Commentary on D. James Kennedy’s book Why I Believe–Introduction & Chapter 1

Here are the links to the articles included in this post. Author’s outline. Introduction. Chapter 1.

D. James Kennedy is the founder of Coral Ridge Ministries in Florida. A television show exists by the same name, although I have not seen it. Dr. Kennedy is an evangelical Christian who has written several books, including Evangelism Explosion and Why I Believe. The latter book was given to me by a friend in an effort to explain to me her reasons for holding to her faith.

Why I Believe is a concise, easy-to-read book containing most of the typical Christian arguments about the subjects below, in one convenient place – making it an excellent instrument for use as a jumping-off point for critical and honest commentaries on these subjects.

Introduction

Chapter 1. Why I Believe in the Bible

Chapter 2. The Stones Cry Out

Chapter 3. Why I Believe in God

Chapter 4. Why I Believe in Creation

Chapters 5-6. Why I Believe in Heaven/ Hell

Chapter 7. Why I Believe in Moral Absolutes

Chapters 8-13

Conclusion

Appendices

The Fabulous Prophecies of the Messiah (1993) by Jim Lippard

Analysis of the Teleological Argument by Eric Sotnak

Five Major Misconceptions about Evolution by Mark Isaac (Off Site)

Frequently Asked But Never Answered Questions” [about creationism] (2003) by Tom Scharle (Off Site)

“A Parable” [about the deity of Jesus] (1909) by M. M. Mangasarian

Introduction

“Anachronist”

This book inspired me to embark on a long search for knowledge and truth. I studied books on history, theology, and the sciences, researching many things Dr. Kennedy considered and many other issues he ignored; I examined some of his references; and I engaged in lengthy electronic debates with several learned individuals. In this series of commentaries, I present some of the things I learned in my quest. As with the book’s chapters, each successive commentary builds on the previous ones. Many of the chapter commentaries include a separate appendix. These appendices consist of supporting material not written by me.

A word about my point of view: I am nonreligious, and I can be classified as “weak atheist” in the sense that my mind harbors no beliefs regarding deities; however, I personally do not reject out-of-hand everything spiritual. Therefore, an atheist might object to my attempt in chapter 1 at formulating a rationale for liking the Bible, or to my proposing reincarnation in chapter 5 as an alternative to Kennedy’s Heaven/Hell argument. In the former case, I merely try to show how Kennedy could have made a more bulletproof argument without resorting to doubtful examples prophecy. In the latter case I simply discuss the plausibility of an alternative which Kennedy ignores, especially because the references he cites do mention it (and one actually advocates this alternative).

A Christian, on the other hand, might object to my heathen’s point of view. Even so, I believe that no honest Christian can object to my treatment of Dr. Kennedy and his book.

Originally I wrote this commentary for my own benefit, and as a result, it may not be as “scholarly” as I’d like for general worldwide distribution; nevertheless I do cite many references and in some cases make suggestions for further reading.

Before I begin with chapter 1, let me say that I loved the introduction to Why I Believe. D. James Kennedy said in a concise way things I have often tried to articulate in the past. Stand ready with reason for your beliefs. Examine the evidence on all sides, and hold fast to that which is good. This captures, in part, the essence of how I try to live my life! With this heartening advice in mind, I plunged into the book.

CHAPTER 1: WHY I BELIEVE IN THE BIBLE

(Composition Argument)

Dr. Kennedy begins his book with a chapter on the why he believes the Bible. I must say, a right proper beginning. After all, the Bible forms the whole basis for his beliefs; therefore he must establish the validity of this basis. Before I even opened the book I was most curious about how he would go about doing this.

I found it interesting that he relies on fulfilled prophecies as a foundation for his belief in the Bible. He makes a good case, but one can’t help feeling uneasy about it. Prophecy is an area so full of snakes that it’s hardly a strong point for the faithful. It’s almost a skeptic’s paradise; nearly everything that can go wrong could easily have gone wrong in terms of provability of the Bible. Kennedy wrote his book to provide believers with “ammunition” to counter challenges from nonbelievers, but intelligent skeptics, or even Biblical scholars, can easily dismiss many of the examples he presents.

I think I can provide a better rationale for believing in the Bible, which may stand up to challenge better. I will try to do so later.

The Bible does indeed contain many fulfilled prophecies. It contains both hits and misses, however, but Dr. Kennedy doesn’t say so. In this chapter he relies on a logical pitfall known as the “fallacy of composition”; i.e., assuming that a property shared by parts of something must apply to the whole. In other words, he implies that if some things in the Bible are demonstrably true, then that is sufficient reason for trusting the soundness of the entire book. Unfortunately the converse is equally valid, so this kind of “ammunition” does not convince.

Examples of prophecy in chapter 1

Let’s get on to the interesting stuff: the prophecies. There are many the author could have selected as examples. He chose first Ezekiel’s prophecies concerning the destruction of the city of Tyre, so I will do the same. I must confess amazement at the use of Ezekiel 26-28 as an example here, since it is in fact an excellent instance of unfulfilled prophecy. Here’s the account in an old standard textbook, Introduction to the Old Testament, by R. H. Pfeiffer:

In a series of oracles against Tyre (26-28), Ezekiel in 585 BC anticipated its capture by Nebuchadnezzar (26:7-14). In reality, Josephus, quoting Philostratus . . . and Phoenician sources report that Nebuchadnezzar vainly besieged Tyre for thirteen years. . . . Accordingly, a later oracle dated in 571, when Nebuchadnezzar had abandoned the siege, states that as a reward for his services against Tyre, for which he had received no wages, the Babylonian king would conquer Egypt (29:17-20; cf. 30:10-12). This Babylonian conquest of the Valley of the Nile, anticipated also by Jeremiah (43:10-13), remained a dream. . . . the victory of Nebuchadnezzar over Amasis did not result in a conquest of Egypt; at most it barred the Pharaoh from interference in Palestine.[1]

Why does Kennedy consider this prophecy about Tyre a hit rather than a miss? Ezekiel predicts disaster, sacking of the city, etc. by Nebuchadnezzar, but after 13 years (or 15, depending on which Bible you have), the city wasn’t sacked. He reached a settlement with Tyre instead, so the terrible destruction in Ezekiel 26 and 27 was a bit less than predicted (the siege probably did great harm, but Tyre had put up with this sort of thing off and on throughout its history). God relents in Ezekiel 29 and gives Nebuchadnezzar Egypt as a consolation prize for trying to do God’s will. In reading the prophecy, however, one gets the distinct impression that Tyre would be taken, sacked; the prediction is long, poetic, but also impossible to mistake. It just didn’t happen, and the Bible even admits this. Perhaps Ezekiel’s prediction simply illustrates his overenthusiastic loyalty to Babylon (he said nothing against Babylon, only against its enemies including Judah).[2] In the grips of nationalist pride, a prophet could make mistaken predictions.

But Kennedy insists that this prophecy was fulfilled after all, 250 years later when Alexander the Great came through and leveled the newer island city of Tyre after building a road using the ruins of the old mainland city of Tyre. This is irrelevant. Ezekiel quite plainly named the conqueror, saying of Tyre (26:7-12) that Nebuchadnezzar and his troops would bring down its towers, enter its gates, kill its people, and break down its walls. That did not happen, as we know from other sources including a later statement by Ezekiel himself. What Alexander may have done two and a half centuries later has no bearing on it. It’s like predicting that the President will die this year of liver disease. If he actually dies of a heart attack fifty years from now, that does not “fulfill” the prediction.

More serious, though, is something easily missed: Dr. Kennedy misrepresents Alexander’s conquest of Tyre. Let me sketch a bit of the city’s history. There’s a whole book about it, by W. B. Fleming; for Alexander’s siege, there are several ancient sources, notably Diodorus.[3]

This walled city stood on an island; it also controlled some territory on the mainland coast, about a half mile away. It passed peacefully into Persian control before 500 BC. After Alexander defeated the Persian king Darius at Issus (late 333 BC), he turned south toward Egypt, and Tyre held out against him. Unwilling to leave hostile forces in his rear, he laid siege to Tyre. He adopted the unprecedented stratagem of using stone and wood from the mainland to build a wide path to the island, and he conquered the city within less than a year. Women and children had long since been evacuated, but he did sack the city, and a good part of it burned. He then marched on south.

Alexander used stone from the mainland to build the path to the island. But of course it wasn’t rocks from the actual walls of Tyre; these were on the island, and Alexander hadn’t yet conquered it when he built the path. Furthermore, we know that the city not only recovered quickly but was being besieged again (by Antigonus) less than 20 years later – proof that the walls still stood! In fact, Tyre remained a major city for another millennium and a half. Thus Dr. Kennedy’s defense of the prophecy is not only illogical but depends on an outright falsehood.

Kennedy also mentions Micah’s predictions of doom for Jerusalem around 700 BC (the date is identifiable from the kings mentioned). These predictions also were not realized. In fact, this example became famous, and a century later Jeremiah refers to it, quoting Micah 3:12 and adding the “explanation” that “the LORD repented of the evil which he had pronounced against them.”

A fundamental problem exists with prophecies of a regime’s downfall: they are generally self-fulfilling, and therefore can’t be considered as bona-fide prophecies, especially when they don’t give dates. Look how easily the downfall of a regime can be predicted:

I hereby prophesy that the United States of America will be on the ash-heap of history.

Sad to say, it will, hopefully centuries hence and only because we dream up something better. Civilizations come and go, governments come and go, countries come and go, borders change. There’s nothing remarkable about this example, but by the standards of many believers, one would call it a “hit.”

You might ask, what about those truly clear prophecies that require no force-fitting? Surely they cannot all be lucky guesses. Well, chance is underrated by most observers. I find that most people seem a little too eager to claim “hits” that don’t withstand skeptical scrutiny. Perhaps as important, “misses” are either ignored or explained away.

