Category: Reality/the natural world

The Reality of Senseless Suffering, by Franz Kiekeben

Here’s the link to this article.

By Franz Kiekeben at 10/19/2023

The traditional argument from evil claimed that God was incompatible with any amount of suffering, for God could, and would want to, prevent every instance of it. Most philosophers nowadays regard that as too strong. A certain amount of suffering might be allowed by God, provided there is a morally sufficient reason for his allowing it—provided, in other words, the suffering serves some greater purpose or is the unavoidable consequence of something that justifies its existence. For instance, it may be that our having free will is a great good which more than compensates for any evil actions resulting from that freedom. Or it may be that certain types of suffering are the only way to bring about something of immense value. As an example of the latter, it is possible that in order to freely develop into the sort of beings that God wants us to become, we must first overcome certain challenges—and these may include disappointments, feelings of frustration, and other experiences we would prefer not going through. (As some theists put it, God’s intention was not to create a paradise in which to keep us perfectly happy, but to create a place where we can grow and develop into persons worthy of spending eternity with him.) It is also possible that an instance of suffering today is the least terrible means of preventing a far greater amount of suffering at some future date. Each of these, as well as several other possibilities that will be discussed below, provides a conceivable explanation for at least some of the bad things that happen in this world.

But even if God is not incompatible with all suffering, he is incompatible with suffering that cannot be justified by some outweighing benefit. Such suffering would be senseless or gratuitous, and if we are to take seriously the claim that God is perfectly good as well as all-powerful and all-knowing, we cannot suppose that he would let someone suffer without reason. If one has the ability to prevent such pointless suffering, yet fails to do so, one cannot be considered morally perfect. It follows that there can either be a God, or there can be senseless suffering, but not both. This leads to a very simple argument in support of atheism:

(1) God is incompatible with senseless suffering

(2) There is senseless suffering

(3) Therefore, there is no God

Now, the existence of suffering itself is not in question. That of senseless suffering, however, is more open to doubt. The theist can always maintain, it seems, that what may appear to us unnecessary and without justification might have some reason behind it. Thus, when faced with the above problem, most theists who are familiar with the issue deny the existence of senseless suffering. Some have attempted to develop theodicies—that is, explanations as to why God allows certain evils—as a solution. Others merely claim that there must be some explanation, even if we do not know what it is, since otherwise God would not allow such events. Either way, the denial allows them to continue believing in a perfect creator.

To others, however, it seems obvious that much of the misery and pain we see around us serves no purpose and could be avoided without incurring anything equally bad or worse. This paper will attempt to show that that intuition is in fact correct. There are cases of suffering that we have good reason for considering unjustified. But if we have good reason for thinking that there is such a thing as senseless suffering, then we have good reason for disbelieving in the existence of God.

Before proceeding, however, we have to consider another way of criticizing the above argument, for not every theist agrees as to what form the solution to the problem should take. According to some, there is something else there that should be disputed.

The Denial of the First Premise

Philosopher Stephen Wykstra once referred to the incompatibility of God and senseless suffering as “a basic conceptual truth deserving assent by theists and nontheists alike.”[1] Most believers share his view, and therefore reply to the above argument by maintaining that all suffering must in fact have some justification. According to some, however, even suffering that serves no purpose and that could be avoided without loss is compatible with God. Thus, rather than denying its existence, such theists maintain that in at least certain situations God allows senseless suffering. They challenge the argument, not by arguing against the second premise, but by arguing against the first.

For the most part, this rather unorthodox view is the result of different interpretations of what is meant by “senseless” or “gratuitous,” or of what perfect goodness entails. And in some cases, it is due to simple confusion. Nevertheless, it is important to examine the claims of those who argue this way. Doing so will at the very least clarify the nature of the problem. This section therefore surveys the main suggestions that have been advanced in defense of God-condoned senseless suffering.

Perhaps the simplest among them is that based on God’s supposed inscrutability. As is often said, God works in mysterious ways. Some therefore appeal to our ignorance of his purposes and intentions in order to argue that we may simply be incapable of understanding why he permits senseless suffering. Who are we to say God could not allow such a thing?

This suggestion, however, misses the point of the problem. One does not need to understand what God’s reasons might be in order to see the incompatibility of a perfect being with that of suffering that is not justified. That incompatibility does not depend on any specific details regarding God’s purposes. Rather, it is based on what the existence of an all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good being entails. A being with that combination of attributes could not allow pointless suffering in the sense described above. God’s inscrutability is therefore an irrelevant detail.

A second argument says that it is enough for God to create beings whose lives contain more happiness than unhappiness. After all, he did not have to create anything at all. Our existence is a gift from God. It follows that if our lives are, on the whole, worth living, we have no reason to complain. And yet, such lives are compatible with a certain amount of suffering that serves no purpose and that could have been avoided. Therefore, God can allow senseless suffering.

The main problem with this solution is that creating beings whose lives are on the balance positive is not sufficient for perfect goodness. A god who allows unnecessary suffering is, everything else being equal, not as good as one who prevents its occurrence. Therefore, such a god cannot be perfect. We may have no basis for complaining to a creator who acted in this way, given that we owe everything to him. In fact, one may argue that to criticize God is to be ungrateful and rather petty. All of that is beside the point, however. This second argument, then, fails as well.

Some state that evil is not a positive property, but is instead the mere lack of goodness. This idea provides theists with a third way of claiming senseless suffering to be compatible with God. For, on this view, in allowing senseless suffering, God is not allowing some actual thing, but only the absence of something—and that, some suppose, makes all the difference.

Unfortunately, this attempt to solve the difficulty misses the point as well. In fact, there are at least two things wrong with it. First, it is obviously false that suffering is merely the lack of some property. To suffer is to experience something—for example, physical pain—and that something is very real. It makes no sense to explain away that reality by describing it as, say, “lacking substance.” To do so is to ignore the facts. But the second flaw with this proposal is, if anything, more serious. For even if we were to grant that suffering is only the absence of something, the problem would remain. God would not allow that absence any more than he would allow the presence of a positive evil. After all, the absence of something can be (and in this case, would be) a bad thing. To allow it without reason is therefore, once again, incompatible with perfection.

Another suggestion consists of claiming that we have better reasons for believing in God than for believing in the incompatibility of God with senseless suffering. In other words, instead of arguing:

 (1) God is incompatible with senseless suffering

(2) There is senseless suffering

(3) Therefore, there is no God

one may argue:

            (1*) There is a God

            (2) There is senseless suffering

            (3*) Therefore, God is compatible with senseless suffering.

This kind of move is called a “Moorean shift,” after the influential twentieth-century philosopher G. E. Moore, who used it in a different context. Now, most theists, as already mentioned, reject the second premise in the original argument rather than the first. On their view, it is more reasonable to deny the existence of senseless suffering than to deny God’s incompatibility with it. At the very least, that seems a more reasonable alternative. The main objection to the above, however, is that it does not appear that the existence of God is more certain than the incompatibility claim. Whereas that incompatibility, once understood, seems obvious, God’s existence is much more open to doubt. To a convinced believer, this may not appear to be the case. However, one should keep in mind what is meant by “God” here. It does not mean merely an intelligent creator of the universe, nor even one who created it specifically for us. It means a being who is in addition omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good. Now, this is a rather remarkable set of characteristics. There would have to be quite a bit of evidence in its favor to make belief in such an entity even somewhat reasonable. Yet the arguments for God that theists find the most convincing do not support the existence of anything answering that description, or even so much as approaching it. At most, one might hold that design arguments (including the fine-tuning argument) lead to the conclusion that an intelligence is responsible for the properties of the universe, and cosmological arguments to the conclusion that something (not even necessarily an intelligence) caused everything else to exist. None of them says anything about omniscience, omnipotence, or perfect goodness. And ontological arguments, which do say something about those properties, are far more problematic, and almost universally rejected.

So far, four different attempts to show God’s compatibility with senseless suffering have been discussed, none of which was very promising. The remaining ones, which are somewhat stronger, focus on the possibility of senseless suffering being either a cause or an effect of some outweighing good. In this, they mirror the explanations of justified suffering mentioned at the start of this paper.

Some of these arguments state that senseless suffering may be a necessary means for achieving a desired end. One example of this was suggested by William Lane Craig. In a book-length debate on the existence of God with philosopher Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Craig says that perhaps “only in a world in which gratuitous natural and moral evils exist [do the] the optimal number of persons… freely come to salvation and the knowledge of God.”[2] On this sort of view, then, senseless suffering is allowed to occur in order to bring about something worthwhile, or allow something worthwhile to continue existing. But in that case, why regard the suffering as senseless? Craig recognizes this as a potential objection. He admits that his opponent might say that the suffering is not gratuitous given that it serves a greater purpose. What we have here, then, is really a semantic disagreement. Craig’s idea of what constitutes gratuitous suffering is not the one mentioned above (and presumably not the one Sinnott-Armstrong had in mind when he stated that “even one bit of unjustified evil disproves the existence of God”).[3] Much the same can be said with regards to the remaining views in this section.

A group of similar but distinct arguments involve an appeal, either directly or indirectly, to free will (where what is meant is what philosophers have traditionally called libertarian free will, the ability to act in a way that is not predetermined). Such an appeal is, of course, found in the most common reply to the problem of evil, the claim that evil exists because God gave us the freedom to make our own choices. But the same idea can also be used more narrowly as an explanation for the existence of senseless suffering. On this view, God is justified in giving us freedom of choice because such freedom is something essential, or is at least a great good. However, because we have free will, we can bring about suffering that serves no purpose. Such suffering is therefore compatible with the existence of God.

A special case of the appeal to free will is based on the view known as open theism. Open theists maintain that, although God is omniscient, he does not have complete knowledge of the future because the future is as yet undetermined. For this reason, God cannot know ahead of time every evil that will occur as a result of our free choices. Senseless suffering is therefore a real possibility, and one that has in fact occurred throughout history.

There is more than one reason why one might regard free will as indispensable. One might claim that freedom is an end in itself. For example, free will might be so valuable that its existence more than compensates for any senseless suffering that happens because of it. This, however, seems rather implausible. Even if free will is a great good, the question remains why it should have unlimited scope—or, even if not unlimited, then at least to the extent that we see. The freedom of criminals to act is obviously less important than the rights of their victims. That, after all, is why societies try to prevent crime. And God could give us freedom while ensuring that no great suffering results from our actions. Why, then, allow senseless suffering?

According to the most common view, the answer lies in treating free will, not as an end in itself, but as a necessary means toward some other end, such as the existence of virtue or the possibility of our having a personal relationship with the creator. Philosopher Michael Peterson, for instance, argues that curtailing freedom so as to eliminate the possibility of senseless suffering would undermine responsibility and morality, so that the “moral enterprise” would be greatly diminished.[4] Our freedom itself might not be sufficient justification for all of the pain and misery that humans cause, but, according to this view, the existence of morality is.

But whether it is freedom itself, or something made possible by that freedom, the argument underlying all of these views states that free will is a great good which God is justified in giving us. However, as a result of this freedom, we can bring about suffering that is not itself necessary for the existence of any outweighing good. An act of murder, for example, does not serve any purpose if its occurrence is not necessary to either bring about a greater good or prevent an equal or greater evil. Everything else being equal, the world would have been better without it. Such an act is therefore, according to the above views, senseless. Nevertheless, God permits it.

Once again, however, the actual disagreement here is about meaning. According to these views, God is justified in creating us free, in spite of the evils that result from it, because of the value of freedom. But if so, that means our freedom itself is a benefit that more than compensates for any suffering that results from its use—which means that such suffering is not in fact senseless according to our definition. While it is true that individual acts performed by us may not themselves be necessary for an outweighing good, an outweighing good—namely, free will—makes it necessary that they be allowed to occur. These views therefore also fail to show that God is compatible with senseless suffering.

