Biking is something else I both love and hate. It takes a lot of effort but does provide good exercise and most days over an hour to listen to a good book or podcast. I especially like having ridden.
Here’s my bike, a Rockhopper by Specialized. I purchased it November 2021 from Venture Out in Guntersville; Mike is top notch! So is the bike, and the ‘old’ man seat I salvaged from an old Walmart bike.
Here’s what I’m listening to: It Ends With Us, by Colleen Hoover
Amazon abstract:
In this “brave and heartbreaking novel that digs its claws into you and doesn’t let go, long after you’ve finished it” (Anna Todd, New York Times bestselling author) from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of All Your Perfects, a workaholic with a too-good-to-be-true romance can’t stop thinking about her first love.
Lily hasn’t always had it easy, but that’s never stopped her from working hard for the life she wants. She’s come a long way from the small town where she grew up—she graduated from college, moved to Boston, and started her own business. And when she feels a spark with a gorgeous neurosurgeon named Ryle Kincaid, everything in Lily’s life seems too good to be true.
Ryle is assertive, stubborn, maybe even a little arrogant. He’s also sensitive, brilliant, and has a total soft spot for Lily. And the way he looks in scrubs certainly doesn’t hurt. Lily can’t get him out of her head. But Ryle’s complete aversion to relationships is disturbing. Even as Lily finds herself becoming the exception to his “no dating” rule, she can’t help but wonder what made him that way in the first place.
As questions about her new relationship overwhelm her, so do thoughts of Atlas Corrigan—her first love and a link to the past she left behind. He was her kindred spirit, her protector. When Atlas suddenly reappears, everything Lily has built with Ryle is threatened.
An honest, evocative, and tender novel, It Ends with Us is “a glorious and touching read, a forever keeper. The kind of book that gets handed down” (USA TODAY).
On Saturday, 10 June 1944—four days after the Allied landing at Normandy—the rural village of Oradour-sur-Glane, in Vichy occupied France, was surrounded by an SS Panzer division of German soldiers. They rounded up all of the residents, forced the men into barns and stables, the women and children into the church. Then, with machine guns and fire-bombs, they murdered all 643 of them: 462 women and children were killed in the church. The women had felt safe in the church, because, of course, that’s where God is paying the closest attention to those who worship him. So how could a caring, attentive, powerful, competent god have allowed this savagery to happen? “God is good, God is great, but since he works in mysterious ways, he allowed the German soldiers to do their job that day.” Such a response illustrates the all-too-common incoherence of Christian theology: it doesn’t make sense.
How to explain this god’s failure to act? These victims were in his church.
Fast forward 52 years: One of the first shootings at a school to attract worldwide attention happened in Dunblane, Scotland, 13 March 1996. Sixteen kids and their teacher were killed. A few days later, among the many bouquets of flowers left outside the school, one included a Teddy Bear holding a message: “13 March 1996: the day God overslept.” Not: “…the day we realized there is no god,” or “…the day we found out that god too is dead…”
Overslept actually made the point pretty well. There has been a meme floating around on Facebook for a while: “How did you sleep last night? Oh very well, thank you, just like God during the Holocaust.”
Belief in the Christian god took a huge hit in western European countries in the wake of two world wars. The catastrophe of Oradour-sur-Glane no doubt contributed to this trend. There were devout folks who regarded the few Oradour survivors as “miracles of god,” but…
“This is not to say that the survival of certain individuals is seen in an unambiguously positive religious light. If anything, the fact that God permitted women and children to die in a church caused a crisis and even loss of faith among many believers who lived in Oradour.” (Sarah Farmer, Martyred Village: Commemorating the 1944 Massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane, p. 103)
Louise Bardet was the mother of a schoolteacher who died in the church. She was interviewed in 1988, and was asked if she was a believer: “Oh, a little. But not like some you’ll find. But yes, at bottom I’m a believer. I’m Catholic, so to speak.” Did her faith help her cope with the death of her children? “No, I don’t think that it helped me. Because I really didn’t deserve that. Oh no, I don’t think that it helped me.” (Farmer, Martyred Village, p. 243)
René Hyvernaud, a resident of Oradour who had escaped, described what he found the next day at the church:
“‘I was met with an horrific spectacle. Inside several meters from the main entrance, I saw the body of a woman laid out, completely unclothed. It looked as though her clothes had caught fire.’ Further into the church about 4 or 5m in, he saw a pile of bodies, around one and a half meters high and 2 to 3m in diameter. The whole thing was a reddish blaze from which smoke bellowed. You could still definitely make out the forms of bodies due to the skeletal structures. Other bodies, mainly children and half burnt, were strewn across the nave.’ He went further into the church where he saw two children both shot dead, legs intertwined. He wanted to separate them but he could not stand the thick smoke and the ‘nauseating odour which suffocated me.’ Before leaving he saw that ‘the floor of the sacristy had crumbled and that, below, fire was still blazing.’” (Robert Pike, Silent Village, p. 299)
Another survivor, Aimé Faurgeras, made a discovery in the toilet behind the church: “At the back of one of the stalls Faugeras found the body of a baby, wrapped in its swaddling. The baby, a boy, had received mortal gunshot wounds.” (Pike, Silent Village, p. 309)
The god worshipped at that church in Oradour-sur-Glane was the one derived from the Old Testament, and given a boost in the New Testament: a god who could be found above the clouds, able to spy on everyone, with a throne next to his own for Jesus. It is virtually impossible to reconcile this concept of god with what we now know about the Cosmos. There are hundreds of billions of galaxies, and trillions of stars with planets. No amount of theologizing—and, Oh how the apologists have tried! —enables us to accept that there is a god paying close attention to every planet and to every being on those planets. There are now eight billion humans on Earth: there’s a god monitoring each one of us? How can anyone make the case for this when 462 women and children were murdered in that village church? —where god should have been paying close attention.
