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No matter where you go … there you are
— Buckaroo Banzai

While people have died for lies—the 9/11 hijackers, for example, or the Heaven’s Gate cult—they didn’t know it was a lie.  That the apostles were in a position to know and still died defending it is strong evidence that the Jesus story is accurate.

Or, at least this is the story Christians tell themselves.

There are several issue here, but let’s focus first on the big one: how do we know how the apostles died?  Since their dying as martyrs is key to this apologetic, you’d think that this was well established in history.  But as we’ve seen (“Is Mark an Eyewitness Account?”), sometimes Christian historical claims have a very weak pedigree.

Our one-stop shopping source for this question is historian Hippolytus of Rome (170–235) in his “On the Twelve Apostles.”  At best, this is an early second century work written close to 150 years after the facts it claims to document.  At worst, it was written even later by an unknown author (called “Pseudo-Hippolytus” by historians) and deliberately or inadvertently compiled with the writings of Hippolytus.

Here’s the summary:

• 4 apostles were crucified: Andrew, Bartholomew, Peter, and Philip (the last three upside down).
• 3 were killed in some other way: James the son of Alpheus was stoned, James the son of Zebedee was killed with a sword (presumably decapitated), and Thomas was killed by spear.
• 5 died natural deaths: John, Matthew, Matthias (the new twelfth disciple added after Judas left the group), Simon the Zealot, and Judas the son of James (Thaddeus).

Another popular source for this information is John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, first published in 1563 and in many later editions.  Its late age, 1500 years after the events, is enough to disqualify it since we have the earlier account, but its popularity makes it an important source.  To a large extent Foxe was simply a mouthpiece for the anti-Catholic sentiment in England at the time, and many sources dismiss its accuracy (Wikipedia, 1911 Britannica, Catholic Encyclopedia).

Foxe largely agrees with Hippolytus on the deaths of the apostles except for the ones that Hippolytus says died natural deaths, giving that fate only to John.  He says that Matthew was “slain with a halberd” in Ethiopia, Matthias was stoned in Jerusalem and beheaded, Simon the Zealot was crucified in Britain, and Judas the son of James was crucified in what is now eastern Turkey.

James the son of Zebedee seems to have the oldest martyrdom story.  Hippolytus probably got his account from Acts 12:2, written in the latter half of the first century, which says that Herod Agrippa (grandson of Herod the Great) killed him “with the sword.”

For most of the other apostles, however, contradictory stories cloud the issue.  For example, Bartholomew’s death is documented in a number of contradictory ways.  One account says that he was beaten and then drowned.  The Martyrdom of Bartholomew (c. 500) says that he was beaten and then beheaded.  The most popular, perhaps because it’s the most gruesome, is that he was skinned alive and then crucified (or perhaps beheaded).

Various sources add to the story of Matthias.  He was crucified in Ethiopia.  Or he was blinded by cannibals but rescued by Andrew.  Or he died a natural death in Georgia on the coast of the Black Sea.

Simon the Zealot might have been sawn in half in Persia.  Or crucified in Samaria.  Or martyred in Georgia.

Add to this:

• the many additional contradictory stories about other apostles not included in this brief list,
• the decades-long period of oral history from event to writing, and
• the time span, usually centuries-long, between the original manuscripts documenting the martyrdom stories and our oldest copies that make those copies suspect.

What can we conclude given this evidential house of cards?  Only that “most apostles were martyred for their faith” is historically almost indefensible.

And it’s not just that the claim for any particular martyrdom story is flimsy; it’s that we can be certain that many of them are false because they contradict each other.

Let’s pause for a moment to savor this lesson.  “Tradition holds that” or “The Church tells us that” is never enough—be sure to look behind the curtain to see what evidence actually supports a historic claim.

“Who would die for a lie?”  I dunno—first establish that someone died at all.

Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity,
never of the correctness, of a belief.
— Arthur Schnitzler (1862–1931)

Photo credit: Wikimedia

Related links:

• “Would someone die for what they knew was a lie?” Iron Chariots Wiki.
• “‘Die for a Lie’ won’t Fly” Debunking Christianity, 5/11/06.
• Robert M. Price, “Would the Apostles Die for a Lie?”
• “What happened to the 12 disciples of Jesus?” icthus.com.
• Lee Strobel, “Would Someone Die For A Lie?” YouTube, 3/16/07.
• John Foxe, Book of Martyrs full text, Project Gutenberg.

In the beginning … God walked in the Garden of Eden like an ordinary supernatural Joe.  He dropped by Abraham’s for a cup of coffee and a chat.  He didn’t know what was up in Sodom and Gomorrah and had to send out angelic scouts for reconnaissance: “The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sin so grievous that I will go down and see if what they have done is as bad as the outcry that has reached me” (Gen. 18:20–21).

But, like Stalin gradually collecting titles, God has now become omniscient and omnipotent.  He’s gone from needing six days to shape a world from Play-Doh and sprinkle tiny stars in the dome of heaven to creating 100 billion galaxies, each with 100 billion stars.

That’s 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg of universe.

And yet, oddly, his biblical demonstrations of power faded with time.  From creating the universe, he’s weakened such that appearing in a grilled cheese sandwich is about as much as he can pull off today.  He has the fiery reputation of the Wizard of Oz but is now just the man behind the curtain.

Even God’s punishments became wimpier.  A global flood, with millions dead is pretty badass.  Personally smiting Sodom and Gomorrah is impressive, though that’s a big step down in magnitude.

And it’s downhill from there—God simply orders the destruction of Canaanite cities, and to punish Israel and Judah, he allows Assyria and then Babylon to invade.  As Jesus, he doesn’t kick much more butt than cursing a fig tree, and today he simply stands by to let bad things happen.

Maybe God’s power diminishes as the universe’s dark energy increases?

Photo credit: Why There is no God

We’ll begin with the big category, folklore.  This is the traditional knowledge or forms of expression of a culture passed on from person to person.  Folklore can be material (quilts, traditional costumes, recipes, the hex signs on Amish barns, etc.), behavioral (customs such as throwing rice at a wedding, what constitutes good manners, superstitions, etc.), or traditional stories.

Traditional stories is itself a large category, containing music, anecdotes, ghost stories, parables, popular misconceptions, and other things you might not think of.

Now on to the kinds of traditional stories that are most interesting to apologetics.  These terms can overlap quite a bit, so consider these definitions approximations.  First, let’s consider stories seen as true (or plausibly so) by their hearers.

• Legends are grounded in history and can change over time.  They can include miracles.  Urban legends are a modern category of legends that don’t include miracles, are set in or near the present day, and take the form of a cautionary tale.
• Myths are sacred narratives that explain some aspect of reality (for example: the myth of Prometheus explains why we have fire and the Genesis creation myth explains where everything came from).  Epic poems such as Beowulf and the Odyssey are one kind of myth.

The difference between legends and myths is that a legend is set in a more recent time and generally features human characters, while myths are set in the distant past and have supernatural characters.  Some stories are mixtures of the two—the Iliad tells the story of a real city, and the characters include gods, humans with supernatural powers, and ordinary humans.

Lady Godiva, King Arthur, William Tell, and Atlantis are examples of legends—the stories have human characters and are set in a historic past.  Myths include the stories of Hercules and Zeus, Hindu mythology, the Noah story, and the creation stories of dozens of cultures—they have gods as characters and are set in a distant or undefined past.

Let’s take a brief detour to look at a few relevant terms that are not part of the category of traditional stories.

• Religion starts with the sacred narratives of mythology and adds beliefs and practices.  Myth and scripture are both sacred, but scripture is the writings themselves.  Doctrine is codified teaching, and dogma is that mandatory subset of the doctrine that must be believed for one to be a member.
• Superstition is any belief that relies on a supernatural (instead of natural) cause like astrology, omens to predict the future, magic, or witchcraft.  It can also be defined as the unfounded supernatural beliefs of the other guy’s religion (not your own, of course).  Merriam-Webster defines it as “a belief or practice resulting from ignorance, fear of the unknown, trust in magic or chance, or a false conception of causation.”

Finally, let’s consider stories understood by their hearers to not be true.

• Fables have a particular kind of character: nonhumans such as animals, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature that have human-like qualities.  Fables end with a moral.
• Fairy tales also have particular characters: fantasy characters such as fairies, goblins, and elves.  Magic is also an element.  There is no connection with historic time (it begins “Once upon a time …”).
• Parables are plausible stories with plausible characters (no talking rocks, no magic) that are not presented as true.  Parables illustrate a moral or religious principle.