Some prophecies not mentioned [4]

Let’s begin with Daniel. The book describes a figure with a head of gold, upper body of silver, lower body of brass, legs of iron and feet of iron and clay. The Bible says that these all represent four kingdoms from “gold” to “iron,” each inferior to its predecessor, and then goes on to make various predictions about their fates.

The trouble is, scholars throughout history have been force-fitting this into several lists of governments. They do this because the time-frames for these four kingdoms are vague and to the extent they are specific, no one has tied them convincingly to world events. They argue over which four kingdoms are meant and arguments are taken largely on the grounds of making the prophecy look good or look bad, or at least match one’s own view of history, depending on one’s preconceptions.

Or take Jeremiah; possibly the best example of a false prophet. In Jeremiah 22:24-30, Jeconiah was cursed of God. According to Jeremiah, God had doomed Jeconiah to childlessness. Yet according to I Chronicles 3:17-18, Jeconiah did indeed have children. In Jeremiah 34:45, Jeremiah predicts that King Zedekiah would die in peace. In reality, his son was killed before his eyes, he himself was blinded, and he apparently died while languishing in a Babylonian prison (II Kings 25:7). Finally, Jeremiah 29:10 predicts that the Exile would last 70 years. It actually lasted 48.

How about Matthew? Thomas Paine, one of our country’s founding fathers, went through all of Matthew looking for passages that were claimed to be fulfillment of prophecy, and debunked each one (see the chapter 1 appendix for a more in-depth exploration of messianic prophecy[5]). One example is Matthew 2:23, “He shall be called a Nazarene.” Paine writes: “Here is good circumstantial evidence that Matthew dreamed, for there is no such passage in all the Old Testament; and I invite the bishop and all the priests in Christendom, including those of America, to produce it.” [6]

Now let’s look at the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. This is a spectacularly undiscussed topic. In fact, there were two exiles. The first, the Assyrian, deported 27,000 Israelites, traditionally known as the Ten Tribes, into another part of Assyria. The Judeans were left in charge, probably because they didn’t oppose the Assyrians. These inhabitants of Judah were exiled two centuries later. It was touch and go, but in the end the Judeans survived.

The Assyrians were brutal and heavy-handed. The ten tribes they took ended up disappearing from history. However, the Bible is full of prophecy that assumes and presumes they will someday return in spite of their apostasy. Or, at least, a lot of folks over a lot of centuries expected them to return; the sanest story comes from the Jewish historian Josephus who reported that the Ten Tribes existed as a powerful nation beyond the Euphrates. Most likely the Ten Tribes intermarried with the people of a new region and vanished by assimilation.

In any case, their disappearance raises many difficult problems that are not easy to explain or resolve even if one takes the standard line that they got the covenant curses they deserved. So did the Judeans, but they somehow survived. What the difference was isn’t really clear, because the Judeans weren’t really any more pious monotheists than the Israelites.

See how pliable Biblical prophecy can be? In short, it’s a lot less impressive than it looks. I am told that these critiques are well-known in seminaries but seldom seen or heard outside of them.

General problems with prophecy

Self-fulfillment has already been discussed above in relation to predictions of ruined regimes; also vagueness in the case of Daniel. In general, prophecy supplies fertile ground for the proliferation of other quandaries:

1. Uncertain time periods.

Isaiah is often regarded as two or even three different individuals, separated by a significant amount of time and space. This is not so odd as it sounds. There are many ancient manuscripts which purport to be by Moses or some other ancient worthy, but which are so obviously written later in time. Older books of the Bible had ample opportunity for such accretions, because the most ancient Bibles we have are circa 150 BC (i.e. the Masoretic texts for the Old Testament) and even these aren’t the source of most modern translations. Much of one’s view of Biblical prophecy could hinge on whether one takes Isaiah in particular at face value. Many scholars do not, but traditionalists do.

2. Shrewd predictions.

A wag once wrote “If you must predict, predict often.” What is needed is a demonstration that prophecy works on a level that cannot be explained by chance. Note that if someone predicted the fall of Fidel Castro “within five years,” that would be a reasonably specific prophecy, but the odds of it coming true are better than 50/50, too. We must not discount ordinary shrewdness in the matter.

Long-range prophecy presents problems; it’s hard to find a genuinely convincing unarguable hit. For closer-range prophecy, one has the problem that it’s not always correct (see Tyre for a splendid example) or that it’s often a pretty shrewd bet. So, distinguishing it from chance is not an easy proposition.

3. Non-fulfillment or allegorical fulfillment.

Much of what is touted as prophecy sometimes comes true and sometimes does not; hardly a proof of anything. Kennedy contends that Biblical prophecy is absolutely reliable. But, there are many prophecies in the Bible that have not come true or did not in the time frame one would expect, reading the text straightforwardly. It is not convincing to argue that these will come true later on or did come true later in some allegorical sense. And in some cases, there is no real evidence that the predicted event ever happened at all (for example, the casting of lots for Jesus’s clothes at the Crucifixion).

4. Intentional fulfillment.

Biblical prophecy also stumbles against the fact that people of various cultures paid some attention to divination in those days (astrologers frequently held powerful positions in government) and they may have tried to fulfill known prophecies. It could hardly hurt for a politician to fulfill cheerfully a well-known old prophecy, since this might demoralize his political opponents. Possibly the Three Wise Men came, not necessarily because they were Jews (they probably weren’t) but because as scholars in foreign parts, they studied everyone’s prophecies. These things are hard to prove or disprove, but undeniably, there’s nothing remarkable about people of those times paying attention to the prophetic literature of others.

5. After-the-fact editing.

The above discussion and examples highlight some difficulties with Biblical prophecy without even mentioning the painful possibility that a prophecy was made to look good after the fact! Ample scope for tampering clouds the credibility of Biblical prophecy. Our earliest Old Testament texts date to circa 150 BC, centuries after what appears to have been the original era in which they were first written. Our current reverence for antiquity was not yet fully developed in this age, and in the Bible, signs of a certain amount of editing abound, if you go by the average scholar. The most accessible is the book of Jeremiah; the Septuagint text varies substantially from the Masoretic text, in sequence and even in the number of chapters.[7] Another example is a prophecy concerning Josiah in I Kings 13:2, but evidence inside the Bible itself indicates that much of the Old Testament was not written until the time of Josiah (II Kings 22:8+, in which the book of the Law is conveniently “found” in the temple, and contains some laws that nobody had heard of before). Another example: the end of the Book of Mark has or has not the last chapter, depending on which ancient manuscript one uses. Certainly, when one looks at 20th century prophetic claims, the same sort of problems (vagueness, after-the-fact “improvements”) occur.

Let’s look at Daniel again. The Book of Daniel contains outright errors about its own time-frame, supposedly contemporaneous to “Darius the Mede” (who was actually Persian, not Median, and who was preceded by Cyrus, not the other way round as written in Daniel), and also contains apparent confusion about the historical relationship of Chaldeans and Medians. However, it makes some stunningly accurate prophecies about the future. How is it that Daniel is so fuzzy about its own “present” and so accurate about the “future”? Well, there are clues (such as referring to angels by name) that the book was actually written in what it claims is the future, and contains a hazy history as the “present.” The clues indicate that the writer was probably a man of Greek times. In fairness, I doubt that the book disguises history as prophecy with intent to deceive. In this view, it was likely never meant as it is so often taken today, but rather as stories to comfort the Jews in more modern times.

It should be obvious by now that one cannot possibly regard prophecy fulfillment as a validation of the Bible. Too many uncertainties, unanswered questions, and examples of non-fulfillment clutter the Biblical prophecy landscape.

Other issues related to chapter 1

In reading his book, I noticed that Kennedy sometimes succumbs to another major pitfall, or fallacy, of logical argument by citing Scripture as proof of concepts originating in Scripture. This is known as circulus in demonstrando, or circular reasoning, in which a premise is used as the conclusion one wishes to reach, as in “Biblical prophecy is true because God says so in the Bible. And the Bible is true because it is the word of God.”

Fundamentalist Christians go one step further by insisting on the inerrancy of the Bible. Lloyd Averill (Professor of Theology and Preaching at Northwest Theological Union in Seattle) describes it like this:

What the Bible says is true without exception.

One of the things it says is that it is errorless.

The Bible must therefore be errorless because it says it is.

