This week we wrap up Chapter 2 of Mere Christianity with Lewis’ somewhat feeble attempt to address the morality of witch-burning. Until a few centuries ago, it was a rather popular practice among Christians, and—well, let’s let Lewis speak for himself.

I have met people who exaggerate the differences [between different moralities], because they have not distinguished between differences of morality and differences of belief about facts. For example, one man said to me, ‘Three hundred years ago people in England were putting witches to death. Was that what you call the Rule of Human Nature or Right Conduct?’ But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things. If we did—if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbours or drive them mad or bring bad weather—surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did?

This is an amazing apologetic. Notice, he’s not quite arguing that Christians were doing the right thing by burning witches. He merely wishes to argue that we have made scientific progress, rather than moral progress, in ceasing to put witches to death. He ends Chapter 2 with the observation, “You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house.” He’s neither justifying nor accusing the witch-burners; he’s merely arguing that we today are no better, because we would burn witches too, if we thought they were real.

Sadly, he got that part exactly right, at least as far as believers are concerned. There are Christian evangelists in Africa today who are spreading witch rumors and inciting people to violence against them, just like in the Old Days. Women and even children are dying, or being savagely tortured and/or driven from their villages, because Christians believe that “these filthy quislings” deserve it. Lewis is exactly right in saying that this morality shows no signs of being any better than that of the 17th century witch burners.

But let’s look at Lewis’ underlying assumption. He’s taking it for granted that everyone would agree that, if you believe in witches, the Right thing to do is to put them to death. He assumes that obviously real witchcraft would deserve the death penalty, and that this is true even today, even for believers like himself. Sure, there’s no such thing as a real witch, but if there were, why then fetch the rope and kindling boys! And be quick about it!

I’m going to disagree with Lewis on two counts. First of all, a civilized and just society should never penalize anyone for being the wrong thing. Justice, including the death penalty, must be limited to punishing people for doing the wrong thing. If a real witch used supernatural powers to murder someone, then society ought to accuse her of the murder, prove her guilty of the murder, and then punish her for the murder—not for being a witch. If she used magic to make it foggy so no one would see her flying around on her broomstick, you don’t burn her for being a witch, and you certainly don’t demand a death penalty for making it foggy at night, even if she really and truly did bring bad weather by magic.

The second and larger point centers around that crucial word “believe.” Lewis’ argument goes like this: We don’t kill witches because we don’t believe there are any. If we did believe they existed, then surely (or at least, Lewis is sure) we ought to agree with putting them to death. See anything missing in that line of thought?

What’s missing, obviously, is any consideration of the question of whether or not our beliefs were actually correct. The witch-burners of 17th century England believed they were putting real witches to death. According to Real Morality, was it Right for them to do so? That was the specific question that was asked of Prof. Lewis, and that is the specific question which he adroitly side-stepped and never answered. Yes, yes, it’s true that we now know there are no witches, but that means we also know that the people who got burned at the stake were, in fact, innocent. What does Real Morality say about murdering innocent victims on account of Christian beliefs, Professor Lewis? Professor Lewis?

Granted, this is an especially tricky question and it’s not surprising that Lewis would prefer to avoid it, because once you realize that Christian beliefs led to the murder of large numbers of innocent victims, the moral question becomes, “Who led the murderers to believe in killing witches?” Take a wild guess what the answer is.

Exodus 22:18 — Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.

Yup. We could also add the Old Testament prophets who praised King Saul for putting to death all the witches in Israel (except the famous witch at Endor). Even the New Testament lists witchcraft among the acts of the sinful nature. Christians believed in witches, and in killing witches, because the Bible taught these things as though they were true. Now the moral question becomes, “If you believe God’s Word, and act on it, are you morally guilty, or does the guilt belong to God?” If we know that the Bible can be wrong about life-and-death issues, can Real Morality ever allow us to act as though Scripture must necessarily be true?

Remember, too, that the witch-burners typically were not relying on the Scriptures alone. They first “obtained” a confession from the accused witch, and then executed her. Perhaps we should ask Prof. Lewis about the morality of using torture to elicit confessions from the accused? Assuming he gave a similar answer, he might say something like “if we really thought they were Al Qaeda supporters witches, surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved torture, then these filthy quislings did?” Once again, though, the justification is based on our own (possibly erroneous) belief, rather than the wrongdoing (if any) of the accused.

This is the problem with faith-based moralities, with moralities that are based on some unseen and unverifiable list of Rights and Wrongs. It’s too easy to punish people because of certain wrong beliefs on our part rather than any wrong behavior on theirs. And it keeps coming back to haunt us. Christians tortured suspected witches in the 17th century, but oh yes, we know better than that now, because there are no witches. But did we really learn, or are we just using the same 17th century moral rationalizations today, now that we want to hurt those we suspect of being terrorists?

And of course, Christians today are literally killing “witches” once again, in Africa, with support from American churches. And it all comes back to their failure to make significant moral progress since the 17th century. To be fair, the Bible does make it hard to advance beyond that point. How can one Bible-believing Christian credibly tell another Bible-believing Christian not to believe the clear teaching of the Bible, and not to obey its clear commandments? There’s just not a lot of room to maneuver without exposing certain doubts about the believability of the Bible.

This puts Lewis in an even more insecure position, morally speaking, because not only does he fail to condemn witch-burning on moral grounds, but he does acknowledge that “God’s Word” is wrong about witches being real. That means the Scripture is factually wrong about at least some life-and-death moral issues. Lewis’ purported and invisible Real Morality thus becomes a standard that we cannot obtain even by divine revelation. Lewis claims that we all know we fail to keep this Moral Law, but how could we know whether we’re keeping it or not, if even the Bible itself cannot reliably tell us what it is?

All that Lewis has left, in the end, is some kind of subjective, mystical perception of Right and Wrong, an inner sense that boils down to “whatever seems right in my own eyes.” It’s dressed a little fancier, and it’s a bit pretentious, in that it presents itself as something engraved on our heart by God Himself, but bereft of both a real-world standard of morality and a reliable Scriptural standard, it’s the only standard he has left. The believer has no alternative but to accept his own personal opinions of right and wrong as the sole measure of Real Morality.

Maybe that’s why Lewis is so popular: he gives people a way to view their own personal morality as “coincidentally” being the same as Universal Moral Law, thus allowing them the pleasures of self-righteousness without the burden of having to live by someone else’s rules. Not a terribly high-quality ethic, but damn clever marketing, eh? No wonder so many modern apologists choose him as their patron saint.

According to C. S. Lewis, “the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in” lies in assuming the existence of a natural Law of Morality. This isn’t just some arbitrary, human legislated regulation either. It’s a real Law of Nature that defines a real standard of Right and Wrong—a standard, moreover, that we all fall short of.

This week, Lewis looks at one last objection to that premise.

Other people wrote to me saying, ‘Isn’t what you call the Moral Law just a social convention, something that is put into us by education?’ I think there is a misunderstanding here… We all learned the multiplication table at school. A child who grew up alone on a desert island would not know it. But surely it does not follow that the multiplication table is simply a human convention, something human beings have made up for themselves and might have made different if they had liked?

He also compares it to which side of the road we drive on, which (unlike math) is a convention. In America, we drive on the right-hand side of the road; in England, on the left. There’s no natural law that says things have to be that way, and we might just as easily have decided on different conventions. So the question is, when we learn morality, are we learning about a pre-existing law, as in mathematics, or about a mere convention, as in driving?

Lewis, not surprisingly, favors the former, and he gives us two reasons.

His first reason will probably sound familiar:

The first is, as I said in the first chapter, that though there are differences between the moral ideas of one time or country and those of another, the differences are not really very great—not nearly so great as most people imaging—and you can recognize the same law running through them all, whereas mere conventions, like the rule of the road or the kind of clothes people wear, may differ to any extent.

That’s a rather un-mathematical assessment. “Not very great”? In whose opinion? It seems to me that that the kind of morality that condones selling your daughters for sexual purposes, mutilating the genitals of babies, and committing acts of genocide, is very different from the kind of morality that finds these things abhorrent. But have I disproved Lewis’ point? We can’t really say, because he hasn’t really given us any objective guidelines for measuring the amount of difference between two moralities, let alone setting a specific point at which the difference would be great enough to falsify his claim. All Lewis is really saying is, “I know moral conventions are different in different times and cultures, and I hereby declare those differences irrelevant.” This is one avenue of investigation that he simply filters out.

What he ought to have noticed, had he been willing to look, is that our moral standards are not merely different today than they were in ancient times, they’re better. We’ve improved, to some extent, on the morality of our forefathers. We’ve even improved on God’s morality (which may explain some of Lewis’ reluctance to probe too deeply into this part of the evidence).

As I’ve said before, morality is rooted in our perception of the likely outcomes of different behaviors. As we live and learn, and as our society gradually acquires the collective experience of its members, we get better at understanding how some behaviors that originally seemed like a good idea (e.g. slavery) are actually more detrimental than beneficial. As a species, we’re a bit thick. It can take centuries of painful experience to convince us that we really don’t like the consequences of certain previously-sanctioned behaviors. But we do learn from those consequences, eventually. And that accumulated experience becomes our new and improved morality.

Thus, it’s not because we’re being guided by the timeless wisdom of the Ten Commandments or some other mystical list of simple rules. Experience itself is teaching us. And sometimes, what it teaches us is that certain situations don’t have a simple, clear-cut distinction between right and wrong. Sometimes you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Other times, the right solution requires making an exception to the so-called “Moral Law.” Not everyone is going to feel right about making such exceptions, especially if they buy what Lewis is selling here. Belief in a Moral Law can prevent you from doing the right thing, and can drive you to do the wrong thing. Thus, secular morality is better than the kind of superstitious morality Lewis wants us to believe in.

Oops, he overheard us, and now he’s going to use this argument against us.

The other reason is this. When you think about these differences between the morality of one people and another, do you think that the morality of one people is ever better or worse than that of another? Have any of the changes been improvements? If not, then of course there could never be any moral progress. Progress means not just changing, but changing for the better. If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilized morality to savage morality, or Christian morality to Nazi morality… The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other. But the standard that measures two things is something different from either. You are, in fact, comparing them both with some Real Morality, admitting that there is such a thing as a real Right, independent of what people think, and that some people’s ideas get nearer to that real Right than others.

Rather fascinating, isn’t it? Lewis has very nearly declared that Christian morality is not Real Morality, and can thus be improved upon. A fairly obvious observation for anyone versed in real-world secular morality, but a fairly astonishing conclusion for Lewis to come to, given that Mere Christianity attempts to use this idea of Moral Law to prove the existence of a divine Law Giver. I can’t help but think that Lewis would object here, and would try to deny that Christian morality is different from Real Morality, but that’s the thrust of his argument. Otherwise, how could you ever compare Christian morality to any other morality (even Nazi morality!) and say that it was better? His whole point is that for one thing to be better, it must be different from the standard it’s being measured by.

The other possibility would be that he is merely playing devil’s advocate: “If you think that one morality is better than another, then you must think there is some Real standard of morality.” In 0ther words, he’s not agreeing that he thinks we’ve made moral progress, or that one morality can be better than another, he’s just saying if all y’all liberal types want to say that, then you have to agree that Moral Law really exists. Pretty clever, except that this argument implies that Christian morality cannot be any better than Nazi morality. Oops.

The problem here (besides the above) is that Lewis completely overlooks the fact that anyone who compares one morality to another is inevitably going to favor whichever morality is most like his own. Let’s take, for example, the question of gay marriage. Is it moral to allow it? Is it moral to forbid it? There are, within the Christian faith, within even the conservative, evangelical Christian faith, those whose morality would give an answer that was the exact opposite of what the rest of their fellow believers would say. Never mind secular versus pious; within Christian morality itself, there are questions for which you get opposite answers at the same time, depending on which Christian you ask.

This is how we know Lewis’ so-called Moral Law is not a natural law like the laws of mathematics. The question “What is 2 x 12?” does not give different real-world answers depending on who you ask: two dozen eggs is 24 eggs, just like two dozen homeopaths are 24 quacks. Count ‘em: the laws of multiplication are laws because they give the same answers to the same questions, no matter who does the asking or the answering. And, more importantly, you can check the answers, and determine whether or not the first person came up with the right number. There’s a consistent real-world referent for your answer, and that’s how we know Real Multiplication exists.

Lewis’ alleged Law of Human Nature doesn’t work that way. For instance, the obvious retort to gay Christian morality is to deny that gay Christian morality is Real True Christian Morality™—which is an easy claim to make, but how are we going to check your answers? Lewis believes in a “real Right,” meaning an invisible, mystical standard defining Right and Wrong for all circumstances, but we don’t have a written copy of that standard, nor can we determine it experimentally UNLESS we abandon Lewis’ superstitious and imaginary Law in favor of a secular morality based on a practical consideration of behaviors and consequences. The “Moral Law” approach, by itself, cannot tell you when your moral standards are wrong; it merely encourages you to look down on the morality of others.

Thus, there are (at least) two different moralities: a real-world, secular morality that needs no God, and a superstitious and subjective morality that tries to give God credit for moral answers that are secretly being borrowed from the secular kind. Because the superstitious morality often resorts to secular morality, the two moralities have a certain amount of overlap. Where they don’t overlap, as in the case of circumcision or gay marriage for instance, the superstitious morality is wrong, meaning it promotes as “good” things that have bad consequences, and forbids as “bad” things that have good consequences (or at least neutral ones).

The big difference between secular morality and superstitious morality is that the superstitious moralist has no consistent real-world referent for his moral answers (unless he resorts to secular morality). Thus, as I mentioned above, if you ask a superstitious moralist to compare two moralities, he has no choice but to favor whichever one is most like his own. We don’t have a copy of The Divine List of Do’s and Don’ts (if it were even possible for such a thing to exist), and without resorting to secular morality, he can only judge by whatever seems right in his own eyes. That’s why Lewis’ mathematical corollary fails, and why even Christian morality can give opposite answers to the same question depending on which Christian you ask.

Secular morality, by contrast, does not have this problem, because it’s based on a secular consideration of real-world consequences. Granted, the answers won’t always be easy, and some problems may not have any Right answers at all. The answers you do get, however, have the benefit of being based on real-world truth, rather than on subjective assumptions about what God’s preferences ought to be. That’s important, because when your morality is not based on real-world truth, moral issues boil down to “might makes right,” and you end up with the majority ganging up on minorities and oppressing them, as is being done right now to gays.

In summary then, and contrary to Lewis’ eloquent and misguided rhetoric, we can compare morality with mathematics and clearly see that morality (as Lewis envisions it) is not some kind of natural law that always gives the same answers to the same questions. There is more than one Morality, with the secular one being far better than the other. The alternative, advocated by Lewis, is to take the results of secular morality (e.g. “murder is wrong”), superstitiously ascribe them to an invisible magical Law Giver, and then sweep in a bunch of arbitrary, prejudiced, and self-serving “moral Rights” that end up harming people (especially minorities). This is detrimental to society as a whole, not just to the victims, and therefore it is, in secular terms, immoral.

Next week: Witches (see Servants of Satan, Burning). Stay tuned.

Last week, Lewis tried to convince us that morality is not merely some kind of herd instinct, which is partly true. Unfortunately, he was not able to discern the true role of instinct in human morality because he’s limited by the preconceived conclusion that he’d like to drive us to. He’s not trying to understand how psychological and sociological factors influence our moral thinking, he’s merely trying to make morality sound mysterious and unexplainable so that he can superstitiously give God credit for it.

These same constraints limit his arguments this week, as he proposes two more answers to the “morality as a herd instinct” objection.

Another way of seeing that the Moral Law is not simply one of our instincts is this. If two instincts are in conflict, and there is nothing in a creature’s mind except those two instincts, obviously the stronger of the two must win. But at those moments when we are most conscious of the Moral Law, it usually seems to be telling us to side with the weaker of the two impulses… And surely it often tells us to try and make the right impulse stronger than it naturally is? I mean, we often feel it our duty to stimulate the herd instinct, by waking up our imaginations and arousing our pity and so on, so as to get up enough steam for doing the right thing. But clearly we are not acting from instinct when we set about making an instinct stronger than it is.

This, sad to say, is not C. S. Lewis at his finest. While he was undoubtedly a fine scholar, and probably not consciously attempting to mislead anyone, it must be said that this particular argument presents us with observations so subjective and distorted as to be deceptive. Like all half-truths, there are elements of it that do reflect a certain real-world experience, but without giving us a complete or accurate picture.

According to Lewis, if you see a man drowning, your instinct for self preservation is stronger than the herd instinct calling you to rescue him. Then, some magical Moral Law “speaks” to you and tells you that you ought to make your weaker instinct stronger, until you are willing to help. Indeed, in this portrayal, Lewis gives “Moral Law” many of the same behaviors and personal traits as are traditionally ascribed to the Holy Spirit—a polytheism as ironic as it is inadvertent.

This is nothing more than plain old ordinary superstition: seeing something you don’t understand and giving credit to some magical, supernatural cause (he even personified it for us!). But it’s really not that hard to understand. We see imminent tragedy unfolding in front of us, and we’re distressed by our inability to do more to help. We desperately want to believe that there is something more we could do to help, but that’s just a kind of psychological denial of our own weakness and limitations. Sometimes we experience a misplaced and irrational sense of guilt, the feeling Lewis describes as the “Moral Law…telling us to side with the weaker of the two impulses.” It’s not really that some anthropomorphic principle was telling us we should have helped, we’re just suffering from feelings of inadequacy, sublimated as guilt.

Notice, too, that Lewis arbitrarily designates the helpful impulse as being always weaker than the instinct for self preservation. Read the stories of any number of dramatic rescues, though, and you’ll see that this simply isn’t so. Often, the instinct of self-preservation does not manifest itself at all, or does so very weakly. Then again, remember that when we read the stories of how people reacted to incipient disaster, we only get to read the stories of the survivors—those whose survival instinct kicked in soon enough to let them live to tell their tales. Our sample is necessarily biased against those whose helpful instinct overruled the dictates of self-preservation.

Now granted, I too am oversimplifying a complex psychological phenomenon. There are other factors involved as well, like social status, family ties, personality traits, and so on. The main point I want to make here is that Lewis’ appeal to superstition is fundamentally hostile to finding a practical and accurate understanding of what is really going on in the mind of a person making a split-second life-or-death decision about whether to risk himself for the sake of another. Understanding how it really works means we have one less excuse for appealing to the magical/supernatural alternative. Lewis’ argument works best in the absence of any useful understanding of the truth. But let’s move on.

Here is a third way of seeing it. If the Moral Law was one of our instincts, we ought to be able to point to some one impulse inside us which was always what we call ‘good,’ always in agreement with the rule of right behaviour. But you cannot. There is none of our impulses which the Moral Law may not sometimes tell us to suppress, and none which it may not sometimes tell us to encourage.

Lewis puts his finger squarely on the central flaw in his whole thesis, and doesn’t realize he’s done it. He cites sex, maternal love, patriotism, and “fighting instinct” as things that are sometimes right and sometimes wrong, and he says this goes to show that instinct doesn’t always get the right answer. He’s still laboring under the misapprehension that there will necessarily always be a right answer, known to the Moral Law, against which we can measure our natural impulses.

The reason why instinct cannot be trusted to always give the morally “correct” answer is because there is no moral rule, or law, that is always right under all circumstances. You cannot say, for example, that one should always be patriotic and defend one’s country. That would be a moral law that you could apply to a variety of circumstances, and sometimes the outcome would be desirable, and sometimes not. Sometimes it might even lead to an outcome that one group would find desirable while another would not. And each would declare that Moral Law confirmed their opinion about whether the patriotism was “right” or “wrong,” morally speaking.

Instinct is merely a pattern of behavior. If the world were such an uncomplicated and reliable place that it were possible to write down a Moral Law that would infallibly dictate the best possible behavior under all possible circumstances, then there’s no particular reason why we couldn’t or shouldn’t develop moral instincts to fit the same pattern. As Lewis himself observes, that’s not possible, because the morality of an action depends on the circumstances in which it takes place. The same action, taking place in different circumstances, can lead to different consequences. What was good in one situation might be the worst possible thing in another.

Lewis actually makes a statement that is quite profound, once you strip it from his superstitious presuppositions and consider it in the light of real-world morality:

Strictly speaking, there are no such things as good and bad impulses. Think once again of a piano. It has not got two kinds of notes on it, the ‘right’ notes and the ‘wrong’ ones. Every single note is right at one time and wrong at another.

That’s a brilliant insight, and only Lewis’ Christian faith prevents him from realizing what he has stumbled across. An impulse—an intention to behave in a certain way—is not right or wrong in and of itself. That is, there is no universal rule that says “these kinds of impulses are always moral and those are always immoral.” Morality is a question of what kind of consequences will result from a particular course of action in a particular set of circumstances. That’s not the kind of problem that can be reduced to a manageable number of applicable Laws: either there will be some circumstances that the Law does not cover (meaning the “Law” will not always be right), or else it will have to enumerate every possible combination of circumstances, resulting in a virtually limitless list of special cases so picky that none of them would be suitable as a general guideline for human behavior.

Laws are, by nature, simplified rules that make certain assumptions about the circumstances under which they will be applied. These assumptions won’t always be correct, because no simple description can cover all possible circumstances. That’s why we have courts, and judges, and pardons and so on. Laws are inherently imperfect, and thus there can be no Perfect Law. As Lewis observes (without quite realizing the implications), “the point is of great practical consequence.”

The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs. There is not one of them which will not make us into devils if we set it up as an absolute guide.

As history has shown time and time again, that includes the common superstitious impulse that tells us we ought to obey God and His so-called Moral Law. An impulse is just an intention to act, and there is no law, no rule of how to act, that always prescribes the right thing under every possible circumstance. This is a brilliant insight from one of the most brilliant and famous authors in modern Western Christianity. It is really a shame that his faith won’t let him see the truth he has discovered.

In Chapter 1, C. S. Lewis introduced two ideas that (he claims) “are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in.” These two ideas are (a) that there is a universal Moral Law defining right and wrong, which we somehow inherently know, and (b) that we do not obey this law. Unfortunately, these two ideas are not themselves the product of clear thinking, and indeed are a rather biased and superstitious failure to understand human morals realistically. There is no singular universal Moral Law by which we all make moral judgments; rather, we judge right and wrong based on how we feel about the outcome. This fundamental disconnect between theory and reality has already bubbled to the surface in a number of inconsistencies between what Lewis claims and what we find through even a trivial examination of the real-world facts.

In Chapter 2, Lewis acknowledges some of these difficulties and attempts to either refute or discredit them. As we shall see, though, his attempts to reduce his troubles only adds to them. As the good fairy told Pinocchio, once you tell a lie, it grows and grows until it’s as plain as the nose on your face—even when you sincerely believe the lie because you first deceived yourself.

Lewis begins his response by suggesting that “a good many people find it difficult to understand just what this Law of Human Nature, or Moral Law, or Rule of Decent Behavior is.” Notice, he doesn’t credit them with having reasonable objections, or with having raised valid points about possible weaknesses in his hypothesis. He declares that they “find it difficult to understand” the concept he calls Moral Law. In other words, we’re starting from the assumption that these objections are not problems with his theory, they’re some kind of failure on the part of his critics.

For example, some people wrote to me saying, ‘Isn’t what you call the Moral Law simply our herd instinct and hasn’t it been developed just like all our other instincts?’ Now I do not deny that we may have a herd instinct: but that is not what I mean by the Moral Law. We all know what it feels like to be prompted by instinct… It means that you feel a strong want or desire to act in a certain way… But feeling a desire to help is quite different from feeling that you ought to help whether you want to or not. Supposing you hear a cry for help from a man in danger. You will probably feel two desires—one a desire to give help (due to your herd instinct), the other a desire to keep out of danger (due to the instinct for self-preservation). But you will find inside you, in addition to these two impulses, a third thing which tells you that you ought to follow the impulse to help, and suppress the impulse to run away. Now this thing that judges between two instincts, that decides which should be encouraged, cannot itself be either of them. You might as well say that the sheet of music which tells you, at a given moment, to play one note on the piano and not another, is itself one of the notes on the keyboard. The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play: our instincts are merely the keys.

Let’s be clear about one thing from the outset: there is no Moral Rule that says that whenever you hear a cry for help, the Right Thing To Do is to suppress your instinctive desire for self-preservation, and to put yourself into danger. Sometimes that’s the right thing to do, and sometimes that exactly the wrong thing to do. Ask any fire fighter who has seen co-workers endangered by family members rushing into the flames to seek a missing child. Ask the child who safely escaped, only to lose the parent that ran into the flaming home not knowing where the child was. The rightness or wrongness of the behavior is determined by the consequences of that behavior, not by some arbitrary rule that declares “Thus always shalt thou do.” There is no one rule that applies to all circumstances, and each decision must be weighed in light of its probable outcomes.

I suspect that when Lewis first developed this argument, he had never had any personal experiences that involved hearing a cry for help and putting himself in danger in order to come to someone’s aid. There’s something of the armchair hero in his dispassionate description of a person hearing a cry, experiencing Impulse 1, followed by Impulse 2, followed by a consideration of which moral principles to apply to the conflicting impulses in order to decide a final course of action. Contrast this with any number of true-life stories in which real people responded instantly and instinctively, in the heat of the moment, without taking the slightest thought for their own safety and well-being (and sometimes with disastrous results, as in the parent rushing back into the burning home). Lewis’ version doesn’t sound terribly implausible in and of itself, but real life nevertheless frequently begs to differ.