The final and strongest argument we will consider is one due to the influential philosopher Peter van Inwagen. It states that there is an inherent vagueness in the amount of suffering needed for accomplishing God’s purposes, and that therefore it is to a certain extent an arbitrary matter whether some instance of it should be allowed. From this, it follows that God is justified in permitting some evils that are strictly speaking unnecessary, and therefore gratuitous.

To make this idea clearer, consider an analogy. Suppose that a city government passes a law making anyone who parks illegally subject to a fine. The purpose of such a law is, of course, to discourage illegal parking, and the amount the authorities decide to charge attempts to strike a reasonable balance between too harsh a punishment (which would create more hardship than the law justifies) and too lenient a punishment (which would fail to achieve its purpose). Does it follow, however, that there is an exact minimum that the authorities ought to set as the fine? If it is set at, say, twenty-five dollars, and that works, then it seems that twenty-four dollars and ninety cents would work just as well. But if so, then that means the government is charging violators an extra ten cents without justification. But then the same thing could be said about a twenty-four dollar and ninety-cent fine, for ten cents less than that might also work. The point is that there does not appear to be a set minimum that the fine should be set at. Nevertheless, there must be a fine in order to curb illegal parking. Thus, the government is justified in setting it at a given amount even though a slightly smaller amount would work just as well. Similarly, God may have to permit a certain amount of suffering in order to achieve his purposes, but if there is no precise minimum that God must permit, there will be instances of suffering that are not essential for those purposes. These, according to van Inwagen, are therefore gratuitous. Nevertheless, God is justified in allowing them.

Van Inwagen’s argument, if it works at all, can only do so if he is right about there being an inherent vagueness in the amount of suffering needed for God’s purposes. This isn’t necessarily the case. The analogy with a parking fine seems to make sense because, even if there is an optimum amount for such a fine in any given situation, we cannot tell that there is (much less what that amount might be). However, if there are strict cause and effect laws, there must be a specific fine that constitutes the minimum needed to discourage a given number of drivers in a particular area from parking illegally. (Nor is the number of drivers that ought to be discouraged arbitrary, for that is itself determined by the optimum balance of value accomplished versus cost incurred.) By the same reasoning, the suffering needed in the universe so as to achieve God’s purposes must be a set amount. Now, it is of course possible that in reality there are no strict cause and effect laws. But even if so, it remains the case that God could have created a world in which there are.

On the other hand, it is possible that a universe with strict cause and effect laws cannot be as desirable, and may even be incompatible with God’s purposes. One reason for maintaining this is, once again, the importance of free will. A universe with strict cause and effect laws would be deterministic, which is inconsistent with libertarian freedom. One might therefore argue that God was justified in creating the kind of world in which the amount of suffering needed is unavoidably vague.

Even if we grant this last point, however, it does not necessarily follow that any of the suffering allowed by God is senseless. Once again, that depends on what one means by the term. Van Inwagen’s argument specifically addresses the concept introduced by philosopher William Rowe, who called an instance of evil gratuitous if God could have prevented it “without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.”[5] As van Inwagen correctly points out, given that there is no minimum amount of suffering needed for accomplishing God’s purposes, whatever amount is sufficient will include some that could have been prevented without loss. Rowe’s definition therefore allows for at least this type of counterexample. But now consider the concept introduced above, which merely states that suffering is senseless whenever it cannot be justified by some outweighing good. If there is no minimum amount that God must allow for his purposes, does it follow that some amount will be senseless on this definition? Obviously not. For, if there is no precise amount, then it is impossible for God to ensure that no more than what is precisely needed occurs. At the same time, God is, as this argument presupposes, justified for the sake of an outweighing good in allowing some amount of suffering. It follows that every instance of suffering that he does allow is justified even if a little less might have been sufficient. This is no more problematic than the claim that a twenty-five dollar parking fine is justified. Van Inwagen’s argument, then, also fails on the definition of “senseless” used here.

Given God’s perfection, any suffering he permits must be morally justified. But if senseless suffering is suffering that is not justified by some outweighing good—and thus not morally justified—it follows that God cannot permit its occurrence. This means that any argument that attempts to provide a reason why God might allow it will either be mistaken or will mean something else by “senseless.” The only question that remains, then, is whether such suffering in fact occurs. That is the issue addressed in the final section.      

Rowe’s Argument for the Reality of Senseless Suffering

The most frequently discussed argument for the existence of gratuitous evils is William Rowe’s. It uses examples of terrible evil and suffering that do not appear to serve any purpose and thus are very likely unjustified. Rowe refers to two cases in particular. The first is that of a fawn that has been burned in a forest fire and lies injured and helpless in great pain for several days before dying. This scenario was invented by Rowe, but there is no doubt that it is the sort of thing that sometimes happens. The second example is that of an actual case of a five-year-old girl who was brutally beaten, raped and strangled to death on New Year’s Day in 1986. As Rowe points out, it does not seem reasonable to suppose that an all-powerful and perfectly good being could have any reason for permitting either of these things. The evidence we have suggests that evil and suffering of this magnitude cannot be justified. But what is worse is that events like these are not isolated incidents. Many other similarly terrible things have taken place throughout history, and continue to do so on a daily basis. The amount of pain and misery in our world is staggering—and that makes it all the more certain that there can be no justification for each and every such event.

Some of course claim that there may be reasons for such events that we are unaware of. We may simply not be able to see what those reasons are due to our limited knowledge. Consider the connection that an event today may have with some outcome in the distant future. This is not something human beings can detect. Most of us have heard of the familiar example of a butterfly that, by beating its wings, sets up a causal chain that eventually results in the formation of a hurricane. In much the same way, the movements of the suffering fawn may lead to some great good, or prevent some great catastrophe, many years from now.

But while such things are certainly possible, we have no reason for supposing that they are true. They are, at best, rather unlikely. As Sinnott-Armstrong points out, if we see a butterfly beating its wings, we have no reason to worry about a potential storm, and in fact have good reason to dismiss the possibility.[6] Most butterflies do not cause hurricanes, after all. And the same can be said with respect to other possible explanations of suffering that have been suggested. Even if they might be true, we have no reason for thinking that they are. The only evidence we have is of what appear to be a lot of pointless evils. As best as we can tell, there is no justification for them. This already makes it more likely than not that God does not exist.

However, it is not just that such events appear to be unjustified. What is even worse is that, in some cases, there does not appear to be anything that could justify them. Consider the rape and murder of the five-year-old. In a reply to Rowe, philosophers Daniel Howard-Snyder and Michael Bergmann suggest, as a possible justification, “the good of both the little girl and her murderer living together completely reconciled (which involves genuine and deep repentance on the part of the murderer and genuine and deep forgiveness on the part of the little girl) and enjoying eternal felicity in the presence of God.”[7] But in order for this to be sufficient, such a benefit must outweigh the horror of the act, and there must be no preferable alternative. Yet, neither of these seems to be the case. To begin with, there clearly appear to be better overall scenarios. In a world in which only minor evils occur, for example, those guilty of them might also come to feel deep repentance (because these would be the worst evils in that world) and be similarly forgiven by their victims. The benefits in this scenario, then, are analogous, whereas the negative act that leads to them pales by comparison. Even if we suppose that the benefits are fewer—perhaps because the amount of repentance and forgiveness involved is smaller—the overall balance of good to evil is certainly much better. In fact, of the two scenarios, only for the second is it plausible to maintain that good outweighs evil. Rowe concludes that, for any good we consider, it probably either fails to be sufficient to justify the suffering of the little girl, could have been actualized by God without such terrible suffering, or could have been replaced by some equal or greater good that could have been actualized without such terrible suffering.[8] Moreover, this is the case not only with regards to this one example of horrendous suffering, but with respect to many other instances of it, and even with respect to many lesser evils.

Rowe’s argument, then, provides us with good evidence for the existence of senseless suffering, and therefore with good evidence for the nonexistence of God. But we need not stop there. A different, and arguably stronger, way of defending this conclusion is available.

Another Argument for the Reality of Senseless Suffering

As mentioned above, there are, broadly speaking, two ways to dispute the existence of senseless suffering: by claiming that there must be some justification for it that we do not know about, or by attempting to find specific reasons God might allow it. Similarly, one might say that there are two ways of arguing for the reality of senseless suffering, each roughly corresponding to one of the methods on the negative side. We have already covered the first, the claim that there does not appear to be any justification for many of the cases we see. The second is to try to show that particular instances of it cannot be justified.

One way to do the latter involves a fact that has been neglected in discussions of the problem of suffering. Consider the causal explanation suggested above for why God might allow the prolonged pain of the fawn: perhaps the laws of cause and effect are such that this is the only way to bring about some great benefit in the future. However, even if we grant that, it is not sufficient to justify the suffering. This explanation ignores the fact that God is omnipotent, and therefore is not bound by natural laws—laws that he himself created. He can change or override those laws, and thus can ensure the occurrence of the future event without having to depend on the suffering. To put it another way, God can perform a miracle. The fact that is often overlooked, then, is that, in order for the fawn’s suffering to be justified, it must be logically impossible for the future event to be brought about without it, or something at least as bad, taking place. So long as God can accomplish a goal painlessly, however, any suffering allowed for that purpose is unjustified.

Now, with respect to certain other evils, there are plausible reasons for claiming that they are logically necessary for a given outcome. One example is that of the repentance felt by a murderer. In order for something to qualify as genuine repentance, it must be felt in response to an actual instance of wrongdoing. Thus, even God cannot ensure that someone feels genuine repentance without permitting an immoral act. (This is, of course, a different question from whether such repentance is of sufficient value to excuse something as bad as murder.) But the case of the fawn does not appear to be like this. It seems clear that its suffering is not logically necessary for any purpose God might have. In its case, a miracle is available as an alternative. This fact can therefore be used as an argument for the existence of senseless suffering.

The fawn, which experiences terrible pain as it slowly dies, does not benefit in any way from its ordeal. Even if one supposes that it enjoys an afterlife, its suffering cannot be of use to it, for, unlike a person, it is incapable of learning some valuable lesson as a result. If there is some beneficial outcome, then, it must be for the sake of others. One possibility is the one already discussed, that the movements of the suffering fawn set up a causal chain that eventually leads to some event of immense value. Another is that someone who can learn a valuable lesson, perhaps on the importance of compassion, does so by becoming aware of the fawn’s suffering. The problem is that neither of these seems to require actual suffering. The reason is simple: God can make it the case that the animal experiences no pain, yet behaves as if it does. There is more than one way for an omnipotent being to accomplish this, but perhaps the simplest would be to prevent certain neurons from firing and then cause movements in the fawn’s muscles as if they had fired. Clearly, neither of these is logically impossible. Moreover, the miracle in this case would be sufficiently limited and localized so as to go undetected. (One reason some claim that God needs to accomplish his goals by means of normal causal processes, rather than by directly creating them through miracles, is that it is important for the universe to behave in a lawful, predictable manner. A hidden miracle such as the one just described, however, avoids this problem.) In this way, God can set up a causal chain leading to some important result without, however, there being any pain. The pain that the fawn in reality experiences is therefore unjustified. And that means it is not compatible with the existence of God.

What can a theist say in response? There are a few potential objections, but none that is plausible. One might question whether it is possible for God to perform the described miracle while avoiding all harmful consequences. However, any effect the miracle might have would necessarily follow in accordance with the laws of nature, which, as already observed, cannot constrain God. Another possible response is to deny that God would perform such a miracle because doing so would constitute an act of deception. Anyone observing the fawn would believe it is suffering when in fact it is not. But such a complaint can only make sense if that act of deception is worse than the pain experienced by the fawn, which seems clearly false. Neither of these replies is convincing, then.

A third objection, and one that might occur to most people, is that perhaps the miracle scenario described is in fact what happens—in other words, that God actually does intervene to prevent animals in this type of situation from experiencing pain. In this way, the senseless suffering fails to occur. In effect, this third response consists of employing the Moorean shift described above. To argue this way is to claim that the existence of God is more certain than suffering of the fawn, and therefore that it is the existence of the latter that we must reject.