However much that flawed syllogism may read like a caricature, it is not. There is no need to caricature what is already so egregious that its exaggeration cannot be improved upon.[8]

The Bible is inerrant? Kennedy appears to think so, although he doesn’t actually say it outright. He is very selective in what he presents to support his reasoning, and he completely ignores the abundance of Biblical inconsistencies that have jumped right out at me. Because he says he wrote the book to help Christians deal with challenges from unbelievers, and the Bible is often challenged on its inconsistencies, I ardently hoped he would address them somehow. Contradictions are understandable for a hodgepodge collection of documents, but not for a carefully constructed treatise reflecting a well-thought-out plan. Here are just a few Biblical inconsistencies; those that relate specifically to God I will leave for a later chapter:

Were man and woman created after all other creatures (Genesis 1), or was man first and woman last with all other creatures in between (Genesis 2)? And how can there be light and days before the Sun was made?
After young Joseph was thrown into a pit by his brothers because they resented their father’s favoritism toward him, did his brothers draw him out and sell him (Genesis 37:23-27), or (in the very next verses) did his brothers leave him in the pit to die where he was rescued by a band of merchants who happened along?
Did Jesus drive the money changers from the Temple at the end of his public ministry (Matthew, Mark, Luke), or did this occur at the beginning of that ministry (John)?
How long did Jesus stay in Jerusalem, a couple of days or a whole year? (John vs. the other three)
When Mary Magdalene and the other Mary entered Jesus’s tomb (all the gospels disagree on how many women were there), did they find it occupied by one Angel (Matthew 28, Mark 16), or rather, were two angels on guard? (Luke 24) Did the women share with the disciples a message from the Angel(s) (Matthew 28, Luke 24), or did they really say “nothing to anyone”? (Mark 16)
Is it true that the disciples wouldn’t let Paul join them until Barnabas interceded and “brought him to the apostles” (Acts 9:26), or did Paul instead spend 15 days alone with Peter but saw no other apostles save James? (Galatians 1:18-19)
How many of each kind of animal were brought into the Ark? One pair of each or seven pairs each of the “clean” ones?
What is the ancestry of Jesus, the one given in Matthew or in Luke? Both trace back to David, but the lists of names are quite different in length and very few names are common to the two lists. The usual explanation of identifying one genealogy as Mary’s fails to explain the convergences and divergences in the two lists, or why one list is twice as long as the other, or why Mary’s parents Joachim and Anna (according to Catholics) aren’t there at all.
What about the virgin birth? As a physiological fact, it fails from the weight of scriptural evidence and the test of Christian orthodoxy. Consider:
- In only one place the New Testament reports unambiguously the miraculous birth of Jesus. In Matthew, Mary was found to be with child by the Holy Spirit. Matthew associated this condition with Isaiah’s prophecy that “a virgin shall conceive and bear a son.” But he used the Septuagint version of Isaiah, a Greek translation prepared for non-Hebrew-speaking Jews, which mistranslated the original Hebrew word meaning only “young woman” to the Greek word for “sexually innocent female.” Matthew made a mistake. Isaiah knew the Hebrew word for “virgin” for he used it elsewhere in his writings.
- Luke’s account is ambiguous. He doesn’t eliminate the possibility that Joseph could have impregnated Mary (only that the Holy Spirit will “come upon” her, and the power of God will “overshadow” her). Nor does he say if Joseph was embarrassed that his betrothed had become pregnant without his help. Neither Luke nor Matthew mention the birth again, and Mark and John say nothing about it at all, a strange omission for such a miracle. Paul’s close association with Luke should imply that Paul knew of it, but he obviously thought it unimportant.
- The people around Jesus were not led to expect anything unusual about him. Matthew, Mark, and Luke make it clear that Jesus performed miracles only reluctantly, lest the sensation-seeking crowds miss his great spiritual message. Word of his own miraculous birth would have drawn those crowds just to see the human oddity rather than to hear his words.
- Mary and many others considered Jesus mad, probably because he spent much of his life roaming around in the desert as a holy man. But such behavior would be expected for a “son of God.” Furthermore, if Mary ever told anyone of his miraculous birth and was believed, Jesus would have had followers since birth — but he had none until he acquired some from John the Baptist.
- From the beginnings of the early post-New Testament church, Christian orthodoxy insisted that God’s gift is trivialized if either the divine or the human character of Jesus is weakened. Hope for humankind’s redemption could be realized only if God really revealed himself in real man, and the church considered as heresy anything that made Jesus less than human. And it’s impossible to affirm full humanhood for one who was born as no other man has come forth.[9]

The Virgin Birth story was almost certainly inspired by the numerous tales of pagan gods making mortal women pregnant. Even such historical people as Pythagoras, Plato, and Alexander the Great were imagined to have divine paternity – Apollo for the first two and Zeus for the third.

How did Judas die? What were Jesus’s dying words? So many incongruities! I’m getting into too much detail here and feel the urge to run off on tangents. I’d better stop now. Even the great 3rd century church father Origen declared that some passages in the Bible “are not literally true but absurd and impossible.”[10] An exhaustive list of all the inconsistencies would require a whole book (and such a book does exist: The Bible Handbook by W. P. Ball and G. W. Foote, though I haven’t seen it myself).

A Better Approach to Challenges

Despite the way it’s advertised, Why I Believe fails to supply adequate answers to challenges from nonbelievers. I would like to suggest an answer the specific question “Why do you believe in the Bible?” that a skeptic would have more difficulty arguing with. There is a price, however; although honest Christians should not find it too steep: One must admit that the Bible is imperfect. If the documentation I have presented so far seems antagonistic, let me first offer more palatable evidence based on the Bible’s own witness to itself:

The Bible does not witness to its own inerrancy. The author of 2 Timothy wrote about “all scripture” being “inspired by God.” This does not apply to the New Testament. Keep in mind that the Old Testament was the only scripture that existed for Christians at the time (the term translated as “scripture” in 2 Timothy was commonly used among Greek-speaking Jews to refer to the Old Testament). Similarly, the passage in 2 Peter that speaks of the “prophecy of scripture” clearly refers only to the Old Testament messianic anticipations. Also, 2 Peter itself was not originally part of the New Testament in the second century when many churches came to accept a Christian canon of 20 books. Neither passage speaks to the issue of scriptural inerrancy, but rather only to that of scriptural inspiration and authority.

As far as the Old Testament goes, Jesus himself was clearly not tied to the reliability of the Jewish scriptures, although he revered them. Averill writes:

He felt free to differ from their precepts when he thought them wrong, and to urge upon his followers similar nonconformity (healing on the sabbath, gathering food on the sabbath, refraining from ceremonial cleansing before meals, for example). Even more, he declared unequivocally the inadequacy of some Old Testament moral teaching (“You have heard it was said to the men of old . . . . But I say unto you. . . .”). From his teaching we must conclude that he found the Law and the Prophets to be insufficient in themselves. . . . The best evidence that Jesus differed from the prevailing scriptural view of his time lies in the fact that his interpretation of that scripture resulted in the charge of blasphemy leveled against him by religious authorities.

Even if one accepts “Thus saith the Lord” as authentic communication from God, that doesn’t guarantee the accuracy Leviticus’s endless legalisms or the Chronicles’ monotonous begats. And Paul makes it clear four times in 1 Corinthians that what he is writing is not the word of God but rather his own opinion (7:6, 12, 25, 40). Lastly, there’s the issue of begging the question: One cannot claim that the Bible is in all respects true because the Bible says it is, since the truth of what the Bible says is precisely the thing to be proved.

Now, to answer the question “Why do you believe in the Bible?” Remember, the discussion so far has been restricted to belief in the Bible, without addressing the related issues of belief in God or Christianity. Those beliefs are more difficult for me to justify. For the Bible, here is an answer I, as a nonbeliever, propose would satisfy a skeptic better than any other:[11]

I believe the Bible expresses higher truth than literal history or science. What the Bible has to say about the meaning of our human existence is not tied to having all of its facts straight about the structure of our human existence.

I believe that the main business of the Bible is to deliver an authoritative message. That message stands independently of whether or not there was such a man as Bildad the Shuhite; whether or not Daniel actually wrote the book that bears his name; whether or not the original creation was accomplished by God in six 24-hour days; whether or not a flood covered the earth, whether or not Revelations has any truth to it, or whether or not God inspired every word. I understand and accept the flaws in the Bible, but those things only distract, not detract, from its message.

The Bible has much to say on the nature of humanity, which makes it a book worth reading, enjoying, and learning from. The central message, embodied in the life, ministry, and teaching of Jesus, is that we are made by Love for love. About that, historical and scientific scholarship are silent and unknowing.

In other words, stick to the main message; the rest is excess baggage. Just as important, those who make this argument should make their views explicit, should not try to defend the Bible as history or the literal word of God, and should not complain about criticisms of it as such. Besides, considering the Bible as sacred and perfect amounts to idolatry, and isn’t that a sin?

My proposal is far from perfect. A Jew might make the above statement more easily than a Christian. The main message, or fundamental core of worth, might be disputed. You are likely to receive objections to this answer: Why the Bible then? Why not some other book that expresses higher truth? Can you prove that universal truth cannot exist independently of God? What is the Bible’s real core of worth? These are extremely difficult questions to answer. But at least it moves the debate to a deeper level, into a more constructive direction than bickering over historical accuracy, unfulfilled prophecies, and contradictions.

I can suggest possible answers to some of these deeper questions.

Q. Why the Bible then? I can get the same message from the writings of other religions.

A1. Why not? As long as it fulfills my needs, I’m satisfied.

A2. If you want, I can show you how it has helped me. . . .

Q. Why not some other book that expresses higher truth?

A1. They don’t appeal as strongly.

A2. Why do you use what you use?

A3. I do use other books. For example. . . .

Q. Can you prove that universal truth cannot exist independently of God?

A1. I didn’t claim that I could know, absolutely, the Universal Truth (which I believe does exist). The Bible, however, seems like it should be close enough, however short it might fall.

A2. I didn’t claim the existence of a universal truth. The Bible provides a subjective truth to which I can relate personally and intensely. This I consider to be more important than a Quixotic quest for a Universal Truth.

A3. What if Universal Truth does exist independently of God? What does that mean for the Bible? The answer is “not much.” [But it might mean something for the nature of God.]

A4. [A nonbeliever’s answer] I don’t need to believe in the God of the Bible, or any personal God for that matter, in order to have my life enriched by the spiritual truths I find in the Bible. The Bible and its teachings gives my life more meaning here and now.

The subjective basis of believing in the Bible, or for adhering to any belief system, is unavoidable. It is important to deal with this by pointing out how a belief system, in this case the Bible, can give life meaning where history and science might not. If you want meaning in life, you’ll have to develop it somehow, get it somewhere. If meaning is not objective, but subjective, then the Bible is as good a place as any, depending upon how it affects your life. If meaning is objective and not subjective, then it’s still impossible to prove that this meaning is not in the Bible somewhere.

