods? Why would you trust them when they regard truth and falsehood as being virtually the same in terms of what we should believe?

We rightly look down on such rationalizations and self-deceptions, because of their practical implications. The Loser’s Compromise attempts to avoid that stigma by contriving a counterfeit form of “justification” that is really just unjustified beliefs masquerading as justifiable. This is a pure fraud, a con, and ought to be thoroughly and soundly repudiated by all honest inquirers after the truth.

RC is making the claim that my Gospel Hypothesis is not valid because it cannot be constructed via propositional logic.

DD said:

There’s no requirement that hypotheses must be formed by propositional logic. We just need to be able to predict what consequences would result from the situation described.

Sorry, I disagree, A testable hypothesis (which is the hypothesis at hand) must be valid in terms of propositional logic. You stated it yourself,

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

The reason these hypotheses are invalid is because they cannot be correctly described using propositional logic.

You gave good examples, you just forgot some other failures, such as tautology and non sequeter.

Tautology and non-sequitur, however, are fallacies that describe incorrect conclusions, not incorrect premises. I think what’s happening here is that RC is getting a little ahead of the game and is trying to draw conclusions before we’re done defining the premises.

Reality itself is not formed by propositional logic, so it makes no sense to insist that we can only make hypotheses that are restricted to propositional logic alone.

I agree absolutely that reality is not governed by propositional logic, or any logic at all for that matter.

But hypotheses are not reality, they are a tool used by humans to reach truths about reality. Reality is not governed by the set of natural numbers either, but I cannot throw out their definition when using them as a tool.

Well, I phrased that badly. What I meant was that there is no sense in requiring the latter portions of a hypothesis to be logically derived from earlier portions. Or to put it a different way, it makes no sense to take the rules that apply to the complete process of drawing conclusions based on premises, and try to inject them into the preliminary process of defining what your premises are so that you can draw conclusions from them. That’s like insisting that all new aircraft have to pass a test flight before you’re allowed to attach the wings. If you haven’t added the wings yet, it’s not time for the test flight.

I think the reason you are missing my point is that in the rush to reach your conclusion, you are combining several hypothesis that are not independent, and thereby leaping over intrinsic problems. You did it again with your example in your last comment:

For example, if I propose a hypothesis that President Obama is a hologram and not a real person, on the basis of a weird dream and a strong subjective feeling, my basis for proposing the hypothesis is purely bogus. Yet the hypothesis is testable nonetheless: if he’s a mere hologram, you can walk through him and even see through him. It has testable consequences, despite its spurious origin, and therefore can still be a valid hypothesis.

Is the hypothesis that Obama is a hologram, or Obama not a real person? If I prove he is not a hologram, have a said anything about whether he is a real person?

Here I think is the point at which RC and I part ways in our thinking. To my way of looking at it, I am combining qualifiers in order to construct a more-specified hypothesis, i.e. one that is distinguishable from a broader group of similar hypotheses. I’m not just testing whether Obama is a hologram, and I’m not just testing whether he’s a real person, I’m investigating a more specific condition: whether some unknown agency is using holograms to simulate a non-existent president. By combining qualifiers, I can create a hypothesis that resembles one or more broader categories of hypotheses, while being distinguishable, in each case, from the broader category.

RC seems to be saying that there is some rule against using compound qualifiers to define a more-specific hypothesis, and/or some rule that says a hypothesis can only contain a single specifier and that additional specifiers are required to be derived from the first via valid propositional logic.

I don’t think there is any such restriction on how we define our hypotheses. I believe that it is perfectly legitimate to declare complex, testable hypotheses like, for example the hypothesis that Newtonian physics correctly describes phenomena above the atomic level and at speeds substantially less than the speed of light, while Einsteinian physics correctly describes phenomena below the subatomic level and at speeds approaching the speed of light, with more complex interactions of both physics near the boundaries between the two pairs of domains.

That’s a pretty complicated hypothesis, combining a number of compound specifiers that cannot be obtained by applying propositional logic to the other specifiers within the hypothesis. I believe it would be an even better example than the Gospel Hypothesis of something that ought to fail RC’s standards for a valid hypothesis. Yet if it cannot be a valid hypothesis, then it can never be tested, and thus can never describe a valid scientific conclusion. This would be rather a shock to a large number of physicists.

Here is your Gospel Hypothesis, broken down:

1. There exists an all-wise, all-knowing, all-powerful and all-loving Creator.

This is not a hypothesis, this is a definition: There can be only one Creator meeting these criteria, no lesser being qualifies.

A hypothesis is a definition. It defines the condition(s) that we’re going to compare against the real-world evidence in order to draw conclusions about whether the hypothetical description of the condition(s) is true. And notice, this is a compound definition: you cannot use propositional logic to derive the part that says “He is all-wise” from the part that says “He is all-knowing”, or “He is a Creator” from “He is all-loving”. Why am I allowed to combine these specifiers, which are not derived from one another, but not allowed to combine other specifiers on the grounds that they’re not mutually logically derived?

2. [He] wants a genuine, personal, eternal relationship with each of us.

This is a hypothesis, not derived form the basis (1). Since it is a non sequeter, it is one of an almost infinite number of hypotheses one could make not pertaining to the attributes of all-powerful, etc.

This looks to me like sequential processing. The Gospel Hypothesis is 1 (one) hypothesis, not a series of hypotheses derived from one another. In fact, you don’t derive hypotheses from hypotheses, you derive conclusions from hypotheses. Those conclusions may suggest further hypotheses, but each new hypothesis is independent from any hypotheses which may have preceded it. This is necessarily the case, because we need to be unbiased when considering whether or not the new hypothesis is true. Otherwise we run the risk of attaching the success of the earlier conclusion to the new, untested hypothesis, and thus reaching an unjustified conclusion in favor of the new hypothesis.

Your criteria for the choice of this hypothesis, is your next hypothesis:
3. He is willing and able to become one of us, dwell among us for a time, and then die for us so that we can be together forever

You see the problem already. You have biased the hypothetical structure towards the outcome you want.

No, what I’ve done is to specify the precise condition I wish to test. This is a perfectly valid approach, because the more specific our hypothesis, the more precisely we can measure how consistent the real-world facts are with that specific hypothesis. What’s more, this is a highly commendable approach, because it allows us to test multiple similar hypotheses that differ only in certain specific details, giving us the ability to extract much more detailed and fine-grained information from the available evidence.

The key point here is that specifying the hypothesis in no way constrains the evidence itself. It’s futile to try and bias a hypothesis, because when you get to the part where you compare the hypothesis to the evidence, the evidence is either going to be consistent with the consequences of the hypothesis (in which case we’re justified in concluding that the hypothesis is true) or it’s going to be inconsistent with the hypothesis (in which case we’re justified in rejecting it). That’s why the scientific method has been so successful in allowing biased and imperfect humans to discover genuine real-world truth.

Let’s suppose, for example, that we get all racist and say, “All members of <insert ethnic group here> have smaller brains than members of <insert our own ethnic group here>.” If you wanted a biased hypothesis, it would have to look something like that. But what happens when you take that hypothesis and test it by measuring the brain size of both ethnic groups? The expected consequence that follows from the biased hypothesis is that there will be a significant correlation between ethnicity and measured brain size. If the measurements are consistent with this hypothesis, then it’s true, and if not, then it’s false. The bias of the hypothesis itself is irrelevant.

If you think about it, every hypothesis is “biased,” since it asserts the truth of a proposition that might be either true or false. The point is that we don’t just accept that bias. We test it, and decide its truth or falsehood based on whether or not the condition described is consistent with what we find in the real world.

The basis for hypothesis (3) is unproven hypothesis (2), not the basis (1). Convenient, but as someone who has spent quite a few hours trying for program computers in ML (a propositional logic programming language), you can expect only halts.

As I’ve pointed out before, though, I don’t have 3 separate hypotheses derived from one another. I have one hypothesis that is highly specified, through the application of compound qualifiers. The rules RC says I’m breaking are rules that apply to the process of drawing conclusions based on the premises, but you can’t start that process until your premises have been defined, and all I’m doing in stating the Gospel Hypothesis is defining what the premise (singular) is. I want to test for a highly specific condition, and therefore my hypothesis requires a corresponding specificity.

So bad logic, and yet I agree you have reached the correct conclusion. This is I think, because we have lots of empirical data that support your description of the Christian dilemma, and a real dilemma it is. The entire field of apologetics exists not because of some philosophical argument, but because the data shows a real problem for the Christian philosophy.

At least we both agree on the main thing. My apologies to RC for picking apart his comment, but I felt like I needed to the reasons for my technique.

Well, yes and no.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Take care and behave yourselves while I’m gone, ok?

We come now to Prophecy #8 in Geisler and Turek’s short list of “messianic” prophecies that are supposed to astonish us all with their amazing pinpoint accuracy. The prophecies so far have been amazing, all right, though perhaps not for the reasons Geisler and Turek intended. They (and we) however, have saved the best for last.

Let’s start with the passage, from Daniel 9.

“Seventy weeks have been decreed for your people and your holy city, to finish the transgression, to make an end of sin, to make atonement for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal up vision and prophecy and to anoint the most holy place. So you are to know and discern that from the issuing of a decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until Messiah the Prince there will be seven weeks and sixty-two weeks; it will be built again, with plaza and moat, even in times of distress.

Then after the sixty-two weeks the Messiah will be cut off and have nothing, and the people of the prince who is to come will destroy the city and the sanctuary And its end will come with a flood; even to the end there will be war; desolations are determined. And he will make a firm covenant with the many for one week, but in the middle of the week he will put a stop to sacrifice and grain offering; and on the wing of abominations will come one who makes desolate, even until a complete destruction, one that is decreed, is poured out on the one who makes desolate.”