Such a Moorean shift can also be used in answer to Rowe’s argument or any other argument for the existence of such suffering. If senseless suffering is incompatible with God, and God exists, then there is no senseless suffering, and therefore there must be an explanation for why he allows such things as the murder of a five-year old. Similarly, if the fawn’s pain is incompatible with God, then according to this argument it must be the case that the fawn does not experience it. However, as we have already seen, there is a problem with maintaining that the existence of God is more certain than such things. A perfect being, with supreme power and knowledge, is not the sort of entity for which we have any good evidence. That a brutal murder cannot be justified does, on the other hand, seem fairly certain. And that animals who have been burned in a forest fire experience great pain is, if anything, even more obviously true. Therefore, given these facts, the most reasonable conclusion is that there is senseless suffering. If so, then God does not exist.

[1] Wykstra, “The Humean Obstacle to Evidential Arguments from Suffering,” 77.

[2] Craig and Sinnott-Armstrong, God?, 126.

[3] Craig and Sinnott-Armstrong, God?, 85.

[4] Peterson, Reason and Religious Belief, 126-127.

[5] Rowe, “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism,” 336.

[6] Craig and Sinnott-Armstrong, God?, 139-140.

[7] Howard-Snyder, Bergmann, and Rowe, “An Exchange on the Problem of Evil,” 152.

[8] Howard-Snyder, Bergmann, and Rowe, “An Exchange on the Problem of Evil,” 129.

Bibliography

Craig, William Lane, and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong. God?: A Debate between a Christian and an Atheist. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Frances, Bryan. Gratuitous Suffering and the Problem of Evil: A Comprehensive Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2013.

Howard-Snyder, Daniel, Michael Bergmann, and William L. Rowe. “An Exchange on the Problem of Evil.” In William L. Rowe, ed. God and the Problem of Evil. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2001.

Howard-Snyder, Daniel, and Frances Howard-Snyder. “Is Theism Compatible with Gratuitous Evil?” American Philosophical Quarterly 36, no. 2 (1999): 115-30.

Peterson, Michael. Reason and Religious Belief, 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Rowe, William L. “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism.” American Philosophical Quarterly 16 (1979): 335-41.

Trakakis, Nick. The God Beyond Belief: In Defense of William Rowe’s Evidential Argument from Evil. Dordrecht: Springer, 2007.

Van Inwagen, Peter. “The Problem of Evil, the Problem of Air, and the Problem of Silence.” In William L. Rowe, ed. God and the Problem of Evil. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2001.

Wykstra, Stephen. “The Humean Obstacle to Evidential Arguments from Suffering: On Avoiding the Evils of ‘Appearance’.” International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion 16 (1984): 73-93.

A Mighty Fortress Is Their Faith: Protecting Ancient Superstitions

Here’s the link to this article.

By David Madison at 10/13/2023

“…an utterly wrongheaded approach to their faith…”


About ten years ago, when was I writing drafts of chapters that would be part of my 2016 book, Ten Tough Problems in Christian Thought and Belief, I asked a few Christian friends to read and critique what I’d written. They all refused, except for one Catholic woman—showing more courage than the others—who seems to have learned something from my chapter on the gospels: “I didn’t know Jesus was supposed to come back.” I was not surprised, since so many Catholics have told me they were never encouraged to read the gospels. Another Catholic woman who refused my request was honest about her reason: she embraced her faith passionately because she is eager to see her mother again in heaven—and she wanted nothing to jeopardize that. One Protestant admitted that he worked hard to keep his faith intact, and was reluctant to read anything that might fuel his doubts.

This experience came to mind when I read John Loftus’ post here a few days ago, 9 October 2023, Ten Reasons Why Most Believers Don’t Seriously Question Their Faith (a repost from 2012). This is the third reason he mentions:

“A very large percentage of believers do not seek out disconfirming evidence for their faith, which can be decisive. They are sure of their faith so they only look for confirming evidence. This can only make them more entrenched in whatever they were raised to believe in their particular culture. But it’s an utterly wrongheaded approach to their faith.”


An utterly wrongheaded approach: Very often our identities are anchored/locked to what we were taught as children by parents and clergy. How could these trusted figures have been wrong? It’s a thought so many people refuse to entertain, secure as they are in the version of reality that seems oh so right because it has defined who they are for years. In his fifth reason, Loftus states that “…believers fear to doubt. It’s the very nature of faith in an omniscient mind-reading God that he is displeased when they doubt his promises. So in order not to displease him they do not seriously question their faith.”

But this is the tragic irony: “an omniscient mind-reading God” is a component of ancient superstition—and the Christian faith is a bundle of quite a few of these components. In the Old Testament, animal sacrifice was a major part of piety, as a way to atone for sins committed. The theologians who wrote the New Testament substituted a human sacrifice, absorbing a common cult idea that believing in a dying-rising deity assured eternal life. As Richard Carrier has put it, “…Jesus is just a late comer to the party. Yet one more dying-and-rising personal savior god. Only this time, Jewish.” (Dying-and-Rising Gods: It’s Pagan, Guys. Get Over It, 29 March 2018)


Of course, the ecclesiastical bureaucracy doesn’t want the laity to see this background—the blatant superstitions—and works hard with ritual and ceremony, preaching and religious education (= indoctrination) to keep people in awe of Jesus their lord and savior. Loftus’ list of Ten Reasons provides helpful insight into how the church keeps members loyal—and keeps going. And what we’re up against. Religions specialize in blunting curiosity. As an elderly Catholic women admitted to me recently, “We were told not to think about what we were taught in catechism.” 


But are there ways to breach the walls of the Mighty Fortress of Faith? Something must be working, since the church—at least in North American and Western Europe—is losing ground. For details on this, see Robert Conner’s recent article here, The Lingering Death of the American Church, and his book, The Death of Christian Belief. 


If we could just build little fires of curiosity, prodding the faithful to be suspicious about the plea of clergy to take their teaching “on faith”—to go ahead and think about what is taught in Sunday School and catechism. Three things come to mind when I wonder how to breach the fortress walls.

ONE


What a novel idea: let’s start with the Bible! How could people object to that? Well, it’s risky. Catholic clergy don’t urge their parishioners to read the Bible, and despite the central role of the Bible in Protestant belief, its preachers don’t make a habit of giving Bible reading assignments every Sunday, perhaps at the end of the sermon: “Please be sure to read Paul’s Letter to the Romans this week—and write reports to hand in next Sunday.” This doesn’t happen because it is risky. Any layperson who reads the Bible carefully can detect the problems, errors, contradictions, and too much silliness—and then go running for explanations to the clergy, who don’t want that burden. 

Here are a few examples: 


In Mark 4, Jesus tells his disciples that he teaches in parable to prevent people from repenting and being forgiven; his chapter 13 is a frightful depiction of the arrival of the kingdom of god. Matthew claims that, at the moment Jesus died, lots of dead people came live in their tombs, then walked around Jerusalem on Eastern morning. Luke includes the alarming Jesus-script in which he states that his followers must hate their families and even life itself (Luke 14:26), and that his mission is a destructive one: “I have come to cast fire upon the earth, and how I wish it were already ablaze!” (Luke 12:49) 

So much of Jesus-script in the gospels is risky—here’s a list of specifics.


In Paul’s Letter to the Galatians (5:24) he teaches that “…those who belong to Christ have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.” How many Christian couples, on their wedding day, have Galatians 5:24 in mind as they look forward to their honeymoons? In Romans 1, Paul includes gossips and rebellious children in his list of those who deserve to die. In fact, it would be remarkable for clergy to urge the folks in the pews to read the Letter to the Romans. It’s a dense, daunting patch of scripture. Conservative Christian scholar Ben Witherington III, in his massive commentary on Romans (Paul’s Letter to the Romans: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary), states on page 1: “…the goal of understanding this formidable discourse is not reached for a considerable period of time.” Isn’t this a dangerous thing to admit? Isn’t the Bible supposed to be the accessible Word of God—perfect for placement in millions of hotel rooms? 

The Bible is a perfect tool for inciting devout believers to doubt their faith. 


TWO


The state of Christianity today should make the faithful wonder, “What the hell happened?” What does it mean (1) that this religion has splintered into thousands of different, quarreling brands, and (2) no one is working toward reconciliation? The ecclesiastical bureaucracy of each brand—enjoying prestige and power—doesn’t seem to mind. There are no serious negotiations under way for Southern Baptists and Catholics to work out their disagreements about god and worship—and merge. Every Christian should be wondering, asking: “How can I be sure that my denomination is the right one—a true representation of the religion of Jesus?” No, it won’t do to assume that your clergy have it right. What would be the basis for that assumption? 


The scandal of Christian division and disharmony should prompt deep skepticism, should be a tip-off that cherished beliefs might be dead wrong. Maybe this is another way to breach the walls of the Mighty Fortress. One tool to help with this coaching is John Loftus’ 2013 book, The Outsider Test of Faith: How to Know Which Religion Is True.


THREE


Does the biblical god concept fit with our contemporary knowledge of the Cosmos? I suspect it will be hard to get people to think seriously about this. Of the eight billion humans now on this planet, how many of the adults know what Edwin Hubble discovered a hundred years ago? Are five percent aware? Ten percent? Using one of the most powerful telescopes of his time, Hubble collected the data demonstrating that the Andromeda galaxy is indeed another galaxy, far beyond the Milky Way. Many astronomers at the time argued that our galaxy was the universe. 

Our perspective was changed forever: there are indeed billions of other galaxies. In December 1995, the telescope named after Hubble photographed for ten days a tiny patch of sky (about the size of a tennis ball viewed from 100 meters). The result is known as the Hubble Deep Field, and revealed almost 3,000 galaxies. 


So this is a fair question to pose to our churchgoing friends: Do you know how humanity rates in the Cosmos? The Bible deity who keeps a close watch on every human, who enjoys the aroma of burning animal sacrifices—is this idea compatible with what we now know about the universe? Theologians have worked so hard at reinventing Bible-god, to make this deity less local, provincial, tribal, petty. But we come back to the question that all theologians must answer: where can we find the reliable, verifiable, objective evidence for the god you’re constantly updating?


It’s unlikely we can breach the Mighty Fortress of faith with this approach, but it might work with a few folks. 


ANOTHER REALITY


I suspect that faith takes a hit when people face horrors they don’t expect—which their faith is supposed to protect them from—and when they contemplate so much horrendous suffering in the world. It seems that the Sunday after 9/11, church attendance was high in the New York area. I’ve wondered why. Were people looking for comfort—or answers? Why would a good, powerful, caring god have let those planes fly into the buildings? Wasn’t this horror an indictment of religion itself? The hijackers were religious fanatics, as Christopher Hitchens has pointed out:


“The nineteen suicide murderers of New York and Washington and Pennsylvania were beyond any doubt the most sincere believers on those planes. Perhaps we can hear a little less about how ‘people of faith’ possess moral advantages that others can only envy.” (p. 32, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything)


When an earthquake killed hundreds of people in central Italy, the pope said that Jesus and his mother were there to comfort the survivors. What feeble theology. Jesus and his mother were powerless to prevent the earthquake? And the 2004 tsunami that killed perhaps 80,000 toddlers and babies—how does that align with “this is my father’s world”? We commonly hear, “god works in mysterious ways”—but that is so anemic, painfully pathetic. Theology has a lot to answer for. 


An utterly wrongheaded approach to their faith has prevailed for such a long time. There are signs it faces a much tougher road ahead. 

David Madison was a pastor in the Methodist Church for nine years, and has a PhD in Biblical Studies from Boston University. He is the author of two books, Ten ToughProblems in Christian Thought and Belief: a Minister-Turned-Atheist Shows Why You Should Ditch the Faith, now being reissued in several volumes, the first of which is Guessing About God (2023) and Ten Things Christians Wish Jesus Hadn’t Taught: And Other Reasons to Question His Words (2021). The Spanish translation of this book is also now available. 

His YouTube channel is here. At the invitation of John Loftus, he has written for the Debunking Christianity Blog since 2016.