It is important to remember that belief systems are essentially subjective. Choosing one or another depends upon personal tastes, circumstances and goals. Aside from healthy objective skepticism, there is no objective reason for preferring strong atheism to theism, or vice versa, only subjective reasons (however, those who have no belief at all, one way or the other, will argue that their system is most objective). If you take the position that beliefs are subjective, you do not need to provide independent confirmation for a “personal experience with God.” Instead, you need only point out that it is a part of your own belief system and that you have made your choice, despite the possibility of alternate interpretations. Taking this position does not require you to prove that the Bible is right with any of these “higher truths,” but merely requires you to show how you are better off for believing in them.

Mind Games to Protect Almighty (?) God

Here’s the link to this article.

By David Madison, 03/10/2023

The vulnerability of god is the biggest mystery

In a few of my article here I have mentioned one of the worst mind games ever used to defend god. A few days after the 2012 murder of 20 children at the Sandy Hook School in Connecticut, a devout woman was sure it had happened because “God must have wanted more angels.” Clergy and theologians know better than to say anything so blatantly grotesque, yet they feel the same obligation to get god off the hook. Why is there is so much suffering, cruelty, agony on a planet supposedly under the care of an omni-god: all good, all wise, all powerful? “This is my father’s world”—so they say. Our awareness of the everyday reality disconfirms this suggestion—at least it disconfirms the idea that a caring father-god is paying attention.

Professional theologians work hard at devising excuses to explain the obvious absence of god, and secular authors come right back at them to puncture their arguments. In John Loftus’ 2021 anthology, God and

Horrendous Suffering, there are two essays that describe some of these efforts, David Kyle Johnson’s “Refuting Skeptical Theism,” and Robert M. Price’s “Theodicy: The Idiocy.”

At first glance, skeptical theism might sound like a step in the right direction. Johnson points out that we may be tempted to assume that it means believers edging toward agnosticism, or those who “barely believe.” But No, skeptical theism is a clumsy attempt to rule out evil and suffering as a reason for denying that a good god is in charge. Johnson sums it up this way:

“The problem of evil suggests that the seemingly unjustified (i.e., senseless or gratuitous) evils that exist in the world serve as evidence against god’s existence. But since god is so much ‘bigger’ than us—more wise and powerful and perfect—he could have reasons for allowing such evils that we simply cannot see or comprehend. Consequently, no evil, no matter how gratuitous it seems, can serve as evidence against god’s existence.

“In other words, because we should be skeptical of our ability to fathom god’s reasoning (hence ‘skeptical theism’), the problem of suffering is no problem at all. For all we know, god has a reason to allow evil, and thus the existence of evil cannot bolster the atheist’s argument” (p. 212).

So the skeptical theist argues that we should be skeptical about our knowledge of god, who is assumed to be “more wise and powerful and perfect” than we are. But this is tiresome theobabble: theological assumptions—actually guesswork—the product of speculation for thousands of years, based on no hard data whatever.

Among devout believers there is a tendency to embrace possibilities instead of probabilities. Especially when they’re trying to defend miracles: because their god has such extraordinary power, it has to be possible that the many divine wonders reported in the Bible actually happened, whether it’s Jesus turning water into wine, or feeding thousands of people with just a few loaves and fishes. But what is more probable? That such things actually happened, or that such stories derive from magical folklore of the ancient world—about which most laypeople seem to be unaware? If critical thinking skills are locked in neutral, of course it’s easy to take these things on faith—as devout have been trained to do since childhood. But the laws of probability don’t go away. Johnson devotes six pages to a section of the essay titled, “Skeptical Theism Is Logically and Mathematically Invalid.” There you will find what he identifies as a Simple Version of the math, then the Bayesian Version.

The math may be daunting for many people, but the facts of evil should be even more daunting. But I suspect that the full scale of evil falls outside the horizon of awareness of most humans—except for evils that affect them directly.

A careful study of history can be a cure for lack of awareness.

The current issue of BBC History Magazine (Vol. 24, No. 2) includes an article by John Bulgin, titled, “How the Holocaust Began,” pp. 46-51. We read this:

“Within a matter of weeks, the targets of this mass murderer moved from military-aged men to include women, children, and the elderly. Children were spared none of the horror. Mothers were required to hold babies in their arms as both were shot, sometimes with the same bullet.

“By the end of September 1941 the massacres reached an appalling

apex at Babyn Yar, a ravine in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv. Over the course of two days, the Einsatzgruppen and their collaborators murdered more than 33,000 people in a single Aktion. Each consecutive group was marched to the murder site and forced to lie on top of the still-warm bodies of those who had just been killed before they were shot themselves” (p. 50).

Bulgin notes that “Senior Nazis became concerned about the emotional burden the killings were placing on their own men” (p. 50).

Clergy and theologians also are aware of the emotional burden on believers that acute awareness of evil and suffering would bring. So this becomes the strategy: divert attention, obfuscate, come up with shallow excuses that might convince those who have already been deceived by doctrine. John Bulgin has pointed out that more than 33,000 people were murdered in two days at a ravine on Ukraine. “Oh, but god must have had some greater good in mind—he’s much wiser than we are—so hold onto your faith no matter what!”

This provokes utter confusion, not clarity, however, as Johnson explains:

“…because people everywhere profess to have moral knowledge—to know that some things are morally good and others are morally bad. Indeed, if I can’t know that the murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust was a morally bad thing, what can I know? If I can’t lament the 2004 Indian Tsunami which killed an estimated 230,000 people in one day (because, for all I know, somehow it inexplicably prevented even more deaths), then I can lament nothing. In short, my objection here goes like this: 1. If the argument of the skeptical theist is sound, then moral knowledge is impossible. 2. Moral knowledge is possible. 3. Thus skeptical theism is not sound” (p. 222).

Skeptical theism is based on deity inflation: god is so much bigger, better, wiser than we are—his ways, his ultimate goals, are beyond our understanding (but again, please show us the data to justify this claim).

Johnson drives home the point:

“If…god has different moral standards that make him conclude that genocide, burned fawns, and raped children are acceptable, our terms ‘loving’ and ‘moral good’ cannot apply to him—at all! Indeed, it would seem that the only words that would apply are those like ‘deplorable’” (p. 224).

“If god really is too big to understand—so big that we cannot even know whether he condemns child rape—then we really should profess to know nothing about him at all, including whether he exists” (p. 228).

“…the skeptical theist would not only have to admit that moral knowledge is impossible, but also that skeptical theism is hypocritical, irrationally unfalsifiable, and entails (at best) religious agnosticism and (at worst) global skepticism” (p. 229).

To even try to make a case that 33,000 people murdered by Nazis in two days can’t be called evil, because a god will see to it that a greater good will eventually emerge, is a foul mind game; it is just as grotesque as “God must have wanted more angels.”

It was a smart move by the editor of the anthology to place Robert Price’s essay, “Theodicy: The Idiocy” right after the Johnson essay. It’s an additional slam-dunk—in just ten pages. Price notes that theodicy was Gottfried Leibniz’s word (coined in 1710) to describe the attempt to “vindicate God’s supposed goodness in spite of all appearances.” Price says that “the real game is to protect one’s faith in God at all costs, and that cost is great indeed” (p. 233).

Theologians are up against the wild incoherence in Christian belief, and so many incriminating Bible stories. Price includes unanswered prayer in his discussion, since Jesus-script in Mark 11:24 presents a major challenge: does god keep his word? “I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you will receive it, and you will.” Don’t we hit a brick wall here in protecting faith? How can this not be awkward for sincerely devout folks? Price refers to it as “… a peculiar condition of having to deal with the failure of expected divine intervention. Why has not God blessed me as I asked? Did not Jesus promise that he would? You see, here we have an unstable combination of magic and religion” (p. 235). Oh, that the devout could see to what a sweeping extent their beliefs derive from ancient magic, e.g. eat this, drink that (the eucharist) to get right with god—these are magic potions. How could a good, wise god have invented or approved of such superstitions?

The apostle Paul was a master of bad theology, and Price calls attention to that. The Old Testament vividly depicts the wrath of god on those who disobey his laws. Paul savored the wrath of his god (I Corinthians 10:6-11):

“Now these things occurred as examples for us, so that we might not desire evil as they did. Do not become idolaters as some of them did, as it is written, ‘The people sat down to eat and drink, and they rose up to play.’ We must not engage in sexual immorality, as some of them did, and twenty-three thousand fell in a single day. We must not put Christ to the test, as some of them did, and were destroyed by serpents.And do not complain, as some of them did, and were destroyed by the destroyer. These things happened to them to serve as an example, and they were written down to instruct us, on whom the ends of the ages have come.”

Paul was a master at mind games: if you put Christ to the test, you might get destroyed by serpents; shape up, maintain your personal purity—by no means should you eat, drink, and rise up to play—because the “end of the age has come.” Well, No it didn’t, and theologians and clergy who aren’t looking to the sky for the kingdom to come have to invent even more mind games. How tiresome, as Price notes: “It is so very ironic that the massacre stories present a stumbling block only to biblical literalists who are stuck believing that every story in the Bible must be true. Everyone else can breathe a sigh of relief!” (p. 241)

Yes, of course, many devout Christians don’t engage their minds with such issues. As Price kindly puts it at the end of the essay, “…they are too busy attending to good humanitarian works of mercy in the name of their faith to waste time with theodicy…” (p. 243) Unfortunately the incoherence of their faith falsifies the entire belief system. In a footnote at the end of essay, John Loftus notes the challenge that Christopher Hitchens presented to believers: “…come up with one moral action they could do that nonbelievers could not also do…” (p. 243)

Loftus also points to a stark, cruel reality: “If readers want a complete picture of the deeds of Christians then seriously consider the many morally atrocious deeds their faith-based morals have caused. Christianity is red with blood in tooth and in claw. Throughout most of its history violence was its theme, its program, and its method for converting people and keeping believers in the fold. Its history is a history of violence. There is no escaping this” (p. 243).