Another flaw in this argument is that it falls short of actually proving his point. Even if we allow that some 3rd-party agency is helping to arbitrate between two conflicting instincts, this would not necessarily imply that the arbiter was some kind of universal Moral Law. A far better explanation would be to say that one instinct is simply stronger than the other, so no rational evaluation of moral principles is necessary. And should the erstwhile hero happen to be sufficiently self-possessed to consider the implications before acting, it makes more sense to say that he bases his decision on the expected outcomes, rather than on knowing that Moral Code Section 79 Article 132 A stroke 17 applies to this exact circumstance.

Lewis is telling a superficially plausible tale consistent with the point he’s trying to make, but it does not bear up under scrutiny. Even if we leave the hero himself out of the picture, and just ask ourselves how hindsight decides which decision ought to have been more morally correct, the Moral Law explanation falls short of the “expected outcomes” explanation. We don’t really have any way to know what such a Law ought to prescribe, other than to consider the consequences of the actions. Thus, by assuming the existence of a Moral Law, we have learned nothing that we can’t discover by considering the outcomes apart from any such Law. All we accomplish by appealing to a Moral Law is making a concession to superstition, and manufacturing an excuse for inserting God into a picture that doesn’t really contain Him.

But let’s take a step back. Lewis’ point is that instinct is not enough to explain human moral behavior. Despite his flawed example and superstitious “explanation,” that’s a partially correct observation. Instincts contribute to how we feel about certain types of outcome, and not uncommonly contribute quite strong feelings. The tiger that ate Golg yesterday is going to be hungry again tomorrow, and when he comes back to our tribe, Golg won’t be there to help us defend ourselves. The tribe that runs towards the tiger when Golg cries out for help, is the tribe that faces less danger in the long term. The tribe that laughs and says, “Sucks to be you, Golg!” is the tribe whose gene pool is going to run dry when the tiger picks them off one by one.

That’s why we see “defend the herd” instincts in non-human species—creatures not made in the image of God and not subject to any particular “Moral Law” written on their hearts and souls. Evolution is capable of producing some quite sophisticated and even altruistic behaviors, purely from the ongoing experience of a collection of genes distributed in a pool of social individuals, human or not. Thus, while social instincts are not sufficient to explain all human moral behavior, they’re more than adequate to produce a lot of the behaviors, priorities, and decisions that Lewis would like to ascribe to some sort of invisible, magical Moral Law.

The flaws in Lewis’ rebuttal are not fatal to his argument, but they do provide us with a good illustration of the ways in which his superstitions get in the way of clear thinking. Human instincts are not passive keys, to be played or not played according to some kind of celestial sheet music. They’re spontaneous and motivational, driving our decisions, not responding to them. Lewis realizes this, I’m sure, but his superstitions constrain him, and he ends up with a flawed and inaccurate analogy. Instead of defending his arguments, he ends up highlighting the discrepancies between the way things really are and the way he thinks things ought to be. It sticks out like Pinocchio’s nose, but unlike the wooden boy, Lewis seems completely unperturbed. It’s part of what makes him so popular, in certain circles anyway.

Chapter 1 of Mere Christianity sets out to establish what C. S. Lewis calls “two facts” that “are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in.” We looked at the first of these “facts” last week: the notion that there is some kind of universal Moral Law, aka the Law of (Human) Nature, that dictates the definition of Right and Wrong. According to Lewis, we all know that this Moral Law exists, and we’ve even got some kind of inherent knowledge of what its commandments are. And yet (“fact” number two), we do not do what this Law tells us we should.

We’ll get to the rest of Chapter 1 in a moment, but first let’s note in passing just how far Lewis has already gone astray, due to the preconceived ideas he’s trying to impose on his interpretation of the evidence. Because he’s thinking in terms of divine commandments, he’s already introducing the notion that his so-called Moral Law is not just a description of common patterns of behavior, but is in fact some kind of obligation that each and every individual is somehow responsible to live up to. It’s a subtle little twist, but as he gets into the second part of Chapter 1, we’ll see that this extra little assumption is really a key factor intended to drive us to Lewis’ desired conclusion.

It’s kind of slick, in a way. He directs our attention to certain real-world facts (i.e. the way people judge actions in light of consequences), and then, while our attention is focused on the observations, he slips in a subtle, biased twist that colors our interpretation of these facts. Notice, the extra twist is not part of the observed facts: we don’t observe any Universal Moral Law with any objectively declared principle binding its precepts upon all mankind. This is purely Lewis’ ideology, injecting itself into the argument when it thinks no one is looking. Pretty sneaky, eh?

Before we get to Lewis’ second “fact,” let’s clean up a loose end from last week. Lewis is arguing that there is a universal, and universally-known, Moral Law.

Men have differed as regards what people you ought to be unselfish to—whether it was only your own family, or your fellow countrymen, or everyone. But they have always agreed that you ought not to put yourself first. Selfishness has never been admired. Men have differed as to whether you should have one wife or four. But they have always agreed that you must not simply have any woman you liked.

The problem with these two examples is that neither one is true. There have been and still are cultures and subcultures that admire those who put themselves first (and in fact some of our own celebrities are famous for it). They may not call it “selfishness,” since that’s the term used by people on the receiving end of this kind of behavior, assuming they don’t like it. But the cult of ego has always been a significant part of human society, and forms a large part of the “divine right of kings” mythology that has been popular for so much of human history.

Likewise, the people who “all agree” that you shouldn’t simply take any woman you like are the people who, despite the casual and callous sexism of Lewis’ era, were willing to admit that there is a certain merit to be had in respecting women’s rights. This has not always been a universal condition, and in fact in times of war the idea of “take any woman you like” has been rather popular, to the point that it even became part of the Law of Moses.

What Lewis is referring to is the common assumption that all “right-minded” men have agreed with the things he’s proposing, i.e. everybody whose moral perceptions must be correct because they match Lewis’ standards. He’s not reasoning based on things as they are, he’s simply exercising his own preconceived ideas about the way things ought to be. But like I said, that’s last week’s topic. Let’s move on to this week’s.

It seems, then, we are forced to believe in a real Right and Wrong. People may be sometimes mistaken about them, just as people sometimes get their sums wrong; but they are not a matter of mere taste and opinion any more than the multiplication table. Now if we are agreed about that, I go on to my next point, which is this. None of us are really keeping the Law of Nature. If there are any exceptions among you, I apologize to them. They had much better read some other book, for nothing I am going to say concerns them. And now, turning to the ordinary human beings who are left:

I hope you will not misunderstand what I am going to say. I am not preaching, and Heaven knows I do not pretend to be better than anyone else. I am only trying to call attention to a fact: the fact that this year, or this month, or more likely, this very day, we have failed to practice ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people.

Notice how Lewis’ preconceived ideas about morality inject themselves into his interpretation of the facts. Not only does he believe there is a real Right and Wrong, his argument implicitly assumes that this Moral Law is right about what’s Right and Wrong for everyone, all at the same time. He is assuming, in other words, that there’s always a Right thing we could have done, and that by failing to do it, we have done Wrong.

Sadly, we live in a world where this is not always the case. There are many situations where life gives us, not a choice between Right and Wrong, but a choice between Wrong and Wrong. Two shoppers each have handicapped granddaughters whose heart is set on getting a Groompy doll for Christmas, and there’s only one left. To be generous to the stranger is to add one more heartache to a small child’s life of misery. What’s the “right” thing to do? Or on a more serious note, take certain hot social issues, like abortion. To intentionally kill a healthy human fetus seems Wrong, but to violate a woman’s body via an unwanted pregnancy is also Wrong. What’s the Right answer? There isn’t one, which is why it’s so controversial.

In fact, if we go back to our original understanding of morality, we can see why this situation is more or less inevitable: we all judge Right and Wrong in terms of how we feel about the consequences of our choices. Some choices are easy: if you threaten enough people, they’ll gang up on you and eliminate you as a threat, which you probably won’t like. That’s easy, because there’s a clear difference between the good outcome and the unpleasant one.

But what about situations where all the outcomes are undesirable, albeit in different ways? There is no clear path to the right answer, because there is no right answer. This happens often enough in real life that we can say with reasonable certainty that Lewis’ mythical Moral Law is just that: mythical. We all wish there were always a way out, a right answer that resolves every situation, but there isn’t. Some of us, like Lewis, retreat from this harsh reality by imagining an invisible, universal, and eternal Law that knows all the right answers, even if we don’t. But this kind of fantasy is just wishful thinking, and it’s mere superstition to try and attribute our own moral behavior to this kind of imaginary Law of Nature.

This gives Lewis a significant handicap when it comes to trying to develop an impartial and reasonable system of morality and ethics. Had he begun with an accurate understanding of how we make moral judgments, he would have seen right away that there is no Moral Law that provides consistently Right answers to all human individuals at the same time. It can’t, because our moral judgments are based on consequences, and it’s frequently difficult, if not downright impossible, to find a course of action that produces outcomes that everyone regards as optimal. There’s just too much conflict and competition, and not enough material and social capital to go around.

Lewis has missed this point, which is a real shame because now he’s going to lay what he calls “the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in” without taking this vital element into account. Instead, he’s going to assume that there is always a Right answer, a course of action that we know we ought to do, and yet some mysterious force within each of us magically drives us to choose Wrong instead. Superstition piles up on superstition, and “clear thinking” gets buried at the bottom, unmissed and unlamented.

One of the most widespread arguments against atheism today is the claim that we know God exists because we all possess some kind of inherent knowledge of a universal and unchanging moral law, implying the existence of a universal and eternal Law-Giver. C. S. Lewis may not have been the first to make this argument, but he gives it an almost prototypical presentation in the first chapter of Mere Christianity, and it’s a safe bet that most modern proponents of the “moral law” argument took it directly or indirectly from Lewis. In a very real sense, then, we have an opportunity to study the roots of a major pillar holding up modern apologetics. And not surprisingly, we’re going to be most interested in the very large cracks at its base.

Last week, we spent some time exploring the consequences that would result from selfish creatures being able to anticipate the consequences of different actions, including the social consequences, and we saw how this would produce a natural and even inevitable functional morality. In essence, it’s just a set of guidelines: certain types of actions, in certain contexts, produce certain types of consequences, and therefore we selfishly want to pursue the actions that are most likely to produce the consequences we feel we would enjoy. No single set of rules can cover all possible combinations of circumstances and actions, of course, so any moral code will suffer from a certain number of ambiguities. Also, different individuals and subcultures have to act in different environments, which naturally introduces a certain amount of variation in the moral codes that evolve. Overall, however, we all have a lot of needs and wants in common, and thus our moral systems will naturally evolve a fairly common core set of values.

Lewis, unfortunately, isn’t starting from this kind of forward thinking. He starts from the assumption that moral law comes from a Creator God, and then looks for evidence he can use to support that conclusion. In other words, he’s indulging in backwards thinking: given the conclusion you want to reach, find some plausible-sounding chain that ends up where you want to be.

Lewis, however, is far too gifted a writer to present his argument as such an obvious rationalization. Instead, he presents it as though he were “discovering” some kind of real-world truth. It’s quite engaging, really: starting with observation and proceeding step-by-step to his conclusion, taking care that each step is carefully linked to the one before. It’s this realistic-sounding, pseudo-scientific approach that gives Lewis’ writing its appeal, and makes it sound like he’s really onto something. If we look closely, however, we can see that he achieves this superficial appearance by a careful selection of evidence and a biased interpretation of that selection.

He begins with the observation that people quarrel:

Every one has heard people quarrelling. Sometimes it sounds funny and sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant; but however it sounds, I believe we can learn something very important from listening to the kind of things they say. They say things like this: ‘How’d you like it if anyone did the same to you?’ — ‘That’s my seat, I was there first’ — ‘Leave him alone, he isn’t doing you any harm’ — ‘Why should you shove in first?’ — ‘Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine’ — ‘Come on, you promised.’ People say things like that every day, educated people as well as uneducated, and children as well as grown-ups.

What Lewis finds significant about such exchanges is that neither party is expressing a merely personal objection, as in “Hulk no like, Hulk smash!” Rather, the accuser is appealing to a standard of behavior that they expect the other to know about. And likewise the defender appeals to some kind of common standard, or to some circumstance justifying an exception to the standard. This is perfectly normal and natural, of course: two selfish individuals, arguing over which particular context ought to be applied to their actions, so as to lead to the desired social consequences. But Lewis wants us to see this as something bigger, as some kind of transcendent Mystery.

Quarrelling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and Wrong are: just as there would be no sense in saying that a footballer had committed a foul unless there was some agreement about the rules of football.

Now this Law or Rule about Right and Wrong used to be called the Law of Nature. Nowadays, when we talk of the ‘laws of nature’ we usually mean things like gravitation, or heredity, or the laws of chemistry. But when the older thinkers called the Law of Right and Wrong ‘the Law of Nature’, they really meant the Law of Human Nature. The idea was that, just as all bodies are governed by the laws of gravitation, and organisms by biological laws, so the creature called man also had his law — with this great difference, that a body could not choose whether it obeyed the law of gravitation or not, but a man could choose either to obey the Law of Nature or to disobey it.

You see what I mean about backwards thinking. Lewis wants to reach the conclusion that God gave mankind a moral law, and that wicked men sinfully choose to disobey that law. So far, all that he has really looked at, in terms of real world evidence, is the fact that people quarrel. From this simple observation, and in blatant disregard of simpler and more natural explanations, he leaps to the conclusion that there must be a Natural Law of morality that, unlike other natural laws, men have the power to choose to disobey (thus making them sinners in need of a Savior). And he backs this up with an appeal to authority: “the older thinkers” called it a Law of Nature, and they ought to know, of course, because they’re older thinkers. Which older thinkers, he doesn’t say.

This law was called the Law of Nature because people thought that everyone knew it by nature and did not need to be taught it. They did not mean, of course, that you might not find an odd individual here and there who did not know it… But taking the race as a whole, they thought that the human idea of decent behaviour was obvious to everyone.

He goes on to justify this conclusion on the grounds that if there were no Law of Right and Wrong, then “all the things we said about the war were nonsense.” Apparently even C. S. Lewis was not above using patriotism as a club with which to thump anyone who disagreed with his conclusions. But I digress. The more important point to consider here is whether it is really true that people do not need to be taught this so-called Law of Nature. Does Lewis really mean that morality is unlearned? That nobody gives any moral upbringing to their children? Is the Bible wrong when it admonishes parents to teach their children good morals? Is the book of Proverbs a complete waste of time?

Lewis here is combining an observed truth (people understand the social consequences of their actions) with utter foolishness (“people do not learn morality”). Morality is very definitely a learned/acquired concept, as shown by the influence of culture and other environmental factors on the type of morality you develop. Take polygamy, for example: was it immoral in King Solomon’s time to have 300 wives and 600 concubines? Tip of the iceberg, that. People learn morality both from explicit teaching and from experience. I doubt that many of us got lessons in Sunday School about proper etiquette while on a raiding party in World of Warcraft, but be greedy and grab the best loot a few times and see how long it takes you to learn moral lessons about the social consequences of online behavior.

Lewis’ argument is beginning to show the discrepancy between the conditions proposed by his argument and the conditions that actually exist in real life. In his argument, there is one moral law, given by one Law Giver, that everyone knows inherently and without being taught. There are a few individual exceptions, according to Lewis, but the rule is One Law to Rule Them All. The real world, however, is different: people do learn morality from experience, and there are different moral codes for different groups of people, according to the different conditions that exist for each group. Already the cracks are showing in Lewis’ argument, and he’s just getting started.

Lewis does recognize this problem, and he attempts to deal with it:

I know that some people say that the idea of a Law of Nature or decent behavior known to all men is unsound, because different civilisations and different ages have had quite different moralities.

But this is not true. there have been differences between their moralities, but these have never amounted to anything like a total difference. If anyone will take the trouble to compare the moral teachings of, say, the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese, Greeks and Romans, what will really strike him will be how very like they are are to each other and to our own… I need only ask the reader to think what a totally different morality would mean. Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him.

Be careful what you wish for. I remember a chapel service in the Christian college I attended where we watched a movie based on a book called Peace Child. It was a missionary story about evangelizing a tribe of occasional cannibals who regarded treachery as a virtue; when they first heard the gospel, they thought Judas was the hero because he betrayed Jesus! Would that be a “totally different” morality, by Lewis’ definition?

The trick here is that Lewis is making a false dichotomy: either all moralities are the same morality, or else each morality must be totally different. That’s like saying that either all languages are the same language, or else each different language must be totally different. But look, there are nouns and verbs and adjectives in Greek and Norwegian and Spanish; grammatically, it’s striking how much they have in common. Does that mean they’re all the same language, which everyone knows because it was written in their hearts by their Creator? Isn’t it really more likely that common needs give rise to similar solutions?

Lewis’ big failure here (and elsewhere) is that he fails to consider simpler and more plausible alternatives. This is one way we can tell that he’s driving towards a pre-determined goal, guided by backwards thinking, instead of using forward thinking to expose the ordinary consequences of sentient behavior. He wants to reach the conclusion that there is one Moral Law, given by one Law Giver, and so he glosses over the fact that we have a number of very different moralities, even if we look just at the Old Testament vs. the New vs. modern Christian culture. Not totally different, of course, but different enough that they’re more consistent with a natural, consequences-based morality than they are with a supernatural, One Law morality.

We’re ready to start the main body of Mere Christianity, but before we delve into what Lewis calls the “law of human nature,” let’s take a moment to do some forward thinking. Let’s start with a species that is intelligent enough to have some understanding of cause and effect, so that they can anticipate the probable consequences of their actions, and choose the ones which will have the most favorable outcomes. Let’s further suppose that these beings possess enough empathy to communicate with each other, to recognize each other’s feelings, and to anticipate what sort of feelings others are likely to feel in any particular set of circumstances.

Given this as a premise, plus the assumption that each individual wants to achieve the most favorable possible outcomes, what consequences would we expect as the members of this species interact with each other and with an environment that contains both dangers and opportunities? If we look at a few specific scenarios, I think a clear general trend will emerge.

Let’s start with Ogg, Glog, and Berk, three members of a clan of these beings. In the first scenario, each one is fending for himself, looking for food. Ogg manages to catch a squirrel—not really a satisfying meal, but better than nothing. Glog, however, decides it would be easier to steal Ogg’s squirrel (or demand a part of it) than to catch one of his own, and the two begin to fight, allowing Berk to sneak in and steal the whole thing while the first two are distracted. Berk gets a meal, but now Ogg and Glog are both mad at him.

Second scenario: a moose wanders into the clan’s hunting grounds. It’s too big for any two or three hunters, so the clan gathers all of its hunters into a full scale hunting party. Ogg and Glog join in the hunt, but they deliberately don’t let Berk in on it because they’re still mad about the squirrel. The hunt is successful, and all the hunters, including Ogg and Glog, get a good, satisfying meal. Berk gets some too, as part of the clan, but by the time the hunters have finished, all the choice bits are gone and he has to make do with leftovers.

We could spend quite a lot of time exploring this particular set of scenarios, but these two give us a good starting point. Notice first of all the consequences of competition versus cooperation. The competing hunters had to settle for smaller prey since each was operating on his own, and the results were poor. Also, as Berk found out, certain behaviors had social consequences: by putting his own selfish interests ahead of those of the rest of the clan, Berk lost social esteem, and found that he received less benefit from intra-clan cooperation than the other hunters did.

The cooperative consequences were much better: the group could work together to bring down much bigger prey, thus providing much more food for each individual in the tribe. It wasn’t a matter of “I’ll give you some of my squirrel and then we’ll both have an inadequate meal,” it was “wow, that was some moose, I couldn’t eat another bite.” Competition is inevitable, and not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, but the potential rewards of cooperation are frequently far better.

What we have here, then, is the evolution of a rudimentary moral system, i.e. a set of guidelines that help us categorize behaviors into those which promote conflict and competition versus those which promote cooperation and mutual benefit. We can call these guidelines “evil” versus “good,” but that’s just a label. The main significance is that we recognize and encourage the behaviors that we anticipate will bring the most desirable outcomes.

And speaking of labels, notice we’re not necessarily talking double-entry bookkeeping here. Ogg and Glog didn’t write down “Debit: one stolen squirrel; Credit: one missed moose hunt.” They got mad at Berk, and regarded him as a “Them” in the age-old categories of Us versus Them. It’s much simpler and more commonplace to categorize people according to how you feel about them. Can you imagine if we had to make all our decisions about how to treat people on the basis of adding up every interaction we’ve ever had with them, assigning a positive or negative score to each, and then adding up the total to see if it ended up on the plus side or the minus side?

It’s much easier, and more instinctive, to simply put labels on people, and then base your judgments on how you feel about the label: liberal vs. conservative, believer vs unbeliever, freshman vs. senior, dude vs. babe, black vs. white, homo vs. hetero, etc. And here’s the trick: if we’re talking about people that know about feelings like this, and who can anticipate that certain behaviors will put them in certain social categories, then that in itself becomes a “moral” guideline. We want to do things that will benefit us; we don’t want to do things that will cause us to end up in an unfavorable category (like Berk did).

We can make several predictions based on the above evolutionary scenario. First of all, we can predict that different groups will evolve different moral standards, though with a lot of common ground based on our common experience (i.e. we tend to have fairly predictable feelings about being robbed, assaulted, threatened, and so on). This is a perfectly natural outcome resulting from the immediate material consequences of certain types of competitive actions, regardless of the culture in which they occur.

Next, we can also predict that there will be certain individuals who will find competition more personally advantageous than cooperation is: the schoolyard bullies, or the bloody tyrants. Their moral system won’t restrain them from harming others, because they’re big enough and bad enough to get away with it. By the same token, however, very few people will adopt such narrowly selfish moral codes because such codes benefit the bully/tyrant at the expense of others, leaving others with little reason to admire the code. The others will stick to seeing that sort of conduct as wrong.

We can also predict that evolved moral codes will tend to have different guidelines for those outside our own social group than they do for those inside our group. For example, the code may say that it is wrong to tell a lie, meaning that it’s wrong to tell a lie to another member of the same group. At the same time, it can be perfectly ok to tell a lie to someone outside the “Us” group (“Do you know where the Jews are hiding?” demanded the Gestapo leader…), and sometimes it might even be wrong not to tell a lie.

Finally, we can predict that moral codes will continue to evolve, as we continue to acquire experience and (hopefully) wisdom regarding which behaviors do or do not contribute to the most desirable outcomes. There may be a period when the bully/tyrant can build a society by imposing his own strength and will on a troubled and chaotic world, and his servants might very well see his tyranny in terms of “the divine right of kings,” assuming they’re better off with a strong bully on the throne than they are with dog-eat-dog anarchy and disorder. But such periods can end, as stability opens up new experiences in the benefits of cooperation, equality, and liberty. Despotism’s Golden Age can fade and tarnish, morally speaking. And likewise with slavery, sexism, and homophobia.

Thus, what we have in the real world are a number of moral codes, with common core principles that evolve naturally out of our common, human reactions to behaviors that are materially harmful to us or beneficial to us. These natural, real-world codes are further augmented by the anticipatory social awareness that helps us recognize which behaviors are going to promote cooperation (and consequent benefits) within our society, versus those which are going to put us into undesirable social categories and to provoke undesirable conflicts with those around us. And these codes evolve and adapt to the particular social and environmental circumstances of the groups that hold them, leading to regional and temporal variations from one another.

This is an extremely important concept for us to grasp, because not only does it spare us the superstitious mistake of ascribing “right” and “wrong” to some invisible legislator in the sky, but it also explains what “right” and “wrong” really mean, and how they are grounded in objective reality itself. When we say that murder is wrong, this is not an arbitrary and whimsical designation. It’s not that some celestial tablet-scratcher flipped a coin that came up tails. Murder is wrong because it produces undesirable outcomes in the real world: undesirable for the victim’s friends and family because they are grieved and hurt by their loss, and undesirable for the murderer because he has just put himself in the category of Dangerous Threats, and society will, if it can, work to eliminate him somehow.

C. S. Lewis, I daresay, isn’t going to see this. That’s going to seriously handicap his argument, because the alternative is actually a pretty sad little system. The alternative is to say that there is no real-world basis for right and wrong, that it’s just an arbitrary system made up by some celestial bully/tyrant, and the only reason we need to care about it is that He is strong enough and brutal enough to hurt us if we fail to play along. That’s not an ethical system, it’s autocratic mind games. It’s like saying blue is good and green is evil—neither color has any intrinsic moral qualities, good or bad, they’ve just arbitrarily been designated as one or the other. Is murder really no more intrinsically immoral that some randomly chosen color?

No. Real-world morality is not arbitrary. It arises naturally and inevitably from the consequences (including the social consequences) of our behavior. And God Himself cannot change that.

I don’t want to get bogged down in the preface, but there are one or two points here worthy of comment, so I thought I’d put one more post into it. As we saw last week, Lewis hasn’t even gotten into the main part of his book yet, and already he’s running into problems with his basic premise. His goal is to “defend the belief that has been common to nearly all Christians at all times,” a kind of “mere Christianity” that transcends personal bias and denominational bickering. And yet, as both ancient and modern church history show, this common core of beliefs is sufficiently elusive that its defenders have a hard time expressing what it is without falling into the No True Scotsman fallacy. Lewis, alas, is no different.