The Cure-for-Christianity Library©, now with more than 500 titles, is here. A brief video explanation of the Library is here. 

An ouroboros of hate: How religion makes peace impossible

Here’s the link to this article.

Avatar photoby ADAM LEE OCT 12, 2023

An Israeli barbed wire-topped fence, with sign reading "Mortal danger: Military zone: Any person who passes or damages the fence endangers his life" | The ouroboros of religious hate
Credit: Oyoyoy, Wikimedia Commons – CC BY-SA 3.0 DEED

Overview:

The latest outbreak of violence in the Middle East shows why religion makes peace impossible. Israel and Hamas are in a fundamentalist deadlock, neither able to triumph, but neither willing to concede.

Once again, the Holy Land is the epicenter of bloodshed and war.

Hamas has launched their biggest attack in years. They surged out of the Gaza Strip in force, carrying out attacks across southern Israel. Israeli military and security forces were caught off guard and overwhelmed, and Hamas had free rein until the IDF was able to regroup.

But what makes this eruption of conflict stand out was the extreme nature of the violence. Hamas fighters committed horrific atrocities—only “committed” isn’t a strong enough word. They reveled in them.

In addition to attacking military bases and police stations, they attacked a music festival, spraying the attendees with gunfire. The dead include Israeli citizens as well as foreign tourists. There are reliable reports that they went door-to-door in Israeli villages, killing indiscriminately, kidnapping some to hold as hostages. The death toll is still rising, but is already over a thousand. There are unconfirmed reports of even worse evils, but it’s uncertain if these are accurate or merely the atrocity propaganda that’s all too common in wartime.

Wherever you start out, you can find deep-rooted causes for why each side acts as it does.

In response, Israel is doling out massive punishment to the Palestinians. They’ve imposed a total blockade of food, water, electricity and fuel on Gaza. They’ve bombed it from the air, flattening residential buildings and decimating a crowded open-air market. They’re poised to launch a costly ground assault.

I need to state my conflicts of interest. As I’ve stated in the past, I have Jewish ancestry. That said, I’m an atheist and a secular humanist, and I don’t identify as Jewish in any religious sense. I’ve never been to Israel and I don’t know anyone directly affected by the attacks. The extent of my connection to Judaism is that anyone who wished harm on all Jewish people would undoubtedly include me in that.

The endless chain of “yes, buts”

Usually, empathy is the way out of conflicts like this. By making an effort to set aside your privilege and viewing the world through the eyes of an oppressed people, you can see what fairness demands.

What makes this conflict such a Gordian knot is that empathy doesn’t seem to help. Wherever you start out, you can find deep-rooted causes for why each side acts as it does. Rather than a path out of the maze, it’s an ouroboros with no beginning or end.

Start with the obvious point, emphasized by most world leaders: Hamas’ savage and indiscriminate killings of civilians are a war crime and deserve to be treated as such. There can be no excuse for targeting innocent people who did nothing to them and who had no part in the decisions of Israel’s leadership. Whatever the justice of the Palestinian cause, this slaughter does nothing to advance it. On the contrary, it makes them pariahs in the eyes of the world.

All that is indisputable. But now, pull back and widen the circle of empathy a bit, and in come the “yes, buts”:

Yes, but: Israel has forced the Palestinians to live under intolerable conditions. The Gaza Strip is effectively a giant prison camp, hemmed in by fences and barbed wire, with Israel holding a chokehold on vital supplies. Unemployment and poverty are rampant. The isolation of the Palestinians is backed up by apartheid laws that make it extremely difficult for them to travel or participate in Israeli society. Whenever any of them lash out, Palestinians suffer collective punishment from Israeli bombardments.

How could living under such conditions not drive a people to despair and nihilistic rage? What other outcome did Israel have any right to expect?

Yes, but: Hamas is a violent, autocratic Islamist group that takes Jewish genocide as an explicit goal. They’ve never recognized Israel as a state, nor acknowledged its right to exist. On the contrary, they believe Muslims have a sacred right and mandate to conquer all the land where Israel currently exists. Can you blame Israel for confining Gazan Palestinians and treating them harshly, when their leadership’s stated goals are the destruction of Israel and extermination of the Jewish people?

Yes, but: Israel has its own religious fanatics whose views are no less extreme. They believe Jewish occupation of the entire land is their God-given right, and any non-Jews living there should be ethnically cleansed. The Israeli government has furthered these aims by supporting radical Jewish settlers, who’ve taken over so much Palestinian territory that a two-state solution may already be impossible.

Yes, but: To a people who’ve survived as much trauma as the Jews, it’s expected they’d long for a homeland of their own. The Jewish people have hung on for centuries, isolated and defenseless, in the midst of often violently hostile societies. They’ve always been treated as aliens, as outsiders, as the other, or as plotting evildoers. They’ve been confined to ghettoes, deprived of rights, and hounded from one country to the next. They’ve suffered pogroms, blood libel, and other bigoted violence. This long chain of oppressions culminated with the Holocaust, the most horrific act of state-organized evil in human history. How could these centuries of persecution not have left their mark on the Jewish psyche?

The history of the Middle East is like a red-hot chain stretching back into the mists of the past.

That’s especially true since Israel, from the moment of its birth, was surrounded by other states that were hostile and that immediately attacked them. Of course they’re going to conclude that outsiders will never protect them and they have to take charge of their own security. Of course they’re going to go to any lengths necessary to secure their homeland. What other outcome did the world have any right to expect?

Yes, but: The land that became Israel wasn’t a blank slate. When the Zionist movement selected it for settlement, there were already people living there. Those are the Palestinians, and they were pushed off their own land, made second-class citizens, and in the end, subjugated and imprisoned by a colonizing power.

Is there any group of people, either now or ever in history, who’d accept this treatment and give in peacefully? What other outcome did the world have any right to expect?

Yes, but: The land of Israel is the original and sacred home of the Jewish people. They lived there for untold generations, until they were subjugated and expelled by a cruel empire, condemning them to wander the world for a two-millennium diaspora. They have a historic claim on this land, and they have a moral right to have it returned to them, even if that means…

And so on and so on, forever.

The history of the Middle East is like a red-hot chain stretching back into the mists of the past. Each link is forged of an atrocity that one side committed against the other. The pain and rage arising from that then lays the groundwork for the next link to be welded on.

No one has a path to victory

Can that chain be broken? There’s no telling. The most depressing part about this new eruption of violence is that it’s laid bare the fact that an ending is almost impossible to imagine.

Hamas has no path to victory. They can kill unarmed civilians and commit acts of terror, but that’s all. They’re no match for the Israeli army. Israel can inflict pain on the Palestinians whenever it wants, as much as it wants. Whatever damage they manage to inflict on Israel, they’re bound to suffer even worse retribution.

Israel, meanwhile, has a tiger by the tail. They have millions of desperate, angry people penned up within their borders, with no plausible long-term solution for what to do with them. By oppressing the Palestinians so long and so harshly, they’ve nurtured a burning hatred toward themselves—to which their only response is still further oppression. It’s not clear if they could ever ease up on the Palestinians without risking an even bigger backdraft of violence.

READ: War, again

And thus, bloodshed leads to bloodshed, reprisal fuels reprisal, and hatred on one side nurtures hatred on the other, in a never-ending spiral of futility. I wrote about another clash between Israel and Hamas in 2009, and the story was almost identical. Nothing has changed in the years since.

On top of this, both sides are fueled by sacred values that their faith will never permit them to compromise. Both Israeli settlers and Hamas jihadists believe, in mirror-image fashion, that God is on their side and that it’s God’s will for them to possess this particular stretch of land. So long as these clashing fundamentalisms hold sway, peace is impossible. This so-called holy land may well be the last and the worst outpost of bloodshed on earth.

Crisis averted! Ken Ham knows why evangelicals ‘lost Gen Z’

Here’s the link to this article.

Indoctrinating children for me, never for thee!

Avatar photoby CAPTAIN CASSIDY OCT 06, 2023

Crisis averted! Ken Ham knows why evangelicals 'lost Gen Z'
Photo by Greg Rosenke on Unsplash

Overview:

Ken Ham says evangelicals have ‘lost Gen Z’ because he and his ilk can no longer indoctrinate children in public schools.

We explore his claims and figure out where the blame really rests.

Reading Time: 10 MINUTES

YouTube offered me a Ken Ham short video the other day, which demonstrates that I have completely confused its algorithm. In it, the serial grifter and ur-liar-for-Jesus offers his thoughts about why evangelicals “lost Gen Z.” Let’s go over his video and see if he’s right. Then let’s see where the blame really rests.

A quick introduction to Ken Ham and Creationism

Ken Ham leads a Young-Earth Creationist group called Answers in Genesis. As the label implies, he erroneously believes that his god conjured everything in the universe into existence about six thousand years ago. (I’m sure that was quite a surprise to the civilizations around back then.) Other kinds of Creationism exist, some of which come much closer to the Earth’s real age of 4.5 billion years and the universe’s real age of 10-20 billion years, but here we speak only of Young-Earth Creationism.

Creationism is a relatively new doctrinal stance that arose in the 1970s-1980s thanks to an American law professor named Phillip E. Johnson. It had the marvelous good fortune of gaining popular awareness at a time when American evangelicals were undergoing a massive shift into the hardline fundamentalist-fused culture warriors we know today. The newly-politicized and tribalism-addled group happily absorbed Creationism along the way. By the late 1990s, Creationism was a required belief for them.

(Related: Back when evangelicals loved the ACLU.)

Often, Young-Earth Creationists call their belief system “intelligent design.” In this way, they pretend it’s not just another name for Young-Earth Creationism. In the 1990s and 2000s, this dishonesty was absolutely key to their disingenuous attempts to sneak their beliefs into public schools. I will not be granting them this pious fraud.

Ham and his associates also erroneously believe that Christians who don’t accept Creationism are Jesusing all wrong.

He thinks this because of a very childish interpretation of the Bible called literalism. That means they erroneously think that everything in the Bible literally happened the way the Bible’s writers describe it. Their entire faith system depends on this belief being 100% true. So they get very fretful when other Christians have differing interpretations of the Bible. They think that such inconsistency “undermines” a Christian’s beliefs.

As far as I know, they have conducted no research into that assumption. In fact, they haven’t conducted much original research at all since their early years—because their field researchers kept realizing that Creationism was impossible and deconverting from the belief.

Ken Ham insists this is “the FIRST Post-Christian Generation,” y’all!

And now we arrive at Ken Ham’s first error. It occurs in his video’s title.

YouTube video

Ken Ham calls this video “The FIRST Post-Christian Generation – this is how we lost Gen Z.”

But this isn’t the first post-Christian generation. Ken Ham attributes this idea to Barna Group, which has also referred to Gen Z that way.

Researchers began calling America “post-Christian” back in 2013. That puts us very solidly into Millennial territory, since they were born between 1981-1996. The oldest Gen Z people (born between 1997-2012) in 2013 would have been roughly 15. Folks that young aren’t generally pushing the religion needle one way or the other.

Rather, Millennials began—and are still—turning America post-Christian, not Gen Z. That’s the generation that evangelicals panicked about in the 2010s.

Gen Z simply continues the trend of increasing secularity in America.

But okay, Ken Ham. How exactly did you lot manage to lose an entire upcoming generation of adults?

Ken Ham has lost Gen Z, everyone! (Has he looked under the sofa?)

Moving on, Ken Ham tells us in the video:

But now we have the second world view dominating because we have allowed generations of kids to be indoctrinated in an education system that has thrown God out, the Bible out, prayer out, Creation[ism] out. They teach you all came about by natural processes. There is no supernatural, there is no God.

Sorry to say this, but the majority of pastors have endorsed that system, told parents that’s fine, but don’t worry about what they’re being taught. Just come along, we’ll tell them about Jesus. And you see now we’re seeing generations who have a different foundation and a whole different worldview. And Generation Z in particular is called by George Barna, Christian researcher, “the first post-Christian generation” in this nation.“The FIRST Post-Christian Generation – this is how we lost Gen Z,” Ken Ham. Uploaded 5/20/23.