And now, Geisler and Turek’s “messianic” interpretation:

He will die in AD 33: Messiah will die (be “cut off”) 483 years (69 * 7) after the decree to rebuild Jerusalem (that works out to A. D. 33). The city and the temple will then be destroyed. (This occurred in 70.)

Let’s begin by checking Geisler and Turek’s math. Before we do any date calculations, though, we need to point out the fact that date math is a bit unusual because the people who started the Christian calendar didn’t use zero as the starting point. That is to say, 1BC is followed immediately by 1AD, without any intervening zero. 1BC to 1AD is 1 year, not two.

Counting backwards from 33 AD, then, we find that from 33AD to 1AD is 32 years, and from 1AD to 1BC is one more year. Subtract that from 483, and we have 450 years left to account for. 450 years earlier than 1BC is 451BC, so that’s the year we need to check out in order to locate the “decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem.”

Trouble is, the original decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem was issued by Cyrus the Great in 538BC, which is way off. A later king, Artaxerxes, issued a pair of decrees affirming and re-authorizing the original decree of Cyrus, one in 455BC and another in 445BC, which is closer, but still no cigar.

In fact, there are several different decrees that you could pick from in order to find something to land you in the right ballpark: 538BC, 516BC, 455BC and 445BC. Be a little bit generous in what you’re willing to accept as “close enough” and you can have your pick of dates, which is always helpful when you’re trying to prove the “pinpoint accuracy” of OT prophecy.

Dr. Harold Hoehner, cited by Geisler and Turek as the source for their chronology of Daniel 9, actually moves the date of the last decree one year later, to 444BC.

The date of this decree is given in the biblical record. Nehemiah 1:1 states that Nehemiah heard of Jerusalem’s desolate conditions in the month of Chislev (November/ December) in Artaxerxes’ twentieth year. Then later in Artaxerxes’ twentieth year in the month of Nisan (March/April) Nehemiah reports that he was granted permission to restore the city and build its walls (2:1). To have Nisan later than Chislev (in the same year) may seem strange until one realizes that Nehemiah was using a Tishri-to-Tishri (September/October) dating method rather than the Persian Nisan-to-Nisan method. Nehemiah was following what was used by the kings of Judah earlier in their history. This method used by Nehemiah is confirmed by the Jews in Elephantine who also used this method during the same time period as Nehemiah.

Next, one needs to establish the beginning of Artaxerxes’ rule. His father Xerxes died shortly after December 17, 465 b.c. and Artaxerxes immediately succeeded him. Since the accession-year system was used the first year of Artaxerxes’ reign according to the Persian Nisan-to-Nisan reckoning would be Nisan 464 to Nisan 463 and according to the Jewish Tishri-to-Tishri reckoning would be Tishri 464 to Tishri 463. . . .

In conclusion, the report to Nehemiah (1:1) occurred in Chislev (November/December) of 445 B.C. and the decree of Artaxerxes (2:1) occurred in Nisan (March/April of 444 b.c.

From 444BC to 1BC is 443 years, plus 1 year for the 1BC to 1AD transition, subtracted from 483 years, brings us to 39AD, some years after Jesus’ death. How do Christians deal with this discrepancy? I’d better just quote this.

According to the Jewish custom, our Lord went up to Jerusalem on the 8th Nisan, which, as we know, fell that year upon a Friday. And having spent the Sabbath at Bethany, He entered the Holy City the following day, as recorded in the Gospels. The Julian date of that 10th Nisan was Sunday the 6th of April, a.d. 32. What then was the length of the period intervening between the issuing of the decree to rebuild Jerusalem and this public advent of “Messiah the Prince”—between the 14th of March, b.c. 445 and the 6th of April a.d. 32 (when He entered into Jerusalem)? THE INTERVAL WAS EXACTLY AND TO THE VERY DAY 173,880 DAYS, OR SEVEN TIMES SIXTY-NINE PROPHETIC YEARS OF 360 DAYS).

From b.c. 445 to a.d. 32 is 476 years = 173,740 days (476 x 365) + 116 days for leap years. And from 14th March to 6th April, reckoned inclusively according to Jewish practice is 24 days. But 173,740 + 116 + 24 = 173,880. And 69 x 7 x 360 = 173,880.

Did you catch that? 173,880 equals 69 “prophetic years” of 360 days each. Isn’t that cool? If the Bible comes up with the wrong number of years, you just redefine what a year is, and multiply it to get a number of days, and use the days (implicitly converted back to real years) to arrive at the date you were shooting for. If the original numbers don’t work, just make up new ones!

But wait, it gets better. The calculation above was by Sir Robert Anderson, and starts from the wrong year, according to Dr. Hoehner. Here’s Dr. Hoehner’s “correction”:

In previous chapters in this book it was concluded that Christ’s crucifixion occurred on Friday, Nisan 14, in a.d. 33. Reckoning His death according to the Julian calendar, Christ died on Friday, April 3, a.d. 33. As discussed above, the terminus a quo occurred in Nisan, 444 b.c. Although Nehemiah 2:1 does not specify which day of Nisan the decree to rebuild Jerusalem occurred, it cannot have occurred before Nisan 1. . . . it could have occurred on some other day in Nisan.

“Using the calculating method Anderson used, Hoehner comes up with the 476 solar years. This is the difference between 444 b.c. and a.d. 33. By multiplying 476 by 365.24219879 days, comes to 173,855 days, and Hoehner states:”

This leaves only 25 days to be accounted for between 444 b.c. and a.d. 33. By adding the 25 days to Nisan 1 or March 5 (of 444 b.c.), one comes to March 30 (of a.d. 33) which was Nisan 10 in a.d. 33. This is the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem. . . . The terminus ad quem of the sixty-ninth week was on the day of Christ’s triumphal entry on March 30, a.d. 33.

(I’m quoting from an article that quotes Dr. Hoehner—the first and third paragraphs are Hoehner speaking, and the middle paragraph is by the article’s author, Thomas Ice.)

So we take 483 years, as predicted in Daniel, pick an arbitrarily defined “prophetic year” from a calendar that no one has ever used or defined, and use that to make an equation of 483 x (360 / 365) to get 476.38356164 solar years (according to my calculator), which we round off by just ignoring everything to the right of the decimal point. Then we multiply the rounded-off figure back again by 365.24219879 days to convert the solar years back to 173855.28662404 days (once again ignoring the decimal part) to get a day that’s 25 days less than Anderson’s original 69 x 7. Since “25 days” contains a number, we add 25 in again to get the exact day of Jesus’ “triumphal entry” into Jerusalem.Wowzeroonies!

This stunning display of “prophetic math” is even more astonishing when you go back and re-read the original conditions and—yep, Dr. Hoehner admits that we don’t know what day in Nisan the decree was issued. By carefully maintaining strict mathematical accuracy to eight decimal places except when we don’t, we can calculate that March 30 of AD33 is exactly 173,880 days after whatever the unknown day was that the decree was actually issued. Astounding!

Have I pointed out yet that Daniel never says anything about “weeks of years”? He just says “seven weeks, and sixty-two weeks.” Hebrew scholars check me out on this, but I believe the Hebrew words for “week” and “seven” are very similar if not identical, and the Christian prophecy buffs are just borrowing the “weeks/sevens” substitution because it suits their timescales.

It’s entirely possible that Daniel was simply saying what he actually meant: 69 weeks, or a total of 483 days (a year plus a few months) between the issuing of Cyrus’ original decree in 538BC and the arrival of an “anointed” prince who would rebuild the city. Or maybe Darius’ decree, or one of the ones by Artaxerxes.

Remember, Cyrus himself was designated as God’s Anointed One in Isaiah 45:1. Anointing was just the customary way of designating God’s legitimately-appointed ruler, and there were any number of “messiahs” (i.e. anointed ones) in Israel’s history. The concept of THE Messiah, capitalized, was a much later addition to the Judeo-Christian tradition. Certainly, an ordinary mortal seems like a better fit for the prediction that the anointed prince would soon “be cut off, and have nothing.” And the dedication of the rebuilt Holy Place (temple) took place in 515BC, not during Jesus’ lifetime.

Besides, I’ll let you all in on a little secret. The date Daniel was really referring to was the issuing of the Balfour Declaration, in 1917. If you take Daniel’s 69 “sevens”, you get 483, divided by seven days in each week and added to 1917 takes us to 1984 (assuming we take off a couple of years for the leap years), which is exactly the day my wife and I moved to Washington DC, which is the capital of the United States and thus corresponds prophetically to Jerusalem, the capital of Israel. So Daniel was really predicting me.

I’ll be posting a mailing address later on where you all can send in your tithes and offerings. Cash only please.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With that in mind, here is Version 2.0:

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

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

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

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

To illustrate why this “compromise” is actually a form of self-deception, let’s consider two different people, one of whom believes that Queen Victoria was an actual person who lived in England in the 1800’s, and the other wants to believe that Sherlock Holmes was an actual person who lived in England at the same time.

Which of these people need to resort to the Loser’s Compromise? The person who wants to believe in Queen Victoria doesn’t. Queen Victoria actually did exist, and there’s abundant evidence of both her existence and her reign. There is no correspondingly abundant evidence for a competing theory that she existed only as an entertaining character in the fictional works of some prominent author. The evidence reflects a clear and distinct difference in support for the Real Person Hypothesis versus the Fictional Character Hypothesis, and that difference in evidentiary support is what we mean when we say we are justified in concluding that Queen Victoria really existed.