Lewis, to his credit, realizes that it would be an error to claim to defend Christianity while at the same time offering only a defense of his own personal or denominational faith.

The danger clearly was that I should put forward as common Christianity anything that was peculiar to the Church of England or (worse still) to myself. I tried to guard against this by sending the original script of what is now Book II to four clergymen (Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian, Roman Catholic) and asking them for their criticism.

No Baptists, no Pentecostals, no Eastern Orthodox, and certainly no Mormons (God forbid!). Just a careful selection of faiths close enough to his own beliefs to be “real true Christians” but different enough that he can convince himself that he is indeed presenting “the belief that has been common to nearly all Christians at all times.” Indeed, he even convinces himself that he has been “of some help in silencing the view that, if we omit the disputed points, we shall have left only a vague and bloodless H. C. F.” (by which I presume he means “Historic Christian Faith”). The careful reader will notice, however, that he has “silenced” this view by omitting a substantial number of the disputes, leaving only minor disagreements to trouble him.

Curiously, even though Lewis sets out to prove a common, non-denominational body of “mere Christian” faith, he seems to judge true Christian spirituality in terms of one’s commitment to a mainline denomination.

Hostility has come more from borderline people whether within the Church of England or without it: men not exactly obedient to any communion. This I find curiously consoling. It is at her centre, where her truest children dwell, that each communion is really closest to every other in spirit, if not in doctrine. And this suggests that at the centre of each there is a something, or a Someone, who against all divergencies of belief, all differences of temperament, all memories of mutual persecution, speaks with the same voice.

One of the hazards of being a truly intelligent believer, as Lewis is, is that your intellectual gifts allow you to imagine some pretty amazing things and to arrive at rationalizations that make them sound plausible. Here is C. S. Lewis, Oxford don, talking himself into believing that the major divisions within Christianity are inspired, at their center, by a common spirit speaking the same things to all. Amazing. And notice, the “truest” children of each of these faiths are those who allow other men to tell them what to believe; the independent believers, who make their own judgments about questions of faith, are “borderline” and disobedient.

One would think that, if all these denominational divisions were an imposed burden on Christianity, then the goal of a true believer ought to be to pursue the “mere Christianity” instead of the denominational divisions. But, as Lewis himself admits, there are significant differences that cannot be swept under the rug, and indeed that he would not want to sweep under the rug.

[Y]ou cannot … conclude, from my silence on disputed points, either that I think them important or that I think them unimportant. For this is itself one of the disputed points. One of the things Christians are disagreed about is the importance of their disagreements. When two Christians of different denominations start arguing, it is usually not long before one asks whether such-and-such a point ‘really matters’ and the other replies: ‘Matter? Why it’s absolutely essential.’

So Christians have divided themselves into conflicting denominations over issues that really matter, and indeed are absolutely essential—and yet Lewis would have us (and himself) believe that at the center of each of these denominations is the same Spirit speaking with the same voice, whether the denomination is right or wrong about the essentials. What’s more, true believers need to be obedient to some denomination (whether or not it is right about essential issues), because failure to obey these teachings (even the wrong ones!) makes you a “borderline” Christian whose doctrinal objections can safely be ignored when compiling a list of beliefs “common to nearly all Christians at all times.”

I’m expecting some Lewis to build some pretty interesting arguments on top of this foundation, aren’t you?

Let’s move on. Lewis next announces his reluctance to address topics where he himself is not “in the front lines” as it were. Thus, for example, he intends to skip over any discussion of the morality of birth control, as he is neither married, nor female, nor a priest. Nor a priest? Hang on, it’s not because he thinks priests have some special knowledge about birth control. He just says it means he has no pastoral responsibility towards women, and therefore he’s going to take advantage of the opportunity to dodge that issue as well. Whew.

He next complains that the word “Christian” should be used only in the very specialized sense of someone who follows the teachings of the apostles, as the disciples in Antioch did. That one struck me as a little odd, given that I would have thought a Christian would be someone who followed the teachings of Christ, not the teachings of his apostles. That, however, opens up a whole lot of disputed points about what Jesus really taught and intended by his teachings, and Lewis would just as soon leave those out, in order to maintain the myth that there is a common set of core beliefs that have been held by nearly all Christians at all times. So “apostles’ teaching” it is.

He closes his preface by assuring us that he does not intend for “mere Christianity”, the common beliefs of all Christians, to become an alternative to denominations. Rather, he compares it to a hall—not an auditorium style “great hall” or anything, just an ordinary unadorned hallway, with doors leading off to the actual rooms.

I hope no reader will suppose that ‘mere’ Christianity is here put forward as an alternative to the creeds of the existing communions—as if a man could adopt it in preference to Congregationalism or Greek Orthodoxy or anything else. It is more like a hall out of which doors open into several rooms. If I can bring anyone into that hall I shall have done what I attempted. But it is in the rooms, not in the hall, that there are fires and chairs and meals. The hall is a place to wait in, a place from which to try the various doors, not a place to live in.

I think I know exactly what he means. “Mere” Christianity, the set of core beliefs that nearly all Christians have held since the beginning, is not satisfying. When you’re out in the hall, it’s just you and God. What makes the rooms interesting and attractive is that there are people there, people like you, people who are real. Maybe not in all the rooms, but just keep trying the doors until you find a group of people who are enough like you that you can call them true children of the faith. And if you still don’t succeed, find a door to an empty room (there’s lots!) and make your own denomination. Others will be along presently to join you.

The one thing you don’t want to do is to ask which door God Himself is hiding behind. Keep looking for that door long enough, and you’ll find the one that leads outside, where the sun is shining and the air is clean. There are people there, too, the “disobedient” and independent thinkers, or in other words, the free. Some are good and some are bad (just like inside), but they can come and go as they please.

But enough metaphor. Lewis has set the tone for his book, and it’s a rather peculiar tone: Christian unity is something to be praised rather than something to be pursued. Denominational divisions are a hindrance to the spread of the gospel, and at least some of the divisions are about genuinely essential matters, yet the goal is to pretend there is unity in order to get people into the hall, and from there into one of the denominations (right or wrong). And that’s ok, because even the wrong denominations are inspired by the same Spirit speaking to all in the same voice. Not that you should necessarily listen to what those other denominations are teaching, of course.

Where I come from, enticing people under false pretenses is considered immoral. If being honest about your faith means it’s harder to make converts, maybe there’s something wrong with your faith. Professor Lewis ought to have been bold and forthright about the conflicts and contradictions within Christianity rather than trying to produce an elegant and articulate cover-up. But that, it seems, is what we have to deal with here.

I’ve got a very simple and straight-forward example of an instance where the claim, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” can easily be shown false.

The problem with extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence is that believers have no extraordinary evidence to back up their extraordinary claims (otherwise why would they be so vexed by this requirement?). It’s not at all that skeptics are making any kind of unreasonable demand. All that this oft-repeated claim means is that if you’re going to say something is true, then we ought to be able to see things in the real world that are consistent with what you claim: if you claim extraordinary things are part of the real world, then we ought to be able to see extraordinary things, in the real world, that are consistent with those claims.

But that’s too much to ask of the credulous, so they’re anxious to rationalize away this perfectly reasonably requirement. Let’s see how cl tries to get out of this one.

Take the claim that some person climbed a tree, for instance. I doubt there is anybody out there who would deny this claim’s ordinariness, as people have been known to climb trees since antiquity. If I were to make the claim that some person climbed a tree, what sort of evidence would a reasonable individual require?I’m willing to bet your answer to that question would be comprised of one or more of the following:

1) some kind of hard evidence, e.g. an authentic photograph or video footage;

2) reliable testimony from a trusted source.

If your answer is comprised of one or more of the aforementioned, then I’m going to argue that it’s fair to call those examples of “ordinary evidence.”

Notice that he’s distinguishing between “ordinary” and “extraordinary” on the basis of commonality vs. rarity. Tree-climbing is “ordinary” because people have frequently been observed to climb trees, and it’s common knowledge that humans have a long history of doing so. Likewise, photographs of people climbing trees, and trusted sources who report seeing people climb trees, are proportionately common. Since this evidence occurs frequently, and not rarely, it is “ordinary” and not “extraordinary.”

He continues with this same standard in his “extraordinary” example—only not quite.

Next, take the claim that some person climbed one of the 88-story Petronas twin towers in Malasia. I doubt there is anybody out there who would deny this claim’s extra-ordinariness, as such feats are, well… simply not ordinary. If I were to make the claim that some person climbed one of the 88-story Petronas twin towers in Malasia, what sort of evidence would a reasonable individual require?

I’m willing to bet your answer to that question is going to be the same as your answer to the previous question: either some sort of hard evidence, reliable testimony from a trusted source, or both.

As such, I’m going to argue that the person who makes the argument, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” either misuses the term extraordinary, or attempts to increase the claimant’s burden of proof without justification.

Did you catch that? Climbing the Petronas towers is “extraordinary” because it doesn’t happen very often. How often do you see hard evidence, then, of someone climbing them? Equally rare. Reliable witnesses saying they saw someone climbing them? Equally rare. By cl’s usage of “extraordinary,” the evidence is just as “extraordinary” (i.e. “rarely encountered in real life”) as the claim. Yet he denies that the evidence is extraordinary because the type of evidence (e.g. photographic, or eyewitness testimony) is the same as for the “ordinary” case. In other words, he’s using a different definition of “extraordinary,” a definition based on type rather than on frequency of occurrence.

We can use that standard too, but if that’s the case, climbing a tree and climbing a building are both “ordinary” in that they’re both examples of humans climbing things. In other words, if we define “extraordinary” as meaning that the category itself must be rare, then neither example is extraordinary, since both fit in same the category of “people climbing.” What makes the Petronas climb extraordinary is the particular set of details in which it is different from other instances of people climbing things. But then, the same is true of the evidence: what makes it extraordinary are the particular details that make this particular photograph, or this particular eyewitness testimony, different from other photographs and testimonies.

Thus, it’s not the skeptic who is misusing the term “extraordinary,” it’s cl himself who equivocates on the meaning of the term, defining the claim as extraordinary based on the rarity of the details, and defining the evidence as ordinary based on the broad category of types of evidence. If you maintain a consistent standard of what “extraordinary” means, then the evidence can and must be just as extraordinary (or just as ordinary) as the claim it supports, just as cl’s example shows. This leaves cl with a double fail on his hands, because not only does his argument fail to prove his point, but we’re also left wondering just why he feels the need to try and make this argument in the first place. People who actually have reliable evidence don’t go around trying to downplay its importance.

I’ve got a few books in my queue now, but I think the book I’d like to tackle next is Mere Christianity, by C. S. Lewis. It’s a logical next step, because Lewis is one of the people who helped define the modern, evangelical Christianity that Geisler and Turek were mere apologists for. It also doesn’t hurt that Lewis is a higher calibre of thinker, which may spare us some of the groaners G&T laid on us with distressing regularity.

Of course, Lewis is going to have his own set of quirks. The first page of the preface, for instance, consists of Lewis explaining how the contents of the book were originally given on the radio, and how the first printed edition used contractions and italics to capture the informal feel of the original talks. It says a lot about his personality that he feels the need to explain to us why contractions and italics were a mistake, and how the new edition expands all the contractions and rephrases the sentences to emphasize the ideas without the use of italics.

Never fear, though: this book isn’t going to be a tedious lecture on the fine points of grammar and typography. After this initial fussiness, he jumps right in to what I think may be a core problem in the whole book. And, sad to say, he doesn’t seem to notice that it’s a problem.

The goal of Mere Christianity is surprisingly similar to that of Colson’s The Faith: to unite Christians around a common core set of beliefs. Where Colson’s approach was inspired largely by his conservative political agenda, though, Lewis’ goal is more strictly evangelical. He believes, or wants to believe, in a fundamental unity of the Body of Christ (i.e. the Church), that both underpins and transcends the doctrinal and denominational diversity that have been part of the religion since the apostles’ first squabbles.

The reader should be warned that I offer no help to anyone who is hesitating between two Christian ‘denominations’. You will not learn from me whether you ought to become an Anglican, a Methodist, a Presbyterian, or a Roman Catholic. This omission is intentional… Ever since I became a Christian I have thought that the best, perhaps the only, service I could do for my unbelieving neighbours was to explain and defend the belief that has been common to nearly all Christians at all times.

And this is where things begin, very subtly, to go wrong. In setting out to “explain and defend” a consistent belief (singular) that has been “common to nearly all Christians at all times,” Lewis must first assume that such a thing exists. It’s understandable that he would make this assumption. Truth is consistent with itself, and therefore Christianity cannot be based on the truth unless it is based on some core, self-consistent body of doctrine that defines it. Underneath all the controversy, there must surely be something we could call “mere Christianity” that’s just the plain truth about God without all the inconsistency and mutual contradictions of denominationalism.

The problem is that, in fact, the self-consistent core is what’s missing from Christianity. As Lewis himself observes:

There are questions at issue between Christians to which I do not think we have been told the answer. There are some to which I may never know the answer: if I asked them, even in a better world, I might (for all I know) be answered as a far greater questioner was answered: ‘What is that to thee? Follow thou Me.’

The reason Lewis cannot find answers, and thinks it possible that he may never know the answers, is that the questions have to do with why some very clear and authoritative Christian teachings say one thing, while equally clear and authoritative Christian teachings say something irreconcilably contrary. Of course, such observations are unsurprising if you are willing to consider that Christianity is merely an imperfect myth arising from the confused superstitions and misperceptions of men. For Lewis, though, these are mysteries that “ought never to be treated except by real experts.”

Lewis sees very clearly that these internal inconsistencies and mutual contradictions make a poor argument for Christianity as The Truth About God.

I think we must admit that the discussion of these disputed points has no tendency at all to bring an outsider into the Christian fold. So long as we write and talk about them we are more likely to deter him from entering any Christian communion than to draw him into our own. Our divisions should never be discussed except in the presence of those who have already come to believe that there is one God and that Jesus Christ is His only Son.

The inconsistencies of Christian teaching are solid evidence that Christianity arises from fallible human sources rather than from infallible and divine inspiration. The solution Lewis proposes, however, is not that we should reconsider Christian claims about the Gospel, but that Christians should seek to hide the problem until after the potential convert has bought into the faith. And he sees nothing at all dishonest in this advice: he’s merely being pragmatic. People need to be converted to Christ; open discussion of Christian issues prevents people from converting; therefore we need to suppress open discussion, QED.

To be fair, Lewis’ position is not entirely unjustified. Consider, for example, the way creationists exploit disagreements between scientists as a means of discrediting evolutionary science in toto. Is it unfair to suggest that discussion of complex, subtle, theological issues ought to be restricted to those who have the background to properly understand subtle and complex theology? Not necessarily.

On the other hand, not all of it is about fine points of esoteric and theoretical issues. For example, where is a believer supposed to turn for answers to questions about the faith? Is the Bible the sole authority for Christian faith and practice, or did God appoint a local presbyter (aka “presbyter” aka “prester” aka “priest”) to serve as His designated representative via a hierarchical chain of command culminating in an infallible Pope? That’s a rather practical, down-to-earth everyday example, and you’ll get different answers from Catholics and Protestants. (Ask an Eastern Orthodox while you’re at it!)

Do you have to be baptized to be saved? Seems like a question whose answer ought to be reliable, but again, you get different answers depending on who you ask. Catholic? Orthodox? Protestant? Which Protestant? Different denominations have a different answer yet again. Does the Holy Spirit indwell believers, and manifest His charismatic gifts, in modern times as He (allegedly) did in the past? Should we listen to messages that come from via utterances and interpretations? Again, depends on which Protestant (or even which Catholic!) you ask.

If Jesus was God, and he prayed “not my will, but Thine be done,” which of those two wills was God’s will? How can Jesus be God, and yet his will is not God’s will? Or how can God’s will be contrary to God’s will, such that you can pray “not [God's] will, but [God's] will be done”? Or if Jesus has two wills, a human will and a divine will, which one is “Jesus’ will”? Here you’ll have a harder time getting a consistent answer from any Christian, and it starts to verge on the esoteric. But these are some of the fundamental inconsistencies in the very nature of what Christians believe about who God is, as well as about the relationship between Jesus and God. If Jesus is not divine (and thus not possessed of infinite virtue etc), then can you make the doctrine of Redemption work? Can one mere mortal human life atone for all of the sins of all mankind?

The reason so many divisions, denominations, and doctrinal disputes exist within the Christian framework is because Christianity is fundamentally flawed and inconsistent at its core. Wise and rational men, like C. S. Lewis, realize that Christianity needs a self-consistent core if it is to be a genuine Truth, and so they make it self-consistent by a process of rationalization: sifting through the contradictions, and finding redefinitions and collateral assumptions that can be added to produce something more plausible. It’s almost a quantum phenomenon: by observing “mere Christianity,” you collapse the multiple conflicting possibilities into something that (in your own perception at least) is more solid.

The problem, of course, is that where genuine quantum phenomena collapse into a common, objective reality, the theological equivalent only exists within the minds of the men who conceive them—and these “realities” frequently conflict. There may be some shared perceptions among small groups of people with similar personalities, backgrounds, cultures, biases, politics, and so on. But the fundamental differences still arise, and still produce denominational (and non-denominational) divisions within the Church.

Lewis’ goal is commendable: he wants to take an objective view of Christian faith, and to present the core beliefs of Christianity without bias or partisanship.

I am not writing to expound something I could call ‘my religion’, but to expound ‘mere’ Christianity, which is what it is and what it was long before I was born and whether I like it or not.

Despite this noble goal, and indeed because of it, he is going to fail. “Mere” Christianity is a myth, a “truth” that isn’t there. In the process of trying to collapse the superimposed assumptions, interpretations and superstitions of historic believers into a solid, self-consistent belief common to all, he is inevitably going to reduce it along the lines that seem most reasonable to his own preconceptions and preferences. In the process, he’s going to create a subtly new Christianity for millions of Western believers—his religion, whether he calls it that or not. And, like countless believers before him, he won’t even know he’s done it.

I have a couple more substantial books coming in, but in the meantime I thought I’d take a quick look at Chuck Colson’s book The Faith. As some of you may recall, I bought this book in response to a request from a publicist at Zondervans, who invited me to submit questions to Colson, which the latter promised to respond to publicly in his blog. I sent him two rather simple ones (I thought), and never heard from him again. Go figure. So now I’ve got the book, and I’ve got a gap in the XFiles series, so it seems like it must be God’s will for me to review it now.

Here’s the Reader’s Digest ultra-condensed summary: What do Christian’s believe? A curious mixture of evangelical pop theology and contemporary conservative politics (what Colson calls “social holiness”). Why do Christians believe? Because great Christians demonstrate the power of God by the way they fearlessly face persecution and death for their beliefs. Why does it matter? Because if Christians don’t jump up and vote Republican every time Karl Rove says “family values,” they might end up following the example of the great Christians, and frankly that scares the shit out of them. The Church may love martyrs, but they love them best when they’re someone else.

This curious dissonance pervades much of The Faith, with Colson admiring and even gloating over the sufferings of Christians as though this were a noble and enviable witness, while at the same time superstitiously attributing these sufferings to a lack of faith, and suggesting that we could and should avoid suffering a similar fate by doing more to make our nation a Christian nation.

For example, the book opens with the story of the homicidal maniac who broke into an Amish schoolhouse and shot ten girls, five of whom died from their wounds. The last chapter features the story of the murder of Theo van Gogh by a Muslim extremist. Both stories are told in vivid, emotional detail, though slanted to make the victims’ desperation sound like noble piety in the girls’ case, and sheer futility in van Gogh’s case. Both stories are told to try and bring home the point that only “orthodox” Christianity can save us from having future generations praise us for the same reasons as Colson praises the Amish girls. God forbid.

In the introduction, Colson says that his goal is to lay out, in about 240 pages, the key points of Christian orthodoxy that Christians need to know. Obviously, if you’re going to summarize the key points of Christian doctrine in a mere 240 pages, there’s a substantial number important points you need to discuss. You need to be extremely focused and selective. Sensational stories, told in lavish and even lurid detail, would only waste space that could be spent discussing things like how Christians address the problems with the Trinity, or theodicy, or other vital doctrinal issues.

Colson, however, is not a theologian, he’s a politician. And make no mistake, The Faith is a political book rather than a theological one. Though the subject matter of the book is ostensibly religious and doctrinal, the primary goal of the book is to unite the largest possible body of voters believers around a core set of conservative doctrinal and political principles. Don’t expect this book to explore, in any depth, any of the issues that have divided Christians in the past and continue to divide them today.

Take the Protestant doctrine of sola fide (“[salvation] by faith alone”). If this idea is part of “the Faith once for all delivered to the saints,” then the Roman Catholics have clearly strayed from orthodoxy, but if not, then the Protestants are the heretics. What does The Faith have to say about these issues? Nothing much. He does affirm that sola fide—properly understood—is part of Christian orthodoxy. But look at how he says it.

The New Testament makes it clear that this gift of salvation, becoming righteous, or exchanging identities comes by faith—not works—or any merit of our own (Ephesians 2:8). I helped to organize a group called Evangelicals and Catholics Together (ECT), which underlined the agreement of both communions on this central question in a remarkable 1997 document, affirming what the Reformers meant by sola fide—or faith alone!*

*[footnote:] “The Gift of Salvation,” First Things (January 1998), 20—23, also at www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=3453&var_recherche=gift+of+salvation. “We agree that justification is not earned by any good works or merits of our own; it is entirely God’s gift, conferred though the Father’s sheer graciousness out of the love he bears us in his Son, who suffered on our behalf and rose from the dead for our justification…Faith is not merely intellectual assent but an act of the whole person, involving the mind, the will, and the affections, issuing in a changed life. We understand that what we here affirm is in agreement with what the Reformation traditions have meant by justification by faith alone (sola fide).”

Sounds like a great victory for ecumenism, doesn’t it? Particularly for the Protestant side of ecumenism? Colson certainly seems to think that he’s managed to convince the Catholics (or at least some Catholics) that the Reformers were right about sola fide, and that salvation is by faith alone. In actual fact, though, all he’s done is to get them to agree to redefine sola fide in Catholic terms, such that faith itself becomes a work (“an act of the whole person…issuing in a changed life). Notice that the core disagreement—whether works like baptism are required for salvation—is neither mentioned not discussed. All that has happened is that he’s gotten both sides to agree that works alone are not sufficient to earn justification. Since neither Catholics nor Protestants teach that good works can save you apart from the grace of God and the atonement of Christ, this was not a difficult compromise to reach.

Compromise, consensus, lowest common denominator—these are the tools of the politician’s craft, and Colson is using them with a rather cavalier disregard for the deeper doctrinal issues that he’s glossing over. The doctrine is actually less important, you see. What matters is getting more and more Christians to lower their standards, ignore their theological differences, and unite around a conservative social and political platform so that conservative Republicans can have a solid, monolithic, and multitudinous power base to draw on.

That’s why such a short book on doctrine has so many lengthy and tabloidesque digressions: they not only evoke manipulatable emotions, they also help fill in the gaps left by the important issues that he’s not going to touch, in the interests of political expediency.

This book is a (no pun intended) textbook example of why a failure to separate church and state inevitably does the church more harm than help. The important issues, the issues that define why your church is not some other church instead, are left behind, sacrificed on the altar of political necessity. Unity comes at the expense of doctrinal compromise, and the state religion is reduced to what little bit of vague nothing happens to be shared in common by all believers.

As you know, I like to dig into a book and see what makes it tick. That’s probably not going to happen this time, because Colson isn’t so much defending Christian doctrine as he is attempting to exploit it for conservative political ends. Besides, it’s not a terribly substantial book, and there’s just not a whole lot of depth to dig into. So as soon as the other books get here from Amazon, I’ll probably abandon The Faith.

After all, it won’t be the first time.

(Book: I Don’t Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST, by Geisler and Turek, Appendix 1.)

We’re just about done with Geisler and Turek’s attempt to deal with the existence of evil and the problems this poses for their allegedly all-good, all-wise and all-powerful god. And, in a bit of a surprise twist at the end, it turns out that the unbeliever actually wins this one. The Christian runs out of answers, admits that his “explanations” don’t really do the job, and ends up encouraging the atheist to just have faith. Great way to end a book called I Don’t Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST, eh?

Remember last week, when Dr. Geistur (the Christian) argued at some length that there were five possibilities regarding the creation of the world, and that there was some reason why God had no choice but to create a world that would end up full of sin and evil? Yeah. Turns out that was all a sham. This world is not the world that an all-wise, all-powerful and all-good God would make, and Geistur knows it.

GEISTUR: God can’t force free creatures not to sin. Forced freedom is a contradiction.

STRAW: But this world could be better if there were one less murder or one less rape. So God failed because he didn’t create the best possible world.

GEISTUR: Hold on. While I will admit that this world is not the best possible world, it may be the best way to get to the best possible world.

Geistur has been caught out, so he tries to quickly change the subject, which we’ll get to in a moment. But let’s notice first that Straw’s point is exactly right. Not all attempts to sin are successful. Sometimes you try to blow up a plane, and only set your undies on fire (ouch!). This world we live in already contains the possibility that sin can be thwarted, despite the free choice of the would-be perpetrator. Even if you insist that God is too pro-choice to deprive us of our free will, He still has plenty of opportunity to intervene to prevent actual harm from being done between the time sin occurs in the heart and the time the villain’s evil intention is carried out.