Ken Ham himself posted this video to his own channel. That fact forces me to conclude that he is actually proud of this 36-second burst of poor reasoning and dishonesty.

Christians often accuse others of exactly what they themselves do (or want to do). This time the trope is egregiously easy to see.

So is Ham’s self-interest. Gosh, the products he happens to sell could fix this awful problem! Who could have seen that coming?

Why Ken Ham is fretting about Gen Z

Ken Ham sounds very, very upset that he may no longer indoctrinate children to believe his quirky, dishonest, error-packed li’l take on the Bible. By indoctrination, of course, he means dogmatic claims shoved at people—in this case, children—who must accept them without questions or reservation. He wants to indoctrinate children, so he assumes that schools do the same. His is good, though. Theirs is ickie and evil.

But which children does he mean?

Surely not children attending his flavor of Christianity’s religious schools or being insularly-homeschooled by fellow Creationists. Those children are already being indoctrinated with his beliefs. He can’t be upset about losing them.

No, he’s upset that he can no longer indoctrinate the children attending public, taxpayer-funded schools in America. Those schools are off-limits to people like him. Those children are beyond his reach.

Unless a teacher wishes to present Creationism in the context of why it isn’t at all real science, or in the context of a religious belief alongside others, then that’s the only way children in public schools will learn about his beliefs in that setting. In other words, Creationism won’t be presented the way Ken Ham wants it presented: in science classes as an indoctrination meant to completely undermine the backbone of science, the scientific method, and the basic concepts it helped humans understand, like the Theory of Evolution.

No, if Ken Ham wants to indoctrinate those children, then he must get the explicit permission of their parents. And American law, which protects Americans’ right to freedom of religion, has placed strict rules around when and where such indoctrination may occur in a public-school context.

Alas, Ken Ham doesn’t think that his desired indoctrination will take if he can’t use public schools to push it at children. Unless children are surrounded by it 24/7, it won’t overcome what children are learning in public schools. More to the point, it won’t overcome the worldview they are absorbing.

Ken Ham’s god isn’t anywhere near strong enough to defeat a worldview that simply doesn’t lend itself to accepting the claims Ken Ham likes to make.

The ‘biblical worldview’ that’s almost extinct

You might notice that Ken Ham quoted George Barna in assessing Gen Z as ‘lost’ to evangelicals. George Barna started Barna Group many years ago (though he eventually left it to pursue a solo career). Barna Group is a for-profit survey house that sells analyses of its research and polls to worried evangelical parents and leaders. Barna Group workers’ jobs involve creating analyses that will open evangelical wallets.

And nothing worries evangelicals and opens their wallets quite like predicting imminent disaster.

Indeed, George Barna must be having quite a heyday. For years now, he has been crying in the wilderness about the extinction of the ‘biblical worldview.’

If you’re wondering what “biblical” means in this context, it’s simply a Christianese adjective that indicates that its noun is something the judging Christian likes.

Usually, you’ll only see this adjective in evangelical writing, where it modifies any number of nouns:

  • Biblical marriage. That’s opposite-sex, hetero-only, woman-subjugating marriage between one man and one woman who follow evangelicals’ weird, regressive gender-role expectations.
  • Biblical parenting. That’s the creepy, punishment-oriented, dysfunctional-authoritarian parenting style that evangelicals think is the only way to set children up for lifelong faith.
  • Biblical dating. Think “Duggar-style courtship” and you won’t be far off the mark.

Evangelicals love sneering at other flavors of Christianity as sub-par, even though there is no way whatsoever to say that any one flavor is more authentically Christian than any other. The word biblical is how they do their sneering: by implying that other takes aren’t based on the Bible like theirs is.

So a biblical worldview simply means the worldview of a hardline evangelical like Ken Ham or George Barna.

Why Ken Ham and George Barna think that their biblical worldview is going extinct

According to George Barna and his onetime business organization, that worldview is going “extinct!” In 2018, they found that only 4% of Gen Z had a biblical worldview. Then, in 2020, they found that only 2% of Millennials had one.

By 2023, Barna was alarmed to find that the percentage of Americans generally who had a biblical worldview had declined from 6% in March 2020 to 4%. Meanwhile, from 2020 to 2023, he found that the percentage of Americans calling themselves “born again” had likewise declined from 19% to 13%.

I’m not sure if Barna took into account the huge number of senior-citizen evangelicals who have refused to vaccinate or take safety precautions due to the COVID pandemic. Though we know about the evangelical leaders who FAFO, and some websites keep track of a few of the antivaxxers who have likewise died in service to their own willful ignorance, it’s hard to say just how many of those “born again,” biblical-worldview-holding evangelicals have died and brought down Barna’s numbers.

Either way, Barna certainly thinks that his worldview is going “extinct.” By extension, so does Ken Ham. In Ham’s case, he’s also very certain that public education is to blame. Of course, Creationists have never conducted any research regarding this assertion. But he’s still very certain of it, and certainty—even if it’s completely misplaced—carries a lot of weight with literalists.

(Related: “Hello, my name is Kent Hovind” — this dissertation will tell you immediately why Creationists aren’t real big on science.)

That worldview is what is most important to evangelicals

In the context of indoctrinating children, evangelicals like Ken Ham are well aware that their god is nearly helpless up against a mismatched worldview. If children cannot be taught or forced to adopt a worldview amenable to Ken Ham’s flavor of Christianity, then they’ll think for the rest of their lives that his claims are whackadoodle-squared.

We see exactly that same problem in missionary efforts. Some years ago, a then-missionary to Thailand wrote of how she learned this lesson:

I remember our first year on the field literally thinking, “No one is ever, ever going to come to faith in Christ, no matter how many years I spend here.”

I thought this because for the first time in my life, I was face-to-face with the realities that the story of Jesus was so completely other to the people I was living among. Buddhism and the East had painted such a vastly different framework than the one I was used to that I was at a loss as to how to even begin to communicate the gospel effectively.

And so, the Amy-Carmichael-Wanna-Be [a famous Irish missionary] that I was, I dug in and started learning the language. I began the long, slow process of building relationships with the nationals, and I ended up spending lots of time talking about the weather and the children in kitchens. And while over time, I became comfortable with helping cook the meal, I saw very little movement of my local friends towards faith.“Rice Christians and Fake Conversions,” Laura Parker, 1/28/13

Unfortunately for Ken Ham and his like-minded pals, they have a much worse problem than that missionary. Their worldview is very much on the outer fringes of Christianity. So they’re not just fighting reality itself, but every more-sensible flavor of their own religion. Even if a child has a generally-Christian worldview, that’s not enough to make Creationist claims sound plausible.

The demographic time bomb exploded years ago for Creationists

It’s worth mentioning, by the way, that one of the main witnesses for the plaintiffs in the landmark Creationism-based Kitzmiller v Dover Area School District lawsuit in 2005 was a Christian, Dr. Kenneth Miller. Miller, a biology professor, had, in fact, written many peer-reviewed biology articles and even a popular biology textbook.

For years prior to this lawsuit’s filing, Creationists had been champing at the bit for exactly such an opportunity. They’d been sneaking their indoctrination materials into public schools for years in hopes of provoking it. Finally, parents and science teachers in one small, out of the way town got sick of their antics and filed suit against their district’s school board—which was led by and packed with Creationists and their sycophants.

The judge in that case, John E. Jones III, was likewise a Christian—and a Dubya appointee. So Creationists were doubly sure that they’d successfully win the right to push their religious materials into public science classrooms.

They brought their A+ game to this fight, insofar as they could, I suppose.

And they got completely BTFO. They lost. They not only lost, but they lost in the most humiliating ways possible. Not only did Creationism get exposed as purely religious in nature, not only was the Dover school board leader caught red-handed lying to a federal judge, not only were their own witnesses—the ones who didn’t just withdraw from the trial, I mean—exposed as clown-shoes incompetents, but Dover-area voters also immediately replaced the Dover school board with people who understood and accepted real science.

(If you like definitive legal smackdowns or even just want to learn every single way that Creationism is not science but instead absolutely positively simply Christian indoctrination aimed at grooming children to hold a Creationism-friendly worldview, Jones’ opinion paper cannot be missed. It’s one of my favorite reads, a GOAT winner.)

And Gen Z had a front-row seat to watch it happen

Evangelicals’ decline started right around this same time. From 2006, their roller coaster only went downhill.

I really feel like that’s when the pendulum began to swing back to sanity regarding Christians trying to infiltrate public schoolrooms. People began taking those attempts a lot more seriously after that. Sure, Creationists still tried to get into public schools, and they still do try. But they’re tightly constrained compared to how things were before 2005.

I’m bringing up this trial almost 20 years later for a reason. The aftereffects of it cannot be overestimated.

Remember, Gen Z was getting born during the Dover period as well (they were born between 1997-2012). Parents with Gen Z kids were direct witnesses of this evangelical overreach. And the youngest kids in Dover classrooms in 2005 were Gen Z.

The real surprise is that even 4% of Gen Z kids have a biblical worldview, not that so few do. I doubt that percentage will rise.

Ken Ham has no clue in the world how to deal with that demographic time bomb, either

Nowadays, Ken Ham preaches to his choir in his little safe space. I don’t think he makes many new converts to his flavor of Christianity. Instead, he’s stuck in that safe space with a dwindling number of believers. I’m sure it’s very cozy, at least. But it’s going to get less comfortable as the years pass.

The problem Ken Ham is having is that his worldview doesn’t come naturally to anyone. It has to be coached extensively into people who don’t know any better. So generally, that coaching must begin very early. It must also be reinforced constantly and from all sides. Children must be absolutely shrink-wrapped to maintain it.

Even so, the moment such a child ventures out into the real world, their false worldview always risks toppling in the face of reality. There simply does not exist a way for the Ken Hams of the world to shrink-wrap a child so well that reality cannot ever penetrate those layers of indoctrination.

Not anymore, anyway. At one time, I’m sure it was a lot easier to build those bubbles.

As Ken Ham himself has admitted, evangelicals have already lost Gen Z. But let’s be clear here: they lost Gen Z because Gen X and older Millennials refused to allow their children to be indoctrinated with a Creationism-friendly worldview. He demonizes schools for this refusal, but really he’s missed a few steps here!

That said, I’m sure he wishes with all his heart that he could indoctrinate those children without their parents knowing, but it ain’t gonna happen.

Now younger Millennials are poised to start having their own children. Those children will be part of Gen Alpha (born between 2013-2025) and whatever we call the next age cohort. It seems very likely that they will also generally refuse to allow their children to learn fake science to make Ken Ham happy.

His roller coaster may be reaching the end of the ride. But the future for children has never been brighter as a result.

On Being Ignorant of One’s Ignorance and Unaware of Being Unskilled, by John Loftus

Here’s the link to this article.

[Written by John W. Loftus] As a former Christian, especially soon after I first converted, I thought I knew the answers to the riddle of existence. The answers were all in the Bible. And I thought I could also understand the Bible well enough to know, especially before I had any advanced learning. Initially I was a Bible Thumper. My motto was: God said it. I believe it. That settles it. All of the answers were to be found in the Bible, and I thought I knew them–all of them. So without any education at all I soon had the confidence to speak to college professors I met and not be intimidated at all. And I did. I remember walking away from some conversations thinking to myself how ignorant that professor was. Yep. That’s right. At that time I was what psychologists have dubbed “Unskilled and Unaware of it.” And it appears to me many Christians who comment here are just as I was. They come here with the answers. Some of them do not even have a college education. And yet they offer nothing but ignorant comments. I can’t convince them otherwise. They are like I once was.

Looking back on those initial years I could see clearly that I was not able to think through the issues of the Bible, especially hermeneutics, until after gaining a master’s degree. I would have told you upon receiving my first master’s degree that I was ignorant before then. But I kept on learning and studying. Age had a way of teaching me as well. It seems as though as every decade passed I would say I was more ignorant in the previous one. As every decade passed I see more and more wisdom in Socrates who claimed he was wise because he didn’t know. According to him the wiser that a person is, then the less he claims to know. Awareness of our ignorance only comes with more knowledge.

