Monthly Archives: January 2012

Football Christianity

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Bible verses, Christianity, and atheismTim Tebow of the Denver Broncos has made a name for himself (and added his name to the dictionary) with his flamboyant public appreciation whenever God helps him out with a football play.  The interesting thing about his kneeling in praise is that it’s self-aggrandizing while pretending not to be.  It was precisely anticipated in Matthew: “When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others” (Matt. 6:5).  The verse continues: “Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full.”

Mr. Tebow, are we to imagine that the Creator of the universe took time out of his busy schedule of not saving starving children to help you make a good football play?  I understand that it’s important to you, and it’s nice to see a professional athlete not bragging about how great he is, but doesn’t football seem a little trivial?  Doesn’t it make your religion look bad to even suggest that?  And doesn’t it seem illogical to imagine God being yanked first one way by you and then in the opposite way by some guy praying for the opposite result on the other team?

Perhaps I’m being harsh.  Let me try to view this more charitably.

Tebow is also known for evangelizing through Bible verses painted in the eye black on his face.  Above, he’s proclaiming Ephesians 2:8–10: “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast.  For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”

That’s good advice.  But Tebow has promoted a variety of verses, not just the standard John 3:16 (“For God so loved the world …”) or Luke 2:10–11 (“I bring you good news of great joy …”).

Here he gives us Exodus 22:29, which says, “Do not hold back offerings from your granaries or your vats.  You must give me the firstborn of your sons.”  God’s demand of child sacrifice is often forgotten, but it’s good to be reminded of the basics.

Other verses that show how God used child sacrifice within Israel are Ez. 20:25–6.

Of course, the size constraints of eye black makes Twitter look like an encyclopedia, but these messages are worth parsing.  This one is a nice reminder of God’s limitations.  2 Kings 3:26–27 tells of the end of a battle against Moab.  The prophet Elisha promised Judah a victory.  But when the king of Moab saw that he was losing, he sacrificed his son and future heir.  This magic was apparently too much for Yahweh, because “there was an outburst of divine anger against Israel, so they broke off the attack and returned to their homeland.”

A verse with a similar message is Judges 1:19: “The Lord was with the men of Judah.  They took possession of the hill country, but they were unable to drive the people from the plains, because they had chariots fitted with iron.”

Another oldie but goodie.  Psalms 89:7 says “In the council of the holy ones Elohim [God] is greatly feared; he is more awesome than all who surround him.”  How often do we forget that God is part of an Olympus-like pantheon?  Ps. 82:1–2 gives a similar message.

I’m waiting for someone to reference Deuteronomy 32:8, which describes how Yahweh’s dad divided up his inheritance (all the tribes of the earth) among his sons: “When El Elyon [the Most High] gave the nations their inheritance, when he divided up humankind, he set the boundaries of the peoples, according to the number of the heavenly assembly.”

You rarely see an entire chapter reference, but Leviticus 20 is a meaty one with a lot of good fundamentals.  Everyone knows that homosexual relations are abominable, and verse 13 gives the death as the appropriate penalty.  But it’s easy to forget the other demands of this chapter: eat no unclean animals (:25), exile any couple that has sex during the woman’s menstrual period (:18), death to spiritual mediums (:27), death for adultery (:10), and death for “anyone who curses their father or mother” (:9).  It comes as a package, people!

Eye black references to divine genocide are common—1 Samuel 15:2–3, Deut. 20:16–18, and Judges 21:10 for example—but it’s nice to see this one.  Deuteronomy 2:34–5 says, “And we took all [Sihon’s] cities at that time, and utterly destroyed the men, and the women, and the little ones, of every city, we left none to remain.”

I’ll skim through a few more that I’ve seen.  Why aren’t more sermons taught on these verses?