Appealing the the Loser’s Compromise would be foolish under these conditions. Not only does it fail to lend any better support to the conclusion that Victoria existed, but it actually compromises our ability to recognize the truth, since it grants equal weight to the false conclusion that she was merely a fictional character. This is going to be true in any question of objective fact: at most one conclusion will be consistent with the actual real-world truth, and other conclusions are going to be false. To treat all conclusions as equally justified is to prevent oneself from distinguishing between true answers and false ones. For the honest inquirer who wishes to know the truth about Victoria’s existence, such an approach would be abhorrent because of its inescapable self-deception.

It might have a certain appeal, though, to the person who wishes to believe that Sherlock Holmes was real. Because Holmes did not actually exist, the Loser’s Compromise offers the believer something that the evidence can’t: a presumption of legitimacy. By gainsaying all evidentiary differences between the Real Person Hypothesis and the Fictional Character Hypothesis, the believer can avoid having his false beliefs exposed as false. That’s a rhetorical benefit to the person believing a falsehood, but only because his beliefs are false. He doesn’t want to know the truth because the truth isn’t what he wants it to be. Thus, the best he can hope for is to reduce everyone else to a level of ignorance that will prevent them from knowing his answer is wrong.

This is why I call it the Loser’s Compromise. The believer knows (at some level) that the evidence is against him, and that’s why he tries to discredit it so that it cannot be used to distinguish between truths and untruths. It’s an intentional sabotage of one’s ability to discern, and thus is a desperate, last-ditch effort at rationalization. The honest inquirer has no need of it, because the evidence will already support the genuine truth. The only function of the Loser’s Compromise is to create a false justification for a preconceived and false conclusions.

Drs. Geisler and Turek are giving us a quick tour of just the highlights of the so-called “messianic prophecies,” and in so doing are inadvertently giving us a good lesson in just how contrived these “fulfillments” really are. In contrast to the earlier section where they dragged out a handful of Biblical references to actual facts (like the fact that certain people and cities existed), in this chapter they seem almost rushed as they hurry through the Old Testament, skipping over such minor details as the literary and historical context of the verses they use as proof texts. But we’re in no such hurry, so we might linger just a bit longer on those pesky details.

Picking up where we left off last week, we find Geisler and Turek turning next to Isaiah chapter 9, verses 6 and 7.

For a child will be born to us, a son will be given to us; And the government will rest on His shoulders; And His name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace. There will be no end to the increase of His government or of peace, On the throne of David and over his kingdom, To establish it and to uphold it with justice and righteousness From then on and forevermore. The zeal of the LORD of hosts will accomplish this.

Their interpretation of this passage is a bit odd:

He will be God: Messiah will be born as a child, but he will also be God. He will rule from the throne of David.

They omit the contextual references to a military deliverance that destroys an army:

You have enlarged the nation and increased their joy;  they rejoice before you as people rejoice at the harvest, as men rejoice when dividing the plunder. For as in the day of Midian’s defeat, you have shattered the yoke that burdens them, the bar across their shoulders, the rod of their oppressor. Every warrior’s boot used in battle and every garment rolled in blood will be destined for burning, will be fuel for the fire.

And they pick out just those details which they think they can use as a prediction of Jesus. But there are several problems with this interpretation, starting with the fact that Isaiah says nothing at all about any Messiah. Geisler and Turek assume he means a Messiah, but that’s something they’re reading into the text. And it doesn’t quite fit.

For example, David’s throne has ended. His kingdom does not exist any more, and the nation that sits in Palestine now is not a kingdom. There is no throne there to sit on, and the throne that Jesus allegedly sits on now is not David’s, but is a celestial throne at the right hand of God. Purely symbolic, of course, but it’s a symbol of ruling authority, and even in Christian eschatology, Jesus is not going to inherit the earthly throne/authority of David, but is going to establish his own throne/authority, over the whole world, by his own divine power.

Another problem is that the verses cited put the reins of government into the hands of this “child” already, as ruler over an unending kingdom. But Jesus isn’t ruling. He vanished at the beginning of the book of Acts (if not earlier), and according to the New Testament is currently “waiting” for his enemies to be defeated. What Christians do of course is to project this into the future, and claim that in some distant post-Parousian kingdom, this prophecy will be fulfilled. But if that’s the case, then it’s not really right to claim that Jesus has fulfilled it, because the alleged fulfillment hasn’t happened. Does this stop Christians from claiming that Jesus fulfilled it? I guess that’s a rhetorical question.

A bigger problem, though, is the part that says the predicted child will be called Eternal Father. Jesus, however, is not called the Father, he’s called the Son. You could take this to mean he’s going to be named after the Mighty God and the Everlasting Father, in which case this verse would not be prophesying that the child himself would be divine, but if you take the mention of “his name shall be called…God/Father,” as indicating what his true spiritual nature is, then it makes a bloody hash of Trinitarian theology.

Let’s move on to Micah 5.

Marshal your troops, O city of troops, for a siege is laid against us. They will strike Israel’s ruler on the cheek with a rod. But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel, whose origins are from of old, from ancient times. Therefore Israel will be abandoned until the time when she who is in labor gives birth and the rest of his brothers return to join the Israelites. He will stand and shepherd his flock in the strength of the LORD, in the majesty of the name of the LORD his God. And they will live securely, for then his greatness will reach to the ends of the earth. And he will be their peace. When the Assyrian invades our land and marches through our fortresses, we will raise against him seven shepherds, even eight leaders of men. They will rule the land of Assyria with the sword, the land of Nimrod with drawn sword. He will deliver us from the Assyrian when he invades our land and marches into our borders.

Pretty straightforward: when Assyria threatens the northern kingdom of Israel, God will call a mighty war hero out of Bethlehem, just like in the old days, and he and his seven “shepherds” will turn the Assyrian invasion into a rout, drive them back into their own land, and conquer them. So what is the Geisler and Turek interpretation of this passage?

Born in Bethlehem: Messiah, who is eternal, will be born in Bethlehem.

Wait, what? Micah didn’t say anything about Messiah, nor did he say anything about being born, nor did he say anything about being eternal. Nor do the circumstances surrounding the second verse have any resemblence at all to the circumstances that attended the birth of Jesus. The Assyrian Empire was long gone by the time Jesus was born. Micah’s hyped-up promises didn’t come true, and they’re not going to come true. Nor does that mean that the wreckage of his failed prediction is somehow “available” for rag-picker theologians to comb through looking for little nuggets they can put to good use. Micah screwed up, plain and simple, and if I were still a Christian, I wouldn’t be putting his goof on my short list of “proofs” that Jesus must be the Messiah.

One more for this week: Malachi 3.

“See, I will send my messenger, who will prepare the way before me. Then suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant, whom you desire, will come,” says the LORD Almighty. But who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears? For he will be like a refiner’s fire or a launderer’s soap. He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver; he will purify the Levites and refine them like gold and silver. Then the LORD will have men who will bring offerings in righteousness, and the offerings of Judah and Jerusalem will be acceptable to the LORD, as in days gone by, as in former years.

Another fairly easy passage. God promises to come to His temple and purge His priests like the refiner’s fiery forge that melts metal and lets you scrape off the cruft that floats up to the top (yeowch!), and then the ritual sacrifices will go back to being they way they were in the good old days. This is a pretty ominous passage, because it promises a time of such severe testing that the prophet wonders who, if anybody, will be able to endure it. Geisler and Turek’s rendition of this passage?

He will come to the temple: Messiah, who will be preceded by a messenger, will suddenly come to the temple.

Once again, the circumstances of Jesus’ life don’t really match the circumstances of the prophecy. Jesus’ life did not cause the priests to endure any particular fiery refinement. Jesus did not have any noticeable success in purifying the priesthood, nor is he particularly famous for turning people back to a renewed emphasis on Old Covenant sacrifices offered by men. In fact, according to Christian theology, Jesus is supposed to have fulfilled the Old Testament sacrifices by becoming a sacrifice himself. Instead of restoring the old sacrifices to a place of prominence, he is supposed to have made them obsolete. Jesus doesn’t fulfill this “prediction,” he contradicts it!

By carefully excising a bit of a word here and a snippet of phrase there, though, Geisler and Turek craft a Messianic prophecy that they can count as having been fulfilled in Jesus time, even though God did not return to His temple and purge His priests and restore the sacrifices of men to the same prominence they had before. It’s not about what the prophecies actually say, you see, it’s about quoting a passage, and then quoting an interpretation, and then creating the preception that because some of the same thoughts and words appear in each, the quotation is actually saying whatever Geisler and Turek tell us it is saying.

When we hear Christians brag about the Bible’s amazing record of “fulfilled” prophecies, we can agree that it is indeed amazing how many “fulfillments” Christians manage to find in the various Old Testament passages they use and abuse to create their interpretations. This is part of the problem that attends the serious study of Scripture: if you do it honestly, you discover that the distortions and misrepresentations are not only infused throughout Christian thinking, they go all the way back to the New Testament writers themselves, who quote verses out of context and twist the words in ways that Christians would never tolerate from, say, a Mormon or a Jehovah’s Witness. And this is our “infallible guide” to eternal truth?

We’ve still got one more prophecy to cover, but that’s the passage about Daniel’s 70 weeks, and that’s worth a post in and of itself. Stay tuned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Commenter cl gives us a couple of scenarios, one hypothetical and one drawn from painful experience, that give us an excellent chance to exercise our reason, and gain some valuable experience of our own in understanding how to apply the techniques of valid hypothesizing to questions of real-world truth.

The first scenario puts us back in the 1700’s, before the discovery of asteroids.

For example, let’s say it was 1709 and I told you there were huge, flying rocks in outer space, and that a big hole in the ground in Flagstaff, Arizona was evidence. We take a drive out there, grab a couple of beers and some sandwiches, and head on out to the desert. When we get there, you tell me, “Hell no, that hole is evidence of one of Von Daniken’s chariots!”