What’s more, when Person A plans to murder Person B, A’s free will has implications for B’s free will, since murder interferes with B’s ability to freely choose what they will do with their life. Even if God is constrained to minimize infringements on free will, it’s a wash. Somebody‘s free will is going to be harmed, so why does the evil person get his way and the good person doesn’t? Straw’s point doesn’t go far enough (naturally, since he’s only a straw man atheist). It’s not just that God failed to create the best possible world, it’s that He fails every day to do what He can to make it better.

Oops, the atheist is right, time to wave hands and try and distract the audience. You gotta love the choice of words here. Geistur can’t come right out and claim that this world is the best way to bring about the best possible world, because then he’d have to show how it’s the best possible way. He says it “may be” the best possible way. Faced with a solid, substantial, real-world problem raised by the atheist, the Christian backpedals and offers only empty speculation.

The problem is that Geistur doesn’t really have an answer for this one, or for the problem of evil in general. The best he can offer is some hand-waving and the hope that somehow, some way some mysterious and inscrutable answer might be out there somewhere. He assumes that it probably builds character or something.

GEISTUR: God may have permitted evil in order to defeat it. As I’ve already said, if evil is not allowed, then the higher virtues cannot be attained. People who are redeemed have stronger character than people who have not been tested. Soul-building requires some pain.

Kinky.

So if men, being made in God’s image, are devoid of the higher virtues and cannot obtain them without allowing and participating in evil, then it stands to reason that God must also be devoid of the higher virtues, and unable to obtain them, since there’s nobody available to redeem Him from His sins. Geistur’s argument also implies that God must have a weaker character, for the same reason. Otherwise it would be possible to have a strong character without sinning, and then we could have a world in which evil did not play such a vital role.

Let’s remember, too, that we’re only talking about the speculation that the present world may be ONE means of arriving at a better world. It’s not the only way to do so, and it’s certainly not the best. As we’ve mentioned before, Geistur’s own Super Bowl illustration gives us one model that a wise and good God could have used to build a world that builds character through competition. If God were smarter than His worshippers, He ought to be able to think of lots more. (Hey, as long as we’re indulging in empty speculations anyway, right?)

Unfortunately for Geistur’s rosy and shapeless daydream, Straw spoils the mood by asking why God would create people knowing they were going to choose hell. Geistur’s answer, rather astonishingly, is to suggest that it’s like parents choosing to have children, knowing that some day they would disobey! No, seriously, he tries to make it sound like an omniscient God, knowing full well the endless agonies to be suffered by the damned in Hell, would be no more put off by it than a parent would be at the thought of a child choosing to go his own way. Geistur even brings in his Super Bowl illustration again to try and sell the point.

GEISTUR: I was willing to take the risk of loss in order to experience the joy of love. The same is true  of every Super Bowl. Both teams know that one will lose, yet both are willing to play the game despite that risk.

Can’t you just see God sitting up in heaven, in His comfy armchair, TV remote in one hand, cold beer in the other, saying, “Yeah, I knew that billions would end up screaming and sobbing in ceaseless torture just so I could have a few worshipers, but that’s a risk that I was willing to take. You have to take risks to get the most out of life, you know.”

Nice guy. And this is Geistur, the Christian, painting us this cozy picture of his God deliberately creating sinners to go to Hell because the rewards to Him outweighed the risks to us—at least as far as He was concerned. Not a sparrow falls to earth without God’s knowledge, Jesus tells us. It’s just that God doesn’t care. Sweet.

Let’s just give each player a chance for one final quote:

STRAW: I must admit that your intellectual answers make some sense, but evil still bothers me.

GEISTUR: It bothers me too, and it should.

That’s a good closing line. It should bother him, because his straw man’s praise notwithstanding, his intellectual answers only show the tremendous inconsistencies in his Gospel. The rest of Geistur’s lines are all about having faith in some invisible Comforter Who, in some indefinable, subjective, imaginary way, will “help” us to endure the evil that his bastard God has benevolently prescribed for us, as “good” medicine to help us build some kind of “higher character.” Oh yes, and Jesus died on the cross, so He knows all about what it means to have to endure the consequences of sin. Well, except for the part about eternal suffering in Hell, of course. But that’s a risk He was willing to take, so He could get a few worshippers.

I think we can see now why Geistur’s very first priority in this discussion was to demand that we assume that God exists. Under no circumstances is any of this evidence allowed to be applied to the central question of the book, i.e. whether or not real-world evidence reflects the existence of a Gospel-style deity. It might seem like the most fundamental obvious question an apologist ought to have to deal with, but it’s off-limits. And now we know why: the real-world evidence is not consistent with the existence of a God that matches Geistur’s description.

God does not show up in real life. The only source of information we have about God is what we can obtain from the thoughts, words, and feelings of men. Not only is evidence of God absent from the real world, but the evidence which does exist is deeply and fundamentally inconsistent with the evidence that would result from such a God existing and creating us.

Geisler and Turek are right about one thing, though: they don’t have enough faith. When you believe what men tell you, just because men tell you, despite seeing how inconsistent it is with the real world, that’s not faith. It’s gullibility.

And we’re done! There are two more appendices, but they’re primarily aimed at refuting liberal Christianity, and I’m not terribly interested in pursuing that. Maybe some day. But I think we’ve pretty much finished our consideration of what Geisler and Turek think of as the primary evidence for God’s existence. It’s a weird combination of superstition, denial, double standards, and (of course) plain old gullibility, but it’s not what I’d call really good evidence.

So much for that then.

How can we help such people understand why America is not (and does not want to be) a Christian nation? The other day I though of a parallel that might be helpful: calling America a “Christian Nation” is like calling America a “White Nation.” Yes, there were quite a lot of Founding Fathers who espoused at least vaguely Christian rhetoric, just as there were quite a few who owned slaves. And yes, you can find a lot of early American policies and precedents that favored Christianity, just as you can find a lot that favored white men. And you can even argue that, by “freedom of religion,” the Fathers meant being free to choose whatever flavor of Christianity you like best, just as you can argue that when a slave owner like Thomas Jefferson writes “all men are created equal,” he really means only that all white males are equal, and not that women and/or other races are also equal.

If you’re a white supremacist, you may not see anything wrong with doing any of the above. If you’re a Christian supremacist, then you may see a problem only with the “White Nation” arguments (even though they’re the same as your own, slightly re-framed). And that’s the point. The Christian Nation arguments are Christian Supremacist arguments. They’re a bigoted demand that your religion be publicly and officially acknowledged as supreme above all other religions, just as white supremacists demand that whites be held superior to all other races. And that’s why sensible and fair-minded men and women should oppose all efforts to turn America into the kind of Christian nation that our Founding Fathers came here to get away from.

We’re watching a kind of textual cartoon in which Geisler and Turek have a straw-man atheist (Mr. Straw) grilling a Christian (Dr. Geistur) on the question of evil. So far, the atheist seems to be giving the Christian a pretty hard time, and the Christian, despite his smug and triumphant tone, is floundering.

It goes no better for the Christian when Mr. Straw asks why God created people knowing that so many of them would end up eternally damned in Hell.

GEISTUR: Good question. There are only five options God had. He could have: 1) not created at all; 2) created a non-free world of robots; 3) created a free world where we would not sin; 4) created a free world where we would sin, but everyone would accept God’s salvation; or 5) created the world we have now—a world where we would sin, and some would be saved but the rest would be lost.

Or at least, those are the only 5 options Geisler and Turek could think of, so naturally an all-wise and all-knowing God would be incapable of finding or creating a sixth alternative. Right?

That’s the problem with creating God in your own image: you may want to claim that He has the power to make things be whatever He wants them to be, but in actual practice, He can’t exceed the limits of your imagination. He’s restricted to being and doing only what you believe He should, because you’re the one that’s creating Him. So the five options that Dr. Geistur imagines for God are indeed the only five options He has available.

Even given those five options, however, Geistur has a hard time making the last option look like the best (or only) possible alternative. Let’s look at his excuses one by one.

GEISTUR: …The first option can’t even be compared to the other four because something and nothing have nothing in common. Comparing a real world and a non-world is not even like comparing apples and oranges, since they both are fruit. It is like comparing apples and non-apples, insisting that non-apples taste better. In logic, this is called a category mistake. It’s like asking “What color is math?” Math is not a color, so the question is meaningless.

Hmm, grass is not a color either, but the question “What color is grass?” is hardly a meaningless question. Plus, a chocolate bar is a non-apple, and some people do think chocolate tastes better than apples. But quibbles aside, it’s clear that Geistur is attempting to brush off this question without really addressing it. Sure, if you’re really determined, you might think of some instances where it would be meaningless to compare a thing with the absence of a thing, but that’s not a universal principle.

For example, if you have sex with someone other than your spouse, that’s adultery. If you don’t have sex outside of marriage, that’s not adultery. Is Geistur saying that it would be a category error to claim that non-adultery is better than adultery? Good health is not disease; disease is not good health. Can we not determine whether the presence of one is better or worse than its absence? Can we not compare the presence of poisons in our food to the absence of poison, and say which is better?

If we’re talking about God’s choice of actions, we can certainly say that it’s better not to do anything than to do something that results in endless suffering for untold billions of people. Morally, that should be a no-brainer. Plus, even if it were true that you couldn’t compare non-creation with the creation of evil and endless suffering, that’s still no reason for God to create endless suffering. If you can’t compare the two, then neither is better, and God has no reason to prefer to create suffering. Geistur ignores this factor as well, and moves on to the next alternative.

STRAW: Ok, so why didn’t God make his second option—a robot world?

GEISTUR: He could have, but that wouldn’t have been a moral world. It would have been a world with no evil, but with no moral good either.

And why would you need morality, if there were no evil? Once again, Geistur’s God is constrained by the limits of His creator: the fallible mortal man, Dr. Geistur.

Personally, I think it’s rather fascinating that Geistur is convinced a world where God exists and evil doesn’t, a world in which men are the unblemished image of God and obey His will perfectly, would necessarily be a world in which no moral good would exist. What does that tell us about God’s nature and God’s will? Even more ironic, Geistur is trying to make it sound like Robot World would be a bad thing. But how could it be “bad” if morality does not exist, and there is neither good nor evil?

Geistur just moves on to the next two options (with some carefully scripted help from Mr. Straw).

STRAW: So why didn’t he make worlds three or four? Those worlds would allow love, and they certainly would be better worlds than this one.

GEISTUR: Yes, but  not everything conceivable is actually achievable with free creatures… God can’t force free creatures not to sin. Forced freedom is a contradiction.

Interestingly, Geistur concedes that at least two of the five options would be better than the one God supposedly chose. His excuse for why God didn’t choose one of them? Same as Rabbi Kushner’s: God lacks the power to pull either of them off. Despite His allegedly unlimited power and allegedly unlimited wisdom and alleged sovereignty over the affairs of men, God can’t create a world in which free men would fail to sin.

Straw’s next line should have been “Will we have free will in heaven?” but I rather suspect Geistur’s head would have exploded.

Geistur’s God may be constrained by the conceptual limits of His creator, but we’re not, so let’s look at some of the ways a moderately clever God could have created world three. (World four is uninteresting because it involves God creating a sinful world full of suffering and injustice, and why go through all that when there are better alternatives available?)

Despite their morbid preoccupation with sin (especially other people’s), Christians don’t necessarily have a good understanding of why people sin. Instead of understanding the real reasons, they superstitiously give credit to a magical “sin nature” (or “law of sin” as Paul called it) that works mysteriously and inexplicably to cause us to want to do evil just for the sake of being bad. It’s like cartoon bad guys: they don’t have a reason to want to destroy freedom and justice and truth and such, they’re just, well, bad guys.

Real people aren’t cartoon bad guys. They do things for reasons, and those reasons seem good at the time. Address the underlying reasons why people “sin,” and they’ll no longer have any motivation to do wrong. Poof, there’s world three, a world in which people freely choose not to sin because they have no reason to sin.

How? Well, let’s look at a few of the reasons why people do bad things: ignorance, misunderstanding, unsatisfied appetites and biological drives, competition for scarce resources, and so on. Those are all factors that can be addressed, at Creation time, by a wise, good and loving Creator, without compromising the free will of the creatures. Don’t design creatures that need to eat each other for food. Equip them to survive and thrive on sunlight or some other limitless energy source. Don’t give them biological territorial instincts or irresistable and indiscriminate sex drives. Wire their brains to enable perfect empathy and understanding of others, and let them perceive instantly why the good choices are more desirable than the evil choices.

And of course don’t give them a sin nature that will enslave them and force them to do evil against their will. That was what Paul was complaining about, but it’s hardly mandatory that we have such a thing. For that matter, it’s silly to protest that “free will” prevents God from being involved when our free will is already being violated by some kind of magical sin nature. If free will is what we don’t have, then God runs no risk of causing us to lose it.

Geistur’s final score: three swings, three misses. The real world is simply not consistent with what Geistur wants us to believe about the existence and nature of his imaginary God, and when he tries to make excuses for why this is so, his answers are not consistent with reality or with each other. He ducks and dodges and dances away, but he never does provide us with answers that have the easy and automatic self-consistency of real-world truth.

Hang in there folks, we’re almost to the end (of Appendix 1). Geistur is going to try one last time to convince us that evil isn’t all bad, the end justifies the means, and it’s all for our own good. Stay tuned.

I remember watching a cartoon, long ago, where the rabbit was visiting Holland, and happened to spot a hole in the dike. Naturally, he stuck his finger in it to plug it. Well, you can guess the rest. No sooner does he plug one hole than the dike springs another leak. Soon he’s plastered himself to the wall, using fingers, toes, and even his long rabbit ears to plug all the leaks, and then even more leaks break out. He can’t plug the new ones without taking his fingers out of the old ones. You just know this isn’t going to end well for the poor rabbit!

I don’t know what sort of expression was on the faces of Geisler and Turek as they wrote their appendix on the problem of evil, but the more I read it, the more I think they must have had the same intense look of inventive desperation as that cartoon rabbit had. Every time they turn around, their rationalizations have new holes, and they’re running out of fingers to try and plug them all with. The best solution—replace the shoddy structure with a sound and solid one—isn’t available to them. Instead of taking a consistent, cohesive approach, they must resort to an erratic and hyperactive succession of sound-bite rationalizations, hoping to save the day by jumping from leak to leak fast enough to stop the flow of disaster. It doesn’t actually work, but at least they can feel good about how busy they are.

Today’s installment starts with Mr. Straw (the atheist) reminding Dr. Geistur (the Christian) that his excuses thus far have failed to explain why God does not intervene to warn us about preventable disasters like 9/11.

STRAW: If you knew [9/11] was going to happen and had the power to stop it, wouldn’t you have stopped it?

GEISTUR: Yes.

STRAW: So you are better than God!

GEISTUR: No, by stopping 9/11, I would be preventing evil. But God, who has an unlimited, eternal perspective, allows evil choices knowing that he can redeem them in the end. We can’t redeem such choices, so we try to stop every one.

What Geistur fails to consider here is that God, in this scenario, is not merely permitting evil choices, He is making an evil choice of His own, by deliberately withholding information that could have been used to thwart the attacks. That, you may remember, is the exact crime that Moussaoui was sentenced to life in prison for: knowing about the attacks in time to warn people, and not informing the authorities. And God is guilty of the same crime, at least according to Geistur’s theology.

Nor does it excuse the evil of God’s own choices to promise that in some unexplained way we might hope for the possibility that God’s unlimited power might find a way to “redeem” this evil choice later on. A perfectly good God would not need to make up for His evil choices later on, since He would not make evil choices in the first place. Geistur thinks he has plugged the new hole, but all he’s really done is take his finger out of the old one, by putting God in the role of a sinner Who needs forgiveness Himself. And this isn’t the only hole Geistur opens up, as Mr. Straw also notices.

STRAW: Yes, but by your own Christian doctrine, God doesn’t redeem all evil choices in the end. After all, some people go to hell!

GEISTUR: Yes, but that’s because God can bring eternal good only to those who will accept it. Some people ignore the facts or simply choose to play the game in a way that brings them defeat. Since God cannot force them to freely choose to play the game the right way, ultimate good only comes to those who choose it.

Notice how each answer not only fails to solve the original problem, it creates additional problems as well? The problem with 9/11 is that God made the evil choice to withhold the vital, lifesaving information. Geistur attempts to plug this leak by saying God should be excused because He will redeem this evil choice later. When pressed, however, he admits that this isn’t really true, and that God will not redeem them, and in fact cannot redeem them, except for what Jesus called a “few” people. So this answer fails more often than it succeeds.

Geistur doesn’t notice this, though, because in true ADHD fashion he’s already shifted to a completely different compartment in his thinking: the notion that people only go to Hell because they obstinately refuse to go anywhere else. From Geistur’s point of view, God obviously cannot have any flaws, and therefore all these unanswerable problems must be man’s fault, somehow. The problem of God’s evil choice simply pops behind one of Geistur’s magic blinkers, where he can’t see it, and his attention is focused solely on how evil people are.

The problem with this excuse is that people are supposed to be made in God’s image. Geistur is assuming that, left to their own free will, most people will become progressively more evil until they are so opposed to good that they will cause their own harm rather than allow themselves to experience God’s eternal good. They’re made in the image of God, and therefore they naturally become progressively more evil as time goes on. This isn’t just misanthropic, it’s blasphemous!

Nor does it help to say that some kind of “sin nature” is preventing us from valuing and pursuing godliness. If a sin nature is some kind of external influence—that is, if it’s something that’s not an inherent part of human nature as created by God in His own image—then God could solve that problem by purging us of that sin nature (as the Cross is supposed to enable Him to do). Then our free will would be truly free, and we could pursue the good that, being made in God’s image, we ought to innately desire. If He can’t do that because our free will (created in His image) actually prefers the sin nature, then what does that tell us about the image we’re supposedly made in?

And remember, this situation is all supposed to be part of God’s plan, which He foreordained before the foundation of the world. If God today finds Himself in a situation where He has no choice but to make evil choices, which He will usually fail to redeem later on, because He has allowed us to acquire the kind of sin nature that prevents us from pursuing the innate desire for good which ought to come from being made in His image—well, if that’s the way things are, it’s only because that’s the way He always intended for things to be. Even when you try to excuse God due to “circumstances beyond His control,” Christian doctrine teaches us that He and He alone is ultimately responsible for creating and directing those circumstances, according to His own will. His behavior, thus, is inexcusable. He is, and must be, responsible for His own actions, or He is not truly God (at least as the Bible describes Him).

Interestingly, after floundering around for a while trying to make it sound like people should be glad that God allows them to go to Hell, Geistur seems to get an inkling of this same problem. If the situation today is such a mess, why would God create it this way in the first place? That should be interesting, though I’m not too hopeful of any truly profound insights from the good Dr. Geistur. I don’t think we’ll have room for it all in this post, though, so let’s break here and pick this up again next week. Cheers.

We’ve been listening to a fictional Christian, whom we’ve dubbed “Dr. Geistur,” as he tries all sorts of excuses for why God does not oppose evil in the kind of tangible and productive ways that would be consistent with the existence of a good and all-powerful deity. We’ve heard him excuse God on the grounds that God really has no choice, that somehow He lacks the power to prevent evil from happening one way or another. We’ve heard him criticize a Jewish apologist for making basically the same argument, on the grounds that all things are possible for God. We’ve heard him propose analogies like the Super Bowl, as illustrating how struggle can make victory sweeter (though he apparently fails to realize that it also illustrates the existence of alternatives that do not require resorting to sin and evil). And we’ve heard him try to sell the idea that evil isn’t really all that bad, and that it’s actually good for us, in the long run.

As if that hasn’t sufficiently made a general hash of his own religious beliefs, he next turns to this tidy morsel of misanthropy:

STRAW [the Atheist]: If God is infinitely powerful as you say, then why does he allow bad things to happen to good people?

GEISTUR: We’ve already pointed out that there are good outcomes for pain and suffering. But we also need to point out that the question makes an assumption that isn’t true.

STRAW: What’s that?

GEISTUR: There are no good people!

Charming, isn’t it?

Now in all fairness to Dr. Geistur, he’s not indulging in any personal antipathy towards his fellow mortals. He’s merely upholding an anti-human bias that’s inherent within his religion itself. As I mentioned before, one of the techniques that con men use to deceive their victims is the “Blame the Pigeon” strategy. People are more gullible when they’re afraid that they’re guilty of something, so to keep your pigeons from seeing through your scam, you just need to make them feel guilty.

Christianity takes this a step further by asserting that we are all guilty, by definition. There are no good people, according to the Gospel—just like there’s no naturally luxuriant and vibrant hair according to the marketing department of your favorite shampoo and conditioner. Even before you start, you’re inherently inferior and inadequate, and you need our product to make you socially acceptable. Even if we don’t have any actual product to deliver.

Dr. Geistur then gets the strawman atheist character to confess to having told lies and having stolen things. Mr. Straw protests that he’s not all bad, but Geistur retorts that he’s not all good either, and then broadens that to include all people, including babies who, in his view, are sinfully guilty of being selfish. Mr. Straw is judging himself to be more or less good relative to other people, but (Geistur argues) he’s failing to consider where he stands on an absolute standard of goodness.

The point of this whole little diversion is just to get to a point where Geistur can go back to Rabbi Kushner’s book When Bad Things Happen to Good People, and claim that Kushner is making incorrect assumptions about both God and man. As far as Geistur is concerned, evil in the world is not a problem for an omnipotent God because the victims all deserve to suffer. The only real question, according to Geistur, is “Why do good things happen to bad people?” In other words, he’s invoking the Rapist’s Defense (“She was asking for it!”) as yet another excuse for God’s failure to oppose evil in any tangible, real-world way.

Like I said: charming.

Let’s take a moment here to indulge in some of the thinking that’s sadly failing to happen in this little dialog between the Christian and the straw man. Is it really true that there are no good people? And is there an absolute standard of goodness for us to measure people against?

Obviously, the answer to the first question is no, it’s not true at all. But to explain why, we need to understand the answer to the second question, which is also “no.”

When Dr. Geistur accuses Mr. Straw of judging people by comparing them with other people, he’s making an astute observation. We do judge how good people are by comparing them with others. What Dr. Geistur fails to realize is that this is the correct way to judge goodness in a person’s life, because “goodness” is a social relationship whose existence is defined by the person’s interactions with others. If you don’t consider the person’s behavior in light of the other people they are interacting with, then you’re taking things out of context, and are not making a fair judgment.

When a person is part of a group, there’s a certain tension between the best interests of the individual and the best interests of the group. “Goodness,” in a social context, consists of finding a workable balance between behaviors that benefit the individual and behaviors that benefit the group. Ideally, we want to maximize the behaviors that are beneficial to both, and minimize the behaviors that are detrimental to one or the other. It’s “good” to be a positive example and a reliable contributor to the well-being of the group, but it’s “bad” to be too much of a taker/exploiter, or too much of a doormat. “Goodness” is that which maximizes the benefit to all involved.

Now, that’s a fairly abstract description because different groups actually have different characters, objectives, and priorities. “Good” as defined by a fellowship of stay-home, full-time, home-schooling evangelical moms, and “good” as defined by an association of activists working to promote First Amendment liberties, might not be entirely the same list of behaviors. Is it “good” to depend on a wealthier relative to meet your own financial needs? Again, in a third world culture, it might very well be good (and even inescapable), whereas in an affluent society like America it might be seen as a sign of moral weakness, or worse.

How about mandatory celibacy? Good or bad? Even within Christianity, you’ll get a different answer depending on which group is considering the question (and who’s being proposed as being subject to the restriction). Is gay marriage better or worse than promiscuous gay sex? Hmm, might be hard to get a consistent answer to that one too, and might lead the Christian to reconsider his or her answer to the question about mandatory celibacy.

I think you see my point. There is no absolute standard of goodness, because goodness exists relative to a particular person, in a particular set of circumstances, in the context of a particular group with a particular set of standards, expectations, constraints, and so on. If you were to write a book containing an enumerated listing of which actions were “good” for a particular person in a particular social/cultural/economic context, the table of contents alone would probably consume all of the world’s paper and ink!

But by and large, no such reference guide is even necessary. We know that there are good people, and bad people, and we judge them according to our own contexts, as we should and must. But more to the point—and to get back to the topic Geistur is failing to address—none of that has anything at all to do with deserving to be born with crippling birth defects, or deserving lifelong poverty and starvation, or deserving premature death due to natural or man-made catastrophe.

Rabbi Kushner originally asked (and tried to answer) a perfectly good question about why a supposedly good God fails to intervene in cases where the victims suffer evils that they have not provoked by any correspondingly evil deeds. Geistur’s diversion into abstract hamartiology is just that: a diversion, a hand-waving attempt to distract us from the fact that he has no good answers. Go ahead: argue about whether or not it’s inhumanly barbaric to seriously claim that babies deserve to be born with horrendous, life-shattering birth defects. At least if you’re debating hamartiology, you’re not asking why God allowed an innocent child to suffer, and the real question of evil has been successfully dodged.

I wish I could say that this was just a momentary lapse on Geistur’s part, but skimming ahead… no, sorry, there’s lots more where that came from. Stay tuned (if you can stand it).