One writer said:

The British philosopher Bertrand Russell once wrote that “the trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.” This is true whether one interprets “stupid” as foolish (short on smarts) or as ignorant (short on information). Deliberately or otherwise, his sentiment echoes that of Charles Darwin, who over one hundred years ago pointed out that “ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”

The Internet is a veritable all-you-can-eat buffet of such misplaced confidence. Online, individuals often speak with confident authority on a subject, yet their conclusions are flawed. It is likely that such individuals are completely ignorant of their ignorance. Cough.

And so let me link to this writer who in turn links to an important study that can help us determine whether we are ignorant or not. The psychological study is called, Unskilled and Unaware of it.

And it just doesn’t apply to Christians, but anyone who has an overconfident assessment of their skills and abilities, including atheists.

The bottom line is that the more I know the more aware of how little I know. Get it? But there is no way to help a person who has all of the answers know how little he knows except by increasing his knowledge and experience. It’s a catch-22 of sorts. Until you do know a great deal you will never really know how ignorant you are. Therefore only the ignorant are unaware of their ignorance. And only the unskilled are unaware of it too. We see this on shows like American Idol and on Who’s Got Talent? Does it not surprise you how many people audition for these shows who completely lack talent and yet claim they are good? Most bad Karaoke singers do not know they cannot sing. It’s not until they become better at it can they know this for themselves.

It’s not that the ignorant and unskilled don’t know they are at least somewhat ignorant and unskilled. They do. Just ask them. When asked even the ignorant will say so. It’s just that the ignorant do not understand how truly ignorant they really are. They might think it’s a small leap to knowledge when there is a mile (or several miles) to travel for it.

Again, the more we know the more we know that we don’t know, and only people who know can truly know this. Got it? And only people who know can discern others who know. I can have a great conversation/dialogue with some Christians here because I can tell that they know what they are talking about (even if I disagree). And I know who they are because of what they say. It’s a joy to me. In fact, if approved for publication an unnamed Christian scholar and I will be co-writing a book length dialogue about our differences because I can respect that he knows (well, at least as best as a Christian can do anyway). [I’m not defining “know” here as justified knowledge, but in terms of education and awareness, since, as you would expect, I think he’s wrong].

So I’ll continually be bothered daily at DC by ignorant people who are unaware of their ignorance, especially Christians. That’s the nature of this beast. Worse off, they don’t trust me to tell them what they should understand. They will most likely only listen when someone on their side of the fence–whom they respect–tells them.

For now I’m challenging people to consider whether they are ignorant/unskilled and unaware of it. Most Christians who comment here are. I would say this about them as a former professor of philosophy, apologetics, ethics, and the Bible. This is much more true of them now from my perspective.

So the more I know the more I know that I don’t know. But I do know this: I know a hell of a lot more than most people about Christianity. I am not ignorant when it comes to Christianity. I might be wrong, but I’m not ignorant, at least not as ignorant as most of the Christians who comment here. Is this a contradiction? Not at all. For the only way for us to know something like this is to become knowledgeable. Someone can only say he knows a lot when he knows he doesn’t know that much. And only the knowledgeable can have a proper assessment of this because the ignorant are ignorant of their own ignorance!

The next frontier of book bans: Seahorses and talking crayons

Here’s the link to this article.

Avatar photoby ADAM LEE OCT 05, 2023

A scatter of colorful crayons | The next frontier of book bans: Seahorses and talking crayons
Dangerous and potentially subversive! (Pixabay) Credit: Pixabay

Overview:

Conservative parents demanding the banning of books and the censorship of schools have a worldview as fragile as glass. They can’t even tolerate the idea of children hearing that they might not be who or what society tells them they are.

Reading Time: 5 MINUTES

[Previous: Don’t be yourself]

Which comes first: the facts or the interpretation?

To those of us raised with a rational, scientific way of viewing the world, this is obvious. You should gather as much evidence as you can, determine what conclusion it best supports, and believe that. That way, you’re best likely to hold a worldview that accurately reflects reality.

However, religious conservatives have the opposite strategy.

They say that what you should do is first, decide what you want to believe; then make the facts conform to that, either by putting a particular spin on events, or simply omitting the ones that inconveniently contradict your preferred conclusion.

This shouldn’t be a controversial or insulting statement. This is something that religious conservatives are very open about. For example, the creationist organization Answers in Genesis says so themselves.

They argue, in postmodern, post-truth fashion, that evidence never proves one worldview over another and it’s all about what assumptions you start with, so you might as well pick the one that makes you feel the best. In their eyes, a universe where God exists and promises to reward the faithful is more comforting than a godless universe where humanity is on our own, so we should believe the former rather than the latter.

The “liberty” to read what I want you to read

This is a consistent theme in the behavior of right-wing groups like the Orwellian “Moms for Liberty,” which in reality is anti-liberty and anti-free-speech. They exist for the purpose of imposing their personal political beliefs on everyone. They want to control what should be taught in classrooms and what books should be available in libraries, and they want a heckler’s veto over any course material that makes any conservative upset.

In every school district where they pop up, they want to throw out books about racism and civil rights—whether it’s biographies of civil-rights icons like Ruby Bridges or Rosa Parks, or books about racism like The 1619 Project—because it might make white students feel guilty or ashamed to learn real history.

They only want kids to hear a sanitized, whitewashed version of the past where racism was the crime of a few misguided individuals, never a reflection of society as a whole, and everything was fixed and everyone was forgiven in the end. Even if that’s not what actually happened.

For example, in York, Pennsylvania:

“I am Rosa Parks” and “I am Martin Luther King, Jr.” … were two of more than 200 anti-racism books and resources suggested by the Central York School District’s diversity education committee last year. The Central York school board vetoed the entire list. In a clip from a meeting aired by CNN, which reported on student protests of the ban, members referred to the list of reading and educational material as “divisive” and “bad ideas.”

Banned are children’s picture books, K-5 books, middle and high school books, videos, webinars, and web links, including a memoir by Pakistani writer and activist Malala Yousafzai; a book by Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor; an adaptation of “Hidden Figures,” about Black female mathematicians at NASA; “Sulwe” by actress Lupita Nyong’o, about a little girl who fears her skin is too dark, and CNN’s “Sesame Street Town Hall” about racism.“His books on Rosa Parks and MLK were banned. Here’s what this South Florida author did.” Connie Ogle, The Miami Herald, 30 September 2021.

Or in Williamson County, Tennessee, which has become a hotbed of book censorship:

Community members and local advocacy organizations have come forward in disapproval of books like “Ruby Bridges Goes to School,” “Separate is Never Equal,” and “George vs. George,” their argument being that teaching about the darker aspects of racism in United States history isn’t appropriate in elementary grades.

…Steenman said that the mention of a “large crowd of angry white people who didn’t want Black children in a white school” too harshly delineated between Black and white people, and that the book didn’t offer “redemption” at its end.“Here’s what to know about the debate over ‘Wit & Wisdom’ curriculum in Williamson schools.” Anika Exum, The Tennesseean, 8 July 2021.

In that same district, conservatives objected to teaching kids the story of Galileo, because it makes the Catholic church look like the bad guy (!).

At one juncture, the group implores the school district to include more charitable descriptions of the Catholic Church when teaching a book about astronomer Galileo Galilei, who was persecuted by said church for suggesting that Earth revolves around the sun.

“Where is the HERO of the church?” the group’s spreadsheet asks, “to contrast with their mistakes?”“Far-Right Group Wants to Ban Kids From Reading Books on Male Seahorses, Galileo, and MLK.” Kelly Weill, The Daily Beast, 24 September 2021.

And, yes, they want to ban a kids’ book about seahorses, because it mentions that it’s the male seahorse that gets pregnant and gives birth:

Complainants stated during the hearing that there is “social conditioning” in the book, that there are concerns about the book and video “attempting to normalize that males can get pregnant” and the “suggestion that gender is fluid is too early” to be taught in first grade. It was stated that the book paired with the video is “indicative of an agenda”.

Please note: it’s not the book they object to, but the biological facts that the book describes. I can’t help but picture angry, censorious church ladies shielding their sons’ and daughters’ eyes from the seahorse exhibit at the aquarium. If they think seahorses are part of the LGBTQ agenda, isn’t their real complaint with God, who they believe created seahorses in this way?

This is a telling complaint, because it’s an explicit demand to censor reality so as not to conflict with ideology. If kids learn too much about the exuberant diversity of nature, it might give them the idea that our gender roles are cultural constructs and not universally applicable laws. And we can’t have that!

A crayon’s story

But I’ve saved the most absurd for last. According to this story on Daily Kos, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district in North Carolina has banned a book called Red: A Crayon’s Story, by Michael Hall, in response to parent complaints.

That title caught my eye because I know this book very well. I own a copy of it. I’ve read it to my son many times.

It’s a story about an anthropomorphic blue crayon who gets a red wrapper by mistake. His family, friends and teachers (who are also crayons) can’t look beneath the surface. They believe he must be red, because that’s what his label says.

When he tries to draw red things like strawberries or traffic lights, and, of course, fails… the other crayons double down. They insist that he can draw red things, if he just tries harder. They start gossiping that he must be lazy or slow or have something else wrong with him.

Eventually, he meets a friendly crayon who asks him to draw a blue picture. Having absorbed the messages society has placed upon him, he says he can’t. But the other crayon persuades him to try, and he succeeds beyond his wildest dreams. At last, he finds his true color. He’s so good at drawing blue things, the beauty of his art wins all the other crayons over and makes them realize they were wrong about him.

Yes, this is the book right-wingers are up in arms about.

Now you could, if you wanted to, read this as an allegory for gay or transgender people coming out of the closet… but come on. It’s a kids’ book about talking crayons. Its moral is about being true to yourself, but that’s all. It doesn’t demand any specific interpretation. If you persist in seeing it as a story about sexuality, it’s because that’s what you bring to it. (According to the author, it’s a metaphor for his diagnosis of dyslexia.)

Imagine what this says about the mindset of the book censors. They find it deeply threatening and subversive simply to say that you might not be who or what society tells you you are. Even in a story that says nothing about sexuality or gender, they can’t tolerate that. They want to keep any hint of that idea far away from the minds of children.

If these wannabe book-burners weren’t such a threat, they would be ludicrous. It’s a sign of how porcelain-fragile their worldview is that they can’t stand to have kids even consider making up their own minds about their identity. Their only hope, as shown by their own actions, is to raise children who never ask questions and never doubt anything they’re told.

You’re Sure You Know Jesus in Your Heart? Can You Verify That?

Here’s the link to this article.

By David Madison at 10/06/2023

Imagination plays a major role in religious certainty

The huge ecclesiastical bureaucracy has been in charge of promoting an idealized Jesus, hence it’s no wonder Christians are confident that they know Jesus in their hearts. They fail to notice that Jesus is a product, one that is presented in the most positive ways. The church has always gotten away with this because, for the most part, the laity can’t be bothered to look at the so-called evidence; that is, to verify what they’re told about Jesus. 

The supposed sources of Jesus knowledge are simply not valid. They are the equivalent of smoke and mirrors. The fervent promoters of Jesus—theologians and clergy, but beginning with the gospel authors—remind us of the man behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz conjuring stories and fantasies. Let’s consider a few examples.

Visual Aids

For some reason, the faithful are okay with the idea that god is invisible. That’s just one step short of imaginary—but that’s another story for another time. Since Jesus was the part of god that became visible, it has been essential to depict Jesus in stained glass, statuary, paintings—in a wide range of art forms. But all of these depictions come out of the imaginations of artists, because in all of the New Testament—this is a puzzling deficiency of the gospels—Jesus is never described. Some Christians want to believe that the gospels are based on eyewitness reports, which makes it strange that descriptions of Jesus were not included. What did he look like? Was he tall or short, handsome or homely, thin or stout? 