Which begs the further question: How can all of this grievous Christian misbehavior have been tolerated by a good, powerful god? It seems especially grotesque to argue that it has all been part of this god’s bigger plan that we’re incapable of grasping.

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 Tough Problems in Christian Thought and Belief: a Minister-Turned-Atheist Shows Why You Should Ditch the Faith (2016; 2018 Foreword by John Loftus) 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. 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.

Why (Almost All) Cosmologists are Atheists

Here’s the link to this article by Sean M. Carroll.

(2003)

[This essay was originally presented as a talk at the “God and Physical Cosmology: Russian-Anglo American Conference on Cosmology and Theology” at Notre Dame in January/February 2003 and subsequently published in Faith and Philosophy 22(5), pp. 622-640, in 2005.]

Abstract

Science and religion both make claims about the fundamental workings of the universe. Although these claims are not a priori incompatible (we could imagine being brought to religious belief through scientific investigation), I will argue that in practice they diverge. If we believe that the methods of science can be used to discriminate between fundamental pictures of reality, we are led to a strictly materialist conception of the universe. While the details of modern cosmology are not a necessary part of this argument, they provide interesting clues as to how an ultimate picture may be constructed.

1. Introduction

2. Worldviews

3. Theory Choice

4. Cosmology and Belief

5. Conclusions

1. Introduction

One increasingly hears rumors of a reconciliation between science and religion. In major news magazines as well as at academic conferences, the claim is made that that belief in the success of science in describing the workings of the world is no longer thought to be in conflict with faith in God. I would like to argue against this trend, in favor of a more old-fashioned point of view that is still more characteristic of most scientists, who tend to disbelieve in any religious component to the workings of the universe.

The title “Why cosmologists are atheists” was chosen not because I am primarily interested in delving into the sociology and psychology of contemporary scientists, but simply to bring attention to the fact that I am presenting a common and venerable point of view, not advancing a new and insightful line of reasoning. Essentially I will be defending a position that has come down to us from the Enlightenment, and which has been sharpened along the way by various advances in scientific understanding. In particular, I will discuss what impact modern cosmology has on our understanding of these truly fundamental questions.

The past few hundred years have witnessed a significant degree of tension between science and religion. Since very early on, religion has provided a certain way of making sense of the world–a reason why things are the way they are. In modern times, scientific explorations have provided their own pictures of how the world works, ones which rarely confirm the preexisting religious pictures. Roughly speaking, science has worked to apparently undermine religious belief by calling into question the crucial explanatory aspects of that belief; it follows that other aspects (moral, spiritual, cultural) lose the warrants for their validity. I will argue that this disagreement is not a priori necessary, but nevertheless does arise as a consequence of the scientific method.

It is important from the outset to distinguish between two related but ultimately distinct concepts: a picture of how the world works, and a methodology for deciding between competing pictures. The pictures of interest in this paper may be labeled “materialism” and “theism.” Materialism asserts that a complete description of nature consists of an understanding of the structures of which it is comprised together with the patterns which those structures follow, while theism insists on the need for a conscious God who somehow rises above those patterns[1]. Science is most often associated with a materialist view, but the essence of science lies as much in a methodology of reaching the truth as in any view of what form that truth might ultimately take. In particular, the scientific method is an empirical one, in contrast to appeals to pure reason or to revelation. For the purposes of this paper I will assume the validity of the scientific method, and simply ask what sorts of conclusions we are led to by its application.

Within this framework, there are two possible roads to reconciliation between science and religion. One is to claim that science and religion are not incompatible because they speak to completely distinct sets of questions, and hence never come into conflict. The other is to assert that thinking scientifically does not lead to rejection of theism, but in fact that religious belief can be justified in the same way that any scientific theory might be. I will argue that neither strategy succeeds: science and religion do speak to some of the same questions, and when they do they get different answers. In particular, I wish to argue that religious belief necessarily entails certain statements about how the universe works, that these statements can be judged as scientific hypotheses, and that as such they should be rejected in favor of alternative ways of understanding the universe.

Probably nothing that I say will be anything you have not heard elsewhere. My goals here are simply to describe what I think a typical scientist has in mind when confronted with the question of science vs. religion, even if the scientists themselves have not thought through these issues in any detail.

2. Worldviews

One of the most difficult tasks in discussing the relationship between science and religion is to define the terminology in ways that are acceptable to everyone listening. In fact, it is likely impossible; especially when it comes to religion, the terminology is used in incompatible ways by different people. I will therefore try to be as clear as possible about the definitions I am using. In this section I want to carefully describe what I mean by the two competing worldviews, materialism and theism, without yet addressing how to choose between them.

The essence of materialism is to model the world as a formal system, which is both unambiguous and complete as a description of reality. A materialist model may be said to consist of four elements. First, we model the world as some formal (mathematical) structure. (General relativity describes the world as a curved manifold with a Lorentzian metric, while quantum mechanics describes the world as a state in some Hilbert space. As a more trivial example, we could imagine a universe which consisted of nothing other than an infinitely long list of “bits” taking on the values 0 or 1.) Second, this structure exhibits patterns (the “laws of nature”), so that the amount of information needed to express the world is dramatically less than the structure would in principle allow. (In a world described by a string of bits, we might for example find that the bits were an infinitely repeated series of a single one followed by two zeroes: 100100100100…) Third, we need boundary conditions which specify the specific realization of the pattern. (The first bit in our list is a one.) Note that the distinction between the patterns and their boundary conditions is not perfectly well-defined; this is an issue which becomes relevant in cosmology, and we’ll discuss it more later. Finally, we need a way to relate this formal system to the world we see: an “interpretation.”

The reader might worry that we are glossing over very subtle and important issues in the philosophy of science; they would be correct, but needn’t worry. Philosophy of science becomes difficult when we attempt to describe the relationship of the formalism to the world (the interpretation), as well as how we invent and choose between theories. But the idea that we are trying, in principle, to model the world as a formal system is fairly uncontroversial.

The materialist thesis is simply: that’s all there is to the world. Once we figure out the correct formal structure, patterns, boundary conditions, and interpretation, we have obtained a complete description of reality. (Of course we don’t yet have the final answers as to what such a description is, but a materialist believes such a description does exist.) In particular, we should emphasize that there is no place in this view for common philosophical concepts such as “cause and effect” or “purpose.” From the perspective of modern science, events don’t have purposes or causes; they simply conform to the laws of nature. In particular, there is no need to invoke any mechanism to “sustain” a physical system or to keep it going; it would require an additional layer of complexity for a system to cease following its patterns than for it to simply continue to do so. Believing otherwise is a relic of a certain metaphysical way of thinking; these notions are useful in an informal way for human beings, but are not a part of the rigorous scientific description of the world. Of course scientists do talk about “causality,” but this is a description of the relationship between patterns and boundary conditions; it is a derived concept, not a fundamental one. If we know the state of a system at one time, and the laws governing its dynamics, we can calculate the state of the system at some later time. You might be tempted to say that the particular state at the first time “caused” the state to be what it was at the second time; but it would be just as correct to say that the second state caused the first. According to the materialist worldview, then, structures and patterns are all there are–we don’t need any ancillary notions.

Defining theism is more difficult than defining materialism, for the simple reason that theist belief takes many more forms that materialist belief, and the same words are often taken to mean utterly different things. I will partially avoid this difficulty by not attempting a comprehensive definition of religion, but simply taking belief in the existence of a being called “God” as a necessary component of being religious. (Already this choice excludes some modes of belief which are sometimes thought of as “religious.” For example, one could claim that “the laws of physics, and their working out in the world, are what I hold to be God.” I am not sure what the point of doing that would be, but in such a case nothing that I have to say would apply.)

The subtlety has therefore been transferred to the task of defining “God.” I will take it to mean some being who is not bound by the same patterns we perceive in the universe, who is by our standards extremely powerful (not necessarily omnipotent, although that would count), and in some way plays a crucial role in the universe (creating it, or keeping it going, etc.). By a “being” I mean to imply an entity which we would recognize as having consciousness–a “person” in some appropriately generalized sense (as opposed to a feature of reality, or some sort of feeling). A rather concrete God, in other words, not just an aspect of nature. This notion of God need not be interventionist or easy to spot, but has at least the capability of intervening in our world. Even if not necessarily omnipotent, the relevant feature of this conception is that God is not bound by the laws of physics. In particular, I don’t include some sort of superhero-God who is bound by such laws, but has figured out how to use them in ways that convey the impression of enormous power (even if it is hard to imagine ultimately distinguishing between these two possibilities). When I say that God is not bound by the laws of physics, I have in mind for example that God is not limited to moving more slowly than the speed of light, or that God could create an electron without also creating a corresponding positively charged particle. (We are not imagining that God can do the logically impossible, just violate the contingent patterns of reality that we could imagine having been different.) Of course these are meager powers compared to most conceptions of God, but I am taking them to be minimal criteria. There are various types of belief which are conventionally labeled as religious, but inconsistent with my definition of God; about these I have nothing to say in this paper.

It should be clear that, by these definitions, materialism and theism are incompatible, essentially by definition. (The former says that everything follows the rules, the second says that God is an exception.) It does not immediately follow that “science” and “religion” are incompatible; we could follow the scientific method to conclude that a materialist description of the world was not as reasonable as a theist one. On the other hand, it does follow that science and religion do overlap in their spheres of interest. Religion has many aspects, including social and moral ones, apart from its role in describing the workings of the world; however, that role is a crucial one, and necessarily speaks to some of the same issues as science does. Suggestions that science and religion are simply disjoint activities[2] generally rely on a redefinition of “religion” as something closer to “moral philosophy.” Such a definition ignores crucial aspects of religious belief.