Photo credit: Wikimedia

Related posts:

• See all the definitions in the Galileo Unchained Glossary.

Related links:

• “Literary or Profane Legends,” New Advent.

That’s a fair question, and I’m happy to make a claim and defend it. Even if you accept my contention that the Bible is just legend and that the supernatural stuff didn’t happen—that it’s the surviving fragments of the blog of a prescientific tribe of people who lived two to three thousand years ago—that only tells us what didn’t happen.

So what did happen? That the New Testament exists is undeniable; what explains it? Here we go.

1. Jesus lived. The Christ Myth Theory, which argues there is insufficient evidence for a historical Jesus, is another possibility, but the simplest argument seems to be that a real man grounded the Jesus story. It’s easy to imagine false legend being built on a foundation of an actual person in history.

2. Jesus was an influential rabbi who had a following. He was killed, and stories grew up about him after he died.

3. The stories were passed from person to person orally for decades, eventually touching thousands or tens of thousands of people. The religion spread quickly by evangelism and trade through the Ancient Near East, from Palestine to Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor, Greece, Italy, and beyond.

4. The stories were corrupted as they went. Some of this might have been inadvertent, but some was deliberate. Embellishments were added to improve the story, either to satisfy imagined or real prophecy from the Old Testament (for a Jewish audience) or to duplicate a supernatural feature of a competing Greek, Mesopotamian, or Egyptian religion (for a gentile audience). Starting from a Jewish community that spoke Aramaic, it found a home in a far-flung community that was culturally Greek.

5. Christianity relied initially on oral history. After decades, when it became clear that the imminent second coming wasn’t coming, the apocalyptic element of the religion was toned down, the religion settled in for the long haul, and the stories were committed to parchment. A handful of these gospels were written in the first century, including the four that made it into the New Testament. Dozens more were added in the following centuries.

6. Some of these later gospels were benign, but others were dangerously incompatible. A Christian community that accepted one tradition might consider another community heretical, and vice versa. Church fathers wrote books against particular heresies: Irenaeus wrote against Gnosticism, Tertullian against Marcionism, and Origen against Platonism. Different philosophies were debated, and the collection of dogmas that we think of today as orthodox Christianity was hardly the obvious winner.

• In opposition to Paul, the Ebionites saw Jesus as preaching an extension of Judaism, not a new religion. Paul himself documents this internal disagreement in the debate over circumcision (Gal. 6:12–13).
• Other heresies fragmented the church before the Council of Nicaea—Montanism (an early kind of Pentecostalism), Nicolationism (hedonism), Antinomianism (an extreme view of salvation through faith alone), Sabellianism (Jesus and God the Father were not distinct persons but two aspects of one person), Doceticism (Jesus was only spirit, and his humanness was an illusion), Arianism (Jesus didn’t always exist but was a created being), rejection of Trinitarianism (God exists in three persons), and others. But of course these were heresies only from the standpoint of the church that eventually emerged victorious.

7. The gospels and epistles were copied over the years and modified in small and large ways to adapt to different communities’ beliefs.

8. What we think of as the official Christian canon of books was largely fixed at the Council of Nicaea in 325.

Point out anything that doesn’t fit, but this sketch best explains the facts as far as I can tell. It is far more plausible than accepting the gospel stories as history.

Read the first post in this series: What Did the Original Books of the Bible Say?

The word “belief” is a difficult thing for me.
I don’t believe. I must have a reason for a certain hypothesis.
[If] I know a thing, then I know it.
I don’t need to believe it.
— Carl Jung

Photo credit: fradaveccs

Paul’s epistles precede Mark, the earliest gospel, by almost 20 years.  The only miracle that Paul mentions is the resurrection (1 Cor. 15:4).  Were the miracle stories so well known within his different churches that he didn’t need to mention them?  It doesn’t look like it.

Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles (1 Cor. 1:22–3).

The Jews demand signs?  That’s not a problem.  Paul had loads of Jesus miracles to pick from.  But wait a minute—if the Jesus story is a stumbling block to miracle-seeking Jews, then Paul must not know of any miracles.

Miracles come later, with the gospels.  Looking at them chronologically, notice how the divinity of Jesus evolves.  He becomes divine with the baptism in Mark; then in Matthew and Luke, he’s divine at birth; and in John, he’s been divine since the beginning of time.

The four gospels were snapshots of the Jesus story as told in four different communities at four different times.  Because the synoptic (“looking in the same direction”) gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke share so much source material, their similarity is not surprising.  Nevertheless, 35% of Luke comes uniquely from its community (such as the parables of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son), and 20% of Matthew is unique (such as Jesus and his family fleeing to Egypt after his birth and the zombies that walked after Jesus’s death).  And, of course, John is quite different from these three, having Gnostic and (arguably) Marcionite elements.

This synoptic similarity undercuts the argument that the gospels are eyewitness accounts.  If the authors of Matthew and Luke were eyewitnesses, why would they copy so heavily from Mark?  The authorship question (that Mark really wrote Mark, etc.) that grounds the claims that the gospels record eyewitness history is another tenuous element of the evolving story, as I’ve written before.

The gospels don’t even claim to be eyewitnesses (with the exception of a vague reference in John 21:24, in a chapter that appears to have been added by a later author).  And even if they had, would that make a difference?  Would tacking on “I Bartholomew was a witness to all that follows” to a gospel story make it more believable?

Would it make the story of Merlin the wizard more believable?

Consider some of the noncanonical gospels that include attributions.  “I Simon Peter and Andrew my brother took our nets and went to the sea” is from the Gospel of Peter, and “I Thomas, an Israelite, write you this account” is from the Infancy Gospel of Thomas.  These gospels are rejected both by the church and by scholars despite these claims of eyewitness testimony.  Why then imagine that the vague “This is the disciple who testifies to these things and who wrote them down; we know that his testimony is true” (John 21:24) adds anything to John?

There are dozens of noncanonical gospels.  Christian churches reject these in part because they were written late.  But if we agree that the probable second-century authorship for (say) the gospels of Thomas, Judas, and James is a problem because stories change with time, then why do the four canonical gospels get a pass?  If the gospel of John, written 60 years after the resurrection, is reliable despite being a preposterous story, why reject Thomas, written just a few decades later?

The answer, it seems, is simply that Thomas doesn’t fit the mold of the version of Christianity that happened to win.  History, even the imagined history of religion, is written by the victors.

Read the first post in this series: What Did the Original Books of the Bible Say?

God made everything out of nothing,
but the nothingness shows through
— Paul Valery

Photo credit: Wikimedia

Related posts:

• Is Mark an Eyewitness Account?

This wasn’t just an active imagination on the part of the screenwriters.  No, this came from history.

It was August of 1914, near Mons in Belgium. The German army was making its sweep into France in the opening stages of World War I. Heavily outnumbered units of the British Expeditionary Force came under vastly superior German fire, and their destruction seemed assured. But in perhaps the strangest tale in modern warfare, the British were saved at the last moment by an inexplicable heavenly presence: a brigade of warrior angels appeared and wrought destruction upon the Germans, handing the day and the victory to the British.

This is an excerpt from Skeptoid.com.  The episode goes on to expose the myth, noting that the origin of the supernatural part comes the short story “The Bowmen” by Arthur Machen, published five weeks after the battle.  Machen was inspired by the Battle of Agincourt, the miraculous and overwhelming English victory that took place almost exactly 500 years before the Battle of Mons.  He imagined the ghosts of those English and Welsh archers using their fabled longbows to annihilate the Germans like they had done to the French cavalry when they were living.

Archers became angels with an article of supposed battlefield remembrances some months later, and the angelic story was solidified by several books years later.  The story inspired Mary Norton, author of the two books from which Disney’s Bedknobs and Broomsticks was adapted.

Granted, the horde of angels was never part of any official account of the battle, and even within the British public during the war this was probably a minority belief.  But similarly, the historical resurrection of Jesus was never part of any modern consensus view of history, and Christianity is a minority of worldwide belief (to cite just two groups, Roman Catholics are 16.8% and Protestants are 6.1% [2009 estimates]).

If some combination of outright fiction, selective memory, and wishful thinking can make it into the history of our well-educated modern era, shouldn’t this natural explanation win out over the supernatural Jesus story?

Photo credit: Lichfield District Council

Related posts:

• See all the definitions in the Galileo Unchained Glossary.