Events such as these should prompt theologians to just give it up.
Maybe, on 10 June 1944, a god with billions of galaxies under management, was just too busy somewhere else, e.g. a few planets in the Andromeda Galaxy had collided, leaving a major mess to clean up. But that’s a lot to wrap our minds around. Let’s just accept that on 10 June 1944—as was the case on 13 March 1996—god overslept. God exists, but wasn’t paying attention. Perhaps this god isn’t even aware of what’s happening on the scattered cosmic debris that we call planets.
Apologists, in fact, must use the same excuses to account for other major lapses on god’s part. It can hardly escape notice that our brains are not perfectly, optimally designed—that is, for the pursuit of peace and love. The history of humanity is the story of ongoing warfare and barbarism. Aggression, territoriality, tribalism appear to be imbedded our brains. It was a delusional theologian who wrote Genesis 1:31: “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.”
Believers have a choice here:
(1) Accept that god created man from the “dust of the ground” (Genesis 2:7), and did a pretty poor job of it, given what we know of the very dark side of human behavior. This wasn’t a matter of oversleeping. This was incompetence, which another theologian seems to admit in Genesis 6:5-6, i.e., the “very good” verdict didn’t hold up:
“Yahweh saw that the wickedness of humans was great in the earth and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made humans on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart.” Well, wasn’t it his own damn fault that he had created such an inferior product?
(2) Accept that our brains are the result of evolution, which accounts for many of the flaws in our brains and bodies (see Abby Hafer’s book, The Not-So-Intelligent Designer: Why Evolution Explains the Human Body and Unintelligent Design Does Not). Some theists have accepted evolution as the “way god created life on earth,” but that doesn’t help much. Then god seems to have overslept over vast stretches of time: he wasn’t paying attention to the mess evolution was making of things, leaving humans endowed with aggression, territoriality, tribalism—and, by the way, mental illness, another grievous affliction that so often impacts our brains.
Our tribalism has wrought so much havoc. The countries that came to blows in World War I, e.g., England, France, Germany, Italy, the US, considered themselves Christian nations, worshipping Jesus as their lord and savior. But the leaders of these nations exploited love of country—tribalism—to rally their troops and citizenry to fight Christians in the enemy nations. So the Christian god just watched all this go on, with so much horrendous suffering for four years? Or maybe not: he overslept, or was caught up in business in other galaxies. The aggression and tribalism came out in extreme form on 10 June 1944 at Oradour. The brains of those who planned the operation and the brains of the soldiers—who did as they were told—were so badly damaged by biology, nationalism, tribalism, and propaganda.
Another common attempt to exonerate god for so much evil and suffering is the claim that he gave us free will, so the fighting and wars are the fault of humans. But this really doesn’t work at all for a god who is supposedly supremely watchful, aware of what is happening to every human being, every minute of the day. Folks go to confession because their god knows what they’ve been up to. There have been countless times when god should have overridden/dismissed free will, because the evil about to happen was too horrible. Surely god especially can see that the free will excuse makes him look bad. Didn’t god have options?
[Essential reading on Free Will: the article that John Loftus published on this blog, 26 March 2023: “I Seek to Prove: Free Will Is Impossible and Immoral.” For so long we have heard the human Free Will argument to moderate god’s accountability for evil, but our choices are not what we think they are.]
It is a very common Christian belief that there are countless angels who help with the divine workload, and thousands of saints who have assigned tasks as well. The Catholic Church is sure that the Virgin Mary appears in visions throughout the world. God could have assigned her to intervene whenever and wherever a priest is about to rape a child. As soon as his pants are down, Mary could into pop into view to scream threats and painfully disable his genitals. If there is a god—especially one who ordains priests—how is it remotely conceivable that he doesn’t intervene when children are being harmed by his priests?
And how is it remotely conceivable that this god couldn’t have found some way to rescue those women and children killed in the church on 10 June 1944? Couldn’t he have found a way to stop the Holocaust, to have softened Hitler’s heart in his savage hatred of Jews (the Bible tells us that he hardened the pharaoh’s heart), to have prevented the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that killed 225,000 people—including newborns and toddlers?