The Tea Partiers are the intellectual bastard children of Karl Rove and Rupert Murdock (and similar manipulators of public opinion). Bred from the innuendo and suspicion fostered by conservative political strategy, they have grown up unable to trust any authority, even the ones that created them.

The plan was that by using slander and demagoguery, conservatives could control what people believed and how they would vote. It even worked, for a while. But much to their current surprise and dismay, it’s turning out that the victories they’ve bought with their dishonest tactics are victories they’ve charged to a very expensive credit card. And it’s time to pay the bills.

The trouble with rabble-rousing is that you end up with a lot of roused rabble. And in this case it’s a lot of roused rabble with an inherent mistrust of authority. Is it a coincidence that they’re developing a taste for candidates like Sarah Palin and George Bush, whose popularity is based on their lack of “elite” leadership skills? If you don’t trust your leaders, why not put the incompetents in that position, so they’ll be less of a threat, eh?

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. There’s no cure short of waiting for the Tea Partiers to realize that denying reality is mostly self-destructive. The question is, can the RNC survive the monster they worked so hard to create?

Last week, in the debate over evil, Dr. Geistur (the Christian) told Mr. Straw (the atheist) that evil wasn’t really all that bad, and that the end justifies the means. This week continues along the same lines, with some gratuitous mockery of atheists and some blissfully oblivious hypocrisy thrown in for color.

MR. STRAW: So you’re saying that evil has a purpose that has implications in eternity.

DR. GEISTUR: Yes.

From man’s point of view, evil is evil, but from God’s point of view, evil is ultimately not just good, but better than having no evil at all.

This is why the first curveball Geistur threw was an insistence on having this debate under the assumption that God must exist. That’s a very important assumption, because without it, if we remember that God does not show up in real life, and that the real question is whether or not men are feeding us a coherent and reasonable theology, the fact that you end up arguing “evil is good” might seem like a pretty serious self-contradiction.

At this point, there’s a bit of a breakdown in the script. Geisler and Turek, the authors, break the fourth wall in order to take a gratuitous swipe at atheists in general.

STRAW: Suppose there’s no eternity. Suppose we live, we die, and that’s it.

GEISTUR: It’s possible, but I don’t have enough faith to believe it.

STRAW: Why not?

GEISTUR: Haven’t you read this book?

STRAW: No, I jumped right to this appendix.

GEISTUR: That’s just like you, isn’t it? You don’t want to play the game; you just want to see the final score.

Take that you atheists! You can practically see Geisler and Turek sitting in front of their keyboards, worrying about what happens if anyone just skims their book. Suppose they go straight to the appendix, and judge the whole book by the quality of their arguments about theodicy? We don’t want them to conclude that the rest of the book is this bad, do we? Hey, I know, let’s make them think that’s what the evil lazy atheists all do—then they’ll have to read the whole book, just to “play the game.” Problem solved!

Word.

Of course, if you do read the whole book, like we have, you might notice that Geisler and Turek’s whole argument for eternal life and eternal judgment boils down to just taking man’s word for it that these unseen and self-contradictory ideas are really true. Because they “don’t have enough faith” to question what men tell them, even when the teachings are perverse and absurd. And they’re making fun of the atheists?

But it’s not just atheists who earn Geistur’s smarmy contempt. America in general—yes, this great Christian nation we always hear so much about—is equally to be dispised:

STRAW: I suppose I suffer from the American disease of instant gratification.

GEISTUR: That’s probably why you’re having trouble realizing the value of suffering and “no pain, no gain!”

STRAW: You’re right, reading this book is too painful. It’s too long.

I’ll grant you that it is indeed painful to watch a pair of otherwise educated scholars undertake a long, slow process of intellectual self-castration, especially when using instruments as blunt as those favored by Geisler and Turek. But somehow I don’t think that’s what Geistur is trying to say. Having gotten hold of a pleasurable fantasy, Geisler and Turek are indulging in a bit of self-gratification, imagining atheists everywhere moaning and gasping in the pain from the hard-hitting points they raise. Let’s give them a few minutes of privacy, shall we?

Ok, all done guys? Good, let’s get back to the actual discussion then, shall we?

STRAW: …let’s get back to the question of evil. If there is an eternity, then some evils in this world may have an eternal purpose. But there are certainly some evil acts in this world that have absolutely no purpose.

GEISTUR: How do you know?

STRAW: It’s obvious! What good purpose could there be in, say, the terrorist attacks on 9/11?

GEISTUR: While I wish it had never happened, there were some good things that came out of those terrible events. For example, we came together as a country; we helped those in need; and we resolved to fight the evil of terrorism. We were also shocked into pondering the ultimate questions about life, and some people came to Christ as a result of it. As C. S. Lewis said, pain is God’s “megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” 9/11 certainly woke us up!

Wow, Geistur came really close to admitting that 9/11 did more harm that good. And he really has to grope a bit to find some way to make evil sound like good. The terrorist attacks were good because they brought us together as a country? Really? I can’t help but wonder if Geisler and Turek would make the same argument today. Is this really the Great Revival they were hoping for? Are they glad that 9/11 led to a Republican rush to war in Iraq that proved disastrous and unjustified, resulting in a Democratic backlash that put Obama in the White House?

It’s no wonder why Geistur wishes 9/11 had never happened, despite his vague and empty reassurances that some good must surely come out of it. And, just to increase his discomfort, Straw presses the issue by pointing out that even if a few good things happened, the bad outweighs them. Geistur falls back on that favorite Christian stand-by: agnosticism.

STRAW: Yes, you can find a silver lining in just about anything, but there’s no way your “silver lining” outweighs the pain and suffering.

GEISTUR: How do you know? Unless you are all-knowing and have an eternal perspective, how do you know the events of 9/11 will not work together for good in the end? Perhaps there are many good things that will come out of that tragedy in the individual lives we will never hear about. In fact, good results may even come generations from now unbeknownst to those who will experience them.

STRAW: Maybe, but I don’t have enough faith to assume that.

Oops, I lied. That last line is not what Straw originally said. It’s only what he would have said if he were a real atheist instead of Geisler and Turek’s sock puppet straw man. In the book, Mr. Straw just whimpers something weak about Geistur copping out. That gives Geistur a chance to repeat his argument about how limited human knowledge is and how little we know about the future. And therefore evil is good, because we can’t ultimately know beyond all possible doubt that it is indeed evil.

Straw does redeem himself a bit with this next line, though.

STRAW: If God would tell me his reasons, then maybe I could believe you.

GEISTUR: Job already tried that tactic. After he questioned God about why he suffered, God baffled Job with questions about the wonders of creation (Job 38-41). It’s as if God were saying to him, “Job, you can’t even understand how I run the physical world that you can see, so how are you going to understand the vastly more complex moral world that you cannot see—a world where the results of billions of free choices made by human beings every day interact with one another?” Indeed it would be impossible for us to comprehend such complexity.

And just to prove the deep intellectual profundity of this point, Geistur backs it up with an allusion to the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, starring Jimmy Stewart. Cause what I’m sayin’, you just can’t argue with a fictional character that was portrayed by Jimmy Steward, know what I mean?

Ok, sarcasm aside, this is actually very close to bringing up an important and truly profound point. The issue is not whether an omnipotent and omniscient deity might know something humans don’t know. The issue is whether Straw, the man, could and should believe Geistur, the man. We’re not talking about observing God behaving in mysterious ways, we’re talking about the claims that men like Dr. Geistur make in God’s absence, and whether these claims have self-consistency of real-world truth.

If God were to show up in real life and tell me that He has reasons, then I would believe. That’s the difference between Job and Geistur. Job knew that God had reasons, because God showed up in person to tell him He had reasons, whether or not those reasons made any sense to Job (or to anyone, for that matter). Geistur has nothing like that. He does not know that God has any good reasons for allowing 9/11, he’s just clinging to faith in the doctrine that God must have had a reason.

Meanwhile, Straw is weighing the evidence to see whether or not Geistur is saying things that make enough sense to be believable. And Geistur can’t offer Straw the evidence that Job had, because Job had a God Who cared enough to show up in real life and to, well, to tell him to STFU. We don’t have that. God doesn’t show up even as a bully to suppress honest inquiry with thinly veiled threats. So it’s up to Jimmy Stewart to try and make up for God’s absence.

Geistur is, ultimately, making an appeal to agnosticism (or an appeal to ignorance, if you prefer). That’s a pretty poor argument, though, so he tries to deny that he’s doing it.

STRAW: But it seems like that’s an argument from ignorance.

GEISTUR: No. It’s not like we have no information about why bad things happen. We know that we live in a fallen world, and we know that good things can come from bad. So we know it’s possible that God can have a good reason for bad things even if we don’t know what those reasons are. And we know that he can bring good from bad. So it’s not an argument from ignorance, but a reasonable conclusion from what we do know. And while we don’t know the reason for every specific bad thing that happens, we know why we don’t know: we don’t know because of our human limitations.

And that’s Geistur’s final summation for his argument from agnosticism; after this, he changes subjects, so that’s probably Geisler and Turek’s final conclusion as well (at least for this particular rationalization). Unfortunately, none of the things Geistur says “we know” are things we actually know.

We don’t “know” that the world has “fallen” from an initial state of perfection. That’s merely a story that Geistur accepts by faith. Nor do good things come from bad things, strictly speaking. Life is a struggle, and when bad things happen, people work to make them better. The good things are the result of the work, not of the bad things. It’s true that you can’t have emancipation without having slavery first, but the goodness of the emancipation is not caused by the institution of slavery. The evil (slavery) creates a lack of goodness (liberty), but restoring that deficiency doesn’t mean that good came out of the bad. Good comes out of people working to improve the situation. And besides, though emancipation is good, it’s far better never to have lost your liberty in the first place.

Likewise, we don’t “know” that it’s possible for God to have a good reason for the bad things. In fact, there’s no way Geistur could possibly know that an omnipotent and omniscient God could not have found some way to achieve the good without requiring the bad. Even if we grant that it might be good to “wake up” America by blessing the terrorist attacks of 9/11, we still have to consider whether or not it would be better to issue the wake-up call by some means that did not involve horrific death for thousands of men, women and children. And by his own arguments, Geistur cannot know that a truly wise God could not think of a better way.

And finally, we don’t know that God can bring good from bad, because we never see Him do it. We see men superstitiously giving God credit for good things (and paradoxically failing to assign Him responsibility for the bad), but God Himself does not show up in real life to do anything at all, good or bad. Like I said before, the good that happens, happens because people make it happen. Once again, it’s Geistur’s faith, not his knowledge, that causes him to make the assumptions he cites as evidence that he’s not arguing from ignorance.

There’s one last exchange I want to address this week: the Jewish answer.

STRAW: What do you think of Rabbi Kushner’s answer to the question? You know, he wrote the book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People.

GEISTUR: I think his answer is wrong.

STRAW: Wrong? Why?

GEISTUR: Because his answer is that God isn’t powerful enough to defeat evil on earth. So we need to forgive God for allowing evil.

STRAW: What’s wrong with that?

GEISTUR: Because there’s strong evidence that God is infinitely powerful. Fifty-six times in the Bible God is referred to as “almighty,” and in several other ways he is described as all-powerful. We also know from scientific evidence that he created this universe out of nothing (take a look at chapter 3 of this book). So Rabbi Kushner’s finite god doesn’t square with the facts.

Isn’t it funny how bad your own arguments can sound when you hear someone else make them? Geistur’s main point in this appendix has been that God allows evil because He really doesn’t have any choice: either He allows evil (even though it’s evil), or He destroys some vital principle of free will that makes us real people (thus committing an even greater evil). We fallible mortals might wish evil weren’t here to make us suffer, but sadly even “almighty” God can’t come up with a better alternative.

Hearing a Jew make the same sort of argument puts it in a whole different perspective. Of course, Rabbi Kushner does commit one faux pas that Geistur would never allow: the good Rabbi is frank and open about the fact that he blames evil on certain divine limitations, without tangling up his thought processes by as many convoluted rationalizations and contradictory dogmas. But you can’t swallow such direct and unadulterated honesty without a serious risk of evangelical headsplosions, so Geistur looks suspiciously at the plain, unvarnished version of his own argument, and flatly rejects it.

And that brings us to as good a break as any. Tune in again next week, when we’ll hear Dr. Geistur say:

GEISTUR: There are no good people!

Should be fun.

At the beginning of their book, Geisler and Turek compared life to a jigsaw puzzle.

Just as the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle are difficult to put together without the picture on the box top, the many diverse pieces of life make no sense without some kind of unifying big picture. The question is, does anyone have the box top to this puzzle we call life?

In their last chapter, they claimed to have found the box top, the big picture that makes life make sense. By a curious coincidence, it happened to be the same as the religion they’re trying to sell us. And yet, when we compare their box top to the pieces on the table in front of us, the two clearly fail to line up.

The box top shows a wise and powerful shepherd who truly cares for his sheep and is able both to lead them to verdant pastures and to drive away any predators before they even approach the sheep. What do we see in the puzzle pieces? Mutton. Scrapie. Rocky, overgrazed pastures. Whole packs of wolves. But no shepherd. None of the pieces we can actually see really match the image of the loving, powerful, and all-wise guardian and caregiver, so lovingly depicted on the box top Geisler and Turek have painted for us.

So hidden away in an appendix (where believers are less likely to read it), in a comic-strip dialog format (which allows the Christian character to make broad claims without having to document them), Geisler and Turek are attempting to be the ones to find the answer believers have been looking for since before Jesus was even born. And, in keeping with long-standing traditions, they’re failing.

Last week, we saw how Geisler and Turek tried to make Mr. Straw (the atheist strawman in this dialog) sound unreasonable and whiny for asking why God is not currently opposing evil the way any good person would reasonably be expected to do. The Christian character, Dr. Geistur (as we’re calling him), even went so far as to imply that we, the victims, are guilty and responsible for causing all the evil that exists in the world—including things we have no control over.

Now it’s Dr. Geistur’s turn to get a little unreasonable, as he twists and turns, trying to think of some justification for God’s decision to serve as an accessory/co-conspirator to evil, continuing to provide it with the means and the opportunity to manifest itself in the world.

GEISTUR: If God wanted to end evil now, he could. But have you thought that maybe God has other goals that he would like to accomplish while evil exists?

STRAW: Like what?

GEISTUR: For starters, he would like to have more people choose heaven before he closes the curtain on this world. Paul seems to indicate that Jesus will come back after “the full number” of people become believers (Rom. 11:25).

Dr. Geistur seems to be a bit unsure as to whether evil is really all that bad. Remember, we’re not just talking about suffering here, we’re talking about sin. Geistur’s argument is that God could oppose evil, but then He wouldn’t be able to do as much. God with evil has more power to do good than God without evil. It’s like a performance-enhancing drug: it gives God super powers that He wouldn’t have otherwise. Sure, it may be wrong, but let’s face it, God is hooked on evil. Without it, He’s useless.

Is this really the argument Christians want to make? If God is truly the creator of everything, did He deliberately create a situation in which He would necessarily be dependent on evil in order to be able to do good? Dr. Geistur seems to have failed to think this through. Perhaps we shouldn’t judge him too harshly, though: the problem of evil is really a tough one because it’s fundamentally inconsistent with Christian beliefs. And that’s giving Dr. Geistur some serious cognitive dissonance.

Notice, for example, how he consistently invokes a kind of tunnel vision by assuming that the only thing God can do to oppose evil is to destroy the entire planet. Why doesn’t God oppose evil? Because He doesn’t want to destroy this world until the “full number” of predestined believers has been saved. It’s either/or: either God can do nothing to oppose evil (thus giving people time to repent), or He can end evil by destroying the entire world, along with all earthly opportunities for salvation. No other options, even for God.

Utter nonsense, of course: there are any number of lesser ways God could oppose evil, even while allowing it to continue to exist in some form. Geistur himself even proposes some of them—as chores we need to undertake. He can see that alternatives exist, but somehow he can’t make the connection between them and God. It’s the psychology of denial: if he could see them, he would be unable to explain why God doesn’t do them. Therefore, he cannot see them, except as things we ought to be doing.

We see another example of this psychological blindness when Mr. Straw (as the atheist cartoon) raises the possibility of God merely helping us when we suffer.

STRAW: That’s nice, but if I were suffering, I’d rather have God help me than you.

GEISTUR: If God prevented pain every time we got into trouble, then we would become the most reckless, self-centered creatures in the universe. And we would never learn from suffering.

STRAW: Learn from suffering! What are you talking about?

GEISTUR: Ah, you’ve just hit on another reason why God doesn’t end evil right now. Can you name me one enduring lesson that you ever learned from pleasure?

Notice how Geistur twisted the original suggestion from the idea that God could help comfort us after we experience pain into some kind of demand that God prevent us from ever experiencing negative consequences from our evil deeds. The reasonable expectation, which Geistur can’t explain or refute, is magically transformed into an unreasonable demand that he can dismiss.

Or can he? Think about it: the lessons we learn from pain are lessons about how to avoid the evil consequences of our evil deeds. But what if evil never existed in the first place? Without evil, there are neither evil deeds to do nor evil consequences to suffer, and thus no value in learning lessons about avoiding evil. No evil = nothing to avoid, and no motive to even want to do anything wrong in the first place!

Or let’s consider the proposition that, without pain (and evil), we would necessarily become the most reckless and self-centered creatures in the universe. Really? Even though we were made in the image of God? Did God become the most reckless and self-centered creature in eternity before the creation of pain and evil? I’ll give you a minute to think about that.

Or how about the idea that we could not learn enduring lessons without evil? Once again, Dr. Geistur twists this into a demand for enduring lessons we learn from pleasure (i.e. not just in the absence of evil). The strawman atheist, of course, can’t think of any, though it’s not hard to do (has Geistur never learned the satisfaction of a job well done, or the rewards of proper hygiene and exercise and nutrition, or the joy of helping others?). There’s lots of things that both make you feel good and teach you valuable lessons, but the psychology of denial prevents Geistur from seeing any of them just now.

Geistur’s dilemma becomes even worse when you try and put the word “enduring” into a Christian context. According to the Gospel, believers are going to spend eternity in heaven, which means that our earthly experiences are going to be a vanishingly small percentage of what our “enduring” experience will be. In order to be a properly enduring lesson, in a Christian context, it needs to be a lesson that will be applicable to the conditions that will allegedly exist eternally in heaven.

So, for example, Geistur argues that “You can’t develop courage unless there is danger.” Is this an enduring lesson, though? In an atheistic, secular sense of “enduring,” sure. But courage is only a virtue when there is a danger to face and an evil to oppose. Is that what conditions are going to be like in heaven for all eternity? What kind of relationship will there be between Jesus Christ and his Bride (i.e. the Church), if being raped and tortured is a valuable and enduring lesson in the Christian sense? What is there about watching your children slowly starve that makes you better prepared for what God has in store for believers in heaven?

Amazingly, Mr. Straw almost points out this problem. Dr. Geistur’s response has to be seen to be believed.

STRAW: But I wouldn’t need all those virtues if God would just quarantine evil right now!

GEISTUR: But since God has reasons for not quarantining evil right now, you need to develop virtues for this life and for the life hereafter. This earth is an uncomfortable home, but it’s a great gymnasium for the hereafter.

STRAW: You Christians always punt to the hereafter…

Yes, God does not quarantine evil, so that we can develop virtues. And we need to develop those virtues because God does not quarantine evil. And anyway, 9-11… er, I mean, the afterlife.

Geistur never does quite explain how exactly we’re better prepared for heaven if we suffer here on earth. Maybe heaven really sucks and so God has to make us suffer in this life so that His “rewards” will seem to be an improvement? Once again, good needs evil in order to have the power to be truly good. Heaven, somehow, is not the kind of place that could be good enough all by itself, without the evil.

Geistur makes one last, feeble attempt to make earthly sufferings sound relevant to heaven, but it takes a bit of careful scripting. Geisler and Turek have to sneak the word “punt” into Mr. Straw’s line so that Geistur can make a neat segue into talking about football as a metaphor of how rewards are sweeter when you really have to work for them. Just imagine what it would feel like to win the Super Bowl!

In fact, Geistur is simply changing the subject: Mr. Straw brought up a good point about how suffering would be irrelevant to a believer’s experience in heaven, and the Christian basically says “Ooo, look a monkey!” Wave your hands, blow some smoke, and how about them Raiders eh? Anything to get off the point. He never quite explains how winning the Super Bowl is like the victory believers experience in heaven, he just claims that they’re alike.

But what’s particularly ironic is that Geistur’s metaphor blows up in his face. Yeah, I bet it feels great to win a Super Bowl, and yeah it’s probably a lot of hard work and grunt time. But here’s the deal: the winning team didn’t need to be raped as little boys in order to prepare them for that tremendous victory. They didn’t have to try and exterminate the Jews to make touchdowns. They still got to experience the strength- and character-building process of striving for glory without the need to resort to evil in order to empower themselves.

God could take a pointer or two from a buncha dumb jocks. Despite Geistur’s frantic hand-waving attempts to make it sound like evil really isn’t so bad, and is in fact a valuable tool for helping us win our own personal spiritual victories, there are non-evil ways to accomplish everything good that Geistur is trying to give evil credit for. And it’s Geistur himself who points out this alternative.

All of Geistur’s excuses for God fail for that simple reason. Not only does God have countless lesser ways that He could be opposing evil, but there’s not even any need for evil to exist to be opposed. Ordinary, uninspired sports fans can come up with alternatives that build character, self-discipline, and moral fiber, without depending on sin to accomplish their goals. And if the God that Geistur preaches were a God that really existed, then He could do that too.

But He doesn’t, so He can’t, and that’s why Geisler and Turek have to hide their discussion of evil in an appendix.

We’re looking at Geisler and Turek’s attempt to rationalize away the problem of evil, as presented in a dialog between two characters we’ve named Mr. Straw (the Atheist), and Dr. Geistur (the Christian). The dialog started with one honest and reasonable question from Mr. Straw, which immediately provoked Dr. Geistur to change the subject, to deny that he had changed the subject, to insist that the rest of the discussion must be based on the assumption that God exists, and then to smugly insinuate that, because Mr. Straw granted this assumption for the sake of argument, he was “making progress.”

You’d think, after such an inauspicious beginning, that the quality and character of Dr. Geistur’s argument could only improve, but…

STRAW: So why doesn’t your so-called “all-powerful” God stop evil?

GEISTUR: Do you really want him to?

STRAW: Of course!

GEISTUR: Suppose he starts with you?

STRAW: Be serious.

GEISTUR: No, really. We always talk about God stopping evil, but we forget that if he did, he would have to stop us also. We all do evil.

And of course none of us—including Christians—would want God interfering in our ability to do evil, right? Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, say-n’more, knowwhutimean, eh?

Mr. Straw’s retort is that he’s talking about Hitler-calibre evil, not common everyday faults. But Geistur is ready for  him.

GEISTUR: My point is not the degree of evil, but the source of evil. The source of evil is our free choice. If God were to do away with evil, then he would have to do away with free choice. And if he did away with our free choice, we would no longer have the ability to love or do good. This would no longer be a moral world.

Any time a Christian tries to feed you this particular brimming bowl of bull, your very next question ought to be, “And has God always had free will?” Unless He has been at least partially evil from all eternity, God cannot have free will, and thus cannot love or do good. Alternately, we could admit that it is possible for free will to exist in the absence of evil, but that means that we, being made in the image of God, could also possess free will without the need for evil. Because if we couldn’t, then there would need to be evil in heaven, so that the Redeemed would retain their free will and remain capable of loving and doing good in their eternal reward.

Sadly, Mr. Straw is unable to come up with this particular line of discussion, since he’s an empty sock puppet on the fist of his apologetic masters. The best he can do is to point out that not all evil is the result of free choices. Natural disasters, birth defects, infant mortality, and so on, are all evils that happen quite apart from human choice. But Dr. Geistur has an equally muddled answer for that one as well (otherwise Straw wouldn’t have thought of it).

GEISTUR: The Bible traces it all back to the fall of man. No one is really innocent because we all sinned in Adam (Rom. 5:12) and as a consequence deserve death (Rom. 6:23). Natural disasters and premature deaths are a direct result of the curse on creation because of the fall of humankind (Genesis 3: Romans 8).

This is the old con game of “Blame the Pigeon.” Sometimes, when you’re trying to con someone, the victim (aka “the pigeon”) will notice that the stuff you’re selling doesn’t actually work. When that happens, the clever con man will immediately blame the failure of his merchandise on the pigeon himself. This does two things: it rationalizes away the failure, and it makes the pigeon feel responsible for the problem, and thus less likely to complain about it. In the worst case, where victim rejects the blame, the con man can still use this excuse to discredit the pigeon, so that he can at least continue selling his snake oil to other gullible saps.

Notice, too, how Geistur’s blame game neatly avoids answering Mr. Straw’s actual question. The question is not, “Why does evil exist?” but “Why doesn’t an allegedly all-good and all-powerful deity intervene against evil?” Accusing us of causing evil still doesn’t explain why God would not intervene to limit or negate the evil consequences. If your child is being electrocuted, you don’t say “Well, that’s the consequences of his decision to stick his fingers into the electrical socket,” you grab something non-conducting and knock his hand away from the socket. That’s the good and loving way to respond when someone you love makes unwise and harmful choices.