Related links:

• “Angels of Mons,” Wikipedia.
• Brian Dunning, “The Angel of Mons,” Skeptoid, 1/20/09.

Imagine that the year is 50 CE and you are a merchant in Judea or Galilee.  A traveler stops at your house and asks for lodging, and you comply.  After dinner, you chat with your new acquaintance and mention that you have recently become a follower of the Jewish messiah, Jesus.  He is unaware of Jesus and asks to hear more, and you tell the complete gospel story, from the birth of Jesus through his ministry, miracles, death, and resurrection.  Your guest is excited by the story and eager to pass it on.  He asks that you tell it again.

Instead, you ask him to tell the story so that you can correct any errors.  He goes through the story twice, with you making corrections and adding bits to the story that you’d forgotten in the first telling.

You’ve now spent the entire night telling the powerful story, but you and your new friend agree that it was time well spent.  He is on his way, and a week later the events are repeated, but this time your friend plays host to a traveler and the Good News is passed on to a new convert.

Imagine how long you would need to summarize the gospel story and how many times you’d need to correct yourself with, “Oh wait a minute—there was one more thing that came before” or “No, not Capernaum … I think it was Caesarea.”  That confusing tale would be a lot for an initiate to remember, and yet this imaginary encounter was about as good as it got for passing on so complex a story.  Consider other less perfect scenarios—getting fragments of the story from different people over months or years, or having two believers arguing over details as they try to tell the story.

“And then Jesus healed the centurion’s slave—”

“Hold on—that’s when he healed the daughter of Jairus!  Or Gyrus, or something.  And it wasn’t the centurion’s slave, it was his son.  Or maybe his servant, I forget.”

(And so on.)

Apologists acknowledge the problem of oral history when they argue that the earliest gospel(s) were written just 20 to 30 years after the resurrection instead historians’ typical estimate of 40 years, but this does little to resolve the problem.

Let’s then assume just twenty years of oral history in a pre-scientific culture produced a story about the Creator of the Universe coming to earth.  What certainty can we have that such a whopper is correct?

Christians and atheists can agree that the period of oral history is a concern, but what is rarely acknowledged is the translation that happened at the same time.

To see this, first consider a different example.  In response to the 1858 sightings of Mary at Lourdes, France by a 14-year-old girl named Bernadette, the local bishop investigated and concluded a year and a half later that the sightings were genuine.  Bernadette and the bishop were from the same culture and spoke the same language.

The gospel story had a much more harrowing journey.  Jesus and his disciples spoke Aramaic and came from a Jewish culture, but this isn’t where the gospel came from.  Every book in the New Testament was written in Greek and came from a Greek culture.  The story would have been heard in and (to some extent) adapted to a Greek context.

For example, imagine a gospel without the water-into-wine story.  “Wait a minute,” the Greek listener might say.  “The Oenotropae could change water into wine.  If Jesus was god, couldn’t he do that as well?”

Or imagine a gospel without the healing miracles.  “Asclepius was generous with his healing gifts and even raised the dead.  Didn’t Jesus do anything like that?”

Or a gospel without the resurrection.  “Dionysus was killed and then was reborn.  You mean Jesus just died, and that was it?”

Humans have a long history of adapting gods to their own culture—for example, the Greek god Heracles became Hercules when he was adopted by the Romans.  Athena became Minerva, Poseidon became Neptune, Aphrodite became Venus, and Zeus became Jupiter.  Or, a culture might adopt a story or idea from a neighboring community, as Jewish history adopted the Mesopotamian flood story Gilgamesh and the Sumerian water model of the cosmos.

We know how stories evolve in our own time.  As Richard Carrier notes (video @ 26:00), the evolution of the Jesus story is like the evolution of the Roswell UFO Incident.  A guy finds some sticks and Mylar in the desert, and this was interpreted as debris from a crashed spaceship.  But within 30 years, the story had morphed into: a spaceship crashed in the desert, and the military autopsied the dead aliens and is reverse-engineering the advanced technology.

Let’s return to your telling the story to the new convert.  How close was your version of the story to that in the New Testament?  And how similar would the new guy’s telling of the story be to the one that you told him?

How much variation is added with each retelling?

The gospel story was an oral tradition for four decades or more before finally being written down.  That’s a lot of time for the story to evolve.

Christians may respond that by relying on writing, our memory skills have atrophied.  In an oral culture like that in first-century Palestine, people became very good at memorization.

Yes, it’s possible that people memorized the Jesus story so that they could retell it the same as it was taught to them, but there is no reason to imagine that this was how it was passed along.  Indeed, it’s wrong to assume that storytellers in an oral culture always wanted to repeat a story with perfect accuracy.  We care about perfect accuracy because we come from a literate culture.  Only because we have the standard of the written word do we assume that other cultures would want to approximate this unvarying message.

The theory of oral-formulaic composition argues instead that tales are often changed with the retelling to adapt to the audience or to imperfect memory.  Any transcription of such a tale (like a single version of the Iliad) would simply be a snapshot of a single telling, and you would deceive yourself if you imagined that this gives an accurate record of the story.  This is seen in modern-day oral epic poetry in the Balkans and is guessed to be the structure of Homeric epic storytelling as well.

But this is a tangent.  The gospel story wasn’t an epic poem, but rather a story passed from person to person.  It changed with time, just like any story does.

The gossip fence is a better analog than Homer.

Read the first post in this series: What Did the Original Books of the Bible Say?

When a person is determined to believe something,
the very absurdity of the doctrine confirms them in their faith.
— Letters of Junius 12/19/1769

Photo credit: Wikimedia

Related posts:

• The Moon Isn’t Made of Green Cheese … Is It? 

Related articles:

• “Oral Tradition,” Wikipedia.
• “The Singer of Tales,” Wikipedia.
• Kal Korff, “What Really Happened at Roswell,” Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, 7/97.

The short answer is because Papias (< 70 – c. 155) said so.  Papias was a bishop and an avid documenter of oral history from the early church.  His book Interpretations was written after 120 CE.

Jesus died in 30, Mark was written in 70, and Papias documents Mark as the author in 120 (dates are estimates).  That’s at least 50 years bridged only by “because Papias said so.”

But how do we know what Papias said?  We don’t have the original of Papias, nor do we have a copy.  Instead, we have Church History by Eusebius, which quotes Papias and was written in 320.

And how do we know what Eusebius said?  The oldest copies of his book are from the tenth century, though there is a Syriac translation from 462.

Count the successive people in the claim “Mark wrote Mark, which documents an eyewitness account”: (1) Peter was an eyewitness and (2) Mark was his journalist, and (3) someone told this to (4) Papias, who wrote his book, which was preserved by (5) copyist(s), and (6) Eusebius transcribed parts of that, and (7) more copyist(s) translated Eusebius to give us our oldest manuscript copy.  And the oldest piece of evidence that we can put our hands on was written four centuries after Mark was written.

That’s an exceedingly tenuous chain.

The sequence of people could have been longer still.  Papias was the bishop of Hierapolis, in western Asia Minor.  Mark might have been written in Syria, and no one knows how long the chain of hearsay was from that author to Papias.  No one knows how many copyists separated Papias from Eusebius or Eusebius from our oldest copies.

It gets worse.  Eusebius didn’t think much of Papias as a historian and said that he “seems to have been a man of very small intelligence, to judge from his books” (Church History, book III, chapter 39, paragraph 13).  Evaluate Papias for yourself: he said that Judas lived on after a failed attempt at hanging and had a head swollen so large that he couldn’t pass down a street wide enough for a hay wagon.  Who knows if this version of the demise of Judas is more reliable than that in Matthew, but it’s special pleading to dismiss Papias when he’s embarrassing but hold on to his explanation of gospel authorship.

Even Eusebius’s Church History is considered unreliable.

The story is similar for the claimed authorship of Matthew.  A twist to this story is that Papias said that Matthew wrote his gospel in Hebrew (or perhaps Aramaic), which makes no sense since Matthew used Mark, Q, and the Septuagint Bible, all Greek sources.¹

What about the other gospels?  That evidence comes from other documents with simpler pedigree but later dates.

• Irenaeus documented the traditional gospel authorship in his Against Heresies (c. 180).  Our oldest copy is a Latin translation from the tenth century.
• Tertullian also lists the four traditional authors in his Against Marcion (c. 208), but he doesn’t think much of Luke: “[Heretic] Marcion seems to have singled out Luke for his mutilating process.”  Our oldest copy of this book is from the eleventh century.
• The oldest manuscript labeled “gospel according to Luke” dates from c. 200.
• The Muratorian fragment, a Latin manuscript from the seventh century, may be a translation of a Greek original from the late second century (or maybe from the fourth).  It lists many books of the New Testament, including the gospels of Luke and John.