“The massacre is, and in its own way and on a smaller scale, no less shocking than the Holocaust. The soldiers that came that day had no intention of leaving any survivors, so 643 people were killed, including 255 women and 207 children, locked in the church where some would still have been alive when the flames engulfed them. The remains were unrecognizable to family members who survived them…” (Pike, Silent Village, p. 342-343)
If you are a Christian who is okay with all of these horrors—because you’re confident, as the clergy have assured you—god must have his reasons, then you are worshipping a pathetically inept god. If you had been in that church, and god whispered in your ear, “I have my reasons for letting you die this horrible way,” would you have been okay with it?
Oversleeping doesn’t begin to explain it. It’s an alternative to admitting that there is no god, or that god is dead. The absence of god(s) is the best explanation for the world of massive, horrendous suffering we see around us.
“These are hours of exquisite pain; thank Heaven this particular pang comes to us but once.”
BY MARIA POPOVA
“Every man or woman who is sane, every man or woman who has the feeling of being a person in the world, and for whom the world means something, every happy person, is in infinite debt to a woman,” the visionary psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott wrote as he considered the mother as a pillar of society. Having a mother is a lifelong complexity. Losing a mother, no matter the nature or duration of the relationship, is the cataclysm of a lifetime.
That is what Henry James (April 13, 1843–February 28, 1916) reckoned with in his thirty-ninth year, recording the loss in a breathtaking diary entry found in The Complete Notebooks of Henry James (public library).
Henry James and his mother, Mary Robertson Walsh James
James writes:
I came back from Washington on the 30th of last month (reached Cambridge the next day), to find that I should never again see my dear mother. On Sunday, Jan. 29th, as Aunt Kate sat with her in the closing dusk (she had been ill with an attack of bronchial asthma, but was apparently recovering happily), she passed away. It makes a great difference to me! I knew that I loved her — but I didn’t know how tenderly till I saw her lying in her shroud in that cold North Room, with a dreary snowstorm outside, and looking as sweet and tranquil and noble as in life. These are hours of exquisite pain; thank Heaven this particular pang comes to us but once.
After making funeral arrangements with his father and his sister Alice — herself a writer of genius and consummate wisdom on the art of dying — he reflects on the kaleidoscopic nature of the loss:
It is impossible for me to say — to begin to say — all that has gone down into the grave with her. She was our life, she was the house, she was the keystone of the arch. She held us all together, and without her we are scattered reeds. She was patience, she was wisdom, she was exquisite maternity. Her sweetness, her mildness, her great natural beneficence were unspeakable, and it is infinitely touching to me to write about her here as one that was.
One of the greatest betrayals of our illusion of permanence, one of the sharpest daggers of loss, is the retroactive recognition of lasts — the last time you sat across from a person you now know you will never see again, the last touch of a hand that is no more, the last kiss of lips that shall never part again — lasts the finality of which we can never comprehend in the moment, lasts we experience with sundering shock in hindsight. James shudders with this recognition, then finds in it an exhale of relief, of reconciliation with reality that borders on sanctity:
When I think of all that she had been, for years when I think of her hourly devotion to each and all of us — and that when I went to Washington the last of December I gave her my last kiss. I heard her voice for the last time — there seems not to be enough tenderness in my being to register the extinction of such a life. But I can reflect, with perfect gladness, that her work was done — her long patience had done its utmost. She had had heavy cares and sorrows, which she had borne without a murmur, and the weariness of age had come upon her.
I would rather have lost her forever than see her begin to suffer as she would probably have been condemned to suffer, and I can think with a kind of holy joy of her being lifted now above all our pains and anxieties. Her death has given me a passionate belief in certain transcendent things — the immanence of being as nobly created as hers — the immortality of such a virtue as that… She is no more of an angel today than she had always been; but I can’t believe that by the accident of her death all her unspeakable tenderness is lost to the things she so dearly loved. She is with us, she is of us — the eternal stillness is but a form of her love. One can hear her voice in it — one can feel, forever, the inextinguishable vibration of her devotion.
In a bittersweet reminder that we must never hold back our tenderness, for we never know how many chances to share it are left us, he adds:
I can’t help feeling that in those last weeks I was not tender enough with her — that I was blind to her sweetness and beneficence. One can’t help wishing one had only known what was coming, so that one might have enveloped her with the softest affection.
Explanations and arguments: we come across both, but they’re quite different. An explanation is, “Here’s how I see it,” and an argument is, “Here’s how YOU should see it.” Don’t confuse one for the other.
Reading Time: 5 MINUTES
Years ago, I came upon a fascinating psychological experiment. Like the best of these, it was very simple.
It’s called the Copy Machine study. In 1977, when giant copy machines were shared office equipment, psychologist Ellen Langer had her research assistants try to cut into the line of people waiting to make copies. They tried three ways. The first approach was to say, “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine?” It was polite but minimal, and it worked 60 percent of the time.
Next, they added a reason: “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine, because I’m in a rush?” This worked 94 percent of the time.
But the final approach was a surprise. They asked, “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine, because I have to make copies?” It worked 93 percent of the time. It had the form of the second one, with the “because” clause, but there’s no real reason here.
Langer concluded that the form of the request was the trick, and having a “because” clause is important. It satisfies the subconscious need for a reason, regardless of whether there’s a good reason in there or not.
We find something like this empty “because” clause in many Christian arguments.