Until recently, there wouldn’t be too much I could say. Meteor Crater was never recognized as evidence for asteroids until a certain level of gateway knowledge had been acquired, and that only occurred relatively recently. Yet an asteroid indeed formed Meteor Crater some 50,000 years ago. Had someone suggested the site as evidence for huge, flying rocks in outer space 5,000 years ago, they’d probably have been crucified. Or someone… would probably call them a disingenuous sophist.

Right away, we notice that this scenario has been explicitly constructed so as to deny the inquirer access to the evidence which would allow them to distinguish which hypothesis was closer to the truth. The focus is on creating a situation in which the same evidence (the crater) would be as consistent with one hypothesis as with the other. So when we look at this scenario in the light of inquiry versus rationalization, which form do we see being followed here? Does it seek to create the impression that one can learn the truth by drawing out the distinctive consequences that would logically follow from each hypothesis, and then comparing these contrasting predictions to the real world evidence? That would mark this as being honest inquiry. Or does it seek instead to create the impression that the evidence is going to be the same no matter what hypothesis we propose? That would be a telltale sign of rationalization.

I’m going to go out on a bit of a limb here and say that this example actually shows the process of legitimate inquiry, since it includes the fact that the asteroid hypothesis ultimately proved correct, and was proven correct by finding evidence that was consistent with the expected consequences of the hypothesis. If there were giant rocks flying around in outer space, then we could say, even in 1709, that we would expect to be able to see them, given optical instruments of sufficient resolution. We should also expect these rocks to have gravitational interactions with each other and with other celestial bodies such as comets. And such is indeed what we did find once those instruments were developed.

Conversely, if we follow the UFO hypothesis, we find that there is no particular reason, based on the hypothesis of extraterrestrial visitation, why we should expect to find giant holes in the ground as a consequence. We can superstitiously attribute large holes to UFO’s, or to war between demons, or to time-traveling terrorists from 3758AD, but we have no reason to do so. We would simply be applying an ordinary superstition to a phenomenon whose true origin we did not know and could not understand. The most we might have a reason to expect is that we might see more UFO’s someday. But even that’s iffy, because it is not part of the hypothesis that the space aliens have any particular desire to establish an ongoing relationship with the people of earth.

Thus, the way we ultimately discern the correct explanation for the meteor crater is by considering each hypothesis in the light of reason: evaluating the likely consequences of each, making sure it has likely consequences (thus making sure that it is a genuine hypothesis and not just a superstition), and then looking for evidence that these consequences match objective reality.

On to the next scenario.

For example, a lifelong friend with a past history of [OxyContin] use acting shady and asking us for money is most certainly consistent with the I’m Fiending For More [OxyContin] Hypothesis (H1). To assume H1 as true would be in accord with predictable real-world consequences and past experience, and we would be fully justified to deny our friend money on those grounds, correct?

But guess what? Our friend’s requests for money can also be fully consistent with the I’m Trying To Quit [OxyContin] And I’m Too Embarrassed To Tell You I Need Methadone Hypothesis (H2). Even though our assumption in H1 is rationally grounded, it can be quite literally be dead wrong, and I just went through this with a lifelong friend. Although I was rationally grounded to believe in H1, I would have been just as rationally grounded to believe in H2 – which was actually the correct hypothesis – but my stubborn insistence that the evidence only fit my hypothesis almost cost a life. Here I’m glad the stakes aren’t so high, but then again, perhaps they are.

Once again, we see that the focus is on creating a situation in which an honest inquirer cannot draw any kind of reliable conclusion because the same evidence is equally consistent with both hypotheses. But once again I’m going to say that the story as a whole illustrates the honest inquirer’s approach, because when we look at the whole story, we see that again, there was one set of consequences that was more consistent with real-world facts than the other. How else would cl know that he had indeed made a mistake, as opposed to having a friend who was indeed fiending for more OxyContin, and just told the methadone story to make cl feel guilty about not providing the cash?

I’m sure that if cl had thought of the possibility that his friend might be seeking methadone treatment, he would have known right away that more information was needed in order to determine which hypothesis was correct. His unfortunate mistake was not that examining the evidence led him astray, but that he tried to evaluate it using only one hypothesis, instead of comparing two hypotheses with differing consequences.

We should therefore all agree that the way to discover the real truth about God is neither by interpreting everything in the light of a single hypothesis (e.g. “taking the Bible on its own terms”), nor by dwelling on areas where the expected consequences would be the same for two different hypotheses (or attempting to make those consequences sound indistinguishable). When we’re dealing with hypotheses as distinctly incompatible as the Myth Hypothesis and the Gospel Hypothesis, we can only tell which is closer to the truth by looking at the consequences that will be significantly different depending on which hypothesis is true, and then seeing which predictable consequences are most consistent with the actual facts.

In my presentation, I have consistently shown how each hypothesis leads logically and reasonably to the consequences I’ve described. It so happens that the real world consistently fits the pattern predicted by the Myth Hypothesis rather than the one we would expect if the Gospel Hypothesis were true. But that’s not my fault, nor does it change the fact that one can derive the expected consequences of each hypothesis even without a knowledge of real-world conditions, and can still see that they are distinctly different.

Now, if someone could show logically and reasonably why the Gospel Hypothesis ought to produce the same consequences as the Myth Hypothesis, then it would be appropriate to caution us regarding drawing definitive conclusions based on evidence that’s the same for both. But so far this has not happened; we’ve only heard promises that such things are possible and might actually be presented some day. Meanwhile, any warnings about overlapping consequences are premature.

I’ve got reasons (as I intend to post on more fully in the coming week) for feeling fairly confident that cl will not be able to come up with a legitimate explanation for why we ought to expect the Gospel Hypothesis to produce consequences indistinguishable from those of the Myth Hypothesis. In a nutshell, the only way the Gospel Hypothesis could produce the same real-world consequences as the Myth Hypothesis is if God’s existence had no more tangible impact on the real world than that of a myth. Since that would make it rather a moot point to deny the mythical nature of God’s existence, the Myth Hypothesis would still have won, and any dissent would be mere semantic quibbling.

The next section of Geisler and Turek’s book is entitled “Hitting the Bull’s-Eye,” but before we get into the text, let’s do a little exercise in prophetic interpretation. In each of the following examples, which two texts say essentially the same thing?

As you might guess, Geisler and Turek are trying to make the case that the Old Testament “hits the bulls-eye” in its predictions of the coming Messiah. But there’s more bull than bulls-eye in their examples. In each of the three samples above, the first column is the Bible “prophecy,” the second is my paraphrase of the prophecy, and the third is Geisler and Turek’s claimed “Messianic prediction” supposedly based on the Bible text.

There are many interesting features in their list of fulfilled prophecies, which goes on for 5 more passages. Let’s start with the first, where God curses the talking snake for having been more honest than He was about the consequences of eating the forbidden fruit. Here’s the full text of what Geisler and Turek claim is being said in Genesis 3:15:

Seed of a Woman The offspring of Eve (literally the “seed” of Eve) will ultimately crush Satan. But this human being, unlike other human beings, will be from the seed of a woman rather than from the seed of a man.

You like that? There is absolutely nothing in Genesis 3 about the Messiah not coming from the seed of a man. But that’s the main prophetic point Geisler and Turek see, somehow, in this passage. What makes this even more ironic is that in the very next passage, Geisler and Turek claim that the Messiah will be the seed of Abraham—and Abraham is a man! Right off the bat, they’ve refuted their own claim. Oops.

The next “prediction” is even more unfortunate, since by the time Jesus was born the “scepter” and the “ruler’s staff” hadn’t been between Judah’s feet for centuries. Oops again. But more significantly, this little “prediction” is something of an anachronism. Israel did not have a king at all for the first part of its existence, and when they did take a king, their first king was Saul, from the tribe of Benjamin (not Judah). Many OT scholars see this particular blessing as an interpolation introduced during the reign of King David (of Judah) to try and legitimize his overthrow of the previous government. But regardless, it fails both as a “prediction” of Judah’s uninterrupted supremacy and as a Messianic sign.

The next passage exploits most people’s ignorance of Hebrew, particularly as relates to the implied verb “is” which is frequently omitted from things like people’s names, but is implied nonetheless. (A similar example can be found in the Islamic motto, “Allahu Akbar,” which translates literally as “God Great”, but which means “God [IS] Great”.) The supposed Messianic prophecy comes from Jeremiah 23, so let’s look at the passage itself, in context.

“Woe to the shepherds who are destroying and scattering the sheep of my pasture!” declares the LORD. Therefore this is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says to the shepherds who tend my people: “Because you have scattered my flock and driven them away and have not bestowed care on them, I will bestow punishment on you for the evil you have done,” declares the LORD. “I myself will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the countries where I have driven them and will bring them back to their pasture, where they will be fruitful and increase in number. I will place shepherds over them who will tend them, and they will no longer be afraid or terrified, nor will any be missing,” declares the LORD.

“The days are coming,” declares the LORD, “when I will raise up to David a righteous Branch, a King who will reign wisely and do what is just and right in the land. In his days Judah will be saved and Israel will live in safety. This is the name by which he will be called: The LORD Our Righteousness.

“So then, the days are coming,” declares the LORD, “when people will no longer say, ‘As surely as the LORD lives, who brought the Israelites up out of Egypt,’ but they will say, ‘As surely as the LORD lives, who brought the descendants of Israel up out of the land of the north and out of all the countries where he had banished them.’ Then they will live in their own land.”