In judging between materialism and theism, we are faced with two possibilities. Either one or the other system is logically impossible, or we need to decide which of the two conceivable models better explains the world we experience. In my view, neither materialism nor theism is logically impossible, and I will proceed on the idea that we have to see which fits reality better. Of course arguments against materialism have been put forward which do not rely on specific observed features of our world, but instead on either pure reason or revelation; I won’t attempt to deal with such arguments here.

3. Theory Choice

Given this understanding of materialism and theism, how are we to decide which to believe? There is no right answer to this question, and sensible arguments can only be made after we agree on some basic elements of how we should go about choosing a theory of the world. For example, someone could insist on the primacy of revelation in understanding deep truths; in response, there is no logical argument which could prove such a person wrong. Instead, I would like to ask what conclusion we should reach by employing a more empirical technique of deciding between theories. In other words, we address the choice between materialism and theism as a scientist would address the choice between any two competing theories.

The basic scientific assumption is that there is exists a complete and coherent description of how the world works. (This need not be a purely materialist description, in the language of the previous section; simply a sensible description covering all phenomena.) Although we certainly don’t yet know what this description might be, science has been extremely successful at constructing provisional theories which accurately model some aspects of reality; this degree of success thus far convinces most scientists that there really is a comprehensive description to be found. This underlying assumption plays a crucial role in determining how scientists choose between competing theories which are more modest in their goals, attempting to model only some specific types of phenomena–in a nutshell, scientists choose those models which they feel are more likely to be consistent with the true underlying unified description.

We can make such a sweeping statement with some confidence, only because it avoids all the hard questions. In particular, how do we go about deciding whether a theory is more or less likely to be consistent with a single coherent description of nature? It is at this point that the judgment of the individual scientist necessarily plays a crucial role; the process is irreducibly nonalgorithmic. A number of criteria are employed, including fit to experiment, simplicity, and comprehensiveness. No one of these criteria is absolute, even fit to experiment; after all, experiments are sometimes wrong.

Let me give an example to illustrate the different criteria employed by scientists to judge theories. When we observe the dynamics of galaxies, we find that the apparent gravitational force exerted by the galaxy on particles orbiting far around it is inevitably much larger than we would expect by taking into account the combined mass of all the visible material in the galaxy. A straightforward and popular hypothesis to explain this observation is the idea of “dark matter,” the notion that most of the mass in galaxies is not in stars or gas, but rather in some new kind of particle which has not yet been observed directly, and which has an average mass density in the universe which is approximately five times greater than that of ordinary matter. But there is a competing idea: that our understanding of gravity (through Einstein’s general relativity) breaks down at the edges of galaxies, to be replaced by some new gravitational law. Such a law has actually been proposed by Milgrom, under the name of “Modified Newtonian Dynamics,” or MOND[3]. At this point we don’t know for certain whether the dark matter hypothesis or the MOND hypothesis is correct, but it is safe to say that the large majority of scientific experts come down in favor of dark matter. Why is that? On the one hand, there is a sense in which MOND is more compact and efficient: it has been demonstrated to accurately describe the observations of a wide set of galaxies, with only a single free parameter, while the dark matter idea is somewhat less predictive on this score. But there are two features working strongly in favor of dark matter. First, it makes detailed predictions for a wide class of phenomena, well outside the realm of individual galaxies: clusters of galaxies, gravitational lenses, large-scale structure, the cosmic microwave background, and more, while MOND is completely silent on these issues (there is no prediction to verify or disprove). The second (closely related) point is that MOND is not really a complete theory, or even a theory at all, but simply a suggested phenomenological relation that is supposed to hold for galaxies. Nobody understands how to make it part of a larger consistent framework. Therefore, despite the greater predictive power of MOND within its domain of validity, most scientists consider it to be a step backward, as it seems less likely to ultimately be part of a comprehensive description. (Nobody can say for sure, so the issue is still open, but the majority has a definite preference.)

It should be clear why choosing between competing theories is difficult–it’s a matter of predicting the future, not of applying a set of unambiguous criteria. Nevertheless, it’s not completely arbitrary, either; it’s simply a matter of applying a set of somewhat ambiguous standards. Fortunately, cases in which a certain theory would be favored by applying one reasonable criterion while a different theory would be favored by applying a different reasonable criterion are both rare and typically short-lived; the acquisition of additional experimental input or increased theoretical understanding tends to ultimately resolve the issue relatively cleanly in favor of one specific model.

According to this description, the evaluation of a scientific theory involves both a judgment about the theory itself and about the more comprehensive theory which would ultimately describe nature. While a number of disparate factors are applied to concrete theories, the criteria relevant to judging competing comprehensive theories are much more straightforward: among every possible model which fits all of the data, we choose the simplest possible one. “Simplicity” here is related to the notion of “algorithmic compressibility”: the simplicity of a model is judged by how much information is required to fully specify the system. There is no a priori reason why nature should be governed by a comprehensive model which is at all simple; but our experience as scientists convinces us that this is the case.

It should be clear how these considerations relate to the choice between materialism and theism. These two worldviews offer different notions of what form a comprehensive description will take. Acting as scientists, it is our task to judge whether it seems more likely that the simplest possible comprehensive theory which is compatible with what we already know about the universe will turn out to be strictly materialistic, or will require the introduction of a deity.

4. Cosmology and Belief

If we accept the scientific method as a way to determine the workings of reality, are we led to a materialist or theist conclusion? Naïvely, the deck seems to be stacked against theism: if we are looking for simplicity of description, a view which only invokes formal structures and patterns would appear to be simpler than one in which God appeared in addition. However, we are constrained to find simple descriptions which are also complete and consistent with experiment. Therefore, we could be led to belief in God, if it were warranted by our observations–if there were evidence (direct or otherwise) of divine handiwork in the universe.

There are several possible ways in which this could happen. Most direct would be straightforward observation of miraculous events that would be most easily explained by invoking God. Since such events seem hard to come by, we need to be more subtle. Yet there are still at least two ways in which a theist worldview could be judged more compelling than a materialist one. First, we could find that our best materialist conception was somehow incomplete–there was some aspect of the universe which could not possibly be explained within a completely formal framework. This would be like a “God of the gaps,” if there were good reason to believe that a certain kind of “gap” were truly inexplicable by formal rules alone. Second, we could find that invoking the workings of God actually worked to simplify the description, by providing explanations for some of the observed patterns. An example would be an argument from design, if we could establish convincingly that certain aspects of the universe were designed rather than assembled by chance. Let’s examine each of these possibilities in turn.

We turn first to the idea that there is something inherently missing in a materialist description of nature. One way in which this could happen would be if there were a class of phenomena which seemed to act without regard to any patterns we could discern, something that stubbornly resisted formalization into a mechanistic description. Of course, in such a case it would be hard to tell whether an appropriate formalism actually didn’t exist, or whether we just hadn’t yet been clever enough to discover it. For example, physicists have tried for most of the last century to invent a theory which described gravity while being consistent with quantum mechanics. (String theory is the leading candidate for such a theory, but it has not yet been fully developed to the point where we understand it well enough to compare it to experiment.) It is hard to know at what point scientists would become sufficiently frustrated in their attempts to describe a phenomenon that they would begin to suspect that no formal description was applicable. However, it is safe to say that such a point has not been reached, or even approached, with any of the phenomena of current interest to physicists. Although there are undoubtedly unsolved problems, the rate at which successful theoretical explanations are proposed for these problems is well in accordance with expectation. In other words, there does not seem to be any reason to suspect that we have reached, or are about to reach, the fundamental limits of our ability to find rules governing nature’s behavior.

A more promising place to search for a fundamental incompleteness in the materialist program would be at the “boundaries” of the universe. Recall that a complete mechanistic picture involves not only patterns we discern in nature, but some boundary condition which serves to choose a particular realization of all the possible configurations consistent with such a pattern. In the realm of science, this is an issue of unique concern to cosmology. In physics, chemistry, or biology, we imagine that we can isolate systems in whatever initial state we like (within reason), and observe how the rules governing the system play themselves out from that starting point. In cosmology, in contrast, we are faced with a unique universe, and must face the issue of its initial conditions. One could certainly imagine that something like a traditional religious conception of God could provide some insight into why the initial state was the particular one relevant to our universe.

In classical cosmology initial conditions are imposed at the Big Bang, a singular region in space-time out of which our universe was born. More carefully, if we take our current universe and run it back in time, we reach a point where the density and curvature of space-time become infinite, and our equations (gravity described by Einstein’s general relativity, and other fields described by the standard model of particle physics) cease to make sense. This initial moment must apparently be treated as a boundary to space-time. (A boundary in the past, not in any direction in space.) As we now recognize, the conditions near the Big Bang are by no means generic; the curvature of space (as opposed to that of space-time) was extremely close to zero, and widely separated parts of the universe were expanding at nearly identical rates. What made it this way? Do we need to accept the imposition of certain boundary conditions as an irreducible part of our worldview, or is there some way of arguing within a bigger picture that these conditions were somehow natural? Or do we simplify our description by invoking a God who brought the universe into existence in a certain state?

Nobody knows the answers with any certainty. The best we can do is to extrapolate from what we think we do know. In this context, modern cosmology does have something to teach us. In particular, we now know that the issue of boundary conditions is more complicated than it might appear at first. Indeed, we now understand that, despite appearances, the universe might not have a boundary at all. This could happen in one of two ways: either the Big Bang might actually be smooth and nonsingular, or it might represent a transitional phase in a universe which is actually eternal.