Explanation vs. argument
There’s a difference between (1) explaining how you see things or how your worldview fits together and (2) making an argument with evidence to convince me to adopt your worldview. Said another way, the two options are explaining how you see it (explanation) vs. how I should see it (argument). Apologists sometimes focus on (1) and forget that the words coming out of their mouths are backed by zero evidence.
The Strange Notions blog has an example of a Christian explanation.
[Atheist objection:] God is supposed to be all good. But he both permits evil to exist and even causes it through punishments. So God must not be all good.
[Catholic reply:] God is so good and so perfect that he permits evil to exist, and brings greater good out of it.
This reply is Catholic dogma. It’s how Catholics are supposed to think about the problem, and, as an atheist, it may be helpful for me to understand. But use it as an argument, and questions surge forward. How do we know God is good? Why should we think that all the evil in the world is there for a greater good? Why is this the best a perfect God can do? How do we even know he exists? And so on.
As “Here is how I see things,” it does the job. As an explanation that resolves reasonable questions, it fails.
“God did it” is the premiere example of an explanation rather than an argument. It explains part of someone’s worldview, but it’s no convincing argument.
The best explanations are prefaced with something like, “Okay, here’s how it makes sense to me.” For example, “Here’s how it makes sense to me: there is evil in the world, but God permits it and uses it to create a greater good” or “Here’s how it makes sense to me: God did it.” The Christian is making clear that this isn’t intended as a convincing argument.
An explanation has its place, and it may help you understand how something makes sense in a Christian’s mind. But it can be dismissed without consideration if it’s given instead of an argument.
Example 2: Trinity
Another example is the Trinity. The Athanasian Creed explains the incompatible properties that the Trinity must have. That creed is an explanation, not an argument. Imagine trying to explain to a Muslim, who shares the same god of the Old Testament, that the Trinity is not polytheism.
Example 3: consciousness
Apologist Sean McDowell insists that human consciousness must be explained.
Any honest atheist or naturalist would say at least minimally they don’t know the mechanism of how consciousness or mind can emerge from matter. But this actually isn’t a problem for a Christian or a theistic worldview, because God, who is a mind, exists before matter. We’re made body and soul, mind and matter. So it makes sense, if God is spirit, that we would be beings with spirit (@21:45).
God is a mind. God existed before matter. Humans are body and soul. I need to make copies.
Explanations are not arguments.
Example 4: providing evidence
At the “There’s no hate like Atheist love” Facebook page is a meme that reads, “Science is the study of God’s Creation. Therefore, if it doesn’t acknowledge His handiwork in all things it’s not science—it’s pseudoscience.”
In the comments beneath was this (abbreviated) exchange between Carl, who created the meme, and Alec:
Alec: Nice claim. Where is the evidence?
Carl: This is an axiom of science.
Alec: You claim there is a god and it is the work of said god. So, where is the evidence?
Carl: Everywhere
In an open exchange, in response to Alec’s request for evidence, Carl would’ve said, “Hold on—let me be clear. I’m not claiming to make an argument. I’m just explaining how it fits together in my mind. I’m making no demands on you.” In other words, he’d clarify that he was giving an explanation only, not an argument. And, of course, if Carl didn’t feel this way but was presenting the meme as an argument, then it can be dismissed without consideration.
Suppose you see a stage magic show with some friends. Everyone loves it. Afterwards, you mention your favorite trick and say that it seemed completely impossible.
One of your friends says that he is something of an amateur illusionist himself and can explain the trick. Everyone leans in.
He says, “The magician used real magic. He cast a spell.”
Is this satisfactory? Of course not—again, it’s an explanation where an argument is expected. To be an argument, it would need to resolve the questions it provokes. Is all stage magic real magic? How did the illusionist get magical powers? How does spell casting work from the standpoint of physics? And so on.
It’s like “God did it”—a claim that generates more questions than it resolves. How did God do it? What laws of physics (both known and unknown) were used or violated?
Another example is the Shroud of Turin, the claimed burial cloth that holds a faint image of Jesus as he was supernaturally zapped back to life. “God did it,” of course, but the same questions are unanswered.
Conclusion
We see Christianity’s explanation-over-argument problem everywhere. Jesus needed to die for humanity’s sins. Why? How does this make sense to someone outside your worldview?
Only with faith can you please God. Why?
Every human is tainted by Adam’s sin. Why?
Next time you read a Christian apologetic, be careful to separate it into explanation and argument. Discard any explanation pretending to be an argument and see if any substance remains.
“God did it” isn’t an argument. It’s just an explanation. You might as well say, “I need to make copies.”
Biking is something else I both love and hate. It takes a lot of effort but does provide good exercise and most days over an hour to listen to a good book or podcast. I especially like having ridden.
Here’s my bike, a Rockhopper by Specialized. I purchased it November 2021 from Venture Out in Guntersville; Mike is top notch! So is the bike, and the ‘old’ man seat I salvaged from an old Walmart bike.
Here’s what I’m listening to: It Ends With Us, by Colleen Hoover
Amazon abstract:
In this “brave and heartbreaking novel that digs its claws into you and doesn’t let go, long after you’ve finished it” (Anna Todd, New York Times bestselling author) from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of All Your Perfects, a workaholic with a too-good-to-be-true romance can’t stop thinking about her first love.