  • In our modern unbiblical and slavery-free society, we too often forget that not only did God permit slavery, but he regulated it.  Exodus 21:20–21 says, “And if a man smite his slave with a rod, and he die under his hand; he shall be surely punished.  But if [the slave] live for a day or two, he shall not be punished, for [the slave] is his property.”
  • I guess with football players, you’ll find lots of verses about violence.  Isaiah 13:15–16 is a popular one: “Every one that is found shall be thrust through; and every one that is joined unto them shall fall by the sword. Their children also shall be dashed to pieces before their eyes; their houses shall be spoiled, and their wives ravished.”  Another that’s so common as to almost be cliché is Ps. 137:9: “Happy is the one who seizes your [Babylon’s] infants and dashes them against the rocks.”
  • It’s not surprising that sexual slavery interests football players.  Numbers 31:15–18 says, “Now kill all the boys.  And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.”
  • I like to see reminders for racial purity.  Ezra 9:2 says, “They have taken some of their daughters as wives for themselves and their sons, and have mingled the holy race with the peoples around them.”  Other verses in this vein are Nehemiah 13:1–3 and Deut. 23:3.
  • Finally, a helpful reminder that even Jesus can be wrong: “There be some standing here which shall not taste of death till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom” (Matthew 16:28).  Two thousand years later, and we’re still waiting.  Ah well, we all make mistakes!

I think of these as the Forgotten Verses, and I praise athletes like Tebow for putting them front and center where they belong.  It’d be great to get them back into circulation by making them the subject of sermons.  After all, “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness” (2 Tim. 3:16).

I’ll finish with a Saturday Night Live sketch that shows Jesus visiting the Broncos after he won another game for them.

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Word of the Day: Shermer’s Law

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Christianity and atheism clash againI propose “Shermer’s Law” for this observation by Michael Shermer: “Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.”1

This observation makes an important distinction between (1) how someone came to their beliefs and (2) how they later defend those beliefs.  People often come to their beliefs for poor reasons—for example, they may be racist or religious simply because they were raised in that environment.

Few will admit as an adult, “Oh, yeah—I don’t believe that for any better reason than that I was steeped in that environment, and I’m now just an unthinking reflection of that environment.”  Instead, they use their intellect (much more formidable now that they’re an adult) to marshal a defense of their beliefs.  The belief comes first, and the defense comes after.  And this isn’t just to save face with an antagonist; it’s to save face with themselves.

We can come up with a defense for just about anything.  It may not be a very good defense, but it’s something, and it may be sufficient to avoid cognitive dissonance (“Surely I believe this for a good reason, right??”).  The smarter you are, the better the defense you will come up with.

All of us do this, and (this may be consolation) the smartest people can do it more spectacularly than the rest of us.  Isaac Newton wasted time in alchemy, Nobel laureate Linus Pauling in vitamin C research, and Nobel laureate William Shockley in eugenics.

No one’s immune, but this is common in Christians who cobble together rationalizations for their beliefs.  “In for a penny, in for a pound” is easier than taking a step back to soberly consider the logic of the beliefs.  And the smarter the Christian, the better they can defend groundless beliefs.

Try to uncover this by asking, “You’re giving me an argument for Christianity, but is this what convinced you?  If not, why don’t you give me the argument that made you a Christian?”

Photo credit: Wikimedia

1 Michael Shermer, Why People Believe Weird Things (Freeman, 2002), p. 283.

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Five Emotional Pro-Choice Arguments

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In the last post, I argued for a spectrum from a single cell (not a person) to a newborn baby (a person).  This is in response to pro-life advocates who deny this spectrum to argue that we have a “baby” from newborn all the way back to that single cell.

I’d like to make five arguments in favor of my position.  To do that, I’ll try to bypass the intellect to some extent and appeal to emotion.

1. Child vs. Embryos.  Suppose the fertility clinic were on fire, and you could save either a five-year-old child or ten frozen embryos.  Which would you pick?

Of course, everyone would save the child.

But now imagine the same situation two years later.  The ten embryos have become one-year-old babies and the child is now seven years old.  Which would you save?  Obviously, the ten babies.

As an aside, note that the decision in the second instance is much tougher.  In the first, we lost ten insensate embryos, but in the second, it’s a child.  No one equates a newborn or a child with an invisible clump of cells.

2. Different Reactions to Abortion Procedures.  Anti-abortionists focus on the horror of a late-term abortion.  Did you ever wonder why they don’t focus instead on a woman swallowing a Plan B (emergency contraceptive) pill?  Or a drug-induced abortion (the most common procedure for first-trimester abortions)?  Imagine anti-abortion activists carrying signs, not with a photo of an eight-month-old fetus but with life-size drawings of a 100-cell human blastocyst.  The signs would appear blank.