So for centuries, the masters of visual aids have depicted Jesus as they imagined him. If you have a cherished image of the Jesus you know in your hearts, that is the result of artistic imagination. Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Caravaggio portrayed Jesus quite differently; an especially idealized   Catholic rendering probably holds greater appeal. 

Miracles Are Impressive, Right?

Holy heroes the world over, and through the centuries, have attracted followers because of the wonders they perform. And the Jesus whom Christians know in their hearts is no exception. The power of Jesus flowed through his garments, so that a sick woman who touched his hem was healed. He restored sight to a blind man by mixing his saliva with mud, and smearing it on the fellow’s eyes. He transferred demons from a man into a herd of pigs, and glowed on a mountaintop while chatting with Moses and Elijah. Changing water into wine, walking on water, raising Lazarus from the dead, feeding vast crowds with a few loaves and fishes—these were also in his repertoire of wonders. If you’re already supercharged with Jesus-belief, these stories stoke your enthusiasm. 

My challenge to believers is two-fold. 

(1)  Read all of these stories carefully, critically. Are they to be taken seriously? The problem, of course, is that the gospel writers failed to provide sufficient evidence (e.g., documentation) for those of us in the modern world to say, “Sure, these things happened as described.” A careful study of the Lazarus story provokes suspicion. It is found only in John’s gospel (chapter 11)—how were the other writers unaware of it? Jesus says he was glad he didn’t get there in time to save Lazarus, because he seemed eager to score points: this miracle illustrates that he is the resurrection and the life. It looks contrived—no surprise whatever in John’s gospel.                                                                                                                                 

   The Jesus enthusiasts should be aware that such gospel stories reflect the miracle folklore that existed in the ancient world. These were the things holy heroes did, so the gospel authors included them in their accounts. What is more probable: these were bona fide miracles—or borrowings from common folklore? In Jesus: Mything in Action, Volume 1, David Fitzgerald states to issue clearly:

“Like the pagan miracle workers, Jesus cast out demons and healed the blind, deaf, and mute with mud and spit, using the same spells, incantations and techniques taught in many popular Greek magic handbooks of the time.” (p.105)

(2)  Boasting about miracles to prove a god’s power is risky business; such claims present too many problems. For insights into this, I recommend Matt McCormick’s essay, “God Would Not Perform Miracles,” in John Loftus’ 2019 anthology, The Case Against Miracles. Why does an all-powerful, loving, caring god, who knows when even a sparrow falls to the group, put up with such massive suffering in the world? If it was god’s miracle that Jesus fed 5,000 people, why are there hungry people in the world today? If Jesus healed a blind man, why are there blind people anywhere today? McCormick states the theological dilemma precisely:

“…millions of people suffer horribly from disease, famine, cruelty, torture, genocide, and death. The occurrence of a finite miracle, in the midst of so many instances of unabated suffering, suggests that the being who is responsible doesn’t know about, doesn’t care about, or doesn’t have the power to address the others.”  (p. 67)

Jesus Is Cherished in Christian Hearts Because of What He Taught

This is where we hit the hardest brick wall. The clergy make a practice of reading nice, inspiring Jesus quotes from the pulpit. They’re not hard to find. Just do a Google search for good Jesus quotes. But the clergy in hard-nosed brands of Christianity—who hope to see god’s wrath visited on sinners—are far more inclined to rely on the dreadful Jesus quotes. Devout folks who don’t bother to read/study the gospels commonly fail to notice the dreadful quotes. 

I found myself wondering how Christians can be Jesus-followers when there is so much Jesus-script in the gospels that is so very bad. Because it is unnoticed! —churchgoers don’t make a habit of reading/studying the gospels. This reality prompted me to reread the gospels to find the Jesus quotes that most of the devout—I suspect—would disagree with and flatly reject. The result of this project was my 2021 book, Ten Things Christians Wish Jesus Hadn’t Taught. On the book’s website, BadThingsJesusTaught.com you’ll find a list of 292 Jesus quotes that so many Christians wouldn’t be thrilled with. There I have sorted them into four categories: Preaching About the End Time, Scary Extremism, Bad Advice & Bad Theology, and The Unreal Jesus of John’s Gospel. In the book, they’re sorted differently, into ten categories. 

Preaching About the End Time. In Mark’s gospel especially, the kingdom of god will arrive on earth soon, and there will be grim destruction, as depicted so graphically in Mark 13. 

Scary Extremism. In Matthew 10, we read that Jesus sent his disciples out to preach in villages, and he assured them: “If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet as you leave that house or town. Truly I tell you, it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment than for that town” (vv.14-15). That’s extreme, as is the requirement that hatred of family is required for those who want to be followers of Jesus (Luke 14:26).

Bad Advice & Bad Theology. What a shame that the famous Sermon on the Mount includes a fair share of bad advice: don’t worry about what to wear or what to eat, and don’t store up treasures on earth. For so many modern Christians, this advice has no bearing on their lives. And a champion example of bad theology is found in John 6, where Jesus recommends ghoulish magic potions, i.e., eat his flesh and drink his blood, to gain eternal life. 

The Unreal Jesus of John’s Gospel. This Jesus with a colossal ego—so full of himself—is so unlike the Jesus we find in Mark, the first gospel. 

Chances are, the folks who know Jesus in their hearts haven’t paid much attention to these very negative aspects of the gospels, in fact, they’ve been guided away from such texts. Or have been convinced by clever apologists that the bad Jesus quotes aren’t that bad after all. So much energy of the clergy and theologians has to be devoted to making Jesus look good, when the gospels tell such a different story. Always bear in mind that the gospel authors were promoting the early Jesus cult, and ancient cult beliefs/fanaticisms are not shared by so many modern believers.   

Now for the second part of the brick wall that devout Christians face when they are so sure they know Jesus in their hearts. And this is even more problematic. We have no way—none whatever—of knowing what Jesus said. Every single scrap of Jesus-script in the gospels was created by the gospel authors. We are forced to this conclusion because the authors, writing decades later, don’t identify their sources: how did they find out what Jesus said? Devout scholars want to believe that “reliable oral tradition” did the trick, but this is speculation, guesswork; they have no way of verifying this claim. It doesn’t help that the author of John’s gospel (21:24)—the last to be written—mentions a disciple who “testifies to these things and has written them.” We need to see the documentation—not an anonymous author’s boast—and any novelist can create such characters.

The very devout who are sure that they know Jesus in their hearts can claim that this knowledge is guaranteed by the holy spirit—nothing else is necessary. This is a form of blind obedience to their imaginations: dammit, they just know it! And they might claim that “inspired scripture” is the source of their confidence. But oh dear, there is so much in the inspired gospels that works against this claim. Maybe it’s time for these folks to learn how critical thinking can be derailed by confirmation bias. Remember: what you feel in your heart is evidence for what you’re feeling. To back up any claim that you’re tuned in to cosmic realities, please show us where we can find reliable, verifiable, objective evidence.

David Madison was a pastor in the Methodist Church for nine years, and has a PhD in Biblical Studies from Boston University. He is the author of two books, Ten ToughProblems in Christian Thought and Belief: a Minister-Turned-Atheist Shows Why You Should Ditch the Faith, now being reissued in several volumes, the first of which is Guessing About God (2023) and Ten Things Christians Wish Jesus Hadn’t Taught: And Other Reasons to Question His Words (2021). The Spanish translation of this book is also now available. 

His YouTube channel is here. At the invitation of John Loftus, he has written for the Debunking Christianity Blog since 2016.

The Cure-for-Christianity Library©, now with more than 500 titles, is here. A brief video explanation of the Library is here. 

Robert Sapolsky’s new book on determinism

Here’s the link to this article.

Jerry A. Coyne, 9/25/23

Robert Sapolsky, a biological polymath who’s written several best-selling books, pointed out in earlier ones (like Behave) that he was a hard determinist, a view he reinforced on a Sci. Am. podcast—one of their rare positive contributions. Now, as I mentioned in February, his new book, totally about determinism, is about to come out—on October 17. You can order it by clicking on the screenshot below. It ain’t cheap at $31.50 for the hardcover, but I may have to dig down deep to get it–or order it from the library.

Here’s the Amazon summary, which implies that Sapolsky isn’t buying any of the compatibilism bullpucky:

Robert Sapolsky’s Behave, his now classic account of why humans do good and why they do bad, pointed toward an unsettling conclusion: We may not grasp the precise marriage of nature and nurture that creates the physics and chemistry at the base of human behavior, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Now, in Determined, Sapolsky takes his argument all the way, mounting a brilliant (and in his inimitable way, delightful) full-frontal assault on the pleasant fantasy that there is some separate self telling our biology what to do.

Determined offers a marvelous synthesis of what we know about how consciousness works—the tight weave between reason and emotion and between stimulus and response in the moment and over a life. One by one, Sapolsky tackles all the major arguments for free will and takes them out, cutting a path through the thickets of chaos and complexity science and quantum physics, as well as touching ground on some of the wilder shores of philosophy. He shows us that the history of medicine is in no small part the history of learning that fewer and fewer things are somebody’s “fault”; for example, for centuries we thought seizures were a sign of demonic possession. Yet, as he acknowledges, it’s very hard, and at times impossible, to uncouple from our zeal to judge others and to judge ourselves. Sapolsky applies the new understanding of life beyond free will to some of our most essential questions around punishment, morality, and living well together.By the end, Sapolsky argues that while living our daily lives recognizing that we have no free will is going to be monumentally difficult, doing so is not going to result in anarchy, pointlessness, and existential malaise. Instead, it will make for a much more humane world.

As I wrote in February based on this summary:

It’s clear from the summary that the “free will” Sapolsky’s attacking is dualistic or libertarian free will (“some separate self telling our biology what to do”). And although some readers think that kind of free will is passé, that everyone already rejects it, that’s wrong. I suspect those who say such things are compatibilists who don’t get out much.  According to surveys in four countries, most people accept libertarian free will, i.e., if you repeated an episode with everything exactly the same, a person could have decided or behaved differently. They also think that a naturalistic universe (or “deterministic” one, if you will) robs people of their moral responsibility. As I’ve long argued, yes, the concept of “moral” responsibility loses meaning in a naturalistic universe, but the concept of responsibility  (i.e., X did action Y) still makes a lot of sense, and that alone gives us justification for punishment—although non-retributive punishment.

If you doubt the pervasiveness of belief in dualistic free will, just look at religion: the Abrahamic religions and many other faiths are absolutely grounded in free will. They are, after all, predicated on you choosing the right religion and/or savior. This means that you do have a free choice, and woe be unto you if you choose wrong. (Calvinists or any religion that believes in “the elect” are exceptions.)

. . . So it goes. Back to Sapolksky. He espoused his determinism in Behave, but this is a full-length treatment, and a book I would like to have written. My main fear about the book was that Sapolsky would take the Dennett-ian stand towards free will, saying that we really have the only kind worth wanting, and downplaying the naturalism that, Dan believes (with other compatibilists), leaves us only one course of thought and action open at any one time. As I’ve argued, while hard determinism leads immediately to a discussion of the consequences for our world, how we judge others, and the justice system, compatibilism seems to me the “cheap way out,” reassuring us that we have free will and not going far beyond that—certainly not into the consequences of naturalism, which are many. It is the hard determinists, not the compatibilists, who follow the naturalistic conclusion to its philosophical conclusions.

The good news is that now when someone wants to understand determinism, I can just shut up and say, “Read Sapolsky’s book,” for I see no divergence between his views and mine (I’d also add Free Will by Sam Harris.) In the end—and I’ll get in trouble for this—I think compatibilists are semantic grifters. They’re really all determinists who want to find some way to convince people that they have a form of free will, even though they couldn’t have behaved other than how they did. This is the “little people’s” argument, not for religion but for philosophy. But in the end it’s the same: “People need religion/the notion of free will because without it, society could not flourish.” That, of course, is bogus. As long as we feel we make choices, even if intellectually we know we couldn’t have chosen otherwise, society will go on.  After all, I’m a hard determinist and yet I’m still alive, getting out of bed each morning. I don’t know what I’ll pick when I go to a restaurant, even though I know it’s determined right before I look at the menu.