Lily hasn’t always had it easy, but that’s never stopped her from working hard for the life she wants. She’s come a long way from the small town where she grew up—she graduated from college, moved to Boston, and started her own business. And when she feels a spark with a gorgeous neurosurgeon named Ryle Kincaid, everything in Lily’s life seems too good to be true.
Ryle is assertive, stubborn, maybe even a little arrogant. He’s also sensitive, brilliant, and has a total soft spot for Lily. And the way he looks in scrubs certainly doesn’t hurt. Lily can’t get him out of her head. But Ryle’s complete aversion to relationships is disturbing. Even as Lily finds herself becoming the exception to his “no dating” rule, she can’t help but wonder what made him that way in the first place.
As questions about her new relationship overwhelm her, so do thoughts of Atlas Corrigan—her first love and a link to the past she left behind. He was her kindred spirit, her protector. When Atlas suddenly reappears, everything Lily has built with Ryle is threatened.
An honest, evocative, and tender novel, It Ends with Us is “a glorious and touching read, a forever keeper. The kind of book that gets handed down” (USA TODAY).
On this Easter 2023, let us reflect on what is arguably the greatest miracle ever performed—the raising from the dead the body, life, and person known as Jesus of Nazareth. This miracle is believed by over 2.6 billion people—a third of humanity—to be true. Is it? Was Jesus really raised from the dead? Like the apostle Thomas, I have my doubts.
First, let me note that what we’re talking about here is the claim of an empirical objective truth: that there was a man named Jesus who was put to death by crucifixion and resurrected from the dead three days later, after which he ascended to heaven. The claim under consideration here is not just a literary truth, as when U.S. Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, a deeply religious man, in his 1896 Democratic National Convention “Cross of Gold” speech, famously pronounced “we shall answer their demands for a gold standard by saying to them, you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” Nor is this claim merely a metaphorical or mythic truth, in which readers might be inspired to “bear your own cross” or admonished not to be “crucified” by your enemies, or warned not to “resurrect” bad habits, or encouraged to become “born again” through good habits, or to forgive those who sin against us as God forgives us for our sins through the death and resurrection of his only begotten son.
Nor does this have to do with the proposition that Jesus died for our sins, which is a faith-based truth claim with no purchase on valid knowledge. Such a central tenet of the Christian faith cannot be tested or falsified. It cannot be confirmed or disconfirmed. It can only be believed or disbelieved based on faith or the lack thereof. It is in the realm of religious truths, which are different from empirical truths. Such literary, mythic, and metaphorical truths play a central role in human culture and learning through the arts, literature, and religion, but that is not how most Christians think about the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. They believe it is literally true. I know because I have debated a number of theologians and biblical scholars on this and related topics, and when they speak of the death and resurrection of Jesus they are not channeling Joseph Campbell’s “power of myth”. They accept the apostle Paul’s challenge (in 1 Cor. 15:13-19) that: “if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ is not risen. And if Christ is not risen, then our preaching is empty and your faith is also empty. For if the dead do not rise, then Christ is not risen. And if Christ is not risen, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins!”
The proposition that Jesus was crucified may be true by historical validation, inasmuch as a man named Jesus of Nazareth probably existed, the Romans routinely crucified people for even petty crimes (recall that the two other people crucified with Jesus that day were impenitent thieves), and most biblical scholars—even those who are atheists, such as the renowned University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Religious Studies professor Bart Ehrman—assent to this fact. In between these propositions is Jesus’s resurrection, which is not impossible but would be a miracle if it were true. How big a miracle would it be?
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Let’s begin our analysis with the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, and Section XII of his book Philosophical Essays Concerning the Human Understanding, titled “Of the Academical or Sceptical Philosophy.” Here Hume distinguishes between “antecedent skepticism”, such as Descartes’s method of doubting everything, that has no “antecedent” infallible criterion for belief, which means we can’t really know anything; and “consequent skepticism,” the method Hume employed that recognizes the “consequences” of our fallible senses but corrects them through reason so that we can have confidence that we can know some things with confidence. As he advised: “A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.”
Let’s call this the principle of proportionality, better known as the ECREE principle—extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Carl Sagan made famous the principle, but he was quoting the lesser-known sociologist of science Marcello Truzzi (thereby confirming the observation that pithy and oft-quoted statements migrate up to the most famous person who said them). Let’s see how this principle cashes out for a miracle like the resurrection and whether or not we should believe it.
How extraordinary a claim is the resurrection? Let’s put some numbers on it. Demographers estimate that throughout all of human history approximately 100 billion people have lived before the 8 billion people alive today. Not one of those 100 billion people has died and returned from the dead, except maybe one—Jesus of Nazareth. So the claim that one person out of those 100 billion people who died came back from the dead would be extraordinary indeed. How extraordinary? 100 billion to 1. That is about as extraordinary a claim as one will ever find. Is the evidence proportional to the conviction? No. Not even close.