Pretty straightforward, right? As in the latter portion of Isaiah, the prophet is predicting (perhaps retroactively) that the Jews will be released from the Babylonian Captivity and be allowed to have their own king again, and God will bless the restored kingdom and protect it (in return for abandoning polytheism). But Geisler and Turek take just the middle paragraph, out of context, and claim it is making this prediction:

Messiah will be a son of David, and he will be called God.

Somebody can help me out here, but I don’t think that the phrase “The LORD [is] our righteousness,” as a Hebrew name, works out to be Yeshua. Then again, Isaiah apparently got Jesus’ name wrong too, when he “prophesied” that it would be Immanuel. In any case, not only did Mary not name Jesus “God,” (or The Lord Our Righteousness”), but it also failed to come to pass that Judah was saved and that Israel lived in safety in his days. Since Jeremiah is speaking of a period of history in which the Big Event was the return of the Exiles (rather than the Return of Christ), it’s clear that this “Messianic prediction” also failed rather significantly.

I probably shouldn’t belabor the point, but I have to admit, this is actually kind of fun. I was steeped in this kind of credulous, easy-to-please prophetic hermeneutic, and there’s something deeply satisfying about looking at the details once again, minus the relentless imperative to make everything a proof that Jesus is somehow True. So we’ll pick this up again next time and have a look at the last four items on Geisler and Turek’s list of bullsh—er, eyes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Last week we went off on a bit of a tangent as we looked at Isaiah chapters 40-66 in their literary and historical context so that we could see how clearly and explicitly Isaiah declared that his “Suffering Servant” was none other than Israel itself, which was “slain” by the Babylonians and “resurrected” by Cyrus, all so that God could change Jewish theology into a stricter, more Persian-style monotheism.

That understanding, however, is not at all consistent with Geisler and Turek’s apologetic agenda, so as we return to chapter 13, we find the two Bible scholars busily trying to prove that Isaiah was wrong about who he meant when he described the trials and tribulations of the “Servant.”

The first Jew to claim that the Suffering Servant was Israel rather than the Messiah was Shlomo Yitzchaki, better known as Rashi (c. 1040-1105). Today Rashi’s view dominates Jewish and rabbinical theology.

Yeah, go figure. According to Geisler and Turek, it took the Jews almost a millenium and a half to realize that Isaiah wrote down exactly who this servant was, in Isaiah 41. That makes the Jews look like pretty poor scholars until you realize that Geisler and Turek themselves still have not figured this out almost two and a half millenia later.

Not only have they failed to realize that the answer to their question is already written in the book of Isaiah itself, but they’re determined to prove that the rabbis (including Isaiah) are wrong about who the Servant was.

Unfortunately for Rashi and many present-day Jewish theologians, there are at least three fatal flaws with the assertion that Israel is the Suffering Servant. First, unlike Israel, the Servant is sinless (53:9).

With this opening argument, Geisler and Turek set the tone of their anti-Isaiah apologetic: heavy on interpretations that Christians read into the texts, and appallingly light on the actual literary and historical context and content of what they purport to study. Isaiah 53:9 says, “He was assigned a grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death, though he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth.” Notice, there is nothing there about Israel being sinless. Isaiah is simply claiming that Nebuchadnezzar’s invasion of Judah was unprovoked: the Jewish nation did nothing either militarily or diplomatically to rebel against Babylonian authority in the region. They were already paying tribute, and were going about their business (or so says Isaiah, anyway), and thus Nebuchadnezzar’s invasion was entirely unjustified (from Isaiah’s perspective).

In other words, Israel neither rebelled (”had done no violence”) nor broke their treaty with the Babylonians (”no deceit [was] in his mouth”). Geisler and Turek take this simple claim of national non-aggression, and turn it into a claim that the Servant had not committed any sin at all. Why? Because they want to argue that Israel could not be the servant. They “know” that Isaiah was talking about sinlessness because they “know” that Israel couldn’t possible be the Servant, because if he was, then this wouldn’t be a messianic prophecy and thus Jesus would not have been the fulfillment. And wouldn’t that suck?

Let’s go on.

Second, unlike Israel, the Suffering Servant is a lamb who submits without any resistance whatsoever (53:7). History shows us that Israel certainly is not a lamb—she lies down for no one.

Israel, formerly named Jacob, was a he, not a she. Circumcision notwithstanding, I really don’t think he would approve of Geisler and Turek turning him into a female just so they could deny that Isaiah was referring to him in his writings about the Servant.

But I digress. The fact is that Israel was as helpless as a lamb by the time Nebuchadnezzar’s armies got through with him. It wasn’t a matter of choice (any more than the lamb gets to choose whether or not it gets slaughtered to satisfy the blood lust of some primeval death god). The exiles were led away by the Babylonians, and there wasn’t a God-blessed thing they could do about it. But Isaiah goes on to promise that this was not the end of the story, and that the Servant would see his offspring and live a long life, because of his sufferings. In fact, Isaiah goes on to describe, in the chapter immediately following, how these descendants would be so numerous that the nation would swell beyond its borders, and occupy the territories of the neighboring nations.

None of that figures in Geisler and Turek’s commentary, of course, since Jesus did not have any children (that anyone will admit to anyway), and was not, after all, a nation with borders that touched other nations round about.

That leaves us one last argument to look at.

Third, unlike Israel, the Suffering Servant dies as a substitutionary atonement for the sins of others (53:4-6, 8, 10-12). But Israel has not died, nor is she paying for the sins of others.

Geisler and Turek, despite their unfortunate emasculation of the famous patriarch, touch on an interesting aspect of Isaiah’s writings, though they scarcely recognize what they are dealing with since they are bound and determined to reframe it as though it were written in a Christian context. Isaiah has an interesting problem: on the one hand, he must make Israel seem guilty and deserving of the national death that it suffered at the hands of Babylon, in order to avoid portraying God as unjust. On the other hand, he does not want the Jews to despair, so he must simultaneously pursue the contrary goal of making Israel sound like he deserves pardon and redemption.

Isaiah’s solution to this dilemma is actually rather remarkable: by personifying the nation in the guise of its patriarchal founder, he makes a literary distinction between the nation of Israel and the people of Israel. The people committed the sins by believing in other gods besides Yahweh, yet it was the nation that suffered as a result—including those who were not necessarily polytheists themselves. In a way, it’s an appeal to the same sort of unreasoning superstition that makes modern believers like James Dobson proclaim that God will make Christians suffer unless they persecute gays enough to satisfy God’s hatred.

People tend to personify what they experience, seeing everyday happenstance as the mysterious workings of a personal God, and this same kind of anthropomorphic thinking  also works to turn the abstract concept of “nation” into a semi-personal being with whom God can have interpersonal relationships and responses. And this works extremely well for Isaiah, literarily speaking. Israel, God’s servant, is being punished as a person because God is angered by the sins of the henotheistic Jews. Thus, Isaiah can speak in heartfelt sincerity, if poetically, that the Servant’s suffering is due to “our” sin (meaning Isaiah and his fellow Jews). Because they weren’t monotheistic enough to suit God, the Servant, whom God actually loves, had to be made to suffer the penalty for Jewish sins. One “person” suffering the penalty for the sins of others.

That’s a brilliant bit of polemic, because it both excuses God (for punishing the just along with the unjust) and puts the burden of guilt upon the Jewish readers, motivating them to convert and become good monotheists. And if that weren’t enough, it also opens the door for Isaiah to claim, intertwined with the passages about guilt and suffering, that God still loves His Servant and has some wonderful plans in store for the future.

It’s not a strict separation. At times, Isaiah treats Israel and the people as the same. If we read through the whole last section of Isaiah (instead of picking verses 4-6, 8, and 10-12 out of context), we see that the Servant’s sufferings and “death” were inflicted on him by wars, because of his blindness and disobedience, a clear reference to the people’s failure to embrace strict monotheism and obedience to the divine law. And when the Lord appoints Cyrus (the well-known king of the Medo-Persian empire) to bless and restore the Servant, it’s the people who are the beneficiaries and who are promised the utopian fulfillments that, by failing to come to pass, led the later Jews to re-interpret Isaiah’s words as the promise of some future messiah.

But the dual vision of Israel as its own personal Being, as well as being the collective identity of the people, is a useful and persuasive literary device, and suggests that this Isaiah, though ultimately misguided, was actually quite an intelligent and insightful person.

Meanwhile, Geisler and Turek ramble on, oblivious.

This Johnny-come-lately interpretation of Isaiah 53 appears to be motivated by the desire to avoid the conclusion that Jesus is indeed the Messiah who was predicted hundreds of years beforehand. But there’s no legitimate way to avoid the obvious.

They got that last part right. Isaiah himself tells us who the suffering servant was (Israel), why he suffered (because of his blindness and disobedience), how he suffered (the Babylonians waged unprovoked war on him and led him away like a sacrificial lamb), how he was raised (Cyrus called for the exiles to be returned to the land) and how he was to be blessed (the nation was to become a great and mighty nation, expanding its borders and drawing its neighboring nations into the light of its new, monotheistic worship of the One True God). If Geisler and Turek feel compelled to declare that Isaiah himself got all this wrong, there is no legitimate way to avoid the conclusion that they are motivated by a desire to avoid recognizing that their “Messianic prophecy” is a twisted sham.

What Jesus promised, however, Alethea fulfills. One of the great joys I experienced in converting from Christianity to Alethianism was the unexpectedly profound pleasure of discovering how exceedingly self-consistent She really is. Where before I had to work to create patterns of consistency in my beliefs, by harmonizing and rationalizing facts that resisted reconciliation, I now find that the puzzle pieces not slide together more easily, but that they are already assembled and interlocked, even before I became aware of them.