We grope for evidence to back up the claim that the gospels document eyewitness accounts.  Perhaps only faith will get you there.

¹Randel Helms, Who Wrote the Gospels? (Millennium Press, 1997), 41.

If we submit everything to reason,
our religion will have no mysterious and supernatural element.
If we offend the principles of reason,
our religion will be absurd and ridiculous.
— Blaise Pascal

Photo credit: Wikimedia

My favorite is “Conflict”:

A thorough critique of the many failings of this argument will have to wait for another post.  But this argument is easily turned around to make the Atheist’s Wager.  If God exists and is a decent and fair being, he would respect those who used their God-given brains for critical thinking.  He would applaud those who followed the evidence where it led.  Since God’s existence is hardly obvious, he would reward thoughtful atheists with heaven after death.

But God would be annoyed at those who adopted a belief because it felt good rather than because it was well-grounded with evidence, and he would send to hell those who misused his gift of intelligence.

Here it is formulated as a syllogism:

• God treats people fairly and will send honest, truth-seeking people to heaven and everyone else to hell.
• God set up the world without substantial evidence of his existence.
• Therefore, God will send only atheists to heaven.

The Atheist’s Wager can be different than Pascal’s Wager in that Pascal is assuming the Christian god, while the Atheist’s Wager can imagine a benevolent god.  The difference is that the actions of the benevolent god can be evaluated with ordinary human ideas of right and wrong, while Christians often must play the “God’s ways are not our ways” card to explain away God’s occasional insanity as recorded in the Bible.  For example, no benevolent god would send one of his creations to rot in hell forever.  Or support slavery.  Or demand genocide.

Of course, if a non-benevolent god exists, and the Christians stumbled upon the correct way to placate him, then the atheist is indeed screwed.  But then we’re back to the fundamental question: why believe this?

Photo credit: maorix

Related posts:

• And God isn’t Good, Either
• See all the definitions in the Galileo Unchained Glossary.

Related articles:

• Austin Cline, “Atheism & Hell: What if You Atheists Are Wrong? Aren’t You Afraid of Hell?,” About.com.
• “Atheist’s Wager,” Wikipedia.

We can compare the sizes of two sets of numbers by finding a one-to-one correspondence between them, but in the case of infinitely large sets, strange things can happen.  For example, compare the set of positive integers I = {1, 2, 3, 4, …} with the set of squares S = {1, 4, 9, 16, …}.  Every element n in I has a corresponding n² in S, and every n² in S has a corresponding n in I.  Here we find that a subset of the set of integers (a subset which has omitted an infinite number of integers) has the same size as the set of all integers.

Playing with the same paradox, Hilbert’s Hotel imagines a hotel that can hold an infinite number of guests.  Suppose you ask for a room but the hotel is full.  No problem—every guest moves one room higher (room n moves to room n + 1), and room 1 is now free.

But now suppose the hotel is full, and you’ve brought an infinite number of friends.  Again, no problem—every guest moves to the room number twice the old room number (room n moves to room 2n), and the infinitely many odd-numbered rooms become free.

Infinity is best seen as a concept, not a number.  To understand this, we should realize that zero can also be seen as a concept and not a number.  Consider a situation in which I have three liters of water.  I give you a third so that I have two liters and you have one.  I now have twice what you have.  I will always have twice what you have, regardless of the number of liters of water except for zero.  If I start with zero liters, I can’t really give you anything, and if I “gave” you a third of my zero liters, I would no longer have twice as much as you.

Not all infinities are the same.  Let’s move from integers to real numbers (real numbers are all numbers that we’re familiar with: the integers as well as 3.7, 1/7, π, √2, and so on).

The number of numbers between 0 and 1 is obviously the same as that between 1 and 2.  But it gets interesting when we realize that there are the same number of numbers in the range 0–1 as 1–∞.

The proof is quite simple: for every number x in the range 0–1, the value 1/x is in the range 1–∞.  (If x = 0.1, 1/x = 10; if x = 0.25, 1/x = 4; and so on)  And now we go in the other direction: for every number y in the range 1–∞, 1/y is in the range 0–1.  There’s a one-to-one correspondence, so the sets must be of equal sizes.  QED.

(Note that this isn’t a trick or fallacy.  You might have seen the proof that 1 = 2, but that “proof” only works because it contains an error.  Not so in this case.)

The resolution of this paradox is fairly straightforward, but resolving the paradox isn’t the point here.  The point is that this isn’t intuitive.  Use caution when using infinity-based apologetic arguments.

Let’s conclude by revisiting William Lane Craig’s example from last time.

Suppose we meet a man who claims to have been counting from eternity and is now finishing: . . ., –3, –2, –1, 0.  We could ask, why did he not finish counting yesterday or the day before or the year before?  By then an infinite time had already elapsed, so that he should already have finished by then.…  In fact, no matter how far back into the past we go, we can never find the man counting at all, for at any point we reach he will have already finished.

The problem is that he confuses counting infinitely many negative integers with counting all the negative integers.  As we’ve seen, there are the same number of negative integers as just the number of negative squares –1², –2², –3², ….  Our mysterious Counting Man could have counted an infinite number of negative integers but still have infinitely many yet to count.

For a more thorough analysis, read the critique from Prof. Wes Morriston.

And isn’t the apologist who casts infinity-based arguments living in a glass house?  The atheist might raise the infinite regress problem—Who created God, and who created God’s creator, and who created that creator, and so on?  The apologist will sidestep the problem by saying (without evidence) that God has always existed.  Okay, if God can have existed forever, why not the universe?  And if the forever universe succumbs to the problem that we wouldn’t be able to get to now, how does the forever God avoid it?

This post is not meant as proof that all of Craig’s infinity based arguments are invalid or even that any of them are.  I simply want to ask apologists who aren’t mathematicians to appreciate their limits and tread lightly in topics infinite.

Of course, if the apologist’s goal is simply to baffle people and win points by intimidation, then this may be just the approach.

Related posts:

• Part 1 of this topic: Infinity—Nothing to Trifle With
• Word of the Day: Hoare’s Dictum

Related articles:

• “Aleph number,” Wikipedia.
• Wes Morriston, “Must the Past Have a Beginning?” Philo, 1999.
• William Lane Craig, “The Existence of God and the Beginning of the Universe,” Truth Journal.

Philosopher and apologist William Lane Craig walks where most laymen fear to tread.  Like an experienced actor, he has no difficulty imagining himself in all sorts of stretch roles—as a physicist, as a biologist, or as a mathematician.

Since God couldn’t have created the universe if it has been here forever, Craig argues that an infinitely old universe is impossible.  He imagines such a universe and argues that it would take an infinite amount of time to get to now.  This gulf of infinitely many moments of time would be impossible to cross, so the idea must be impossible.

But why not arrive at time t = now?  We must be somewhere on the timeline, and now is as good a place as any.  The imaginary infinite timeline isn’t divided into “Points in time we can get to” and “Points we can’t.”  And if going from a beginning in time infinitely far in the past and arriving at now is a problem, then imagine a beginningless timeline.  Physicist Vic Stenger, for one, makes the distinction between a universe that began infinitely far in the past and a universe without a beginning

Hoare’s Dictum is relevant here.  Infinity-based arguments are successful because they’re complicated and confusing, not because they’re accurate.

One of Craig’s conundrums is this:

Suppose we meet a man who claims to have been counting from eternity and is now finishing: . . ., –3, –2, –1, 0.  We could ask, why did he not finish counting yesterday or the day before or the year before?  By then an infinite time had already elapsed, so that he should already have finished by then.…  In fact, no matter how far back into the past we go, we can never find the man counting at all, for at any point we reach he will have already finished.

Before we study this ill-advised descent into mathematics, let’s first explore the concept of infinity.

Everyone knows that the number of integers {1, 2, 3, …} is infinite.  It’s easy to see that if one proposed that the set of integers was finite, with a largest integer n, the number n + 1 would be even larger.  This understanding of infinity is an old observation, and Aristotle and other ancients noted it.