The first possibility, that the Big Bang is actually nonsingular, was popularized by the Hartle-Hawking “no boundary” proposal for the wave function of the universe[4]. Discussions of this proposal can be somewhat misleading, in that they frequently refer to the idea that the universe came into being out of nothing. This would be hard to understand, if true; what is this “nothing” that the universe purportedly came out of, and what caused it to come out? A much better way of putting the Hartle-Hawking idea into words would be to say that the apparent “sharp point” at the beginning of space-time is smoothed out into a featureless surface. The mechanism by which the smoothing purportedly happens involves technical details of the geometry of the space-time metric, and in all honesty the entire proposal is very far from being well-formulated. Nevertheless, the lesson of the Hartle-Hawking work is that we don’t necessarily have to think of the Big Bang as an “edge” at which space-time runs into a wall; it could be more like the North Pole, which is as far north as you can possibly go, without actually representing any sort of physical boundary of the globe. In other words, the universe could be finite (in time) and yet be unbounded.

The other way to avoid a boundary is more intuitive: simply imagine that the universe lasts forever. Like the Hartle-Hawking proposal, the idea of an eternal universe requires going beyond our current well-formulated theories of general relativity and particle physics. In the context of classical four-dimensional gravitation, it is well known that the conditions which we believe obtained in the very early universe must have originated from a singularity. Extensions of this picture, however, can in principle allow for smooth continuation through the veil of the Big Bang to an earlier phase of the universe. Within this scenario there are two possibilities: either what we see as the Big Bang was a unique event, about which the universe expands indefinitely in either direction in time; or it was one occurrence in an infinitely repeating cycle of expansions and recontractions. Both possibilities have been considered for a long time, but have received new attention thanks to recent work by Veneziano and collaborators (the “pre-Big-Bang” model[5]) and Steinhardt, Turok, and collaborators (the “cyclic universe” model[6]).

In either case, an attempt is made to circumvent traditional singularity theorems by introducing exotic matter fields, extra dimensions of space, and sometimes “branes” on which ordinary particles are confined. For example, in the model of a cyclic universe advocated by Steinhardt and Turok, our universe is a three-brane (three spatial dimensions, evolving in time, for a total of four space-time dimensions) embedded in a background five-dimensional space-time. Motion in the extra dimension, it is suggested, can help resolve the apparent Big-Bang singularity, allowing a contracting universe to bounce and begin expanding into a new phase, before eventually recollapsing and starting the cycle over again.

I don’t want to discuss details of either the pre-Big-Bang scenario or the cyclic universe; for one thing, the details are fuzzy at best and incoherent at worse. Neither picture is completely well-formulated at this time. But the state of the art in early-universe cosmology is not the point; the lesson here is that we are not forced to think of boundary conditions being imposed arbitrarily at the earliest times. In any of the scenarios mentioned here, the issue of initial conditions is dramatically altered from the classical Big-Bang scenario, since there is no edge to the universe at which boundary conditions need to be arbitrarily imposed. Thus, one cannot argue that we require the initial state of the universe to be specified by the conscious act of a deity, or that the universe came into existence as the result of a single creative act. This is by no means a proof that God does not exist; God could be responsible for the universe’s existence, whether it is boundaryless or not. But these theories demonstrate that a distinct creation event is not a necessary component of a complete description of the universe. Although we don’t know whether any of these models will turn out to be part of the final picture, their existence allows us to believe that a simple materialist formalism is sufficient to tell the whole story.

Being allowed to believe something, of course, is not the same as having good reasons for doing so. This brings us to the second possible way in which scientific reasoning could lead us to believe in God: if, upon constructing various models for the universe, we found that the God hypothesis accounted most economically for some of the features we found in observed phenomena. As noted, this kind of reasoning is a descendant of the well-known argument from design. A few centuries ago, for example, it would have been completely reasonable to observe the complexity and subtlety exhibited in the workings of biological creatures, and conclude that such intricacy could not possibly have arisen by chance, but must instead be attributed to the plan of a Creator. The advent of Darwin’s theory of evolution, featuring descent with modification and natural selection, provided a mechanism by which such apparently improbable configurations could have arisen via innumerable gradual changes.

Indeed, modern science has provided plausible explanations for the origin of all the complex phenomena we find in nature (given appropriate initial conditions, as we just discussed). Nevertheless, these explanations rely on the details of the laws of physics, as exemplified in general relativity and the standard model of particle physics. In particular, when we consider carefully the particular laws we have discovered, we find them to be specific realizations of more general possible structures. For example, in particle physics we have various kinds of particles (fermions, gauge bosons, a hypothetical Higgs boson), as well as specific symmetries among their interactions, and particular values for the parameters governing their behavior. Given that the universe is made out of fermions and bosons with particular kinds of interactions, to the best of our current knowledge we do not understand why we find the particular particles we do, or the particular symmetries, or the particular parameters, rather than some other arrangement. Is it conceivable that in the particular realization of particles and forces of our universe we can discern the fingerprints of a conscious deity, rather than simply a random selection among an infinite number of possibilities?

Well, yes, it is certainly conceivable. In fact, the argument has been made that the particles and interactions we observe are not chosen at all randomly; instead, they are precisely tuned so as to allow for the existence of human life (or at least, complex structures of the kind we consider to be necessary for intelligent life).

In order for this argument to have force, we must believe both that the physical laws are finely tuned to allow for life (i.e., that the complexity required for life to form is not a robust feature, and would generally be absent for different choices of particles and coupling constants), and that there is no simpler alternative explanation for this fine-tuning. I will argue that neither statement is warranted by our current understanding, although both are open questions; in either case, there is not a strong reason for invoking the existence of God.

Let’s turn first to the fine-tuning of our observed laws of nature. It is certainly true that the world we observe depends sensitively on the particular values of the constants of nature: for example, the strength of the electromagnetic and nuclear forces. If the strong nuclear force had a slightly different value, the balance which characterizes stable nuclei would be upset, and the periodic table of the elements would be dramatically altered[7]. We could imagine (so the argument goes) values for which hydrogen were the only stable element, or for which no carbon was formed in the life cycle of stars. In either case it would be difficult or impossible for life as we know it to exist.

But there are two serious holes in this argument, at least at our current level of expertise: we don’t really know what the universe would look like if the parameters of the standard model were different, nor do we know what are the necessary conditions for the formation of intelligent life. (Both of these claims are open to debate, and there are certainly scientists who disagree; but if nothing else these are the conservative positions.)

To appreciate the difficulty of reliably determining what the universe would be like if the constants of nature took on different values, let us imagine trying to figure out what our actual universe should look like, if we were handed the laws of subatomic physics but had no direct empirical knowledge of how particles assembled themselves into more complex structures. A fundamental obstacle arises immediately, since quantum chromodynamics (the theory of quarks and gluons, which gives rise to the strong nuclear force) is a strongly coupled theory, so that our most straightforward and trustworthy techniques (involving perturbation theory in some small parameter, such as the fine-structure constant of electromagnetism) are worthless. We would probably be able to conclude that quarks and gluons were bound into composite particles, and could even imagine figuring out that the lightest nearly stable examples were protons and neutrons (and their antiparticles). It would be very hard, without experimental input, to calculate reliably that protons were lighter than neutrons, but it might be possible. It would be essentially impossible to determine accurately the types of stable nuclei that protons and neutrons would be able to form. We would have no chance whatsoever of accurately predicting the actual abundance of heavy nuclei in the universe, as these are formed in stars and supernovae whose evolution we don’t really understand even with considerable observational input. Most embarrassingly, we would never have predicted that there was a significant excess of matter over antimatter, since the process by which this occurs remains a complete mystery (there are numerous plausible models, but none has become commonly accepted[8]). So we would predict a world in which there were almost no nuclei at all, the nucleons and antinucleons having annihilated long ago, leaving nothing but an inert gas of photons and neutrinos. In other words, a universe utterly inhospitable to the existence of intelligent life as we know it. Of course, perhaps life could nevertheless exist, of a sort radically different than we are familiar with. As skeptical as I am about the ability of physicists to accurately predict gross features of a universe in which the laws of nature are different, I am all the more skeptical of the ability or biologists (or anyone else) to describe the conditions under which intelligence may or may not arise. (Cellular automata, the simple discrete systems popularized by Wolfram and others[9], provide an excellent example of how extreme complexity can arise out of fundamentally very simple behaviors.) For this reason, it seems highly presumptuous for anyone to claim that the laws of nature we observe are somehow delicately adjusted to allow for the existence of life.

But in fact there is a better reason to be skeptical of the fine-tuning claim: the indisputable fact that there are many features of the laws of nature which don’t seem delicately adjusted at all, but seem completely irrelevant to the existence of life. In a cosmological context, the most obvious example is the sheer vastness of the universe; it would hardly seem necessary to make so many galaxies just so that life could arise on a single planet around a single star. But to me a more pointed observation is the existence of “generations” of elementary particles. All of the ordinary matter in the universe seems to be made out of two types of quarks (up and down) and two types of leptons (electrons and electron neutrinos), as well as the various force-carrying particles. But this pattern of quarks and leptons is repeated threefold: the up and down quarks are joined by four more types, just as the electron and its neutrino are joined by two electron-type particles and two more neutrinos. As far as life is concerned, these particles are completely superfluous. All of the processes we observe in the everyday workings of the universe would go on in essentially the same way if those particles didn’t exist. Why do the constituents of nature exhibit this pointless duplication, if the laws of nature were constructed with life in mind?

Beyond the fact that the constants of nature do not seem to be chosen by any intelligent agent, there remains the very real possibility that parameters we think of as distinct (for example, the parameters measuring the strength of the electromagnetic and nuclear forces) are actually calculable from a single underlying parameter. This speculative proposal is the goal of so-called grand unified theories, for which there is already some indirect evidence. In other words, it might turn out to be that the constants of nature really couldn’t have had any other values. I don’t think that, if we discovered this to be the case, it would count as evidence against the existence of God, only because I don’t think that our present understanding of these parameters counts as evidence in favor of God.