My experience as a Christian was “Amen” (i.e. “may it be so”), but my life as an Alethian is a continual and intellectually satisfying “of course!” The truth is consistent with itself in ways that not only fulfill my expectations, but anticipate them. And only Alethea can really offer this. Jesus cannot: he is dead and gone, and his followers are so divided that none of them can say confidently and authoritatively what his “truth” even is, since it is not based on observable reality. Only Alethea can rightly and truly claim to be the perfectly self-consistent and coherent Truth.

There are many examples I could give of the difference between the forced “consistency” of my Christian beliefs versus the found consistency of Alethea. For instance, as a young Christian, I once met with the elders of my church because I’d noticed an ominous pattern in the Bible. According to Bishop Ussher, the world was created in 4004BC. Jesus was born in 4BC, exactly 4000 years later. Now, since Peter tells us that “a thousand years are as a day,” that would make 4 days from Creation to the birth of Jesus. Two more “days” would make six, corresponding to the six days of creation, and a Millennium of peace would make for a seventh day of rest.

*sigh* Yes, I really believed that at the time—not that it was necessarily true, but that it was a reasonable probability. Sure, maybe Ussher was wrong about the actual age of the earth, but he based his chronology on the Bible, and who knows if God didn’t intentionally create the gaps in the genealogies in order to leave us a clue about when the Millennium was going to start? By my calculations, in the mid-to-late 70’s, the Second Coming of Christ was due in the year 1997, and thus the Great Tribulation had to start in 1990. Hey, it all sounded plausible, especially if you’d read about all the signs of the End Times as documented in The Late, Great Planet Earth.

You may have realized by now that Jesus did not return in 1997, so that wonderful pattern with all its apparent internal consistency turned out to be not so consistent with reality after all. I created the consistency in my mind by pulling together disparate facts and ignoring anything that didn’t promote my conclusion.

And yet, from an Alethean perspective, there was a very real consistency there. It was just a consistency leading to a different conclusion. Of course Jesus did not return in 1997. He died a long time ago, and consistent with the behavior of dead people, he’s not coming back. But more than that, Alethea explains the curious response of my church elders: they officially upheld the doctrines of the church, but I couldn’t help noticing that they doubted my conclusions, and even manifested a strong skepticism towards the whole idea that God would actually do something so dramatic as judging the world in real life. Oh, doctrinally, they professed allegiance to the notion, but put it into real-world terms, and they were full of cautions. God does not do stuff like that in real life.

I had a similar experience with creationism. Initially it seemed so amazingly consistent, at least with my Christian expectations. Why wouldn’t a Creator leave some kind of identifying stamp on His creation, like a painter signing his painting? But that, too, fell apart as I exposed creationist claims to the whole pattern of real-world evidence. I eventually had to adopt a kind of omphalism, imagining that God had to make the universe appear old and uncreated in order to achieve a “natural” style in His creation, the way people put scrapes and stains on new furniture in order to make it look “antique.”

Over and over I had this experience as a Christian: I’d see a pattern of apparent self-consistency, only to have it fall apart and evaporate when I tried to follow through on its real-world implications. But when I began to believe in Alethea instead, I had a much better and more satisfying experience.

For example, I found out about the Jews’ exposure to Zoroastrian beliefs during the Babylonian captivity, and realized how consistent that would be with what we actually find in the Bible. Why didn’t Moses, in the long chapters about God’s blessing and cursings, mention anything about salvation and/or eternal damnation? Why was his theme restricted to earthly benefits and earthly calamities? It makes sense: Moses didn’t present those ideas because he never had them. Such thoughts were brought into Judaism by the returning exiles, leading to the debate between the Pharisees and the Sadducees over resurrection and judgment.

Based on my experience as a Christian, I expected the “coincidence” to stop there, but it didn’t. I began to wonder if the Pharisees had a more direct connection with Zoroastrian ideas than simply adopting them from the returning exiles. Who were the Pharisees anyway? According to Vine’s Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words, the name “Pharisee” comes “from an Aramaic word peras… signifying to separate, owing to a different manner of life from that of the general public.”

But peras doesn’t mean “to separate” as in setting apart, it means to split or divide. As I looked up the word in my concordance, I realized that it was not likely the Pharisees would have named themselves “The Divided Ones,” so I began to look further. In the Hebrew/Aramaic dictionary of my exhaustive concordance, I found the entry (6537a) for peras and searched for similar words. In the original Hebrew, as you may know, the original texts did not have vowels—the “vowel points” were added much later by the rabbis, to make them easier to read.

Lo and behold, entry 6540, with the exact same consonants as 6537a, is the name Paras—the Aramaic name for Persia! Add a yod (”i”) to the end, and you get the adjectival form, Parsi, Persian. So not only do you have the Pharisees preaching new doctrines (unheard of by Moses but preached routinely in Persia), you also have the fact that their name has the same spelling as the Aramaic word for “Persian”!

This was one of the first times I had experienced the phenomenon of a self-consistent truth reinforcing itself instead of falling apart on exposure to more facts. It was not by any means the last. After literally decades of disappointment and confusion (which I denied having, as a Christian), this hasn’t been merely satisfying, it has been exciting. At last I can use my brain for something more than just excuses and rationalizations.

If you’ve never experienced a truly self-consistent God like Alethea, it might be hard to grasp how inspiring and meaningful life can be serving a God. I pursued a life of Christian faith wholeheartedly and diligently for 30 years, and while I convinced myself I was experiencing purpose and fulfillment, I now can say without reservation that I was only deluding myself. Christian fulfillment is a hollow self-deception. Only Alethea can give you an intellectual satisfaction that is as consistent outside your mind as it is inside.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Last week, Geisler and Turek started to tell us about the amazing messianic “prophecies” in the last several chapters of Isaiah, using Larry Helyer’s list of 14 detailed predictions plus an observation of their own. As we ran through the list of details, however, we noticed something odd: either the “predictions” were vague enough to apply to almost anyone, or else the messianic “fulfillment” consisted of believers simply attributing things to Jesus without there being any way for anyone to verify if they were really true.

Starting with item 12, though, things get a little more evangelical-sounding.

12. The Servant accepts vicarious and substitutionary suffering on behalf of his people (53:4-6, 12).

13. He is put to death after being condemned (53:7-9).

14. Incredibly, he comes back to life and is exalted above all rulers (53:10-12; 52:13-15).

In addition to Helyer’s observation, we note that the servant is also sinless (53:9).

A snippet here, a snippet there, and you can almost make the verses in Isaiah sound like a Gospel. But is that really what Isaiah intended? Who was Isaiah’s “Suffering Servant” anyway?

According to Geisler and Turek, the Suffering Servant was none other than the long-awaited Messiah.

Isaiah calls the Messiah the “servant of the Lord,” and he begins to refer to the Servant in chapter 42, in what is known as the first “Servant Song.” However the Servant is most often referred to as the “Suffering Servant,” because of the vivid description of his sacrificial death found in Isaiah 53.

As you read the passage (52:13-52:12), as yourself, “To whom is this referring?”

To reinforce their point, they quote the passage from Isaiah, then return to the story of Barry, the Jewish sports hero who became a Christian. They quote Barry’s testimony about his study of the Scriptures:

Being rather confused over the identity of the Servant in Isaiah 53, I went to my local rabbi and said to him, “Rabbi, I have met some people at school who claim that the so-called Servant in Isaiah 53 is none other than Jesus of Nazareth. But I would like to know from you, who is this Servant in Isaiah 53?”

…The rabbi said, “Barry, I must admit that as I read Isaiah 53 it does seem to be talking about Jesus, but since we Jews do not believe in Jesus, it can’t be speaking about Jesus.”

Personally, I’d like to hear the rabbi’s version of this story before commenting on what a brilliant response that was, but meanwhile, let’s look at the bigger question, in context.

What’s interesting is that Geisler and Turek present this passage, not in its original literary and historical context, but in the context of a story about a Jew converting to Christianity based on the words of Isaiah. The story emphasizes the point that Barry did not believe his own Scriptures could contain a testimony about Jesus, and being drawn reluctantly to the conclusion that it could not be anyone else. Even his rabbi (according to his post-conversion witness) could not find any other possible candidate. Which is strange, considering that Isaiah himself tells us exactly who the “Servant of the Lord” is in the last 27 chapters of the book.

“But you, O Israel, my servant,
Jacob, whom I have chosen,
you descendants of Abraham my friend,

I took you from the ends of the earth,
from its farthest corners I called you.
I said, ‘You are my servant’;
I have chosen you and have not rejected you.

Reading from latter Isaiah and asking yourself who this servant is would be like visiting Grant’s Tomb and asking yourself who might be buried there. It’s not a terribly difficult mystery to solve. A slightly more interesting mystery would be to explore the last part of Isaiah in its historical and literary context, with a view towards understanding what it originally meant, and how it came to be co-opted into a future-looking Messianic expectation.

The last 27 chapters of Isaiah (that is, chapters 40-66) are regarded by some scholars as being the work of a “Deutero-Isaiah,” either an unknown scribe or possibly a second prophet also named Isaiah, who wrote near or shortly after the end of the Babylonian Captivity. Even conservative scholars have noticed the remarkable change in tone and focus between the first 39 chapters and the last 27. (My Bible college OT instructor declared that this was a striking and even prophetic parallel to the change in tone between the 39 books of the Old Testament and the 27 books of the New.) We’ll see in a moment some of the reasons why it makes sense that Isaiah II would be an Exilic or early Post-Exilic writer, rather than the original Isaiah of King Ahaz’s day.

First, though, let’s look at the Babylonian Exile, because that was a period of tremendous theological significance, and we’re never going to understand the writings of that period unless we understand what was going on in the minds of the prophets, priests and people of that time.