Reader Tom Clark wrote a positive review of Sapolsky’s book on the Naturalism site. Click below to read it.

I’ll give just two of Clark’s quotes:

If free will is widely conceived as being opposed to determinism[1], it isn’t surprising that the latter is seen as a threat to responsibility, meaning, creativity, rationality, and other desiderata tied to our core notion of agency. If we’re fully caused to be who we are and do what we do, then it seems we’re merely biological robots, acting out a pre-ordained script; we don’t make real choices for which we might be praised or blamed.

Could you have done otherwise?

This is why Robert Sapolsky’s book Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will(link is external), is likely to ruffle more than a few feathers (although it will do so very entertainingly, see below). Following up on his earlier work Behave(link is external), Sapolsky, a behavioral biologist, is intent on making it clear to anyone who will listen that there is no escaping determinism if we’re serious about understanding ourselves: understanding how we got to be the exact persons we are and why our intentions and choices arise as they do. Moreover, as he takes pains to point out, indeterminism or randomness doesn’t help the cause of agency. After all, as deciders we want to determine our choices, not have them be subject to factors we don’t control. Strangely enough, therefore, determinism, construed commonsensically as the existence of reliable causal, and more broadly, explanatory connections between our desires, decisions, actions, and their effects on the world, seems a necessary condition of genuine agenthood. We really make choices, just not undetermined or arbitrary ones.

Well, the last sentence is a bit grifty given that “make choices” means, to most people, “we could have made other choices.” But I won’t quibble too much. The best part is that, according to Clark, Sapolsky has no truck with compatibilism:

The fight with compatibilists isn’t about determinism; compatibilists agree that we and our choices are in principle explicable by various determinants, not the causa sui. It’s rather about the relative importance assigned to determinism and its implications for moral responsibility and other beliefs, attitudes, and social practices informed by our conception of agency. Sapolsky argues that compatibilists tend to ignore the causal story behind an individual in order to fix our attention on agents and their capacities for rationality and reasons-responsiveness, capacities that compatibilists argue justify holding each other morally responsible.[8] Most of us are capable in these respects to varying degrees, but by downplaying determinism and the causal story, what Sapolsky calls taking the ahistorical stance, compatibilists in effect block access to the psychological and practical benefits of putting determinism front and center: increased compassion and more attention paid to the conditions that thwart human flourishing. Due to factors beyond our control too many of us end up with the short end of the stick when it comes to health, education, social skills, and employability. Sapolsky is especially critical of compatibilist Daniel Dennett, who has claimed that “luck averages out in the long run”. He responds in characteristically plain-spoken style:

No it doesn’t. Suppose you’re born a crack baby. In order to counterbalance this bad luck, does society rush in to ensure that you’ll be raised in relative affluence and with various therapies to overcome your neurodevelopmental problems? No, you are overwhelmingly likely to be born into poverty and stay there. Well then, says society, at least let’s make sure your mother is loving, is stable, has lots of free time to nurture you with books and museum visits. Yeah, right; as we know your mother is likely to be drowning in the pathological consequences of her own miserable luck in life, with a good chance of leaving you neglected, abused, shuttled through foster homes. Well, does society at least mobilize then to counterbalance that additional bad luck, ensuring you live in a safe neighborhood with excellent schools? Nope, your neighborhood is likely to be gang-riddled and your school underfunded.

In arguing against compatibilists, Sapolsky engages with the philosophical literature, citing skeptics about free will and moral responsibility such as Neil Levy, Gregg Caruso, Derk Pereboom, and Sam Harris (see references below). Such backup suggests he is not completely crazy to think that a robust appreciation of determinism, and therefore the sheer contingency of our formative circumstances, should force reconsideration of our conceptions of credit, blame, reward, and punishment.

Clark’s final sentence:

[Sapolsky’s] persistence in seeing Determined to completion – a prodigious undertaking – is much to be congratulated, although he would disavow deserving any such praise. Even if he’s right about that, we’re still lucky to have him.

YES!  But read the rest for yourself. This is a book we can all benefit from (even those miscreants who accept libertarian free will or compatibilism), and I’m glad I can point to a respected polymath who makes an argument I agree with, but written much better than I’d be able to.

What I’d love to see: a debate about compatibilism between Dennett and Sapolsky.

God Is Okay with Abortion—Devout Christians Tell Us So

Here’s the link to this article.

By David Madison at 9/22/2023

Without intending to!

A member of the congregation is hospitalized with cancer. So fellow parishioners organize prayer marathons to plead with their god to intervene—and it works! So they claim when their friend’s cancer has been defeated, after considerable intervention by medical professionals. What a relief that god granted their wish. 

But what are the implications of this belief? It’s a good idea to think it through.

In fact, this is an example of belief that sabotages the concept of a good god—for three reasons: (1) the guy in the next bed also had cancer, but there were no prayer marathons for him and he died. Didn’t god notice or care? An omnipotent god is influenced by prayer marathons? (2) In fact, if god is capable of curing cancer, why does he allow any cancers in the world? Why not get rid of the disease altogether—kick it off the planet? Stephen Fry was once asked what he would say to god when he dies, if god is, after all, real. His response: “Bone cancer in children? What’s that about? How dare you.” 

(3) The god-cures-cancer claim is based on the assumption that the all-knowing deity is aware of what’s happening inside our bodies. If we look at diseased cells or tissues (extracted during a biopsy) under a microscope, we can see the activity of the pathogens. Surgeons do this in their efforts to save the patient. The all-knowing deity sees it all without a microscope—and thus knows what has to be done to effect a cure. The prayer marathoners have no doubt that their god has these amazing powers of perception, this detailed knowledge of our biological mechanics. 

This is a logical extension of the certainty that their god is aware of everything that every human on the planet does or thinks. The hairs on our heads are numbered; not even a sparrow falls to earth without god being aware (Matthew 10:26-31); on the day of judgement, we’ll be held accountable for every careless word we utter (Matthew 12:36); if we don’t believe in Jesus we will suffer god’s wrath (John 3:36).  

But this confidence that god has detailed knowledge of what’s happening in our bodies at microscopic levels has major implications/complications. How can this god not know that a high percentage of fertilized human eggs never make it to maturity? That is, they abort naturally, either at the zygote or embryonic stage. In this 2012 DCB article by Jonathan MS Pearce, God Loves Abortion!, you’ll find statistics, as well as in this 2023 article on the March of Dimes website.    

What are the implications for theology? Pearce states the following:

“God is supposedly omnipotent, all-powerful; and omnibenevolent, all-loving. We also hear very often how terrible clinical abortions are. Now I don’t want to investigate clinical abortions per se but I do want to look at the standards that Christians adopt when approaching abortion, and then when they evaluate their perfect God. The general approach, rightly or wrongly, is that abortion is the murder of human beings. If this is the case, then the death, at the hands of other humans, of any and every embryo from blastocyst onwards, is bad, abhorrent and so on.
 
“The reason for talking about this is twofold. Firstly, for people who critique abortion on religious grounds, it makes somewhat of a mockery of their arguments. Secondly, again from a religious perspective, it does make God look a little callous. Nay, brutal and unloving.”
 
How can a caring, loving god heal one cancer patient, while ignoring thousands of others? How can a caring, loving god—who knows the intricate details of human anatomy—fail to fix the problems that cause so much loss of life at the zygote and embryonic levels? 

The outrage against abortion is yet another symptom of horribly derailed theology. 

The Christian crusaders against abortion seem to be under the spell of an idealized concept of god that is far removed from the wrathful god portrayed in the Bible. In one episode of Call the Midwife, about mid-wife nuns in post-war London, we find the story of a pregnant woman who has been diagnosed with cancer. She is in anguish, certain that god is judging/punishing her for something she’s done. But the nun who is caring for her is confident that is not so: “I do not believe in a God who judges.” Clearly, this benevolent sister had not read her Bible.  

We find the violent arrival of the kingdom of god described in Mark 13, which includes the warning, “Woe to those who are pregnant and to those who are nursing infants in those days!” (v. 17) They will be among the casualties. In I Samuel 15, Yahweh orders Saul to commit genocide: “Now go and attack Amalek and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.” (v. 3)

The Genesis flood story—Noah’s Ark—is genocide on a massive scale, carried out by god himself. The story is commonly sanitized for children by showing animals entering the ark, and featuring the rainbow at the end. Yet it is a horrifying story. If understood as an actual event—which so many Christians seem to do—the god who carried it out was not the least bit concerned with the toddlers and pregnant women who perished. Can we imagine anything more grotesque than an entertainment theme park designed to celebrate this genocide, namely Ken Ham’s Ark Encounter? Truly, derailed theology. Let’s bring the idea home: even the most devout people I know were deeply stressed in the wake of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami—a minor disaster compared to the Genesis flood. There was catastrophic loss of life, more than 200,000 killed. James A. Haught stated the obvious: 

“Horrible occurrences such as the Indian Ocean tsunami that drowned 100,000 children prove clearly that the universe isn’t administered by an all-loving invisible father. No compassionate creator would devise killer earthquake and hurricanes—or breast cancer for women and leukemia for children.”  (Religion Is Dying: Soaring Secularism in America and the West)

How can it be that the Christian god is outraged about abortions, when he tolerates massive deaths from natural disasters (on a planet he is credited with designing), and millions of abortions caused by bodily malfunctions? 

Devout conservatives are so sure that this the case, but then we run into the next major problem: how can their theology be verified? In fact, there are many Christians who are not so sure that abortion violates the will of god; who are far more sure that their god is concerned for women who, for a variety of reasons, are not ready for pregnancy and motherhood. But the fact is that no theologies can be verified. We ask believers—and we ask it repeatedly—to show us where we can find reliable, verifiable, objective evidence for the god(s) they worship, and for what these gods supposedly require of humans. 

We don’t ask this just out of idle curiosity. Devout folks, who are so sure of their theology, are determined to make it the basis for public policy. Even to the extent, in some cases we’ve heard recently, of making getting an abortion punishable by death. Christians should look around at the many different brands of their faith, and at other monotheisms. If Catholics held power and could set public policy, would Protestants welcome a ban on all contraceptives? If Muslims were suddenly in charge, would Christian women welcome mandatory hijab laws?   

Because of strident, unverifiable theologies, pushed with such fervor by their advocates, it’s been an uphill battle to achieve and preserve equal rights for people of different races, for women (for control over their own bodies) and for gay/lesbian/transgender citizens. Diversity should be welcomed, cheered, appreciated. We come up short in trying to find widely embraced theologies that support such diversity.

There is yet another factor that is rarely considered—and underappreciated: the last thing our endangered planet needs is more babies. Individual countries may fret about declining populations, but the bigger picture is a warning that more people is not a solution. We have been exploiting the planet’s resources for a long time, and there can be no doubt that climate change can be traced in large part to increased human demands and expectations. If there are genuine, credible reasons for women to seek abortions, then so be it. To help ease the burden on earth’s resources.

There has been a lot written about abortion on the Debunking Christianity Blog—check it out for a better understanding of the bad theology that drives the anti-abortion advocates.  

David Madison was a pastor in the Methodist Church for nine years, and has a PhD in Biblical Studies from Boston University. He is the author of two books, Ten ToughProblems in Christian Thought and Belief: a Minister-Turned-Atheist Shows Why You Should Ditch the Faith, now being reissued in several volumes, the first of which is Guessing About God (2023) and Ten Things Christians Wish Jesus Hadn’t Taught: And Other Reasons to Question His Words (2021). The Spanish translation of this book is also now available. 

His YouTube channel is here. At the invitation of John Loftus, he has written for the Debunking Christianity Blog since 2016.

The Cure-for-Christianity Library©, now with more than 500 titles, is here. A brief video explanation of the Library is here.