By choosing as they do, they admit that all procedures are not equal and that there is a spectrum.  Their story is more powerful the older the fetus is.  A blastocyst is very unlike a person, but an 8-month-old fetus is very much like a person.

3. Slaughtering Animals for Food.  Which would be more horrible to watch: a woman swallowing a pill of Plan B or a cow going through a slaughterhouse?  The cow can experience fear and pain, while the single cell can experience neither.  The cell’s claim to superiority is only its potential to be a person.

There’s a big difference from what is and what might be.  A blastocyst has impressive potential but has vastly fewer cells than the brain of a fly.  The only trait it shares with a person is its DNA, a vague and abstract commonality.

And there’s no guarantee that our imagined cell will develop properly during pregnancy.  A single cell might become a human baby or not, just like betting $1000 on black at the roulette table might win or not.  With half of all pregnancies ending in spontaneous (natural) abortion, the odds for each are about the same.

4. Cloning and Skin Cells.  Imagine that in ten years we are able to clone a human from a single skin cell.  Would you never scratch your skin to avoid killing a potential human being, like the Jain who wears mesh over his face to avoid accidentally breathing in a flying insect?  And if not—if “potential human being” is very different in your mind from “human being”—then why not see that same difference between a single cell and a newborn baby?

5. Saving Another Person’s Life.  If a blastocyst is a person, would you give up your life for it?  You might risk your life to save a stranger; is the same true for a stranger’s blastocyst?

What we value changes across this spectrum, and, while we might intellectually argue that a human is a human is a human, emotionally we don’t see both ends of the spectrum the same.

Let me make clear that I’m simply arguing for the existence of a spectrum.  We can agree on this and still disagree on when the okay/not-okay line is for abortion.  The status quo seems to resolve this well: society decides on the upper bounds and then allows girls and women to choose.

Show me why a single fertilized human egg cell is equivalent to a trillion-cell newborn.  It’s not equivalent in any important biological sense; why should it be equivalent morally?

Next time: What’s Wrong with the Pro-Life Position?

Photo credit: ebmarquez

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A Defense of Abortion Rights: the Spectrum Argument

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Christianity and atheism debateA typical pro-life position can be stated this way: (1) human life begins at conception; (2) it is murder to take a human life; therefore (3) abortion is murder and should be considered immoral.

We’ll return to that idea shortly, but first let’s look more closely at human life.  I argue that there is a spectrum of personhood during gestation.

Consider a continuous spectrum from blue to green.  Where’s the dividing line?  Where does blue end and green begin?  We can argue about this, but we agree that blue is not green!  The two ends are very different.

What age is the dividing line between child and adult?  Twelve years?  Eighteen?  Twenty-one?  It’s a spectrum, and there is no objectively correct line.  Again, the line is debatable but no one doubts that a child and an adult are quite different.

An acorn is not a tree, a silkworm is not a dress, a water molecule is not a whirlpool, a piece of hay is not a haystack, and a carton of eggs is not a henhouse of chickens.  Similarly, a single fertilized human egg cell is very different from a one-trillion-cell newborn baby.

Note that this is not simply about the number of cells.  At one end of the personhood spectrum, we have arms and legs, fingers and fingernails, liver and pancreas, brain and nervous system, heart and circulatory system, stomach and digestive system—in fact, every body part that a healthy person has.  And at the other, we have none of this.  We have … a single cell.  In between is a smooth progression over time, with individual components developing and maturing.  That’s the spectrum we’re talking about.

Let’s approach this another way.  Consider a brain with 100 billion neurons versus a single neuron.  The single neuron doesn’t think 10–11 times as fast; it doesn’t think at all.  The differentiation of the cells into different cell types and their interconnections in the newborn may count for even more than the enormous difference in the number of cells.

Note also that the difference between a newborn and an adult is trivial compared to the difference between the cell and the 1,000,000,000,000-cell newborn.

Some pro-life advocates argue that the humans at either end of this spectrum are identical in every meaningful way and use the term “baby” for every point along the spectrum.  I’ve raised babies (with help, of course), and that makes me something of an expert in identifying babies.  As an expert, I can assure you that an invisible cell isn’t a baby.