According to the University of Wisconsin-Madison philosopher Larry Shapiro in his 2016 book The Miracle Myth, “evidence for the resurrection is nowhere near as complete or convincing as the evidence on which historians rely to justify belief in other historical events such as the destruction of Pompeii.” Because miracles are far less probable than ordinary historical occurrences like volcanic eruptions, “the evidence necessary to justify beliefs about them must be many times better than that which would justify our beliefs in run-of-the-mill historical events.” But, says Shapiro, it isn’t. In fact, it’s not even as good as ordinary historical events.
What about the eyewitnesses? Maybe, Shapiro suggests, they “were superstitious or credulous” and saw what they wanted to see. “Maybe they reported only feeling Jesus ‘in spirit,’ and over the decades their testimony was altered to suggest that they saw Jesus in the flesh. Maybe accounts of the resurrection never appeared in the original gospels and were added in later centuries. Any of these explanations for the gospel descriptions of Jesus’s resurrection are far more likely than the possibility that Jesus actually returned to life after being dead for three days.”
The principle of proportionally also means we should prefer the more probable explanation over the less, which these alternatives surely are. And this is a splendid example of Bayesian reasoning, in which the priors of non-Christians is low for their credence that the resurrection really happened, and to date no new evidence has come forth to change those priors, and so our credence in the verisimilitude of the resurrection remains low. Here’s a model example of Bayesian reasoning from the aforementioned biblical scholar and historian Bart Ehrman in his book Jesus, Interrupted:
Our very first reference to Jesus’ tomb being empty is in the Gospel of Mark, written forty years later by someone living in a different country who had heard it was empty. How would he know? Anyhow, suppose that it was empty. How did it get that way? Suppose…that Jesus was buried by Joseph of Arimathea in Joseph’s own family tomb, and then a couple of Jesus’ followers, not among the twelve, decided that night to move the body somewhere more appropriate. … But a couple of Roman legionnaires are passing by, and catch these followers carrying the shrouded corpse through the streets. They suspect foul play and confront the followers, who pull their swords as the disciples did in Gethsemane. The soldiers, expert in swordplay, kill them on the spot. They now have three bodies, and no idea where the first one came from. Not knowing what to do with them, they commandeer a cart and take the corpses out to Gehenna, outside town, and dump them. Within three or four days the bodies have deteriorated beyond recognition. Jesus’ original tomb is empty, and no one seems to know why.
Is this scenario likely? Not at all. Am I proposing this is what really happened? Absolutely not. Is it more probable that something like this happened than that a miracle happened and Jesus left the tomb to ascend to heaven? Absolutely! From a purely historical point of view, a highly unlikely event is far more probable than a virtually impossible one.
The number of gospel inconsistencies and incompatibilities doesn’t help the credence of the resurrection. For example, the gospels do not agree on: how many women came to the tomb (1, 2, or 3 plus “others”); when they came (“while it was still dark” or “just after sunrise”); why they came (“to look at the tomb” or “to anoint the body with spices”); who they saw (one angel, two angels, a man dressed in white, or Jesus himself); what was said, who said what, who else came (Peter, or both Peter and John); who saw the resurrected Jesus first (Peter or Mary Magdalene); or what they did as they left the tomb (“they said nothing to anyone” or “they ran to tell his disciples”).
Matthew seems to imply the stone was rolled away in the presence of the women who came to the tomb, while Mark, Luke, and John say the women arrived to discover the stone had already been rolled away. Matthew and Mark have the resurrected Jesus on his way to Galilee by the time the women arrive at the tomb, while Luke and John have the risen Messiah in Jerusalem on the night of first Easter Sunday. The Q document, thought to be the source for Matthew, does not even mention the resurrection. The Gospel of Thomas, discovered near Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in December 1945 and dated to the early 2nd century CE, also fails to mention the resurrection. The earliest reliable written testimony of the resurrection of Jesus is by Paul and the anonymous author of Mark’s Gospel. It is important to note, in the context of the propensity of human memory to forget, conflate, confabulate, edit, redact, and falsify events that happened in the past, that the earliest Gospel of Mark was circa 66-70 CE, many decades after the events in question, with the rest of the gospels written even later.
So the extraordinary resurrection miracle claim hangs on just two early testimonies, from two ancient authors, neither of whom actually saw Jesus rise up from the dead, and neither of whom touched him, or sat down with him for a face to face conversation. We have nothing written by the Romans—or the Jews for that matter!—about Jesus, the content of his preaching, why he was killed, or what they thought about claims that he had been resurrected. You would think some Roman would have exclaimed “Et tu Again, Jesus?” or some Jew would have snapped “Oy Vey!” And the accounts from Josephus, Pliny the Elder, and Tacitus that Christians cite in evidentiary support, were from the 2nd century, and they reference Christ the Messiah, not Jesus, and they too don’t mention the resurrection.