Obviously, God does not do that. What’s more, Geistur tiptoes around the question of whether God is, in fact, directly responsible for starting the natural disasters, diseases, deaths, and so on. Though he tries to pin the blame on man for provoking “the curse on creation,” curses don’t cast themselves. If creation has been cursed, then someone (or Someone) had to do the cursing.

As we all learned in kindergarten, two wrongs don’t make a right. Supposing that Adam and Eve actually did exist, and actually did sin against God. That might arguably be called evil, but so is putting curses on people, particularly when the people you’re cursing are not the people that actually sinned against you. Geistur tries to pin the blame on all of us by accusing us all of having sinned, but again, this is merely a blame game, since the offenses that allegedly justify the curse do not occur until after we’ve been cursed. And even if that were a valid justification for cursing us, why curse the entire creation as well?

In recent years, Christians (with the exception of Fred Phelps types) have cooled off a bit on the kind of might-makes-right theology that says God is right no matter what He does. There are those who would defend God by arguing that God was merely revealing the curse, not imposing it. According to this “kinder, gentler” theology, the curse on creation was imposed by someone else, rather than by God. Since God gave man dominion over the earth, man had the power to turn that dominion over to, say, Satan, should he choose to rebel against God and abdicate his divinely-ordained rulership through an act of direct disobedience.

The problem with this non-damning God is that it makes it even less reasonable to suggest that He would fail to intervene to mediate and/or remove the curse. Even supposing that the suffering and death were Satan’s will for creation rather than God’s will, God is not off the hook, morally speaking. As the Bible itself says, if you know the right thing to do, and do not do it, it is a sin. By giving Satan free reign to impose his will on Creation, God is effectively doing Satan’s will rather than vice versa. It’s no use trying to blame Man for God’s behavior. By providing Satan with the means and the opportunity to do evil, God necessarily makes Himself an accessory to sin, if not a co-conspirator.

The dialog avoids confronting this difficulty by having Mr. Straw begin to whine and complain about the idea that Jesus will make everything all right at the Second Coming.

STRAW: I’m not interested in the future. I want pain and suffering to end now! Why won’t God end it?

GEISTUR: He will end it, but just not on your timetable. Just because God hasn’t ended all evil yet doesn’t mean that he never will end it.

At which point we’ll all lose our free will and become completely unable to love and do good, right? Oh wait, that was two arguments ago, and thus completely unrelated to what Geistur is saying in this sentence. Silly me, I was looking for coherence.

The point of this argument is to show how totally unreasonable and selfish atheists are. I mean, stomping his little foot and demanding, “I want pain and suffering to end right now!” Isn’t that childish? Isn’t that selfish? I mean, can you imagine a loving (heavenly) father looking down on his children writhing in agony, and saying, “I want that to stop immediately”?

It’s easy to see the priorities here. Mr. Straw’s priority is the well-being of others, specifically those in need and in suffering. Dr. Geistur’s priority is making sure we all understand that suffering continues because God is not ready to end it yet, and that’s ok! It’s all a matter of perspective. To the altar boy bending over, helpless, terrified, humiliated and gasping in pain, Geistur offers the justification that someday, in some unseen, distant future, probably after you are dead, this kindly old priest will no longer be fucking you up the ass. So it’s ok.

Like I said, perspective.

Needless to say, this particular “answer” doesn’t even come close to justifying the lack of response on God’s part now. Future promises of improved behavior do not justify present sins. If it did, we would need no Savior, because we could just stand before the Judgment Seat of God and say, “Yes, Lord, I have done wrong, but none of that should count against me any more than it does against You, because ultimately there will come a time when I’m no longer behaving that way, just as You too will someday cease giving evil the means and opportunity to manifest itself.”

As I mentioned last week, this is Geisler and Turek’s own script. They can make the discussion go however they like. They even get to pick what the atheist says. And it’s still going very badly for them. They’re making excuses, they’re trying to shift the blame, they’re dancing all around the point, and their attempts to justify God only end up making Him look even worse. Not only is God callous and uncaring regarding the sufferings of His children, but (if we’re going to buy the “free will” argument) He necessarily becomes the source of an eternal Evil Himself.

As feeble and corrupt as Geistur’s “answer” is, though, it at least moves us a bit closer to the main rationalization he uses to try and excuse God for His failure to openly oppose the “works of Satan.” As I mentioned at the end of my last post, it’s a combination of arguing that the end justifies the means and denying that evil is really all that bad. Didn’t quite get there this week, but we’re almost there, so stay tuned.

The first question anyone should ask themselves, if they want to know whether the Gospel is true, is “Does the real-world evidence look the way it ought to look given an Almighty Heavenly Father Who loves us?” Even a trivial glance at the real world shows us an overwhelmingly large number of conditions and events that would not be there if there were a genuinely good and omnipotent deity around, at least if He had any concern at all about human affairs. Yet somehow, in fifteen chapters of arguing that it takes more faith to be an atheist, Geisler and Turek have not quite gotten around to considering this most fundamental and obvious mountain of evidence.

It’s not hard to see why. At the back of the book, tucked away in an Appendix, is their attempt to rationalize away the problem of Evil. Even Geisler and Turek could not deny, with a straight face, that real-world conditions are more consistent with atheistic conclusions. Nowhere in their 12-point outline for proving God’s existence was there any place where they could say, “Let’s take a moment and look at the largest and most obvious body of evidence relating to God’s existence, and show how Christianity’s explanation makes more sense.” It just doesn’t fit.

Even hidden away in an appendix, Geisler and Turek aren’t quite comfortable tackling the problem with the same scholarly(-ish) and intellectual(-ish) examination they used in the main body of the book. Instead, we get an almost cartoony script outlining a dialog between “Atheist” and “Christian”—the kind of late-night, bull session format you’d find in a casual frat house, just to kill the time. It’s not going to be deep. It’s not going to be insightful. It’s going to be two tired apologists indulging in a bit of self-gratifying fantasy so they can feel better about the problems their faith has when it confronts the real world.

Before we get started, let’s see if we can’t improve the script just a bit. Right now, it’s a bit cold and impersonal, as though Geisler and Turek didn’t care enough to give their participants names. So let’s name them. The “Atheist” character is an obvious straw man, so let’s call him Mr. Straw. “Christian” is presumably arguing the case Geisler and Turek would argue, so let’s name him Dr. Geistur. That warms things up just a bit, don’t you think? I’ll make that substitution throughout all the quotes that follow. We begin with a pretty decent question by Mr. Straw, to which Dr. Geistur replies with some frantic hand-waving intended to make the rest of the discussion assume that God must really exist.

[Straw]  If there really is an all-good, all-powerful, theistic God, then why does he allow evil?

[Geistur] How do you know what evil is unless you know what good is? And how do you know what good is unless there is an objective standard of good beyond yourself?

[Straw] Don’t try to avoid the question.

[Geistur] I’m  not trying to avoid the question. I’m simply showing you that your complaint presupposes that God exists. In fact the existence of evil doesn’t disprove God. It may prove that there is a devil, but it doesn’t prove that there’s no God.

You can see why this material would have been out of place in the part of the book that claimed it takes more faith to be an atheist. Mr. Straw’s very first line throws Geistur for such a loop that he immediately changes the subject and then lies about whether or not he’s changing the subject. And the point of this diversion is a rather blatant attempt to insist that the rest of the discussion must be based on the assumption that God must exist, no matter what the evidence says. Not even Geisler and Turek can follow that up with a smug “therefore I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist!”

And remember, this is their script. They could make the conversation go any direction they want, and they still can’t even begin to address the question unless everyone involved first agrees to believe that God must exist. They can’t admit the possibility that the existence of evil might have some implications regarding the existence of God. It has to be assumed, on faith alone, that God exists, before we start to consider the evidence. From their very first line, they have declined to acknowledge the most basic and obvious question here, let alone attempting to answer it.

Even their straw-man accuser sees through this ploy (which should give any amateur psychologists an interesting topic of discussion), but their faith simply will not be shaken, and they insist that Straw’s question presupposes the existence of God. Straw calls this an “interesting move,” and then agrees to make Geistur’s assumption “for the sake of argument” in order to try and get Geistur back on topic. In other words, Straw’s lines are written to suggest that he sees the validity of their point and refuses to admit it.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, what about Geistur’s claim that Straw’s question presupposes the existence of God? Does it really force us to concede, however begrudgingly, that God must exist? Let’s look at the points that make up Geistur’s claim:

• You cannot know what evil is unless you know what good is.
• You cannot know what good is unless there is an objective standard of good beyond yourself.
• CONCLUSION: Therefore God exists.

Wait, what?

Geistur’s conclusion has no connection to the premises he claims to derive them from. Even if the premises were valid (which they’re not), they do not lead to the conclusion. You might arguably conclude, given the above premises, that some objective standard of good must exist, but it’s pure superstition to ascribe that “objective standard” to any particular god or gods. It’s like saying, “You presuppose the existence of elves that make shoes, because I see you are wearing shoes.” Attributing something real to something imaginary does not prove that the imaginary exists. You’re just being superstitious.

As a matter of fact, Straw’s question need not require us to define what “good” and “evil” even are. To ask Straw’s question, all we need is enough knowledge to understand that “good” is supposed to be opposed to “evil,” and vice versa. If it is, then a God who is both “all-good” and “all-powerful” by definition is a God whose power ought to be visibly engaged in eliminating and/or preventing evil (no matter what “evil” might be). The question itself does not presuppose that the asker necessarily knows what good and evil are, let alone presupposing that the asker must have obtained his or her knowledge from any particular god. The Christian claim that God is good (whatever they mean by “good”) is inconsistent with the Christian claim that the world is full of evil (whatever they mean by “evil”).

Remember, the core issue we’re investigating is whether or not men are telling the truth about God. We’re testing the words of men to see if they’re consistent with themselves and with what we observe in objective reality. We’re not trying to understand what we observe about God in real life, because God does not show up in real life to provide us with any objective observations, perplexing or otherwise. We have nothing to observe besides the things men say about God, and the only means we have of determining whether those words are true is the principle that truth is consistent with itself. If the real world is inconsistent with what men say about God, then the words of men are false, according to the definition of what real-world truth is.

There are many other things wrong with Geistur’s opening ploy, like the fact that different people have different ideas about what “good” and “evil” are (gays? priests? circumcision?), or the fact that knowing what “chocolate” is does not mean we must presuppose the existence of a deity whose fundamental essence is “vanilla”. Not only does this argument fail to prove that God must exist, it makes a total hash out of any kind of rational attempt to understand the real difference between good and evil.

That’s not really the point, though. Geisler and Turek aren’t trying to directly address the question of whether evil makes God’s existence unlikely, nor are they even trying to teach us how we know good from evil. Their intent is simply to divert the discussion away from any kind of reasonable consideration of whether or not the evidence is consistent with the existence of an all-good, all-powerful deity, and to move it into a “safe” rationalization about how we might best try and gloss over the discrepancies between what Christians believe and what we actually find in the real world. As we’ll see next time, there are at least two basic approaches we can take: “the end justifies the means,” and “well, I dunno, is evil reeeeeeeeally all that bad, in the end?”

Stay tuned.

Last week, Geisler and Turek told us a fairy tale without a happy ending, about a king who disguised himself as a commoner so that he could discover the true feelings of the young maid he’d fallen in love with. This week, they take the supposedly real-life equivalent of that fairy tale, and give the ending not just one, but several grim twists. First, though, they have to make their little rhetorical point about how the Bible is the “box top” to the jigsaw puzzle of life.

We said that if we could find the box top, we’d be able to answer the five greatest questions that confront every human being. Since we now know beyond a reasonable doubt that the box top is the Bible, the answers to those five questions are:

Eh, I’ll summarize: our origin is “God did it,” our identity is “we’re made in God’s image,” the meaning of life is “we were put here so we could make choices that would send us to heaven or hell,” morality is “keeping God’s commandments and spreading the Gospel,” and our destiny is… Well, that’s the rest of this post.

To understand Geisler and Turek’s take on the “eternal destiny” of unbelievers, we need just a bit of a digression. One of the internal inconsistencies in the Christian gospel is the conflict between the humble, loving, self-effacing deity/king of last week’s fairy tale, and the barbaric, unjust, and downright evil concept of Hell, as originally taught in the early church. Various theologians have been trying, since almost the dawn of the church, to find some way reconcile Jesus’ teachings on the subject with the kind of God Jesus also taught. The results have been mixed at best, and it’s not uncommon for later generations to produce a theologian who sees the need to give it another go.

C. S. Lewis is one of the more recent apologists to try and come up with a way to make Hell work in the context of a loving heavenly Father. As he explains at great length in his book, The Great Divorce, Hell is not a place “where the fire never goes out,” nor is it a “lake of fire” that God has “prepared for the devil and his angels,” or at least not literally. Lewis’ Hell is a state of mind, in which sinners are tormented by their own thoughts and feelings, which they refuse to abandon. Heaven could be theirs at any time, but they stubbornly cling to their own evil ways, and thus are personally and exclusively the sole cause of their own agony.

Interestingly, even though this is not at all what was said by Jesus or by any of the apostles, the Lewis Hell seems to be gaining the status of Scripture in conservative Christian thinking. It’s a fascinating study in the evolution of Christian mythology because we can see new “eternal truth” forming in real time, 2000 years after Christ, by conservative Christians seeking some rationalization that will make them more comfortable with the contradictory things their religion teaches. Geisler and Turek give us an inside look at a doctrine in flux, as they present both Lewis’ “damned-because-I-want-to-be” Hell and the original, damned-because-God-damned-you Hell that Jesus taught.

C. S. Lewis said it best when he wrote, “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there would be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it…”

You say, “God doesn’t send anyone to hell!” You’re right. If you reject Christ, you’ll send yourself there.

You say, “God will just annihilate those who don’t believe.” No, he won’t. Hell is real. In fact, Jesus spoke more of hell than he did of heaven… God is too loving to destroy those who don’t want to be in his presence. His only choice is to quarantine those who reject him…

You say, “God will save everybody!” How? Against their will? Some people would rather be ruined than changed. They’d rather continue their rebellion that be reformed. So God says, “Have it your way. You may continue your rebellion, but you’ll be quarantined so that you can’t pollute the rest of my creation.”

You see how the Christian doctrine of Hell is being molded and re-shaped to fit the sensibilities of modern, pampered, well-fed Christians like Geisler and Turek? In Jesus’ day, Hell was a place of torment, where the worm does not die and the fires are not quenched, and the sinner cries out for just a drop of water to cool his tongue and relieve some of the agony of the fires around him. Nobody goes there unless God (or His angels) throw them in. Lewis, however, wants to turn that into a self-inflicted mental state whose very substance is drawn from “self-choice.” God is not only off the hook, He’s completely out of the picture, deliberately excluded by the sinner himself.

Geisler and Turek like the sound of that, so they declare that it’s exactly right to say that God does not send anyone to Hell. But then, contrary to both Lewis and themselves, they declare that God does send people to Hell, as a method of quarantining them away from His other children. In fact, according to G&T, God doesn’t even have any choice in the matter: He has to send people to Hell. Evil, you see, is more contagious than goodness and righteousness. Evil has the power to make good people turn bad, but goodness does not have the power to infect evil people and them good.

Kinda makes you think about the relative strength of good and evil, eh?

You say, “You Christians just want to scare people with hell!” No, we just want people to know the truth. If that scares them, maybe it should.  We certainly don’t like what the Bible says about hell. We wish it weren’t true. But Jesus, who is God, taught it, and for good reason. It seems to be necessary. Without a hell, injustices in this world would never be righted, the free choices of people would not be respected, and the greater good of a redemption could never be accomplished. If there is no heaven to seek and no hell to shun, then nothing in this universe has any ultimate meaning… We struggle through this life for no ultimate reason and Christ died for nothing. WIthout heaven and hell, this incredibly designed universe is a stairway to nowhere.

You might want to read that twice. G&T are claiming that without Hell, life would have no meaning, injustice would never be righted, and there would be no respect for free choice. And they also say that they don’t like what the Bible says about Hell. That may be partially true, since they clearly like what Lewis said better than what Jesus said. But while they certainly don’t want to be seen as being the kind of people who condone the eternal torture of the wicked, they’re clearly Hell’s fanboys, given the extremes they go to in order to try and make Hell sound like a good thing.

As for Hell being the only possible means by which injustices are righted, let’s think about that. What does Hell do to right injustices? What does quarantining the diseased do to right injustices? If you’re going to say that Hell rights injustices by torturing the evildoer, then let’s just go ahead and admit that we’re teaching a God who throws people in Hell for the purpose of torturing them. And then let’s admit that when God allows people to avoid Hell by believing in Jesus, the injustices they’ve committed go unrighted.

As for life having meaning without Hell, maybe Geisler and Turek should talk to some of their fellow Christians who do not believe in a literal, real Hell, and ask them if they do, in fact, find any meaning in life. Never mind asking atheists, who have no problem finding all kinds of meaning in life, without an evil sock-puppet god to threaten them. Just ask other Christians if their lives have meaning, without Hell.

They’re getting a bit warmer when they say that “redemption” is pretty pointless without Hell. After all, who needs a Savior if there’s nothing to be saved from, right? And this, I think, gets to the heart of the Christian ambivalence towards Hell. The doctrine is as horrid and barbaric today as it was when Zoroaster first invented it, but it’s an essential part of the Atonement myth. Jesus’ death was brutal and inhuman, so in order for it all to “make sense,” there must be some even more brutal and even more inhuman consequence that he averted by allowing himself to be crucified. Christians need Hell to help them continue to deny that Jesus’ death was as pointless as it was savage.

Chapter 15 ends with Geisler and Turek using a straw-man “atheist” to argue that life has no meaning, allowing them to retort that they have evidence that life does have meaning. It’s the same old game plan of pretending that Christianity is the only source of real meaning in life. Pure marketing bullshit, of course: not only are there other philosophies that find meaning in the universe, but Christianity isn’t very good at the meaning it does claim to provide.

Think about it: how intellectually and morally destitute does a religion need to be before it has to resort to Hell as an essential source of meaning? We’ve got a loving heavenly Father Who loves us so much that He wants us to be with Him forever in a two-way, intimate, personal relationship so close that marriage is only an approximation of the believer’s relationship with God. And oh, by the way, He has created a special place of fire and endless agony that is the ultimate eternal destination of most of His beloved children. And that’s the meaning of life.

Seriously?

Christianity finds meaning in mythic accounts of Ultimate Blessing and Ultimate Punishment in some far-future “next world,” and that’s because it sucks so bad at recognizing the meaning and purpose that are already present in this one. Ask a Christian to explain what meaning or purpose they find in this life, and they’ll fail. They may try to answer, but their answers will all be stories about things they believe happened in the invisibly-distant past, or the invisibly-distant future, in some world outside of our own. Ask for the present, material, here-and-now meaning and purpose of life, and they can’t do it. Not only does Christianity fail to teach them how to recognize materialistic meaning and purpose, it encourages believers to actively ignore even the possibility such things could exist.

And that’s basically where Geisler and Turek end the main body of their book: clinging to Christianity because they cannot acknowledge or even perceive the meaning of life outside their own narrow and superstitious world view. Their hypocritical boasts echo hollowly in a vast intellectual and moral wasteland, proclaiming that their confused and self-contradictory “evidence” has demonstrated “beyond a reasonable doubt” that the Bible is Truth and that it takes more faith to be an atheist than to be a Christian. Any honest reader will walk away unconvinced, unless of course he would prefer to be as deluded as Geisler and Turek. For those who truly yearn to believe, Geisler and Turek’s rationalizations will work as well as any other, I guess.

But wait, there’s more: the book has three Appendices: “If God, Why Evil?”, “Isn’t That Just Your Interpretation?” and “Why the Jesus Seminar Doesn’t Speak for Jesus.” Stay tuned.

Few things in life are as handy as a good rationalization. No matter where you start from, and no matter what the actual facts are, a good rationalization will always take  you to wherever you want to be. That’s deeply satisfying, if not strictly honest or wise.

The problem is that when you’re faced with a big problem, you sometimes feel the urge to draw on two or more rationalizations, to try and reinforce your position. That’s generally a bad idea. Rationalizations are not the truth, and do not benefit from the perfect self-consistency that is the hallmark of real-world facts. As soon as you start piling on different rationalizations, you begin to expose the inherent inconsistencies between them. Geisler and Turek provide us with yet another good example in this week’s installment of IDHEFBA.

We begin with a fairy tale romance, inspired by Kierkegaard (as interpreted by Philip Yancey).

The king was like no other king. Statesmen trembled before his power. No one dared breathe a word against him, for he had the strength to crush all opponents. And yet this mighty king was melted by love for a humble maid.

How could he declare his love for her? In an odd sort of way, his very kingliness tied his hands. If he brought her to the palace, and crowned her head with jewels and clothed her body in royal robes, she would surely not resist… But would she love him?

It’s a classic dilemma, at least for those in positions of extreme power: you want to know someone’s true feelings, yet you can never know whether the other person’s responses are due to genuine affection or whether they merely feign affection out of respect and/or fear of your great power. Not to give away the plot or anything, but the king here is supposed to stand for God.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. God is supposed to be able to see so deep into the human heart that he knows thoughts we ourselves don’t even know we’re thinking. But work with me here. It’s a rationalization. It doesn’t have to be consistent with the facts as long as it takes us to a desired conclusion via some sort of narrative plausibility.

So where were we? Oh yes, the king’s dilemma. Fortunately, the king is a genius. He thinks real hard and decides to disguise himself as someone else, and then see if the maid will fall in love with him for himself, without knowing about his royalty or power. Unfortunately for the folks at Disney Animation, the story ends there. There is no “happy ending,” because the point of the story is to make us believe that Jesus is really God, in disguise, coming down to us commoners, as a commoner, to see how we really feel.

Let’s pause here for a moment and give Kierkegaard his proper credit. This is a brilliant idea. Ok, perhaps it’s a bit obvious, but sometimes it takes genius to be the first to notice the obvious, and that’s really what we have here. If you’re an omnipotent God, and you want to know what people really think about you when you are, so to speak, not around, all you have to do is take on a more humble form, and then go spend some time with them, in person, in two-way face-to-face interaction.

So props to Kierkegaard. This is exactly what a real, loving God would do—and exactly what the Christian God does not do. If your goal is to find out how the commoner really feels, and especially if you want to give her a fair chance to decide whether she loves you or not, the best and only way to accomplish your goal is to do what any suitor would do: come courtin’ and spend time together. Thus, we can confidently conclude that the God-king of Kierkegaard’s story does not exist, because He does not show up to spend time with us. Thanks Søren!

Ok, back to Geisler and Turek. Our two intrepid apologists, naturally, intend that we should assume that Jesus was God in disguise, showing up in person (once!) because He’s looking for unbiased opinions about Himself. That might work for the small circle of people who actually met Jesus (assuming Jesus actually were God incarnate), but outside of that immediate circle, you lose the whole point of the exercise.

The point of the exercise, in Kierkegaard’s fairy tale, is that the God-king wants to obtain the commoner’s true opinion uninfluenced by His awesome reputation. Outside of the small circle of people who actually met Jesus, though, our opinions about Jesus have no alternative but to be based exclusively on—guess what?—his reputation. That’s all he left behind. He’s not here any more, and God does not show up in real life. Everything we know or think or feel today regarding Jesus is what we know, think, and feel based on what other men say about Jesus. Plus, if He had to come down among us in order to assess our reaction to Him, what will He do now that He’s gone? Either He didn’t really need to come down in the first place, or else His departure has left Him unable to fulfill His mission with regards to the rest of us.

What really comes through when you think about Kierkegaard’s fairy tale romance is how radically different reality is from the fantasies Christians have about their allegedly loving and humble deity. That fantasy is not enough for Geisler and Turek, though, who launch from this unfinished fairy tale right into a gruesome account of Jesus’ suffering, with a morbid fascination that goes into enough bloody detail to border on the pornographic (in the snuff porn sense of the word).

The connection, in Geisler and Turek’s mind, is the idea of Jesus as “The Suffering Servant.” Jesus, being a mighty King in heaven, is supposed to have humbled himself so that he could walk among us, not as our king, but as our servant. That’s the fairy tale connection, the link to a romantic young man willing to go to any lengths to approach his lady love. But there’s no happy ending here. Christians also have to rationalize Jesus’ brutal and violent death, and that’s where things get just a little creepy.

Remember, the original premise is that the whole point of becoming human was so that God could get an unbiased expression of how we feel about Him. He sets aside all the awesomeness and power and glory and so on so that we make up our minds about Him without being unduly pressured or swayed by His reputation. But that rationalization collides head on with the one that tries to explain why Jesus died such a violent death.

Geisler and Turek’s rationalization for the cross is that Jesus didn’t just take on the form of a servant, he became the Suffering Servant. That’s “Suffering,” with a capital Pain. Even though they open with a parable about how God wants our honest and unprejudiced response, they then proceed with a literal blow-by-blow description of every bruise, every wound, every tiny hot sliver of agony experienced by Jesus, in order to impress on us how cruel and unfair it would be for us to fail to offer our love to him in return.

Yeah, no pressure.