This inept attempt to collapse the spectrum by using the term “baby” for both ends is like the slogan used by the animal rights group PETA: “A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.”  In other words, there is no spectrum here: vermin are the same as livestock, which are the same as pets, which are the same as people.

No, a rat is not a boy, blue is not green, and a single cell is not a newborn baby.

A lot revolves around what we call this spectrum.  Do we call it Homo sapiens?  With this term, there is no spectrum, because the species is the same—the single cell is Homo sapiens, as is the newborn baby.

What about “human”?  That seems a good name for the spectrum—that is, we would call the newborn human but not the cell.  Or, we might call the cell human but not a human.  Pro-lifers typically reject this, wanting to use “human” for both ends of the spectrum.

All right, can we all agree on “person”?  I’ve heard pro-lifers reject this as well.

This game where pro-lifers deny names to the spectrum can get tiring.  I really don’t care what the spectrum is called—humanity, personhood, human development, like-me-ness, whatever—call it what you want as long as the naming acknowledges the stark difference between the newborn (with arms and legs and a circulatory system and a nervous system and eyes and ears and so on) and the single fertilized human egg cell.

Now, back to the original pro-life argument: (1) human life begins at conception; (2) it is murder to take a human life; therefore (3) abortion is murder and should be considered immoral.  This argument is invalid because it is oblivious to the spectrum.

Pro-lifers claim to be celebrating life, but equating a newborn baby with a single cell doesn’t celebrate life, it denigrates it.

Photo credit: Wikimedia

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The “God is Simple” Argument

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In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins said, “God, or any intelligent, decision-making calculating agent, is complex, which is another way of saying improbable.”  But is God complex?  Philosopher Alvin Plantinga argued that he is not:

According to much classical theology (Thomas Aquinas, for example) God is simple, and simple in a very strong sense.…  So first, according to classical theology, God is simple, not complex.

Seriously?  We’re consulting a 13th century scholar to understand modern cosmology?  Modern science takes us to the Big Bang, and we need Thomas Aquinas to figure out the remaining riddles?

Here’s philosopher William Lane Craig’s input:

As a mind without a body, God is amazingly simple.  Being immaterial, He has no physical parts.  Therefore to postulate a pure Mind as the explanation of fine-tuning is the height of simplicity!

So anything that isn’t physical is simple?  Sure—something that isn’t physical is maximally simple physically because it doesn’t exist physically.  But that doesn’t help us with immaterial things, whatever they are.  I don’t know what it means to be an immaterial mind, so I have no way of evaluating its complexity.  Incredibly, neither apologist gives any evidence of the claim that God is simple.  They seem to have no way of evaluating its complexity either and propose we just take their word for it.

Of course, science has shown that complex can come from simple.  For example, we see this in the formation of snowflakes, in erosion, or in evolution.  From a handful of natural rules comes complexity—no intelligence required.

But we’re talking about something quite different—an intelligent creator.  And in every creative instance we know of (the creation of a car, the creation of a bee hive, the creation of a bird’s nest), the creator is more complex than the creation.  Plantinga’s God would be the most stupendous counterexample to the axiom that, in the case of designed things, simple comes from complex, and yet we’re supposed to take this claim on faith.

But there’s a way to cut through all this.  Is God as simple as Plantinga or Craig imagine?  Then demonstrate this—make us one.  Humanity can make complex things like a microprocessor, the worldwide telephone system, and a 747, so making this “amazingly simple” thing shouldn’t be hard.  Or, if we don’t have the materials, they can at least give us the blueprints.

Surely they will fail in this challenge and admit that they have no clue how to build a God.  In that case, how can they critique the simplicity of such a being?  Now that their argument that God is simple has evaporated, we’re back to Dawkins’ argument that a complex God is improbable.

Photo credit: Wikimedia

Related links:

  • Alvin Plantinga, “The Dawkins Confusion (A Review of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion),” Christianity Today, March 2007.
  • William Lane Craig, “Dawkins’ Delusion,” Reasonable Faith, 2009.
  • “Divine Simplicity,” Wikipedia.  (Note: neither Craig nor Plantinga accept this view.)