What’s more, in his book The Case Against Miracles, the biblical scholar John W. Loftus notes that “we have no independent corroboration of the Star of Bethlehem at the birth of Jesus, or that the veil of the temple was torn in two at Jesus’ death (Mark 15:38), nor that darkness came ‘over the whole land’ from noon until three in the afternoon (Mark 15:33), or that ‘the sun stopped shining’ (Luke 23:45), nor that there was an earthquake at his death (Matt. 27:51, 54), or another ‘violent’ one the day he arose from the grave (Matt. 28:2).” Could such notable events as these really have occurred without any corroborating evidence? Surely some Roman scribe would have made a note about a three-hour midday eclipse of the sun, not to mention the other miracles. No such extra-biblical evidence exists. Here, the absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
What about the 500 people the apostle Paul says saw the risen Jesus? People often interrupt this to mean that there were 500 independent eyewitness accounts of seeing Jesus after the crucifixion. Not so. We have one account saying there were 500 witnesses, by an evangelist who was highly motivated to write a history in support of his new-found religion—recall that Paul was previously Saul, who converted to Christianity from Judaism after his vision on the road to Damascus.
To that end, a challenge to the resurrection miracle that I often employ is that Jews do not accept it as real, neither in Jesus’ time nor in ours. Think about that: Jews believe in the same God as Christians. They accept the Old Testament of the Bible like Christians do. They even believe in the Messiah. They just don’t think Jesus of Nazareth was him. Jewish rabbis, scholars, philosophers, and historians all know the arguments for the resurrection as well as Christian apologists and theologians making the arguments, and still they reject them. Why? If the arguments and evidence for the resurrection is so solid, in time the community most expert in that field would reach a consensus about it. They haven’t. Christians believe it. Jews don’t. Ben Shapiro explains why here, in our conversation on his Sunday Special show.
Finally, it is important to put the resurrection into historical context, which Bart Ehrman does when he notes that in an ancient view of the divine realm “gods could sometimes be or become humans, and humans could sometimes be or become gods.” Ehrman outlines three models of “divine men” that were common in the ancient world:
Sometimes it was understood that gods could and would come down to earth in human form to make a temporary visit for purposes of their own.
Sometimes it was understood that a person was born from the sexual union of a god and a mortal; thus, that the person was, in some sense, part divine and part human.
Sometimes it was understood that a human was elevated by the gods to their realm, usually after death, and at that point divinized, made into a god.
As Ehrman documents, there are many stories in ancient myths about gods temporarily assuming human form to meet, speak, and interact with humans, and that these stories in many ways are similar to later Christian beliefs about Christ being a preexistent divine being who came to earth as a human, only later to return to the heavenly realm.
Perhaps this is why Jesus was silent when Pilate asked him (John 18:38) “What is truth?”
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“The miracle is that we rise again out of suffering… The miracle is that we create ourselves anew.”
BY MARIA POPOVA
We spend our lives trying to anchor our transience in some illusion of permanence and stability. We lay plans, we make vows, we backbone the flow of uncertainty with habits and routines that lull us with the comforting dream of predictability and control, only to find ourselves again and again bent at the knees with surrender to forces and events vastly larger than us. In those moments, kneeling in a pool of the unknown, the heart breaks open and allows life — life itself, not the simulacrum of life that comes from control — to rush in.
She recounts attending a talk by Stephen Levine — the poet and author best known for his work on death and dying — at which an audience member asked what the meaning of life is. Acknowledging the vastness of the question, Levine paused, then offered: “I think the meaning of life is to let your heart be broken.” Reflecting on his words, Davidson writes:
Let your heart be broken. Allow, expect, look forward to. The life that you have so carefully protected and cared for. Broken, cracked, rent in two. Heartbreakingly, your heart breaks, and in the two halves, rocking on the table, is revealed rich earth. Moist, dark soil, ready for new life to begin.
Davidson — who is living with congestive heart failure after a savage bacterial infection — was a small child when her heart was first broken. Long before she became an accomplished pianist and composer, she was a three-year-old girl living with her foster parents and siblings in Sweden, until she was ripped from the only family she knew to be adopted by an English teacher from Ohio, who eighteen years later was revealed to be her birth-mother, having abandoned her newborn in the heartbreak of an ill-fated love affair. Davidson writes:
Here was the heart of loss. To my three-year-old self, my foster family was my family. The day my mother rang Solvig’s doorbell and brought me home as an adopted child, I lost my first mother and father, my three brothers, a home, a country, and a language. I lost myself and became another child. The shining child waited at the window. The dark child emerged. To the passing eye, I was unremarkable, even normal — but my inner self was silent, dark, and eternally sad for a loss that had no name.
Soon, her single mother married and Tina became the eldest of five children living in an itinerant family across Turkey, Germany, and Israel. Eventually, that dark inner child found light in music as she became an accomplished classical composer, creating with “that wonderful absorbing feeling of being,” with “a sigh of homecoming.” She writes:
Music, like life, is no more than itself. There is no implicit reason to it except that it is. And that is its magic. Like swimming in a dark underground grotto, life miraculously pulses open.