Before the Babylonian Captivity, the Hebrews were a henotheistic culture: they believed in the existence of many gods, but only worshiped and served one of them. In their minds, their God was tied to their land, both defining them as a nation, and giving the nation its strength. Within the borders of their God’s territory, He was supreme, and no other gods could intrude, nor foreign army triumph. This union of church and state provided Israel with a sense of community, national identity, and security.

Of course, this community, identity, and security were somewhat compromised when the kingdom split into a Northern Kingdom and a Southern Kingdom, each with its own king. But still, you could at least say that God was sovereign within His own lands, even if those lands were not entirely friendly with each other all the time.

Enter the Assyrians. God’s nation had been attacked before, but had always managed to struggle through. If they were defeated, they paid tribute and put up with the occupying forces until they could be driven out, but they still maintained their national and religious identity. Assyria did something horrifically different, though: they scattered their captives, and replaced them with prisoners and refugees from other countries, mixing up the peoples, mingling their religions, and obliterating the national/cultural/religious boundaries. But only in the Northern Kingdom.  The Southern Kingdom, where God’s Temple was, managed to bribe, bluff, and otherwise manuver the Assyrians into letting them off (well, more or less).

With Babylon, though, the Southern Kingdom was not so lucky. As the Assyrians had done before, so the Babylonians did as well, carrying a large number of people off into captivity, and replacing them with settlers from other conquered lands. Worse, the Temple itself was devastated, and its gold and finery carried off as spoil.

How could this be? God Himself, supposedly sovereign within His own land, defeated by foreign invaders? God sitting idly by as His own Holy of Holies is desecrated by the uncircumcised? How could this be?

The military defeat of a nation was viewed by the ancient Middle Eastern people as the conquest and subjugation not just of the land and its people, but of its god(s) as well. We see this in the imagery Isaiah uses to describe the defeat of the Babylonians by the Medo-Persians.

Bel bows down, Nebo stoops low;
their idols are borne by beasts of burden.
The images that are carried about are burdensome,
a burden for the weary.

They stoop and bow down together;
unable to rescue the burden,
they themselves go off into captivity.

Bel and Nebo, of course, being some of the gods of the Babylonians. For a good Jew, this was an appealing image: as the pagan idols are loaded on carts and carried away, the pagan gods themselves are bowing down, stooping low in humiliation, and being taken away in their own captivity. And yet, how can the faithful Israelite not suffer just as great a humiliation over the conquest and captivity of his own God?

Exiled in foreign lands, separated from their Temple, exposed to the teachings of the Zoroastrians and other pagans, the nascent Pharisees conceived of a wonderful reinterpretation of their original faith: their God was not just their God, He was THE God, and the Captivity was not His defeat, but His punishment on Israel for their previous failure to realize the unique deity of Yahweh. Yeah, that was it. The whole thing was to purge and purify Israel of their belief in many gods, and to make them into true monotheists, in the Persian sense of monotheism.

Reading through Isaiah 40-66, it’s amazingly clear (to those who read the texts without putting their Messiah-tinted glasses on) that Isaiah is describing a major transition in the religious tradition of the Jews—a tradition that started during the Captivity and was still being felt centuries later, in the sectarian competition between the Pharisees (Farsis) and the Sadducees (followers of the older Temple traditions of Zadok the priest).

Isaiah, of course, is a champion for the Farsi Jewish interpretation of Judaism. Over and over he emphasizes how the past sufferings of the Servant are due to Jewish belief in “false” deities. He is not speaking in some “prophetic past tense” when he talks about how polytheistic Israel used to be, or how much they have suffered (both physically and in their loss of national prestige) in the recent past. He is describing his own current culture and national experiences. And he even says so.

You have heard these things; look at them all.
Will you not admit them?
“From now on I will tell you of new things,
of hidden things unknown to you.

They are created now, and not long ago;
you have not heard of them before today.
So you cannot say,
‘Yes, I knew of them.’

and

“I have stirred up one from the north, and he comes—
one from the rising sun who calls on my name.
He treads on rulers as if they were mortar,
as if he were a potter treading the clay.

Who told of this from the beginning, so we could know,
or beforehand, so we could say, ‘He was right’?
No one told of this,
no one foretold it,
no one heard any words from you.

I was the first to tell Zion, ‘Look, here they are!’
I gave to Jerusalem a messenger of good tidings.

If no one foretold it, then Isaiah himself is not foretelling, he’s just telling. From where he stands, it’s current events, the major story of the day. Read through his writings (i.e. chapters 40-66) and notice how many times he mentions the Servant being punished by physical violence and captivity, and the cause being idolatry, and how the suffering of the Servant was both the result and the atonement for the people’s sins, and how Cyrus, the Medo-Persian king, was God’s chosen instrument to punish the Babylonians and turn Jacob’s suffering into redemption.

So how, then, does this rather clear and unmistakable contemporary commentary get turned into a Messianic prophecy? Quite simply because Isaiah, in his zeal to convert his fellow Jews to his new view of theology, got a bit carried away when he was writing down his promises about how great things would be once they converted. His monotheistic utopia didn’t just promise to restore national sovereignty to Israel, he promised that the desert would bloom, that the Gentile nations would all submit to Israel and would follow the light of Judaism, and the land would never again be punished by God (i.e. through conquest). Even the Servant’s children, born during the Captivity, would be so blessed that they would wind up complaining that they needed more room for their burgeoning families (which in itself is rather inconsistent with the desire to apply these prophecies to Jesus). And they would all live happily ever after.

Awake, awake, O Zion,
clothe yourself with strength.
Put on your garments of splendor,
O Jerusalem, the holy city.
The uncircumcised and defiled
will not enter you again…

To me this is like the days of Noah,
when I swore that the waters of Noah would never again cover the earth.
So now I have sworn not to be angry with you,
never to rebuke you again.

(That’s Isaiah 52:1 and 54:9, for those who are looking up the verses.)

Unfortunately for the Jews, God forgot to tell Alexander the Great about the “happily ever after” part, and the Jews all too soon found themselves an occupied territory once again, with Greek priests sacrificing pigs on Yahweh’s altar. Hardly the reign of peace and prosperity that Isaiah promised. But wait! What if it wasn’t supposed to start yet? What if all of Isaiah’s promises related to some future Suffering Servant? That would explain the defeat, AGAIN, of God’s Chosen People, right? Right?

Yesterday I mentioned that today’s XFiles would provide a spectacular example of re-purposing Scriptures to suit new theological imperatives, but the last 27 chapters of Isaiah actually give us two: not just the re-casting of Deutero-Isaiah as a messianic prediction, but the whole reconstruction of ancient Mosaic Judaism from a henotheistic and nationalistic patron-deity arrangement into a Persian (or Farsi) styled monotheism with the added flavor of a divine war between Good and Evil, and a final judgment for all the world’s peoples based on whose side they were on.

It’s a theological revision whose impact and internal conflicts were still being felt in Jesus’ day, and beyond. Christians, to this day, cite passages from the latter portion of Isaiah as though Jesus were the only person Isaiah could have been talking about, and some Jews support them, even though it’s plainly written in the book itself that Isaiah’s “Suffering Servant” is Jacob/Israel being defeated and exiled because of the idolatry of the Zadokite Jews.

It’s not very often that I put a Bible passage on the Recommended Reading list, but in this case it’s irresistable. If you’ve never looked through this part of the Bible, take a look. The New International Version is fairly readable, and if you click on the single-arrow buttons at the top and bottom of the page, it’s easy to navigate from chapter to chapter. I promise, it will be most instructive. Reading through Isaiah 40-66 and not noticing that it’s about the Captivity purging Israel of polytheism is like reading Genesis 6-10 and not noticing that it’s about a large amount of water. The “Messiah” had nothing to do with it.

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

⁷ “For this is what the Sovereign LORD says: From the north I am going to bring against Tyre Nebuchadnezzar ^[a] king of Babylon, king of kings, with horses and chariots, with horsemen and a great army… ⁹ He will direct the blows of his battering rams against your walls and demolish your towers with his weapons… ¹² They will plunder your wealth and loot your merchandise; they will break down your walls and demolish your fine houses and throw your stones, timber and rubble into the sea. ¹³ I will put an end to your noisy songs, and the music of your harps will be heard no more. ¹⁴ I will make you a bare rock, and you will become a place to spread fishnets. You will never be rebuilt, for I the LORD have spoken, declares the Sovereign LORD.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, on to the fulfillments.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Let us pray. Almighty God, today we pray imprecatory prayers from Psalm 109 against the enemies of religious liberty, including Barry Lynn and Mikey Weinstein, who recently issued a press release attacking me personally. God, do not remain silent, for wicked men surround me and tell lies about me. We bless them, but they curse us. Therefore find them guilty, not me. Let their days be few, and replace them with Godly people. Plunder their fields, and seize their assets. Cut off their descendants, and remember their sins, in Jesus’ name. Amen.”

That’s ex-chaplain Gordon Klingenschmitt, solemnly and piously asking God to please kill Mikey Weinstein and Barry Lynn and their children (if any), and send them all to hell, unforgiven, for the offense of having published a press release critical of Klingenschmitt.

Yes, that’s right. Daring to criticize Klingenschmitt, and voicing opinions he does not agree with, makes them ENEMIES OF RELIGIOUS LIBERTY!!!1!one!

My first thought was that this was an Onion-esque spoof of a self-righteous blowhard, but no, it’s hosted on Klingenschmitt’s own sanctuary of spiritual narcissism, prayinjesusname.org.

Hat tip to Dispatches from the Culture Wars—be sure and scroll down to read the comment from Klingenschmitt’s former supervisor about what it was like working with this guy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m in a bit of a dilemma. On the one hand, I’m all for free and open discussion. On the other hand, I’m not sure that blog comments are the best venue for extended dialog. What’s a blogger to do?