But there’s more to the topic than that.  I remember being startled in an introductory calculus class at a shape sometimes called Gabriel’s Horn (take the two-dimensional curve 1/x from 1 to ∞ and rotate it around the x-axis to make an infinitely long wine glass).  This shape has finite volume but infinite surface area.  In other words, you could fill it with paint, but you could never paint it.

A two-dimensional equivalent is the familiar Koch snowflake.  (Start with an equilateral triangle.  For every side, erase the middle third and replace it with an outward-facing V with sides the same length as the erased segment.  Repeat forever.)  At every iteration (see the first few in the drawing above), each line segment becomes 1/3 bigger.  Repeat forever, and the perimeter becomes infinitely long.  Surprisingly, the area doesn’t become infinite because the entire growing shape could be bounded by a fixed circle.  In the 2D equivalent of the Gabriel’s Horn paradox, you could fill in a Koch snowflake with a pencil, but all the pencils in the world couldn’t trace its outline.

Far older than these are any of Zeno’s paradoxes.  In one of these, fleet-footed Achilles gives a tortoise a 100-meter head start in a foot race.  Achilles is ten times faster, but by the time he reaches the 100-meter mark, the tortoise has gone 10 meters.  This isn’t a problem, and he crosses that next 10 meters.  But wait a minute—the tortoise has moved again.  Every time Achilles crosses the next distance segment, the tortoise has moved ahead.  He must cross an infinite series of distances.  Will he ever pass the tortoise?

The distance is the infinite sum 100 + 10 + 1 + 1/10 + ….  This sum is a little more than 111 meters, which means that Achilles will pass the tortoise and win the race.

Some infinite sums are finite (1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + … = 2).

And some are infinite (1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + 1/4 + … = ∞).

(And this post is getting a bit long.  Read Part 2.)

Photo credit: Wikipedia

Related posts:

• Word of the Day: Hoare’s Dictum

Related articles:

• “Zeno’s paradoxes,” Wikipedia.
• “Zeno’s Advent Calendar,” xkcd.com.
• “Paradoxes of infinity,” Wikipedia.
• “Is God Actually Infinite?” Reasonable Faith blog.
• Peter Lynds, “On a Finite Universe with no Beginning or End,” Cornell University Library, 2007.
• Mark Vuletic, “Does Big Bang Cosmology Prove the Universe Had a Beginning?” Secular Web, 2000.
• Wes Morriston, “Must the Past Have a Beginning?” Philo, 1999.
• William Lane Craig, “The Existence of God and the Beginning of the Universe,” Truth Journal.

The social turmoil of the past makes today’s focus on gay marriage and abortion look almost inconsequential by comparison.

What’s especially interesting is Christianity’s role in some of these movements.  Christians will point with justifiable pride to schools and hospitals build by churches or religious orders.  The Social Gospel movement of the early 20th century pushed for corrections of many social ills—poverty and wealth inequality, alcoholism, poor schools, and more.  Christians point to Rev. Martin Luther King’s work on civil rights and William Wilberforce’s Christianity-inspired work on ending slavery.

(This doesn’t sound much like the church today, commandeered as it is by conservative politics, but that’s another story.)

Same-sex marriage seems inevitable, just another step in the march of civil rights.  Jennifer Roback Morse, president and founder of the Ruth Institute for promotion of heterosexual marriage and rejection of same-sex marriage, was recently asked if she feared being embarrassed by the seeming inevitability of same-sex marriage.  She replied:

On the contrary, [same-sex marriage proponents] are the ones who are going to be embarrassed.  They are the ones who are going to be looking around, looking for the exits, trying to pretend that it had nothing to do with them, that it wasn’t really their fault.

I am not the slightest bit worried about the judgment of history on me.  This march-of-history argument bothers me a lot. …  What they’re really saying is, “Stop thinking, stop using your judgment, just shut up and follow the crowd because the crowd is moving towards Nirvana and you need to just follow along.”

Let’s first acknowledge someone who could well be striving to do the right thing simply because it’s right, without concern for popularity or the social consequences.  I would never argue that someone ought to abandon a principle because it has become a minority opinion or that it is ridiculed.  If Dr. Morse sticks to her position solely because she thinks it’s right, and she’s not doing it because of (say) some political requirement or because her job depends on it, that’s great.

Nevertheless, the infamous 1963 statement from George Wallace comes to mind: “I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”  That line came back to haunt him.  To his credit, he apologized and rejected his former segregationist policies, but history will always see him as having chosen the wrong side of this issue.

Christianity has similarly scrambled to reposition itself after earlier errors.  Christians often claim that modern science is built on a Christian foundation, ignoring the church’s rejection of science that didn’t fit its medieval beliefs (think Galileo).  They take credit for society’s rejection of slavery, forgetting Southern preachers and their gold mine of Bible verses for ammunition.  They reposition civil rights as an issue driven by Christians, ignoring the Ku Klux Klan and its burning cross symbol, biblical justification for laws against mixed-race marriage, and slavery support as the issue that created the Southern Baptist Convention.

Mohandas Gandhi had considerable experience as the underdog.  He said, “First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.”

(And then they claim that it was their idea all along!)

The same-sex marriage issue in the United States has almost advanced to “then you win” stage.  Check back in two decades, and you’ll see Christians positioning the gay rights issue as one led by the church.  They’ll mine history for liberal churches that took the lead (and flak) in ordaining openly gay clerics and speaking out in favor of gay rights.

If someone truly rejects same-sex marriage because their unbiased analysis shows it to be worse for society, great.  But it is increasingly becoming clear how history will judge that position.

Truth never damages a cause that is just.
— Mohandas Gandhi

Photo credit: Spec-ta-cles

Related posts:

• The first post in this series is here: Homosexuality v. Christianity
• Marriage—Designed for Procreation?
• Biblical Marriage: Not a Pretty Picture
• Marriage vs. Religious Freedom
• Confused Thinking About Homosexuality

Related links:

• “Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse, Are Defenders of Natural Marriage on the Wrong Side of History?” Issues Etc., 5/25/12.
• “Pure Religion: Revivalism and Reform in Early 19th-Century America,” The Dartmouth Apologia, Spring 2010, pp 20–24.

I bring this up because of dark clouds gathering over The Amazing Meeting.  I don’t pretend to understand the issue, but an Elevatorgate-like discussion has blown up about an incident of sexual harassment at a previous TAM, how it was handled, and then the inevitable recursive discussions about the descriptions of those incidents, critiques of those discussions, analysis of those critiques, and so on, seemingly to infinity.

Are women welcome and safe at TAM?  That the question is even being asked is incredible to me, but early evidence suggests the fraction of attendees who are women will be half of last year’s 40% because of concern over this story.  It must be an unintended consequence to all sides for a conference that is accused of being unfriendly to women to now become even more populated by men.

Some good has come out of this in that it has encouraged conferences to adopt anti-harassment policies.  That sounds like a positive step to restore confidence, assuming that they’re not extreme by, say, prohibiting a handshake or tap on the shoulder.

I’m amazed at the byzantine turns this topic has taken and the hold it has on some atheist bloggers.  It would take me days to read all that has been written, and let me say again that, not having done that, I don’t pretend to be well-informed about the issue.  But let me summarize an event that happened in my part of the country about 15 years ago that, while much more extreme, may have parallels to today’s anxiety about TAM.

Perhaps you remember the story about the Wenatchee child sex ring, what has been called history’s most extensive child sex abuse investigation.

It began in 1992, when, after much questioning, the 7-year-old daughter of poor and uneducated parents accused a family acquaintance of molesting her.  After repeated encouragement by the Wenatchee police lieutenant who was acting as foster parent to the girl and her sister, the girls eventually named over a hundred abusers and many child victims.

Local Pentecostal pastor Robert Robertson tried to do the right thing and talk sense to the investigators.  For his troubles, he and his family were sucked into the investigation, and the story was rewoven to include his church as a center for orgies with the children.  Others who also tried to rein in the crazy were also charged or fired.  (What explains a defense of the accused but that that person is similarly guilty?)

Child witnesses, mostly from 9 to 13 years old, were often taken from their families and placed in foster care. Many said later that they were subjected to hours of frightening grilling and if they didn’t believe they had been sexually abused, they were told they were “in denial” or had suppressed the memory of the abuse. They were also told that siblings and other children had witnessed their abuse, or that that their parents had already confessed.

Interrogators called some children who denied abuse liars. Children were told that if they agreed to accusations they wouldn’t be separated from parents or siblings. Many of them later recanted. [The police lieutenant] neither recorded nor kept notes of his interrogations.