I’ll spare you the two-and-a-half pages of sadistic glory that Geisler and Turek use to (pardon the expression) drive home their point. But you get my drift. Christians are in denial, and have been for 2,000 years. Their religious leader ticked off the wrong guys, and they came down on him with predictable vengeance, and he lost. His disciples have never accepted that, and have come up with all kinds of rationalizations for why things turned out the way they did. The rationalizations are confused, contradictory, and downright creepy, and they blindly overlook what a real God would really do if He were truly willing and able to participate in a tangible, personal relationship with us.

Up next: Geisler and Turek promise to share with us the “box top” to the jigsaw puzzle of life. Stay tuned.

We’ve made it at last to Chapter 15, the traditional “altar call” with which many preachers end their Sunday sermon. Without any hint of intentional irony, Geisler and Turek are going to end I Don’t Have Enough FAITH to Be an Atheist by urging us to have faith in Jesus. And they base this appeal, not on verifiable evidence or rational logic, but on emotion. And a rather selfish emotion at that.

A young man is brought before a judge for drunk driving. When his name is announced by the bailiff, there’s a gasp in the courtroom—the defendant is the judge’s son! The judge hopes his son is innocent, but the evidence is irrefutable. He’s guilty.

What can the judge do? He’s caught in a dilemma between justice and love. Since his son is guilty, he deserves punishment. But the judge doesn’t want to punish his son because of his great love for him.

There’s a lot that’s wrong with this story already, parable or not. For example, the honest thing for this judge to do would be to recuse himself from the case. There’s a clear conflict of interest here, and whatever decision the judge makes, it’s not going to be impartial. For the judge to proceed is unethical and unfair, both to society and to his son.

Secondly, notice what a terrible parenting philosophy is expressed in that last line. The judge loves his son, therefore he does not want his son to receive a fair punishment for his genuine offenses? Whatever happened to “He who spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is careful to discipline him”? Not that I would recommend corporal punishment, of course, (there are much better alternatives available), but still, if a parent has to object to the idea of punishing his kid, then there’s something wrong with either the punishment or the parent.

The story doesn’t stop here, of course. The judge is about to do something “wonderful.”

He reluctantly announces the sentence. “Son, you can either pay a $5,000 fine or go to jail.”

The son looks up at the judge and says, “But Dad, I promise to be good from now on. I’ll volunteer at the soup kitchens. I’ll visit the elderly. I’ll even open a home to care for abused children. And I’ll never do anything wrong again! Please let me go!”

At this point, the judge asks, “Are you still drunk? You can’t do all of that. But even if you could, your future good deeds can’t change the fact that you’re already guilty of drunk driving.” Indeed, the judge realizes that good works cannot cancel bad works! Perfect justice demands that his son be punished for what he has done.

So the judge repeats, “I’m sorry, Son. As much as I’d like to allow you to go, I’m bound by the law. The punishment for this crime is $5,000 or you go to jail.”

The son pleads with his father, “But, Dad, you know I don’t have $5,000. There has to be another way.”

I’ll spare you the full force of G&T’s fiction-writing skills, but in summary, the judge very dramatically gets down from the bench, takes off his robe, and hands his son $5,000 so that he can get out of jail free. In a presumably tearful and moving moment, the son accepts the money and realizes the point the authors of his story are trying to make:

There’s nothing else he can do. Good works or promises of good works cannot set him free. Only the acceptance of his father’s free gift can save the son from certain punishment.

At this point, we the readers are expected to identify with the son. We’re supposed to feel like we’re undeniably guilty and that we’re facing a just and fearsome punishment, and that God, our Heavenly Father is offering us a chance to escape the just consequences of our own deeds.

Let’s just think about that for a minute. This is the altar call. This is the fisherman casting his nets and seeing who he can reel in. This is 2,000 years’ worth of Christian experience in attracting the sort of believer who is most likely to respond and convert. And it’s targeted at people who identify with the drunk driver who, despite his undeniable guilt, wants to walk out of court a free man.

Who is likely to respond to this appeal? Is this going to attract the sort of person whose standards of morality and ethics are offended by a judge deliberately “gaming the system” in order to obtain benefits for some defendants that he would not bestow on others? No. This particular appeal is aimed at people who take selfish pleasure in the idea of escaping the just consequences of their own evil deeds. Makes you wonder about prison ministries, doesn’t it?

There’s lots we could say about the ethical, moral and judicial implications of the judge’s actions in this story. For example, are the judge’s actions good? If they are, why don’t we try it on all drunk drivers? Bring them in, and tell them that if they plead guilty, they will be assessed an unaffordably large fine, which some employee of the state will then freely give them the money to pay so that they can go home free. Wouldn’t that be great?

Or there’s the question of the judge’s degree of guilt for the consequences if his own actions. Suppose that, early the next morning, while returning from the bar where he was celebrating his narrow escape from justice, the son drunkenly swerves across the center line and head-on into a minivan, killing seven young schoolchildren coming home late from a multi-day field trip. Does the judge bear any moral accountability for enabling his son’s behavior and sparing him a jail term in which he might have had time to think about his situation and enroll in some kind of self-help program?

None of those ethical, moral, or intellectual issues are of any concern to Geisler and Turek. This is an emotional appeal. You’re not supposed to think about it. You’re supposed to dwell on your own feelings of guiltiness, and your own desire to escape justice. You’re supposed to be feeling the elation of believing that God has found some way to let you escape accountability for your own actions and choices, by appealing to the principle of “negotiable guilt.”

What’s the only way God can remain just but not punish us for our sins? He must punish a sinless substitute who voluntarily takes our punishment for us (sinless because the substitute must pay for our sins, not for his own; and voluntary because it would be unjust to punish the substitute against his will).

It’s a good thing we’re not thinking, and are merely wallowing in our own guilt and despair, because if we were thinking we might realize that this kind of “negotiable guilt” is about as corrupt a system as you could come up with. What on earth is the point of justice if it’s not going to punish those who are, in fact, the true perpetrators of the offense that’s being punished? What is the purpose of punishment if it is merely bad things happening to people who have done nothing to deserve them?

What we have here is neither a system of justice nor a system of morals. All we have are guilty people who are not being punished, and innocent people who are. Geisler and Turek make the stipulation that the victims have to volunteer (as though suicide were some sort of virtue), but does that really matter? If the whole system so corrupt that it harms the innocent to benefit the guilty, then is it really an act of virtue to volunteer to help?

Geisler and Turek drive on, oblivious to the moral implications of what they are saying.

Where can God find a sinless substitute? Not from sinful humanity, but only from himself. Indeed, God himself is the substitute. Just as the judge came down from his bench to save his child, God came down from heaven to save you and me from punishment. And we all deserve punishment. I do. You do.

Let’s try and look past the outright creepiness of those last three sentences and think back to the parable Geisler and Turek are telling. In the parable, the child is guilty, and the father/judge pronounces a sentence, and then personally pays the fine that he himself just imposed. But why the elaborate sham? Why not just say, “Son, tell you what, I know you can’t pay this fine, so you don’t have to. I’ll just let you go free.”

In real life we’d say, “The judge has no power or authority to do that; he has to obey the law.” The judge, you see, is not the source of the law, but is merely an officer of a higher authority. But Geisler and Turek are using this judge to represent God, who supposedly is the source of all laws and is himself the highest possible authority. What higher authority is there Who is telling God that He can and must harm somebody, whether or not they’re guilty? Who is the greater God Who is telling God that once some innocent person has suffered, it’s ok for Him to let the guilty off the hook?

In the story, the judge gives the son the money to pay the fine, thus subverting the law while maintaining the outward appearance of upholding it. In real life, this money would be paid to the higher authority, i.e. the state. If the judge is really God, though, then what higher authority does He pay the fine to? If He must pay it to Himself, then has the fine really been paid? If I write a check from myself to myself, has any actual money changed hands? Again, it’s a sham, a fake transaction designed to give the appearance of upholding the law while actually subverting it.

Amazingly, Geisler and Turek take it even further.

[A] perfectly just God must punish bad deeds regardless of how many good ones someone has performed. Once we’ve sinned against an eternal Being—and we all have—we deserve eternal punishment, and no good deed can change that fact.

As if their legal and moral system wasn’t already corrupt enough, Geisler and Turek now propose that punishments be based, not on the seriousness of the crime, or on the harm it causes to others, but on the duration of the person taking offense at what you’ve done. You and I, according to Geisler and Turek, deserve eternal punishment, not because we’re guilty of offenses we kept committing for all of eternity, but merely because the Person we’ve offended is an eternal Being. A truly amazing legal principle, and so self-evident. That’s why crimes against the elderly deserve to be punished so much more than crimes against infants, doncha know. (Sheesh!)

This is what superstition leads to. When you base your concept of justice and morality on the confused conclusions that primitive people jumped to whenever they didn’t understand how the world works, you end up with a confused and superstitious system of morality and justice. You end up recruiting people by offering them a chance to scam the system, using a ploy that benefits the guilty by punishing the innocent, who suicidally volunteer to help you pull it off by arranging their own deaths. And then you see what kind of people respond to this sort of appeal, and what kind of people you end up with in the church, and you wonder why they have such serious problems with morality and justice. Go figure, eh?

Not that Christians are any worse people than anyone else, of course. It’s not that the people themselves are bad (despite Geisler and Turek’s insistence to the contrary). But the church is promoting a corrupt moral system that is the foundational basis for everything else they preach, and they’re appealing to people based on that corrupt moral system. By responding and converting based on the appeal of that system, people are committing themselves to a path that cannot escape the corruption of its own foundation. Especially when it is continually preached, via pulpits, books, broadcasts, and Internet, as the core of what Christians believe.

Christians, like most people, are basically good, but even good people can be led astray by corrupt and superstitious systems. The first step in recovery is to acknowledge the problem. And this story of the subversive judge, and his unjust treatment of his own son, is a fairly typical example of the Christian problem.

The situation is ripe for Stage Two.

Stage Two: The Spiritual Resurrection

As we mentioned yesterday, one of the prerequisites we need for this to work is a people who believe in a spiritual reality that is more true, more real, and more significant than earthly, materialistic reality. Christians were just such a body of believers, as Jesus had taught them to be. But reality can intrude in harsh and confusing ways, as when your prophet is suddenly and unexpectedly arrested, executed and buried. Take the very real trauma of the death of a loved one, compounded by the suddenness and violence of his death, and then compounded yet again by the inexplicable disappearance of his very body, and you have a highly volatile and unstable mixture of psychosocial elements.

Psychological studies have shown that bereavement often produces hallucinations of contact with the recently-deceased (as high as 80% of elderly survivors, for instance). This very common and very human experience usually causes no problems, even when people superstitiously attribute it to actual ghosts. In the context of the death of Jesus, however, this simple, fallible hallucination has all the right ingredients to blossom into a full-fledged Messianic Resurrection delusion, striking first in a small group of grieving women and then spreading to the larger body of disciples.

Normally, people who experience hallucinations of contact with the dead are at least vaguely aware of the fact that their perceptions are subjective rather than being some external, physical phenomenon. When coupled with belief in a supernatural spiritual reality, however, such hallucinations can lead a person to conclude that their perceptions are no mere illusion, but an actual, objectively-real experience outside the normal realms of space and time. This kind of mental context produces what I call an “invincible” faith—you can’t disprove it by physical evidence, because it doesn’t need to be consistent with literal, real-world truth. In the eye of the believer, it’s a “spiritual” truth, and therefore has no need to correspond to any particular material circumstances.

This sort of thinking is unremarkable and even commonplace among believers. For example, believers do not need to have a second experience of making their entire body pass through a vagina in order to claim that they have been truly born again. It’s a “spiritual” reality, and therefore does not need to be consistent with literal, physical birth. It’s the same way with inviting Jesus to come into your heart (even though he’s not literally inside your physical heart) and with having God speak to you (even though no literal words are actually literally spoken or literally heard).

Among sincere believers, a hallucination of Jesus after his death could very easily be seen as a genuine, spiritual experience of a genuine, spiritual resurrection. In fact, for the truly faithful, the spiritual truth is even more true than a mere materialistic, fleshly truth, because the outward form is perishable and perishing, and only the spiritual endures forever. Lazarus (allegedly) rose from the dead, and then died again. A spiritual resurrection is better than a physical one. At least at first—for those who already believe.

What consequences would we expect to find if the early disciples moved from Stage One (The Empty Tomb) to Stage Two (Spiritual Resurrection)? First and foremost, we would expect this experience to produce truly invincible faith. If Jesus rose from the dead in a spiritual body, as opposed to the physical body that was buried, then not even the actual corpse of Jesus would shake the Christian’s faith in the Resurrection. Does the existence of the cocoon disprove the butterfly?

The drawback to this invincible faith, however, is that it’s not as easy to sell to those who are not already believers, especially if they’re of a philosophical/skeptical mind. And interestingly, we see the very earliest Christian writings reflecting some of this problem. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, for example, may be one of the very earliest Christian documents, if not the very first. And in Chapter 15, we see him not only defending the idea of a spiritual resurrection, but also attempting to address the kinds of objections that a skeptic would naturally raise concerning the legitimacy of “resurrecting” something that was not a physical body.

When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or of something else. But God gives it a body as he has determined, and to each kind of seed he gives its own body…So will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable..it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body…I declare to you, brothers, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.”

Notice how Paul emphasizes the contrast between the perishable, natural, flesh-and-blood body that you bury, and the imperishable spiritual “body” that is raised. The body that you “plant” is not the body that will be raised immortal, because perishable flesh and blood cannot inherit the imperishable. It’s a great argument, and it makes the physical, flesh-and-blood body of Jesus totally irrelevant to the truth of the Resurrection (for the believer anyway). Oh, you’ve got the old corpse? So what? That old thing can’t inherit the imperishable spiritual body anyway. Jesus was raised in a spiritual body.

The trouble with spiritual truth, though, is that it doesn’t really amount to much in the real world. To grow your religion, you need converts, and to make converts (especially in the philosophy-happy Greek provinces) you need something more solid than a resurrection that exists only in the minds of those who already believe.

That, incidentally, is another consequence of the Spiritual Resurrection stage: because this “resurrection” is a subjective experience that only takes place in the context of a pre-existing belief, only believers are going to be able to experience it. And that matches the evidence we have: Jesus “appeared” only to those who already believed in him. Even Paul, who supposedly converted on the road to Damascus, makes an oblique reference to “the goads” that were driving him towards a Christian faith even while he was kicking against them by persecuting Christians.

Thus, without any kind of miraculous intervention, we could produce an invincible faith in the spiritual “Resurrection” of Jesus that would make it pointless to even try to produce his original remains (which were probably in bad shape by then because the story tells us it disappeared before it could be properly embalmed). Christians could listen to the Jews claiming that the disciples took Jesus body, and just laugh. Jesus wasn’t in that body any more than he was in that empty tomb! He rose spiritually, like Paul said. Take that, Sanhedrin!

Stage Two is enough to launch the Resurrection story, and to imbue the disciples with the invincible faith that they would later become so famous for. All that’s left is for Stage Two to evolve into Stage Three.

Stage Three: Physical Resurrection

The Stage Two belief is good as far as it goes, but it has some drawbacks, as Paul found in trying to preach the Resurrection to the Jews at Corinth. For the spiritually mature, like Paul, the spiritual resurrection is not only good enough, it’s better than a physical one. But for spiritual babes, and for those that aren’t even ready for spiritual babehood yet, you need a resurrection that’s more true, more real, more…tangible. And fortunately (or unfortunately), all that takes is some ordinary human rationalization and equivocation.

We see this all the time in the lives and testimonies of believers. You know that what you say is true, deeply true, regardless of how the external appearances may look to unbelievers. Somehow you have to convince them. So you turn to your worldview, where “true” blurs into “real” and the difference between “real” (in the spiritual sense) and “real” (in the real-world sense) is vague and shifting. What’s more, you yourself crave reassurance that your own spiritual experiences were real, in the real-world sense. You begin to describe them in more tangible terms, and to think of them physically.

And in the process, you experience what psychologists have labeled the “rewriting” of your own memories. Even without conscious intent to deceive, it’s only natural for our minds to re-organize our experiences to reflect a history that’s more consistent with what we “know” the truth must have been. A synonym here, a slight shift of emphasis there, and a new myth emerges. The spiritual body is a real body, and the “real” body comes to mean physically real (while still remaining a “spiritual” body, in some sense). Spiritual truths take on a literal dimension, the literal resurrection of Jesus begins to out-compete the spiritual version of the story, and eventually displaces it completely, even in the minds of the apostles, because true means real and real means physical. In some sense.

It’s similar to the experience millions of Roman Catholics have every Mass. The priest takes the bread and the cup, recites a few short prayers, and for the believers in the congregation, the bread and wine are literally transformed into actual human flesh and actual human blood. Despite the very obvious observation that the substance of the bread and wine are not changed, the “deeper truth” (in the minds of the believers) is that the transformation does indeed take place. For the faithful, there’s a very very fine line between spiritual truth and physical reality, and sometimes it doesn’t exist at all. All it takes is just a slight shift in your frame of reference, and the “true” memory can be the physically real memory.

What consequences would result from Stage Two evolving into Stage Three? The first consequence is that it would make Christianity more successful outside its original territory than it was inside Palestine. People who weren’t around Jews a lot, and who didn’t live in provinces where it was widely reported that disciples took Jesus’ body, would be more open to the story that his actual physical body was physically raised from the dead.

We would also see a shift from the earlier epistles, like I Cor. 15 and its “spiritual resurrection,” to later stories, like the Gospels, that make the resurrection explicitly literal, and that insist that the buried body (the “seed that [was] planted”) must be the same body that rose (despite what Paul said earlier). And we’d see an odd mish-mosh of resurrection stories, in which Jesus sometimes appeared in his own, recognizable physical body, and sometimes behaved like a ghost, walking through locked doors, changing his appearance at will, and so on.

In other words, Stage Three would have taken over, but traces of Stage Two would still linger. This would not be a conscious change on the part of the disciples, so there wouldn’t be an overt attempt to revise the stories, but merely the natural evolution of “tweaking” and “fixing” things to make them fit better with what you “know” the truth must have been. And of course, none of this would diminish the invincible faith of the disciples, because at no time would they ever consciously lie about what they believed. “Jesus really did rise (in some sense),” and that’s the core of the Gospel, and that’s what they’re sticking to, even if the long decades did inject a little bit of drift into their understanding of what “rise” means.

What’s fascinating about this three-stage approach to faking a resurrection is that we can still see, in Christians today, all of the psychosocial mechanisms needed to turn a simple misplaced corpse into a full-blown Resurrected Christ. We still see Christians having subjective “spiritual” experiences that they attribute to God (or Satan). We still see Christians embracing “spiritual truth” as being genuinely true regardless of whether or not it corresponds to objective, material reality. We still see Christians spontaneously inventing just-so stories to account for discrepancies and inconsistencies in their beliefs. And we still see Christians building “world views” that consist of taking expedient interpretations as though they were original data, all without ever admitting or even recognizing that this was anything other than the Absolute Truth.

We can also see this in the story of the Ascension. One thing a fake resurrection can never do is to produce an actual, resurrected Messiah. No matter how invincible your faith, or how firm your belief in spiritual realities, if Jesus didn’t really rise from the dead, then he can’t show up in real life to vindicate your faith and demonstrate the Gospel, no matter how much the Gospel says he wants to be with us for all eternity.

That’s a bit embarrassing, as year after year rolls by with no Risen Savior to show as the “firstfruits of the dead.” You need a good story to dispose of your Messiah somehow. Something convincing, and yet motivational, with a promise of good things to come (and a veiled threat for unbelievers as well). So you send him up to Heaven. Get all the disciples together, add a few angels, let him miraculously float up until he disappears in the clouds, and you’re done with him.

Except for the problem that there’s no Heaven up there for him to go to.

In the first century, you could get away with this. Nowadays, if you fly to Israel, you can see for yourself, firsthand, what’s up above all those clouds. And it isn’t Heaven. And what did Jesus Ascend to if there’s no Heaven up there?

Ask a Christian what the truth is about Heaven and the Ascension, and you’ll see all the mechanisms I mentioned above. Somehow, some way, they will convince themselves that Jesus’ Ascension into heaven is true, regardless of the real world facts about what’s really above the clouds. They know it’s true, regardless of whether or not it corresponds to the real world, and they’ll find some rationalization or speculation to convince themselves that it is true. It may be strained, it may sound silly to outsiders, but they will succeed, as far as their own beliefs are concerned.

And that’s my point. I used to think the Resurrection was the unshakable proof of the Christian faith, but now I know it isn’t hard to explain at all. All it takes to explain the Resurrection is to presume that Christians back then were pretty much the same as they are today. And that doesn’t take any miracle at all.

That was the one piece of evidence that no skeptic could explain, not with a “swoon theory,” not with a “disciples stole the body” (in front of armed guards? without anyone finding out?) theory—in short, not without a miracle at least as big as the one they were trying to explain away. And as long as the Resurrection was real, everything else was OK. I could just ask Jesus all my questions when I saw Him.

Unfortunately, I was wrong. There is at least one perfectly plausible explanation for the Resurrection that would produce exactly the evidence we have today, including the invincible faith of the apostles and martyrs. And it wouldn’t take a miracle to pull it off.

Stage Zero: The Preconditions

In order for this “resurrection” to work, we need a few preconditions in place. First of all, we need a group of people who believe in the resurrection of the dead. That one’s easy enough, of course: the Jews had a belief in a Zoroastrian-style resurrection and judgment ever since the Farsi Jews came back from the Babylonian Captivity. At least the Pharisees did. Even better, they had a controversial belief in the resurrection of the dead, because some Jews denied it. This multiplies the reward a believer would experience from thinking they saw a genuine resurrection, because you don’t just get back a lost loved one, you also get to prove that your theological enemies are wrong.

The next element we need is a group of disciples who believe that it is permissible to do good on the Sabbath, even when your actions are technically a violation of the Law of Moses. We have that one too: Jesus publicly taught, on multiple occasions, that good works were permissible on the Sabbath, despite the objections of the Pharisees, even when you were doing things explicitly forbidden by the Law. Note that all we need are disciples who believe that they are permitted to break the Sabbath—they don’t have to prove to anyone that their belief is correct. It is sufficient that Jesus has given them a precedent for doing what they think God truly wants them to do, even if it breaks the Mosaic tradition of Sabbath-keeping.

Lastly, we need a group of believers who believe in a spiritual reality that is greater and more significant than mere earthly, materialistic reality. Once again, we have that in abundance in Jesus’ ministry, telling people not to store up treasures on earth, but to invest in the treasures of heaven, sending his disciples to preach that “the kingdom is near” and promising that whoever received them would be given a prophet’s reward (Matt. 10). Jesus was the original author of the phrase “born again,” referring to a spiritual rebirth that would bestow spiritual blessings on the believer. He also made the original promise of a Holy Spirit that would enter into believers and illuminate their hearts and minds.

Stage One: The Empty Tomb

Ok, we’ve got our prerequisites, now let’s turn the death of Jesus into a bogus resurrection. The first thing we need is an empty tomb. That’s easy enough: all we need is somebody to move the body. There are lots of potential candidates, though few would actually have the motive to pull it off. The Herodians, for instance, might have done it out of a desire to stir up trouble for the Pharisees by vexing them with an annoying cult, but that’s pretty far-fetched. What’s much more likely, though, is that the disciples themselves would have done it.

How could the disciples have done it? Wouldn’t that make them party to a deliberate deception, and thus unlikely to die for their faith? Not necessarily. First of all, they might not have done it to deliberately fake a resurrection. Perhaps they simply objected to the idea of Jesus being laid to rest in the tomb of a man like Joseph. The evangelists tell us that Joseph was a secret Christian, a member of the Council who had not consented to their actions, but the disciples wouldn’t necessarily have known that at the time.

Remember, too, that Jesus had a lot of disciples, and not just the famous Twelve Apostles. Nor were the original Christians a united, homogeneous group, as the New Testament itself records. They suffered the full range of internal rivalries, discord, and internal politics. Not all of them would necessarily have asked the Apostles for permission to move the body, or even told them they had done so. With Jesus dead, not all of them would have continued to believe in the (derived) authority of his lieutenants. They would be willing and able to act independently, to move Jesus’ body without the Apostles’ knowledge.

It might be objected that, being good Jews, none of Jesus’ disciples would have broken the Sabbath. That, however, presupposes two things: that all of Jesus’ disciples were “good’ Jews, and that none of them would believe that it might be permissible to do God’s will on the Sabbath. As we’ve already noted, Jesus’ definition of a “good” Jew was substantially different from the Pharisees’ legalistic adherence to Sabbath minutiae, so we can’t safely assume that every single individual disciple would be deterred by Pharisaic prohibitions against handling dead bodies on the Sabbath. Some grieving disciple, in the emotion of the moment, might even act in a way that he or she would later feel guilty about. But they would still do it.

That leaves the problem of the guards, but only Matthew’s gospel alludes to there being any guards, and his account clearly states that the Sanhedrin did not ask for any until the next day. If Matthew was referring to the following morning, that would leave the body unguarded all night—plenty of time for a small group of men to move a dead body. But the Jewish Sabbath begins at sundown and is, in Jewish reckoning, a new day. Is there any time interval large enough for disciples to get unguarded access to the body?