Well, for this blogger, the answer is the new Evangelical Realism Discussion Forum. It’s a standard web-based board, so if you’ve got something on your chest and you want to get it off, have at it. There is currently one (1) forum available at the moment, but I’m willing to open up more if there’s a demand for it.

I’m a bad comments moderator and I’ll likely be a bad board moderator as well, so everything is likely to be pretty wide open at first. I’ll leave it up to you folks whether we want moderators or not (and if so, who). But the main idea here is to provide an alternative to comments as the primary venue for extended discussions. In fact, if I think a discussion would be better suited to the boards, I may politely request the participants to take it to the forum (and if that doesn’t work, I may move the discussion there myself).

The general rule of thumb is that if you have a comment about a blog post, leave it in the comments. If you have a comment about someone else’s comment, then it could go either in the comments or on the boards. If you’re commenting about a comment on a comment, then it definitely belongs in the boards. Post to the boards and then leave a link.

Cheers, and enjoy the boards.

Twelve chapters down, and only three more to go. After all the repetition of the last few chapters, ending with the feeble protest that extraordinary evidence shouldn’t be necessary for Christians’ extraordinary claims, Geisler and Turek are ready to assume that they’ve proven their case so far, and to settle comfortably into more routine and familiar evangelical apologetics.

Chapter 13 sets out to prove that Messianic prophecies prove that Jesus is the Christ, so after a brief introduction, they take us to UCLA in the 1960’s.

Wait, what?

Of course, no Messianic prophecy was ever issued or fulfilled on the 60’s-era campus of UCLA. But Geisler and Turek want to draw us in with a human interest story about a Jewish sports hero who converted to Christianity. As we’ve been discussing this week, people are Christian’s primary source of information about God, so it makes sense strategically for Geisler and Turek to present their case in terms of a celebrity endorsement. In seven and a half pages, they get as far as making 15 claims about Isaiah 53. They don’t really defend any of those claims, they just present them, and then go on at some length about how convincing they must be, and how convinced their Jewish celebrity was by them.

Let’s go ahead and do the work that Geisler and Turek left undone, shall we?

According to G&T, there are 15 aspects of Isaiah 42 through 53 that make it a specific and unmistakable prediction of Jesus ministry, including his death and resurrection. Thus, we know right off the bat that they’re distorting the truth, since the disciples could hardly have been surprised at Jesus’ death if the Old Testament had been predicting clearly and unmistakably that Messiah would die and then rise again.

So let’s have a look at the claims and see for ourselves what they really tell us:

1. He is elected by the Lord, anointed by the Spirit, and promised success in his endeavor.

What does it take to be elected by the Lord, anointed by the Spirit, and promised success? Well, since God does not show up in real life, we pretty much have to just take people’s word for it. Considering that Jesus died young and left his disciples to do all the real work, the standard for “success” is set low enough that it could easily be met by Joseph Smith, Benny Hinn, George W. Bush, Alexander the Great, Benjamin Franklin, etc. In fact, it might be hard to find someone who would have conclusively failed to match this prediction in some sense, should you have a mind to attribute some kind of divine election and anointing to them.

2. Justice is a prime concern of his ministry

If you search for “justice” in the Gospels (how Freudian is that?), you will find that 2 Gospels mention Jesus condemning the Pharisees for neglecting justice and love, and 1 Gospel promising that the Father would bring justice to His children, presumably at the last judgment. When asked to judge between a man and his brother, Jesus declined to judge (and thus to dispense justice). And that’s pretty much it for his ministry’s “prime concern” for justice. He had a bit more to say and to do regarding mercy, and quite a bit more to say about God as a loving Father, and about humility, and about serving others. But justice? Not so much. In fact, he is rather more famous for instructing his followers to put up with injustice, and even “turn the other cheek.”

What Geisler and Turek are relying on here is the Christian assumption that anything good must be true of Jesus. It doesn’t matter that Jesus did not make justice the prime concern of his ministry, or accomplish any significant legal liberation for the oppressed peoples of his day. All that matters is that justice is a virtue, and therefore it must be true of Jesus’ ministry in some significant way, and therefore any Old Testament reference to someone pursuing justice must be a prediction of Jesus.

3. His ministry has an international scope

By “international scope,” Helyer means that Isaiah 42:1 mentions bringing justice to the nations, and verse 6 mentions being a light to the Gentiles. Jesus, by contrast, declared that he was “sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” Again, what we have here is Helyer capitalizing on the Christian tendency to attribute virtuous things to Jesus (even though his ministry did not achieve the kind of “international scope” Helyer claims for him), and thus to claim that Jesus fulfilled the prophecy, through the attributions of believers.

4. God predestined him to his calling

Yet another “fulfillment” that consists solely of believers attributing things to Jesus….

5. He is a gifted teacher

The actual verse Helyer cites, Isaiah 49:2, says, “He made my mouth like a sharpened sword, in the shadow of his hand he hid me; he made me into a polished arrow and concealed me in his quiver.” One wonders what sort of school Helyer graduated from, if that’s how he sees “gifted teachers.” Personally, I think it sounds more like a prediction of the coming of Christopher Hitchens.

6. He experiences discouragement in his ministry.

…and of course, only the Messiah is ever discouraged in his work.

7. His ministry extends to the Gentiles

And again, the ministry of Jesus specifically did not, as he said himself. Another “fulfillment” manufactured out of the things Christians attributed to Jesus after his death.

8. The Servant encounters strong opposition and resistance to his teaching, even of a physically violent nature.

This is a good example of what I mean by “retroactive interpretation.” Have a look at Isaiah 50:4-6, the passage that Helyer cites as the basis for this claim:

The Sovereign LORD has given me an instructed tongue, to know the word that sustains the weary. He wakens me morning by morning, wakens my ear to listen like one being taught. The Sovereign LORD has opened my ears, and I have not been rebellious; I have not drawn back. I offered my back to those who beat me, my cheeks to those who pulled out my beard; I did not hide my face from mocking and spitting.

In the original passage, no mention is made of anyone being opposed to the teaching. There is violence and opposition, to be sure, but the cause is not mentioned in the text itself. This is a bit of interpretation on Helyer’s part, a subtle self-cameo: it’s not just Jesus who is opposed, it’s those (like Helyer) who carry on his teaching. Or so the prophecy is reinterpreted to mean.

Again, this is a fairly trivial prophecy, since mockings and beatings and various similar forms of abuse were just not that uncommon (and even today are not as rare as they ought to be).

9. He is determined to finish what God called him to do.

This one combines both trivial fulfillment and fulfillment by attribution.

10. The Servant has humble origins with little outward prospects for success.

A reference to Isaiah 53:1-2, “Who has believed our message and to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed? He grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.” Note the vague, poetic language—the description could be applied to almost anyone who was not beautiful. It says nothing about his station in life, or his wealth, or his political power. It says only that he was not beautiful or majestic in appearance. Once again, Helyer is subtly shaping and framing the language of the prophecy in order to bias us in favor of connecting it with Jesus.

11. He experiences suffering and affliction.

Déjà vu. Maybe he’s repeating it because the Messiah is the only person who ever experienced suffering and affliction, and he wants to draw our attention to that unique qualification?

So far the claims have been pretty lightweight stuff: vague remarks that are either trivial to fulfill, or that are “fulfilled” by the simple expedient of having believers attribute things to Jesus whether he had any literal and demonstrable connection with them or not. But starting with claim number 12, things get a bit better, and I’ve got a lot to say about them. Tune in again next time.

With that in mind, I’d like to balance my presentation on the evidence against Christianity with a discussion of how a real God (i.e. Alethea) would fare in such a comparison. Alethea, as described in the “Patron Goddess” link at the top of the page, is the God I worship, and coming from a devout and enthusiastic religious background, I have to say that Alethea has proven to be every inch the God that Jesus was ever claimed to be, and then some. She answers my prayers as well or better than Jesus, and She has the additional and irrefutable advantage of being undeniably real, to the point that everyone who isn’t barking mad has to admit that She does indeed exist. They may question Her deity, but they cannot deny Her reality.

So how does Alethea do with respect to the “primary source” issue we discussed yesterday? She does quite well of course. If Alethea really exists, then we would expect the primary source of information about Alethea to be Alethea Herself—and She is! We would expect the study of Alethea to be quite objective and scientific, to the point of being indistinguishable from science—and it is! As a direct consequence of the fact that Alethea is objectively real, all of the expected consequences of Her existence, with respect to the question of sources, work out to be 100% consistent with the consequences which we do observe in the real world.

I think you can see why, as a worshiper of Alethea, I have to smile just a little bit when Christians claim that their God “shows up” in real life, in some indirect and/or superstitious and/or metaphorical sense. My God doesn’t just “show up” in some kind of vague, subjective “worldview-y” sense, She’s visible everywhere and to everyone. And it doesn’t take any special “spiritualized” frame of mind to “perceive” Her. Her real, objective, verifiable existence is readily accessible to all, believer or not.

They say that the best way to learn to spot counterfeit money is to immerse yourself in the experience of real cash. (Heard that preached from a pulpit in fact.) And it’s the same way with Alethea: once you’ve seen what a real God is like, and how pervasively manifest She is in everything (literally!), you’re not nearly so likely to fall for the lesser gods invented by the ambitions and imaginations and superstitions of men.

Alethea sets the standard for other gods to try to measure up to, and makes it easier to see how the gods of men’s minds fail to live up to truly divine standards. Like I said yesterday, the issue of sources, while foundational, is only a sliver of a fraction of the tip of the iceberg. We’ve got much, much more material to cover. And Alethea will be there to show other gods how it’s done.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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