And yet an unslaked longing lurked beneath it all. Thirty years after the separation, Davidson set out to reconnect with her foster family, only to find that her foster mother had died of carcinoma a year earlier. Inhabiting her grief — grief “patient and enduring” that untucked hidden griefs she had been living with at the edges of being — became her way of wresting new life from the broken pieces of her heart. She reflects on this tender and tumultuous process:
The path of memory was littered with startling beliefs and perceptions that operated, silent and deadly, behind the scenes. My progress was uneven. I reworked an understanding, leaped ahead, then wallowed for weeks in a fog. After a remission, I emerged to work on a new piece of the puzzle. The darkness began to lighten, my rage abated, my depressions lessened; I began to breathe.
Punctuating the particular story of her own life with reflections on the universal pulse-beat of all life, she considers what readies the soil for this new fecundity as we continually tussle with our past, with the selves we have been and the lives we have lived and the losses we have lost:
The past presses on the present with staggering consistency. Nothing is separate or fresh, always an afterimage. The slow time-lapse photograph catches the multi-image movement of our lives. Danger lurks in every corner. To reconstruct will challenge perceptions of self, to restore will allow old pain to well up.
The price of forgotten memories, however, is more costly. My puppeteer of darkness is cruel. He perpetuates false beliefs and forces reenactments I cannot control.
The miracle is light. The miracle is that we rise again out of suffering. The miracle is the persistence of the soul to find itself, to look hard into the darkness, reach back, and grasp remnants of ourselves. The miracle is that we create ourselves anew.
With an eye to both creative work and life itself, she echoes Henry Miller’s penetrating insight on control and surrender, and contours the most generative orientation of being:
The word allow asks for balance and helps me rethink the issue of ownership and parentage. Allow provides a medium for growth and questions authority. Too much control forces a finger into sacred ground, leaving a trail of infection. To allow, in the end, is to have.
Let Your Heart Be Broken is a consummate read in its entirety, exploring with uncommon sensitivity and poetic insight the fundamentals of love, forgiveness, creativity, and what it takes to emerge from the inner darkness into a vast vista of light, rooted in the life-tested truth that “we are, in the end, a measure of the love we leave behind.” Complement these fragments from it with Kahlil Gibran on how to weather the uncertainties of love, Hannah Arendt on love and the fundamental fear of loss, and Alain de Botton on surviving heartbreak.
On July 26 I had a nasty cycling crash. I’m fond of telling people that cycling is a low-impact sport, unless you impact the ground, which I did that day. My cycling buddy Bob McGlashan were riding the Lake Casitas loop from Summerland, down the coast to Ventura (there’s a nice bike path next to the 101 freeway) and up the road paralleling highway 33 north. We had a howling tailwind and were flying at over 20mph on a modest upgrade. Well, at the big left turn to the lake, a car was coming the other way at high speed, so I timed my left turn to be after he flew past me, but at the last minute he hit the brakes and turned right. I had to veer right around him a little, which would have been fine, but as his car passed in front of me there was a pothole I had to swerve right to miss, sending me straight into the curb, which I hit at around 20mph, flipping me right into a dirt/rock field. I slammed my head, shoulder and hip really hard, the same side as my total hip replacement from 2013. There’s a dent in my helmet from a rock, so it did its job, but I could barely walk. As we were too far from home for a call to my wife, and no Ubers anywhere near us, I tried riding and there was almost no pain at all, so we rode the two hours back to the car. But by the time I got home I couldn’t walk from my car to the house without assistance, so I went to the Cottage Hospital ER and got an X-Ray and then a CT scan. There were two small pelvic fractures, one on the inferior ramps of the pelvic bone (not a problem) but the other one is on the acetabulum of the hip where the ball of the joint presses up against the socket (mine is titanium and plastic), so every time I put weight on the leg it hurt like hell.
I also pinched a nerve in my neck, which two days later was unbearably painful. I couldn’t sleep without strong painkillers. Another cycling partner of mine, Dr. Walter Burnham, happens to be a world-class orthopedic surgeon specializing in the spine, so he did an MRI on my neck and found some pretty severe degeneration of C-5, 6, and 7—not from the crash but from…”life” (he said, when I asked). So that led to the ACDF surgery, which Walt did on September 6, two days before my 65th birthday.
I would have done it earlier, but Medicare coverage started for me on September 1 so I had to wait in order to have the surgery fully covered. Yes, I have health insurances, with Blue Shield, and a fairly expensive plan at that, but even so my share of what would have been owed without Medicare would have been over $10,000. So, it was worth waiting a couple of weeks. I could rant for pages more about our messed up healthcare system, but I won’t as at the moment I am grateful for the near miraculous performance of Dr. Walt and his team, along with everyone else who took care of me along the way. (i.e., it’s the system that’s messed up, not the people.)
I did notice how careful everyone is now with opioid painkillers, which saved me from being miserable for weeks. When the ER docs wrote a script for a codeine painkiller, unbeknownst to me the law now requires that any opioid prescription must include a prescription for Naloxone, the inhaler that saves your life if you overdose. The codeine (Tylenol 3) was $1.57 for 12 pills. The Naloxone was $75. My wife Jennifer picked up the order for me. I called the ER to complain about the price differential. The woman explained the law to me. I told her I understood, but asked “the instructions say to take 1 every 4 hours. What moron would take all 12 at once?” She replied: “you’d be surprised.” Alas, that’s the world we live in now.
by 
The Pencil-Driven Life 