According to Gospel accounts, Jesus was buried before the Sabbath, in a tomb selected because it was nearby. The women saw where Jesus was laid, and then returned to keep the Sabbath “according to the commandment.” If Jesus was buried before the Sabbath, and if the Jewish religious leaders had anything at all to do at the beginning of the Sabbath, then there could have been a considerable interval of time before they could even go to Pilate to ask for a guard. Add to that whatever interval of time would be needed to gather a guard, explain the mission, gather equipment and supplies, find out where Jesus was buried, and march there.

Moving Jesus’ body would therefore require nothing more than a group of “rogue” disciples, following the burial party, and deciding on the spur of the moment to find Jesus a holier resting place than the one offered by a member of the Council that murdered him, after the other disciples had left to go keep the Sabbath. The guards (if any) could have arrived too late to catch them in the act, and could have sealed an already-empty tomb, without requiring anything more miraculous than bad timing on the Sanhedrin’s part.

Of course, if the “rogue” disciples weren’t deliberately trying to fake a resurrection, wouldn’t people find out? They would have no reason to conceal the fact that they had Jesus’ body, unless perhaps they were afraid of upsetting the apostles, or maybe even experiencing after-the-fact guilt feelings and nagging doubts about whether they did the right thing moving a dead body on the Sabbath. Maybe there could be purely psychosocial reasons why they might keep their actions quiet, even without a desire to fake the Resurrection. But still, people would find out, wouldn’t they? Someone would be bound to talk, sooner or later, if only to get it off their chest, right?

If the disciples did indeed take the body, we would expect there to be widespread reports, later on, of disciples taking the body. And ironically, Matthew himself records that this was indeed the case. There were widespread reports of the disciples taking the body, just as we would expect if this were an ordinary, mundane case of one group of disciples acting without the knowledge or permission of the others to relocate the corpse of Jesus.

Matthew’s whole point, in introducing the story of the guards, seems to be an attempt to provide a Christian counter-story to discredit the Jewish version. Matthew was neither a guard nor a member of the Sanhedrin, nor does he claim to have somehow had this alleged incident reported to him by God or some angel. He simply claims that there were guards, that the guards saw the resurrection, and that they then took bribes to lie about it.

Notice, Matthew offers no evidence to substantiate his accusations, he simply slanders these unknown guards in a way that makes it sound like they’re hiding something. (Sound familiar?) He alone, of all the Evangelists, “improves” the Gospel by adding a new story that provides a plausible explanation for why there are widespread reports that disciples took Jesus’ body. In doing so, however, he unwittingly documents the fact that there were widespread reports that disciples simply moved the body. (And, for an additional irony, Matthew’s story makes these guards the only actual eyewitnesses to what really happened, when Matthew himself was not.)

So we’re all set for Stage One: The Empty Tomb. At this point in our scenario, rogue disciples have not-so-secretly moved the body of Jesus without the knowledge or permission of the other disciples, before the Sanhedrin could conclude their Sabbath duties, make their way to the palace, obtain an audience with Pilate, request a guard, receive permission, walk back to the guard, explain their mission, locate the grave, and post a guard. Sunday morning, when the other disciples return to the tomb, they find it empty, and begin to wonder…

Stay Tuned for Stage Two.

Last week, Geisler and Turek were explaining how they avoid finding errors in the Bible: “[W]hen we run across something inexplicable, we assume that we, not the infinite God, are making an error.” Cool, eh? They realize that things aren’t adding up the way they should. But instead of acknowledging that the Bible is broken, they simply assume that the fault is the reader’s and therefore not the Scripture’s, QED.

Not surprisingly, this inspires them to try and lead us to the following conclusion:

Unlike most other religious worldviews, Christianity is built on historical events and can therefore be either proven or falsified by historical investigation… If after 2,000 years of looking, no one can find the remains of Jesus or real errors in the Bible, isn’t it quite possible that neither exist?

Most people who died 2,000 years ago have indeed ceased to exist, without necessarily being resurrected gods incarnate. Neither are real errors absent from the Bible—all that’s missing is an honest acknowledgment of their existence (on the part of certain believers, anyway). Yes, 2,000 years of denial is arguably impressive, in a morbid sort of way, but it’s hardly a historical proof of Christianity.

So the historical argument falls a little flat, but Geisler and Turek have two more arguments that they’re going to use to try and prove their point: an appeal to science, and an appeal to slander.

[A]fter many years of continual and careful study of the Bible, we can only conclude that those who have “discovered a mistake” in the Bible do not know too much about the Bible—they know too little. This doesn’t mean that we understand how to resolve all the difficulties in the Scriptures, but it means we keep doing research. We really are no different than scientists who can’t resolve all the difficulties or mysteries of the natural world. They don’t deny the integrity of the natural world just because they can’t explain something. Like a scientist of the natural world, a scientist of theology keeps looking for answers.

Ooo, give those men a white lab coat. Theologians are scientists.

Notice what they’re saying, though. After proudly declaring that 2,000 years of searching have failed to discover any “real errors” in the Bible, they’re back-handedly admitting that there are indeed difficulties that even the most earnest and pious Christian rationalizations cannot resolve. Who is to say that some of these known problems are not, after all, “real errors”?

Geisler and Turek can’t hand-wave them away, so they try and distract us with a different rationalization, by saying that “mysteries” in the Bible are like scientific mysteries in the real world. We don’t know all there is to know about the real world, so we shouldn’t expect to know all there is to know about the Bible either. When theologians keep on believing despite known problems in the Bible, they’re just acting the same way a scientist would. Right?

There are many obvious flaws with this argument, starting with the fact that competent scientists know better than to simply assume that all contrary observations are in error. If you find that the actual data does not match the conditions that would result from your hypothesis being true, you don’t merely discard the observation, you modify your hypothesis, or abandon it entirely. To arbitrarily dismiss contrary evidence is to betray a serious lack of scientific objectivity and integrity.

Likewise, competent scientists would not declare that there was a complete absence of contrary data when they knew there were observations that could not currently be explained in terms of the original hypothesis, and which could falsify it. Geisler and Turek deny the existence of “real errors” despite knowing about the currently irresolvable “difficulties.” The most an honest scientist could claim is “we do not know that the Bible is inerrant, since there are still unresolved obstacles preventing us from reaching that conclusion.”

Unlike other scientists, theologians don’t deal with real-world observations that can be repeated, re-measured and re-validated by objective third-party observers. The difficulties faced by real-world scientists stem from the fact that reality is a complicated place.  Theology, by contrast, is difficult because the data consists of the things written by men who died millennia ago, and whose culture, language, and thoughts are anywhere from relatively inaccessible to completely impenetrable.

In other words, theology is a “science” that studies what goes on (or went on) in the minds of men who are no longer available. God does not show up in real life, so theological “scientists” can’t do their work the way other scientists do. The process of theology is more akin to that of the fiction writer than the biologist: you take the story as it has been told thus far, and try to think up a plausible scenario that takes it where you want it to go, and thus the “discovery” is made.

This leads to a pattern of development that I discussed in my post about Mt. Sinai and the burning bush. Studying something that exists in reality results in a converging understanding of the topic, as all scientists converge on the same real-world target they’re searching for. Studying something imaginary results in a divergent understanding of the topic, as each pioneer contributes some new and different perspective not necessarily compatible with other branches on the same bush. If we look at the history of scientific thought, and the history of theological thought, it’s quite clear which pattern shows up in which science (or “science”).

We could go on, but I want to save time for the last argument in Chapter 14: the slander.

Finally, it’s the critics who actually maintain an unfalsifiable position. What would convince them that their view is wrong?… Maybe they ought to consider the evidence we’ve presented in this book. Unfortunately, many critics will not do this. They will not allow facts to interfere with their desire to maintain control over their own lives. After all, if a critic were to admit that the Bible is true, he’d have to admit that he no longer calls all the shots. There would be an Authority in the universe greater than himself, and that Authority might not approve of the life the critic wants to lead.

In other words, if you notice that Ezekiel prophesied that Nebuchadnezzar would destroy Tyre utterly so that it would never be rebuilt, and that centuries later, Tyre was still a thriving seaport visited by Paul, it only seems like a contradiction because you enjoy raping small furry animals. That’s the critics’ dirty little secret, you see. They’re all just a bunch of cartoon bad guys who want to do bad things just because, well, they’re cartoon bad guys and that’s the way bad guys behave. No, seriously, they do. It’s in all the cartoons.

It’s kind of fitting, in a way, that Geisler and Turek chose to end Chapter 14 with the theologian’s equivalent of a sniveling “I know you are but what am I?” Or as Jesus put it, “I thank Thee, God, that I am not like other men…”

It’s especially ironic that they would end Chapter 14 on such a low note, because this is really the last argument in the main body of their book. Chapter 15 is basically the “altar call” portion of the sermon, an emotional appeal rather than an intellectual one. And this last half-hearted attempt at intellectual argument is not only morally bankrupt, it’s intellectually moribund as well.

Take the accusation that the critics are maintaining an unfalsifiable position. “Unfalsifiable” means you’ve phrased your position in such a way as to preclude the possibility, under any reasonably conceivable set of circumstances, that your conclusion could be admitted to be wrong. For example, if you say “any ‘difficulty’ in the Bible is, by definition, an error on the part of the reader rather than an error on the part of the Bible,” then you’ve created an unfalsifiable defense of the proposition that the Bible contains no errors. No matter what errors we find in the Bible, the apologist automatically classifies it as an error that is not in the Bible, so his claim of inerrancy can never be falsified, by definition.

That’s something very different from the problem we face when we can’t prove that something is false because the fact is that it is actually true, or vice versa. It’s not that there is no reasonably conceivable set of circumstances that would convince the critic that the Resurrection was true, and in fact it’s pretty easy to determine what evidence would constitute reasonable grounds for believing.

Just to cite one obvious example, let’s suppose that Jesus died, and rose from the dead, and appeared in Jerusalem, in a living, physical, glorified resurrection body, teaching both believer and unbeliever alike and was still there. Is there anyone out there who enjoys puppy-raping so much that they would still deny the Resurrection with a 2,000-year-old Jesus still living and teaching and revealing God’s will to us in the same city where he originally rose? Would denial of the facts even be a rational strategy for preserving one’s individual liberty?

The problem isn’t that we can’t describe the sort of evidence we ought to be seeing if the Bible were true. The problem is that the question “What would it take to convince you that the Bible is true?” turns out to be a lot like the question “What would it take to convince you that there’s a fully-grown, hungry, carnivorous T-rex standing 50 centimeters behind you?” In each case, if the claim were true, the most fundamental and obvious consequences would be rather unmistakable. That you even need to ask the question is sufficient to show that the claim itself is false.

And by the way, Geisler and Turek’s baseless slander notwithstanding, Bible critics don’t really have a problem submitting to genuine, legitimate authority. We submit to higher authorities all the time. We obey our governments, our police, our teachers, our coaches, and others. We pay our taxes just like everyone else, and have a moral history that’s typically as good as that of our Bible-believing fellows, or better. And of course, the laws of Nature are a kind of higher authority, and we submit to those as gladly as any believer. And again, sometimes more so.

Our only problem is with men who claim an authority based on uncritically taking their word for it that some invisible and all-powerful Person wants us to do what they say. It’s not that we don’t have faith, it’s just that we make a distinction between faith and gullibility. Pardon us if we examine your evidence, and then decline to start writing you checks. If you want real belief, provide real evidence.

So, then, from a real-world perspective, Geisler and Turek have absolutely no grounds for their self-righteous innuendo. It comes, sad to say, from a long history of Christians smearing their critics and spreading unsavory rumors about unbelievers. Nor is this merely an unfortunate manifestation of perverse human nature—Christians are required to believe in the fundamental evil of all non-believers. If unbelievers could be moral and upright without a supernatural Savior and a Holy Spirit, what would be the advantage of being a Christian?

And there you have it. After 14 chapters and 374 pages, Geisler and Turek’s intellectual argument comes to an end not with a bang, but a whimper. We’ll still go through the “altar call” in chapter 15, and maybe even an appendix or two (Appendix I is “The Problem of Evil”!). But from here, we can safely conclude that Geisler and Turek have failed, and failed miserably, to establish their claim that it takes more faith to be an atheist than to be a Christian. They gave it a good shot and tried their best, but in the absence of a God Who actually shows up in the real world, it was just too hard. If you have to try and argue God into existence, it’s already a lost cause.

WARNING: Before reading the following statement by Geisler and Turek, you should turn off your irony meter, remove the battery, unplug the recharger, and store all components in separate rooms of your house.

Critics may also charge, “But your position on inerrancy is not falsifiable. You will not accept an error in the Bible because you’ve decided in advance that there can’t be any!” Actually, our position is falsifiable, but the critics’ position is not. Let us explain.

First, because Jesus’ authority is well established by the evidence, we reasonably give benefit of the doubt to the Bible when we come across a difficulty or question in the text. In other words, when we run across something inexplicable, we assume that we, not the infinite God, are making an error.

Yes, when disproving the claim that you’re merely assuming Biblical inerrancy, what better way to start than by boldly and proudly declaring that you do assume any error is not the Bible’s?

Geisler and Turek, of course, are just trying to follow the standard rhetorical practice of beginning your argument by conceding that there is a legitimate question or problem that your position needs to address. It’s a common enough practice (and the source of a great many creationist quote mines, when followed by scientists). First you declare the problem, and then you proceed to explain how your position addresses that problem.

What Geisler and Turek don’t seem to realize, though, is that by admitting that they simply assume the Bible cannot be wrong, they’re conceding a lot more here than is good for their position.

They try to make their position look legitimate because they say they are only making this assumption in the context of Jesus’ authority, which is “well established by the evidence.” The “evidence” that allegedly establishes Jesus’ authority, however, is the Bible itself, when read under the assumption that it contains no errors. In essence, they’re admitting that the critics are right: they do reach their position on inerrancy by deciding in advance that the Bible cannot contain any errors, and is thus able to establish Jesus’ authority so that his authority can be used to justify the assumption that the Bible contains no errors.

Nor does their argument improve when they try to make it sound like their position is nevertheless falsifiable. The term “falsifiable,” when used correctly, refers to a statement that has been phrased in such a way that we can determine what consequences would result from the statement being true, as opposed to the consequences that would result from it being untrue, so that when we look at the real world, we can determine which set of consequences have actually occurred.

Geisler and Turek aren’t using “falsifiable” in that sense. Instead, they merely hand-wave, setting up an impossible standard of falsification, and then saying, “There, if you can just do that, then you will have disproven our position.” They don’t want to really know if their position is false or not, they just want to set up a pretext for claiming that critics have failed to falsify it. But here, let’s let Geisler and Turek explain it themselves.

[T]hat doesn’t mean that we believe there’s absolutely no possibility for Bible errors. After all, there’s always a chance that our conclusions about inerrancy are wrong—for we are certainly not inerrant. In fact, our conclusion on inerrancy would be falsified if someone could trace a real error back to an original scroll.

You see the catch-22 here. To falsify their position on inerrancy, you must first provide a real error that can be traced back to an original manuscript. Their assumption, however, is that the Bible cannot have any real errors, because God cannot make mistakes. Any error found by any critic is thus, by definition, not a real error, or at least not an error in the manuscript itself.

In other words, all we need to do to meet Geisler and Turek’s standard of falsification is to provide them with something that, by definition, cannot exist. That’s “falsification,” apologetics-style. And even Geisler and Turek seem to have some suspicion that Biblical inerrancy isn’t really a viable position, because their next argument is to try and claim that Christianity don’t need no steenkin inerrancy anyway.

[E]ven if inerrancy is falsified someday, that wouldn’t falsify the central truths of Christianity. As we have seen, the historical evidence that Jesus taught profound truths, performed miracles, and died and rose from the dead for sinful humanity is very strong indeed. Even if the Scriptures are found to contain a false detail or two, the historical truth of Christianity will not be diminished.

The problem, of course, is that the “historical truth” of Christianity is rather dependent on the assumption that the Bible cannot be wrong about anything. If there’s the possibility that some parts of the Bible might not be quite accurate, then it behooves us to subject all of the Bible’s claims to some real-world verification, to discover which parts are true, and which are embellishments, misinterpretations, or even outright deceptions.

Traditional Christian beliefs tend to do rather poorly when subjected to that kind of critical examination, though, and Geisler and Turek hasten to reassure their readers that they do not, in fact, believe that the Bible will ever be falsified. But just in case it ever is, you know, you can still go on believing what the Bible teaches anyway. Just keep on trusting what men say about God even after you discover that they don’t always tell the truth. That’s what they call faith (and what I call gullibility).

We’ll close today’s post with a look at one last pose of fake open-mindedness and falsifiability.

Is there any discovery that would cause us to disbelieve Christianity? Yes. If someone could find the body of Jesus, Christianity would be proven false and we’d give up.

Of course, since they assume Jesus did rise from the dead, they’ll naturally assume that any remains you show them must have belonged to someone else. It’s not like we have Jesus’ DNA in storage somewhere for reference. Anyone who can claim, with a straight face, that all the errors in the Bible are due to mistakes on the part of the reader, is going to have no problem at all denying that some ancient corpse ever belonged to Jesus. It’s a no-brainer (in more ways than one).

Notice what Geisler and Turek did not say: they did not say that they would disbelieve Christianity if you could examine the consequences that would result from the Gospel being true, and the consequences that would result from the Gospel being a myth, and could observe that real-world conditions are far more consistent with the myth hypothesis than with the Gospel hypothesis.

That would be a reasonable, rational way to approach the question, but it wouldn’t be guaranteed to lead to the desired conclusion. So instead they set up a goal that will be impossible for any critic to meet, a standard of falsification that could be thwarted by simply denying that the evidence is “convincing” (in the highly unlikely event of the evidence being discovered at all).

Geisler and Turek know that there is some value in being open to the evidence, and they want to make a show of being open to having their ideas falsified. But in the end it’s just empty posing. They’re not interested in reasonable and rational standards of evidence, and it shows in the arbitrary and unrealistic demands they make of those who would seek to convince them.

The first point in his presentation says that the New Atheists claim that religion causes war, and that Vox can prove statistically that it does not. As always, his refutation consists of ignoring the role of religion in war, and focusing instead on an oversimplification that distorts the data so badly he can make any claim he wants. Specifically, for each war in the Encyclopedia of Wars, he asks, “Is religion the cause of this war?” Not surprisingly, given his biases, he “discovers” that only 3.2% of wars are caused by non-Muslim religions, and fully 93% are allegedly “Non-Religious Wars.”

Wars, of course, are very complex phenomena with very complex causes. And religion is indeed a significant factor in quite a few of those wars,  It might be useful and informative to examine all the wars in recorded history to ask what role religion played in each. Was it provocative? supportive? indifferent? resistent? disruptive? Such a study, though, would produce results that would lend too much support to the New Atheists’ observations, at least if examined by an unbiased group of historians.

So instead of undertaking an unbiased and instructive approach to history, what Vox does is to take the binary approach of asking whether religion was THE cause of any given war, or not. In his argument, the mere existence of other factors, like economics or ethnicity or personal ambition, is sufficient to qualify religion as not being THE cause of the war. And thus he concludes that, by his standards, 93% of all wars were not caused by religion.

That’s hardly surprising. Indeed, the only surprising result from such an approach is that he ended up with any religious wars at all. A motivated historian could easily cite poverty, illiteracy, and socioeconomic factors behind Islamic aggression, for example, and by consistently applying the same approach, end up concluding that 100% of all wars are non-religious.

Vox doesn’t go quite that far. His weakness is that he secretly agrees with the New Atheists, at least as far as Islam is concerned. For example, he makes a consistent distinction between religious violence in general, and Islamic religious violence, which he admits is at least partially religiously driven. In his eyes, though, the New Atheists are a greater threat, and consequently he trumps up a straw-man argument and a bogus “statistical” refutation in order to declare victory and move on.

We’ve covered all this before, but today I wanted to look at one of the unique features of religion that make it particularly prone to aggravating our inherent tendency to wage war on one another. As I mentioned before, wars are complex and have complex causes, but (unlike Vox) I think it might be helpful to consider the actual role played by religion in important human endeavors like warfare.

The thing is, God does not show up in real life, or at least, the gods of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam don’t. This undeniable fact has an inescapable consequence: our only basis for what we believe about God is what men say and think and feel about Him. But men don’t all agree about Him, and therein lies the rub: because God does not show up in real life, how can you determine which men are teaching the “correct” doctrines about Him?

If it were a question about something that exists in the real world like, say, the diameter of the moon, the question could be settled by making careful real-world observations and measurements. No such mechanism exists for observing and verifying the qualities of deities that are consistently and universally absent from the real world, however. Theological arguments have to be won by force: either force of persuasion, or force of law, or force of arms. The only alternative is not to win at all.

Historically, this fact has had a tremendous impact on people’s willingness to conduct war, because even if religion is not the official “cause” of the war, a common and almost inevitable superstition says that God’s blessing determines who the good guys are and thus who will win the war (as witness the myriad “God Bless America” bumper stickers that popped up after 9/11). As the Bible itself teaches in numerous passages, victory in battle is a vindication of one’s religious belief and obedience.

Even Osama bin Ladin, as he watched the fall of the twin towers, can be heard on the video to be murmuring “Allah is great, Allah is great.” Military victory reinforced his belief that Islam was the true religion of God. And America responded in the same spirit, overthrowing the government of Iraq (who had nothing to do with 9/11) because they were Muslim. By defeating them (and their Allah), we validated our national belief that our Christian God was the true God.

After all, God does not show up in real life, so how else are you going to measure, in real-world terms, whose opinions about God are the most powerful? If you can’t superstitiously assume that material wars are merely the physical extension of a spiritual war between light and darkness, good and evil, truth and heresy, then how else can you know? If physical military strength isn’t the material manifestation of spiritual strength (i.e. righteousness), then how can you measure the true strength and power of someone’s spiritual beliefs?

This mechanism works for the whole spectrum of warfare, from the bomb-dropping, artillery-firing, fix-the-bayonets-and-charge of all out war to the subtler but no less devastating cultural warfare that tries to seize control school boards and that passes laws oppressing homosexuals. Believers lack real-world verification for their faith unless they can “prove” the superiority of their opinions by oppressing and defeating those who do not share their beliefs. Spiritual disputes extend into physical disputes in hopes that physical victory will serve as spiritual victory.

Reality-based conclusions don’t have this problem. This is why, for example, you can have literal bombs being thrown at mosques because of arguments about which branch of Islam correctly perpetuates the original teachings of Mohammed, but you don’t typically find one nation declaring war against another over the question of whether thorium decays into lead. Where real-world answers exist, we can get our answers from the real world. Everywhere else, we get whatever “answers” we’re strong enough to take by force.

In theory, we could avoid this problem if believers would insist on real-world proof of anyone’s doctrines before embracing them. But there’s two problems with this approach: (a) that would be “testing God,” which believers universally abhor, and (b) that’s exactly what the New Atheists are proposing. If you don’t want people using literal or figurative war to try and settle questions about non-real-world issues, then don’t embrace beliefs that have no real-world foundation. Stick to what can be confirmed and verified objectively and realistically, and there won’t be doctrinal issues that need to be settled by contests of strength.

I know, I know. That would make too much sense. Plus it wouldn’t satisfy the desire to believe. I know it will  never  happen. I’m just saying that, you know, the New Atheists have a valid point. War is the ultimate means by which believers conclusively “prove” the superiority of their superstitions over the beliefs of others.  So long as God fails to show up in real life, they really have no alternative.

So despite Vox Day’s over-simplified and hopelessly biased “statistics,” there is a religious component to needless human conflicts, whether these conflicts manifest as overt violence or as the lesser warfare of discrimination and oppression. It’s a problem we would do well to solve, though psychology and sociology offer us little hope of resolving it with our current abilities and understanding. Acknowledging that the New Atheists have a valid point, though, would at least be a step in the right direction.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They lie.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jesus must be rolling over in his grave.

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

13. Assuming that round numbers are false.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

16. Confusing general statements with universal ones.

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

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

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

17. Forgetting that latter revelation supersedes previous revelation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6. Basing a teaching on an obscure passage

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

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

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

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

8. Assuming that a partial report is a false report

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10. Assuming that divergent accounts are false ones

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

11. Presuming that the Bible approves of all its records

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rule 1: The boss never makes mistakes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Compare this with what Jones actually said:

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

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

Here are the trends and significances for each period:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why? It’s a matter of worldview.

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

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

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

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

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

Sigh.

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

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

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

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

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

And here’s Chuck Colson reporting the same story:

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

He’s right. I’m not surprised at all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wow.

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

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

Whatever he means by that.

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

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

1. God cannot err.

2. The Bible is the Word of God.

3. Therefore the Bible cannot err.

Notice anything missing in their logic?

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

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

Seriously. This is their argument.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s the real difference between then and now.

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

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

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

Geisler and Turek’s program of indoctrination continues:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And they were wrong.

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

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

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

Here’s Genesis 2:15-17:

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

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

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

Genesis 3 is even clearer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you.

Monday

[Phone ringing]

Hello?

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

Well, no, not really.

What about 50, or even 60 feet tall?

Never really thought about it, actu—

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

Oh, I don’t—

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

But there’s no such thing as—

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

Well, I—

YOU PERSONALLY do not know everything, right?

Heh, no, not hardly. But I—

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

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

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

I suppose there COULD be some kind of alien—

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

Well, I—

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

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

[boring business discussion snipped.]

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

Thanks, you too.

[*click*]

Tuesday

[Phone ringing]

Hello?

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

Uhhhhhh…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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