Recantations were ignored. “It’s well known that children are telling the truth when they say they’ve been abused,” [the] Wenatchee Child Protective Services [supervisor said.] “But (they) are usually lying when they deny it.”

In all, “43 adults were arrested and accused of 29,726 counts of sexually abusing 60 children….  Eighteen pleaded guilty, mostly on the basis of signed confessions.  Ten were convicted at trial.  Three were acquitted.  Eighteen went to prison.”  All confessions were later recanted, all felony convictions related to the sex ring appear to have been overturned, a third of the children claimed to have been abused were at one point taken from their parents and put up for adoption, and the city of Wenatchee had to face lawsuits claiming millions of dollars in damages.

It was a modern-day replay of the 1692 Salem witch trial in which several girls’ accusations resulted in 19 people being hanged and one more pressed to death.

No, just because there’s smoke doesn’t mean there’s fire, and someone encouraging restraint isn’t necessarily part of the problem.  I hope the Wenatchee example of good intentions gone horribly wrong highlights some potential parallels with the TAM situation and that all parties analyze the evidence dispassionately.

Photo credit: Wikipedia

Links about the Wenatchee sex case:

• “Wenatchee Witch Hunt: Child Sex Abuse Trials In Douglas and Chelan Counties,” HistoryLink.
• “Wenatchee child abuse prosecutions,” Wikipedia.

Links about charges against The Amazing Meeting:

• “‘Dogmatic Feminism’ Discussion Podcast (part 1),” Ask an Atheist blog, 6/12/12.
• “‘Dogmatic Feminism’ Pt. 2, and Some Other Things,” Ask an Atheist blog, 6/14/12.
• Jason Thibeault, “Harassment policies campaign – timeline of major events,” Lousy Canuck blog, 6/15/12.

♠   ♠   ♠

“Let’s discuss the accuracy of the Bible.” Paul looked for approval from Jim, saw nothing, and continued. “Many say that the Bible contains the world’s greatest literature. It’s certainly the world’s most influential book—a book that has inspired mankind for thousands of years.”

“I won’t disagree.” Jim picked up what looked like a clumsily wrapped cigar laying on the sofa and put the soggy end in his mouth. It left a small dark stain on the seat cushion.

Paul wanted to continue but was distracted as the end of the thing bobbed up and down under Jim’s shaggy mustache while he chewed, making gentle crunching sounds. “Is that a cigar?” Paul asked finally.

“Cinnamomum zeylanicum—cinnamon bark,” Jim said, his words garbled as he spoke while holding the cinnamon stick with his lips. “It promotes sweating.”

Paul had never considered sweating worth promoting. He tried to ignore the noise, deliberately looking down at his note card to avoid the distraction. “So what I’m saying is that the Bible is very accurate. Researchers have found thousands of copies, enough to convince them that errors introduced from copy to copy have been insignificant. And old, too—less than 400 years after the New Testament originals.* In other words, today’s English translations started with a copy that differed minimally from the original text. Aside from the different language, we read almost the same words as were originally written two to three thousand years ago.”

Jim shook his head. “That’s a foolish argument.”

Paul’s jaw went slack.

“I can say the same of Homer’s Iliad,” Jim said. “It’s quite long and very old—older than much of the Old Testament. We have many old copies of the Iliad, and today’s version may also be a decent copy of the original. Using your logic, must we conclude that the Iliad is correct? Must we say that Achilles really was invulnerable, that Cassandra really could see the future, that Ajax really was trained by a centaur?”

“But that’s not a good comparison,” Paul said. “No one believes the Iliad. Biblical fact is quite different from Greek mythology.”

“Don’t change the subject. You introduced the question of the accuracy of manuscript copies. Does your logic help us judge the accuracy of ancient books or not?”

“I don’t think the Bible and the Iliad can be compared is all.”

Jim sighed. “To your point, no one believes the Iliad now, but they once did. Achilles, Hector, Helen, Aphrodite, the Trojan War—the Iliad tells much of the history of the Greeks just like the Bible is a history of the Jews. And, of course, many of the places and people in the Iliad actually existed. Archeologists have found Troy, for example.”

Jim held up a hand as Paul opened his mouth to speak. “Of course I see the difference. While the Iliad and the Bible were the histories of their people, only the Bible is believed today. Here’s my point. Let’s assume that the Bible and the Iliad are both faithful copies. That doesn’t make them true.”

Paul said, “It’s not just the Bible—other sources confirm Bible stories. Josephus, the first-century Jewish historian, for example, writes about Jesus.” He glanced at a note card in his hand. “Also, Tacitus, Pliny the Younger, and other writers from that time.”

Jim jerked a hand as if dismissing a gnat, and his face showed an exasperated disgust. “I’ve read these sources, and they strengthen your case not a bit. They basically say, ‘There are people who follow a man named Jesus’ or ‘Jesus is said to have performed miracles.’ I already agree with that! I’d be interested if an eyewitness from the Jerusalem Times newspaper wrote a report the day after a miraculous event, but that didn’t happen. You’re left with four—not thousands, but four—written accounts that summarize the Jesus story after it had been passed around orally for decades, and they’re not even completely independent accounts. I need a lot more evidence than that.”

Paul thought for an instant how satisfying it would be to take their argument to the street, even though it would be an unfair fight. He rubbed his right fist against his left palm and strained the muscles of his upper body to drain away some rage. In five seconds he might remind this atheist of his manners. But he had to take the high ground and he pushed on, using a response that Samuel had given him. “Why do you need more evidence? You never saw George Washington, but you accept the historical account of his life. The Bible has the historical account of Jesus’s life—why not accept that?”

Again Jim shook his head. “We have articles from newspapers of Washington’s time published within days of events, and there are hundreds of accounts by people who met him. We even have Washington’s own journals and letters. By contrast, Jesus left no personal writings, we have just a few Gospels as sources of his life story, and those are accounts of unknown authorship handed down orally for decades before finally being written. They were even written from the perspective of a foreign culture—Jesus and his disciples would have spoken Aramaic, and the New Testament was written completely in Greek.”

“You’re overstating the problem. If you don’t like Washington, take Caesar Augustus—you accept the story of Caesar’s life even though he’s from the time period of Jesus.”

“How can you make this argument? Are you stupid?” Jim leapt to his feet. “The biographies of historical figures like Washington and Caesar make no supernatural claims!”

Paul opened his mouth to protest but retreated as Jim waved his arms as he stalked back and forth in front of the sofa like some hysterical prosecuting attorney.

“They were great men, but they were just men. Suppose you read that Washington was impervious to British bullets during the Revolutionary War or Caesar was born of a virgin—these claims were actually made, by the way. You would immediately dismiss them. Or what about Mormonism: Joseph Smith invented it just fifty miles from my hometown of Syracuse, shortly before I was born. We have far more information about the early days of his religion—letters, diaries, and even newspaper accounts, all in modern English—and yet I presume you dismiss Smith as a crackpot or a charlatan. In the case of Jesus, the most extravagant supernatural claims are made—why not dismiss those stories as well? The Bible has tales you wouldn’t believe if you read them in today’s newspaper, and yet you see them as truthful ancient journalism.”

Paul struggled to keep his hand steady as he glanced at his note card. He had no response but was not about to admit it. He decided to try a new line of attack and took a deep breath. “Okay, answer this one. The Bible has stories of fulfilled prophecy. Early books documented the prophecy, and later books record that prophecy coming true. There are hundreds about Jesus’s life alone. For example, the book of Isaiah details facts about the Messiah’s life, and then the New Testament records the fulfillment of that prophecy.”

“Show me.”

“Okay, let’s look at Isaiah 53.”

Jim walked to his bookshelf and pulled off a large leather-bound Bible.

Paul turned to his own copy. “Isaiah says, ‘He is despised and rejected of men’—Jesus should have been the king, but He was rejected by his own people. ‘He was oppressed and He was afflicted, yet He opened not His mouth’—He could have proven that He was God with a word, but He chose to keep silent. ‘He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities’—this describes the beatings He endured before crucifixion. ‘With His stripes we are healed’ and ‘He bore the sin of many’—Jesus was whipped and took the burden of our sins when He died. All this was written hundreds of years before the crucifixion.”

“Unconvincing,” Jim said. “‘He is despised’ doesn’t sound like the charismatic rabbi who preached to thousands of attentive listeners and had a triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. And I notice that you’ve ignored the part of this chapter that was inconvenient to your hypothesis: in the same chapter, God says, ‘Therefore will I divide him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong.’ Jesus is counted as merely one of the great ones and must share with them? That’s quite an insult to the son of God. And who are these equals? Most important, note that there’s no mention of the resurrection here. How can this be a Jesus crucifixion story without the punch line? This chapter is actually a very poor description of the crucifixion because the ‘he’ in this chapter is not Jesus but Israel.”

“But the Gospels themselves refer back to this chapter as prophecy of Jesus.”

“I don’t give a damn—this chapter isn’t about Jesus.”

Paul felt blindsided, as if he were lying on the ground, wondering where the haymaker came from. Samuel hadn’t told him about this rebuttal. Paul said, “Well, what about Psalm 22? It describes the crucifixion experience and has Jesus’s last words, exactly. It even describes the guards casting lots for his clothes. And this was written centuries before Jesus’s day.”

“Come now, think about it! The writers of the Gospels were literate, and they would have read all of the Law—what we call the Old Testament. They could have sifted through it to find plausible prophecies before they wrote the Gospels. Don’t you see? It’s as if they looked at the answers before taking a test.”

Paul leaned forward. “You’re saying that they cheated? That they deliberately invented the Gospel stories to fit the prophecy?”

“Think of the incredible boldness of the Bible’s claims,” Jim said, “that Jesus was a supernatural being sent by an omnipotent and omnipresent God who created the universe. That’s about as unbelievable a story as you can imagine. Deliberate cheating to invent this story—that is, a natural explanation of the Gospels—is much more plausible than that the story is literally true—which is a supernatural explanation. But here’s an explanation that’s more plausible still: suppose Jesus was nothing more than a charismatic rabbi. The original facts of Jesus’s life were then told and retold as they went from person to person, each time getting a little more fantastic. Details might have been gradually changed until they matched a particular prophecy. If people assumed that Jesus was the Messiah, he had to fulfill the prophecies, right? The Gospels were passed along orally for decades after Jesus’s death before they were written down, gradually translated into the Greek culture on the way. No need to imagine the deliberate invention of a false story.”

“But there was no oral tradition. The Gospels were written by eyewitnesses.”

“Prove it.”

“Ask any minister!” Paul said with a chuckle that probably betrayed his unease. “It’s common knowledge. Matthew was an apostle, he was an eyewitness, and he wrote the book of Matthew. And so on for the other Gospel authors—all apostles or companions of apostles.”

“The names of the Gospel books were assigned long after they were written. No one knows who wrote them—each Gospel is anonymous, and the names are simply tradition. No Gospel begins, ‘This is an account of events that I witnessed myself.’ Even if they did, should that convince me? You take any fanciful account, put ‘I saw this myself’ at the beginning, and it becomes true? A natural explanation—that the Jesus story is just a legend—is far, far likelier than the supernatural explanation.”

Jim had been noisily worrying his cinnamon stick but now set it back on the sofa. “Besides, we have lots of examples of similar things in other religions—holy books that are really just myth. For example, we can probably agree that the Koran, Islam’s holy book, is mythology. Muhammad wasn’t really visited by the angel Gabriel and given wisdom from God. Did Muhammad invent it? Did a desire for power push him to create a new religion, with him as its leader? Through extreme fasting, did he have delusions that he interpreted as revelations from God? Any of these natural explanations and many more are much more likely than the Koran being literally true. Or Gilgamesh or Beowulf or the Hindu Vedas or the Book of Mormon. They all have supernatural elements and they are all mythology. How can you and I agree that these are mythology and that mankind throughout history has invented religion and myth, but you say that the Bible is the single exception? When you cast a net that brings up Christianity, it brings up a lot of other religions as well.”

“You can’t lump the Bible in with those books. It’s in a completely different category.”

“Prove it,” Jim repeated, and he slammed his Bible onto the table.

“Why should I have to prove it?”

“Because you’re the one making the remarkable claims.”

“Remarkable?” Paul paused, his mouth open, as he collected his thoughts. “How can you say that? You’re in the minority and you reject the majority view. Christianity is the most widespread religion the world has ever seen. Almost everyone in this country is thoroughly familiar with Christianity. They wouldn’t think the claims are remarkable.”

Jim smiled. “I wouldn’t make that majority claim too loudly. Within your own religious community, your views are in the majority, but your flavor of Christianity isn’t even in the majority right here in Los Angeles. Even when you lump together all the denominations of Christianity worldwide, the majority of people on the Earth still think you’re wrong.

“It’s true that the tenets of Christianity are widely familiar, but that doesn’t make them any less remarkable. A God who can do anything, who has been around forever, and who created the universe? Take a step back and see this as an outsider might. You’ve made perhaps the boldest claim imaginable. No one should be asked to believe it without evidence, and very strong evidence at that.”

Jim picked up his cinnamon stick and waved it as he spoke. “Suppose someone claims to have seen a leprechaun or a dragon or a unicorn. Next, this person says that, because no one can prove him wrong, his beliefs are therefore correct. And since they’re correct, everyone should adopt them. This is nonsense of course. He is making the bold claim, so he must provide the evidence. In other words, we are justified—no, we are obliged—to reject extraordinary claims until the extraordinary evidence has been provided.”

“I have provided evidence!” Paul said.

Jim leaned back on the sofa and looked at Paul, for the first time at a loss for a quick retort. “Son, this is what I expected from you,” he said quietly, almost gently. “But this evidence barely merits the name. What you’ve provided is a flimsy argument that might satisfy someone who wants to support beliefs that he’s already decided are correct. But don’t expect this to convince anyone else.”

Paul sat back in his chair as if hit in the stomach. He had been preparing for a debate like this with increasing intensity for two years, and he thought that he deserved more. He didn’t expect accolades for his cleverness . . . but something? He tried to salvage the discussion and glanced at his note card, almost used up. His voice felt shrill and unreliable as he began. “But you must adjust your demands given how long ago this was. You can’t ask for photographs and diaries when the events happened close to two thousand years ago. It’s not fair.”

“Not fair? Suppose you come to me and ask to buy my house. I say that it’s worth three thousand dollars. You say, ‘I’ll give you five dollars for it.’ I say, ‘No—that’s ridiculous. I must reject your offer.’ And then you say, ‘But that’s not fair—five dollars is all I have.’”

Jim leaned forward, staring at Paul and with his arms outstretched. “That would be absurd. But it’s equivalent to the argument ‘since proving the fantastic claims of the New Testament is quite hard, you’ll have to accept whatever evidence we have.’ No, I don’t! I won’t accept five dollars for my house, I won’t accept pathetic evidence for leprechauns, and I won’t accept it for God.”

Jim paused and then said, “And while we’re at it, neither should you.”

I am the punishment of God….
If you had not committed great sins,
God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.
— Genghis Khan

*Older copies have been found since 1906.

Photo credit: Sheba_Also

Related posts:

• This series explores the reliability of our biblical manuscripts: What Did the Original Books of the Bible Say?

But before those was Bertrand Russell’s teapot.

Bertrand Russell proposed the idea of a teapot orbiting the sun between the Earth and Mars in 1952.  The teapot is too small to detect with any instrument, so it’s impossible to prove this claim wrong.

Russell pushes the teapot contention to the limit:

But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.

How valid is the comparison of God with an orbiting teapot?  We know that there are teapots, and we know how to put things into solar orbits.  It’s just technology, and an orbiting teapot violates no scientific laws.  But the God hypothesis is far bolder because it demands a new category, that of supernatural beings.  They may exist, but science acknowledges no examples.

Is there such a teapot?  Maybe, but why live as if there is?  We can’t invalidate the teapot hypothesis, but that’s not the same as proving it true or even showing that it’s worthy of consideration.

We don’t give equal time to the orbiting teapot hypothesis, so why give equal time to similar claims that are equally poorly evidenced, like God?

Photo credit: Wikipedia

Related posts:

• See all the definitions in the Galileo Unchained Glossary.

Related links:

• “Russell’s Teapot,” Wikipedia.
• “Russell’s Teapot,” Rational Wiki.
• “Why Russell’s Teapot Still Serves,” Textuality blog, 6/29/10.

Proving that God doesn’t exist—or, more generally, that no supernatural beings exist—is impossible as far as I can tell.  An omniscient being wanting to remain hidden would succeed.  That’s a game of hide and seek we could never win.

To see what we can say about God, let’s look for parallels in how we handle other beings not acknowledged by science—Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, space aliens, leprechauns, fairies, or Merlin the shape-shifting wizard.  Any evidence in favor of these beings is sketchy, far too little to conclude that they exist.  Do we reserve judgment?  Do we say that the absence of evidence is no evidence of absence?  Of course not.  There’s plenty of evidence (or lack of evidence) to make a strong provisional case.  In fact, in common parlance we say that these things don’t exist.

While we’re at it, note the error in the adage “absence of evidence is no evidence of absence.”  Of course it’s evidence!  Absence of evidence is no proof of absence, but it can certainly be strong evidence.  If you’ve spent five minutes poking through that drawer looking for your keys and still can’t find them, that’s pretty strong evidence of their absence.

Note also the difference in the claim that Bigfoot doesn’t exist versus the claim that God doesn’t exist.  Science has been blindsided by new animals in the past.  The gorilla, coelacanth, okapi, and giant squid were all surprises, and Bigfoot could be another.  After all, Bigfoot is just another animal and we know of lots of animals.  But the very category of the Christian claim is a problem.  Science recognizes zero supernatural beings.

As definitively as science says that Bigfoot doesn’t exist, how much more definitively can science say that God doesn’t exist when the category itself is hypothetical?  Perhaps more conclusively, what about the claim that a god exists who desperately wants to be known to his creation, as is the case for the Christian god?

Let’s be careful to remember the limitations on the claim, “God doesn’t exist.”  Science is always provisional.  Any claim could be wrong—from matter being made of atoms to disease being caused by germs.  As Austin Cline said in “Scientifically, God Does Not Exist,” a scientific statement “X doesn’t exist” is shorthand for the more precise statement:

This alleged entity has no place in any scientific equations, plays no role in any scientific explanations, cannot be used to predict any events, does not describe any thing or force that has yet been detected, and there are no models of the universe in which its presence is either required, productive, or useful.

The Christian may well respond to science’s caution, “Well, if you’re not certain, I am!”  But, of course, confidence isn’t the same as accuracy.  This bravado falls flat without dramatic evidence to back it up.

Now, back to the original question, Does God exist?  Does this look like a world with a god in it?  If God existed, shouldn’t that be obvious?  What we see instead is a world in which believers are forced to give excuses for why God isn’t present.

Or, let’s imagine the opposite—a world without God.  This would be a world where praying for something doesn’t increase its likelihood; where faith is necessary to mask the fact that God’s existence is not apparent; where no loving deity walks beside you in adversity; where far too many children live short and painful lives because of malnutrition, abuse, injury, or birth defects; and where there is only wishful thinking behind the ideas of heaven and hell.

Look around, because that’s the world you’re living in.

But this isn’t an anarchist’s paradise; it’s a world where people live and love and grow, and where every day ordinary people do heroic and noble things for the benefit of strangers.  Where warm spring days and rosy sunsets aren’t made by God but explained by Science, and where earthquakes happen for no good reason and people strive to leave the world a better place than it was when they entered it.  God isn’t necessary to explain any of this.  Said another way, there is no functional difference between a world with a hidden god and one with no god.

Listen closely to Christian apologists and you’ll see that they admit the problem.  The typical apologetic approach is to:

1. make deist arguments (for example, the existence of morality or design demands a deity to create it)
2. argue that this deity is the Christian god rather than the god of some other religion.

Mr. Apologist, are your deist arguments convincing?  If so, you should be a deist, not a Christian.  And why is the first step necessary?  It’s because the Christian god is functionally nonexistent—you admit this yourself.

The God hypothesis isn’t necessary.  God has no measurable impact on the universe, and science needn’t sit on the sidelines.  There is enough evidence to render a judgment.

We apparently have natural disasters whether there is one god, 20 gods, or no god.  Prayers are answered with the same likelihood whether you pray to Zeus, the Christian god, or a jug of milk.  Religion is what you invent when you don’t have Science.

Can we say that anything doesn’t exist?  With certainty, probably not.  But with the confidence that we can say that anything doesn’t exist—leprechauns, fairies, or Merlin the wizard—we can say that God doesn’t.

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect
if there is, at bottom,
no design, no purpose, no evil and no good,
nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
– Richard Dawkins

Photo credit: Philosophy Monkey

Related posts:

• God is as Believable as Unicorns
• Other posts in the God Doesn’t Exist series

Related links:

• August Cline, “Scientifically, God Does Not Exist: Science Allows us to Say God Does Not Exist,” About.com.

Me: I have a unicorn in my garage!

You: Wow—let’s see!

Me: You don’t want to just take my word for it?

You: Of course not—I want to see.

(I open the garage door.)

Me: Okay, here you go.

You: Uh … this garage is empty.

Me: No … uh, he’s invisible.

You: Okay … can you make him make a sound?

Me: No—he’s silent, too.

You: Can we see food vanish as he eats it?

Me: Of course not—he’s magic.  He doesn’t need food.

(You wander through the garage with your hands out in front.)

Me: What are you doing?

You: Trying to feel for it.

Me: Uh … no—he’s really small and he scampers away.

You: Can you hear him running?  Like the sound of hooves on concrete?

Me: No—I told you he’s silent.

You: Well, how about spreading flour on the floor so we can see the footprints.

Me: Nope.  He can float.  And I’m sure he would, because he doesn’t like to be detected.

You: Can we can catch him with a net and weigh him?  Can we put a sheet over him so I can see him moving underneath?  Could we spray paint and see it on his body?

Me: No—he’s … he’s noncorporeal.  Yeah, that’s it.  Noncorporeal.

Of course, by now you’ve lost interest in this “unicorn.”  Still, you haven’t been able to falsify my claim.  I win!

But no one would accept this conclusion.  By slithering away from every possible test, this supernatural claim has no evidence in support of it.  Any unicorn that has this little impact in the world is pretty much the same as no unicorn at all.  We can’t prove it’s nonexistent, but it’s functionally nonexistent.

“You haven’t been able to falsify my claim” is true, but this is backwards reasoning.  The proper conclusion is: There is no evidence to support this claim, so there’s no reason to accept this claim.

Isn’t this how Christians evaluate the miracle claims of other religions?  Why not handle those of Christianity the same way?

Jesus is Santa Claus for adults
(seen on a bumper sticker)

Photo credit: Wikimedia

Related posts:

• Principle of Analogy

Related links:

• “Invisible Pink Unicorn,” Wikipedia.
• “Flying Spaghetti Monster,” Wikipedia.

Chapter 12 of the book of Judges records intertribal warfare between the tribe of Ephraim (on the west of the Jordan River) and the territory of Gilead (on the east side).  At the end of the battle, the Gileadites captured the fords of the Jordan.  To identify the Ephraimites, they demanded that everyone wanting to cross into Ephraim say the word, “shibboleth.”  The Ephraimite dialect of Hebrew had no “sh” sound, and for them it came out as “sibboleth.”  The Gileadites identified and killed 42,000 Ephraimites with this trick.

The word shibboleth can mean a truism or widely held belief, but the more interesting definition is an identity test or litmus test or test of belonging.

For example, “Unless you are circumcised, according to the custom taught by Moses, you cannot be saved” (Acts 15:1).  Circumcision becomes a shibboleth.

The Taxpayer Protection Pledge, a public promise to never raise taxes, has become a shibboleth for Republican politicians.

Tattoos might be a shibboleth for a motorcycle gang, and a style of clothing or makeup might be a shibboleth for a high school clique.

The atheist community has shibboleths as well.  Like any such test, they can be too quickly used to dismiss potential members.  For example, the typical American atheist is in favor of same-sex marriage, is pro-choice, is liberal, and is a Democrat.  But I know atheists who don’t fit each of these labels, and I’d hate to see them shunned or have their (different) voices and ideas shut down.

Consider the case of Bill Maher, the writer of the documentary Religulous (2008).  He was the winner of the Atheist Alliance International’s 2009 Richard Dawkins award.  This caused a stir within the atheist community because, while his popular film was a powerful credential, Maher has rejected vaccinations in some circumstances.  His atheist credentials were in doubt because he had fallen victim to some of the biases that atheists dislike in those who accept superstitions or religion.

Shibboleths have their place, but make sure they don’t replace a thoughtful and reasoned analysis with a knee-jerk response.

Photo credit: Wikimedia

Related posts:

• See all the definitions in the Galileo Unchained Glossary.

Related links:

• “Shibboleth,” Wikipedia.
• “Shibboleth,” Oxford English Dictionary.