But perhaps the parameters are finely tuned; we might imagine that our understanding of physics, biology, and complexity some day will increase to a degree where we can say with confidence that alternative values for these parameters would not have allowed intelligent life to evolve. Even in that case, the existence of God is by no means the only mechanism for explaining this apparently unlikely state of affairs; a completely materialist scenario is provided by the well-known anthropic principle. Imagine that what we think of as the “constants of nature” are merely local phenomena, in the sense that there are other regions of the universe where they take on completely different values. This is a respectable possibility within our current conception of particle physics and cosmology. The idea that there are different, inaccessible regions of the universe is consistent with the theory of “eternal inflation,” in which space-time on large scales consists of innumerable distinct expanding universes, connected by regions of space driven to hyperexpansion by an incredibly high-energy field[10]. Within each of these separate regions, we can imagine that the matter fields settle into one of a large number of distinct metastable states, characterized by different values of all the various coupling constants. (Such a scenario is completely consistent with current ideas from string theory[11], although it is clearly at odds with the idea from the previous paragraph that all of the coupling constants might be uniquely calculable. The truth is that either scenario is possible, we just don’t know enough at this point to say with confidence which, if either, is on the right track.)

In a universe comprised of many distinct regions with different values of the coupling constants, it is tautologous that intelligent observers will only measure the values which obtain in those regions which are consistent with the existence of such observers. This is nothing more fancy than the reason why nobody is surprised that life arose on the surface of the Earth rather than the surface of the Sun, even though the surface area of the Sun is so much larger: the Earth is simply a much more hospitable environment. Therefore, even if we were to be confident that tiny alterations in the particles and couplings we observe in our universe would render life impossible, we would by no means need to invoke intelligent design as an explanation.

5. Conclusions

The question we have addressed is, “Thinking as good scientists and observing the world in which we live, is it more reasonable to conclude that a materialist or theist picture is most likely to ultimately provide a comprehensive description of the universe?” Although I don’t imagine I have changed many people’s minds, I do hope that my reasoning has been clear. We are looking for a complete, coherent, and simple understanding of reality. Given what we know about the universe, there seems to be no reason to invoke God as part of this description. In the various ways in which God might have been judged to be a helpful hypothesis–such as explaining the initial conditions for the universe, or the particular set of fields and couplings discovered by particle physics–there are alternative explanations which do not require anything outside a completely formal, materialist description. I am therefore led to conclude that adding God would just make things more complicated, and this hypothesis should be rejected by scientific standards. It’s a venerable conclusion, brought up to date by modern cosmology; but the dialogue between people who feel differently will undoubtedly last a good while longer.

See article for Notes and References.

The Story of the Righteous Job and His Righteous God

Here’s the link to this article written by Bart Ehrman.

March 9, 2023

In my previous post I explained how the book of Job comprises both a folk-tale written in prose about a righteous man named Job (chs. 1-2; 42) and a set of dialogues written in poetry between Job, his so-called friends, and eventually God (chs. 3-42). These are two different compositions with two different authors living at two different times with two different understandings of why Job and people like him suffer.

To unpack these understandings, I begin with the folktale as discussed in my book God’s Problem (HarperOne, 2008).

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The Folktale: The Suffering of Job as a Test of Faith

The action of the prose folktale alternates between scenes on earth and in heaven. It begins by indicating that Job lived in the land of Uz; usually this is located in Edom, to the southeast of Israel. Job, in other words, is not an Israelite. As a book of “wisdom,” this account is not concerned with specifically Israelite traditions: it is concerned with understanding the world in ways that should make sense to everyone living in it. In any event, Job is said to be “blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil” (1:1). We have already seen that in other books of wisdom, such as Proverbs, wealth and prosperity come to those who are righteous before God; here this dictum is borne out. Job is said to be enormously wealthy, with 7000 sheep, 3000 camels, 500 yoke of oxen, 500 donkeys, and very many servants. His piety is seen in his daily devotions to God: early every morning he makes a burnt offering to God for all his children, seven sons and three daughters, in case they have committed some sin.

The narrator then moves to a heavenly scene in which the “heavenly beings” (literally: the sons of God) appear before the Lord, “the Satan” among them. It is important to recognize that the Satan here is not the fallen angel who has been booted from heaven, the cosmic enemy of God. Here he is portrayed as one of God’s divine council members, a group of divinities who regularly report to God and, evidently, go about the world doing his will. Only at a later stage of Israelite religion (as we will see in chapter 7), does “Satan” become “the Devil,” God’s mortal enemy. The term “the Satan” here in Job does not appear to be a name so much as a description of his office: it literally means “the Adversary” (or the Accuser). But he is not an adversary to God: he is one of the heavenly beings who reports to God. He is the adversary who plays “devil’s advocate,” as it were, who challenges conventional wisdom in order to try to prove a point. In the present instance his challenge has to do with Job. The Lord brags to the Satan about Job’s blameless life and the Satan challenges God about it: Job is upright only because he is so richly blessed in exchange. If God were to take away what he has, the Satan insists, Job would “curse you to your face” (1:11). God doesn’t think so, and gives the Satan authority to take everything away from Job. In other words, this is to be a test of Job’s righteousness: can he have a disinterested piety, or does his pious relationship to God depend entirely on what he manages to get out of the deal?

The Satan attacks Job’s household. In one day, the oxen are stolen away, the sheep are burned up by fire from heaven, the camels are raided and carried off, all the servants are killed, and even the sons and daughters are mercilessly destroyed by a storm that levels their house. Job’s reaction? As God predicted, he does not utter curses for his misfortune: he goes into mourning:

Job arose, tore his robe, shaved his head, and fell on the ground and worshiped. He said, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there; the LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.” (1:20)

The narrator assures us that in all this “Job did not sin or charge God with wrongdoing” (1:22). One might wonder what “wrongdoing” God could possibly do, if robbery, destruction of property, and murder is not wrong. But in this story, at least, for Job to preserve his piety means for him to continue trusting God, whatever God does to him.

The narrative then reverts to a heavenly scene of God and his divine council. The Satan appears before the Lord, who once again brags about his servant Job. The Satan replies that of course Job has not cursed God – he has not himself been afflicted with physical pain. But, he tells God, “stretch out your hand now and touch his bone and his flesh and he will curse you to your face” (2:5). God allows the Satan to do so, with the proviso that he not take away Job’s life (in part, one might suppose, because it would be hard to evaluate Job’s reaction were he not alive to have one). The Satan then afflicts Job with “loathsome sores…from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head” (2:7). Job sits on a pile of ashes and scrapes his wounds with a potsherd. His wife urges on him the natural course, “Do you still persist in your integrity? Curse God and die.” But Job refuses, “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God and not receive the bad”? (2:10). In all this Job does not sin against God.

Job’s three friends then come to him – Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite. And they do the only thing true friends can do in this kind of situation, they weep with him, mourn with him, and sit with him, not saying a word. What sufferers need is not advice, but a comforting human presence.

It is at this point that the poetic dialogues begin, in which the friends do not behave like friends, much less like comforters, insisting that Job has simply gotten what he has deserves. I will talk about these dialogues later, as they come from a different author from the prose narrative. The folktale is not resumed until the very conclusion of the book at the end of chapter 42. It is obvious that a bit of the folktale has been cut out in the process of combining it with the poetic dialogues: for when it resumes, God indicates that he is angry with the three friends for what they have said, in contrast to what Job has said. This cannot very well be a reference to what the friends and Job said in the poetic dialogues, because there it is the friends who defend God and Job who accuses him. And so a portion of the folktale must have been cut off when the poetic dialogues were added. What the friends said that offended God cannot be known.

But what is clear is that God rewards Job for passing the test: he has not cursed God. Job is told to make a sacrifice and prayer on behalf of his friends, and he does so. God then restores everything that had been lost to Job, and even more: 14,000 sheep, 6000 camels, 1000 yoke of oxen, and 1000 donkeys. And he gives him another seven sons and three daughters. Job lives out his days in peace and prosperity surrounded by children and grandchildren.

This is an intriguing understanding of why there is suffering — it comes as a test. It is not the view you find in the other part of Job, the forty chapters of poetic dialogue between Job and his “friends.” But what do you think of it as an evaluation for why people (even the Jobs of the world) suffer? I’ll explain what I think of it in the next post.

Why Religious Experience Cannot Justify Religious Belief

Here’s the link to this article by David Kyle Johnson.

April 30, 2021

(2020)

[This article was originally published in Socio-Historical Examination of Religion and Ministry, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Fall 2020), pp. 26-46.]

As [Paul] was traveling, it happened that he was approaching Damascus, and suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him; and he fell to the ground… (Act 9:3-4, NASB)

In Chapter 9 of their 1999 book, Phantoms in the Brain, entitled “God and the Limbic System,” neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee told the story of a patient named Paul—a Goodwill store assistant manager who has been blessed—or haunted—by intense religious experiences all his life. Ironically, Paul’s experiences mirror, almost exactly, those of his biblical namesake: the Apostle Paul. “I remember seeing a bright light before I fell on the ground and wondering where it came from.”[1] Like the Apostle, Paul’s experiences completely changed his life, and he goes on to write, at great length, about the profundities of religious truths—”an enormous manuscript … [that] set out his views on philosophy, mysticism and religion; the nature of the trinity; the iconography of the star of David; elaborate drawings depicting spiritual themes, strange mystical symbols, and maps.”[2] But unlike the Apostle’s, Paul’s brain can be directly observed by modern science—and we now know what causes his religious experiences: focal seizures in his temporal lobe. Each one coincides with a religious experience and produced in Paul what has come to be known as “temporal lobe personality.”

Similar experiences happen to individuals of every religion, yet they teach those individuals vastly different, even contradictory, things. The Apostle Paul’s experience, for example, taught him that Jesus was the Messiah, the son of God, and (arguably) that he was identical to God himself.[3] Muhammad’s religious experiences, which inspired his writing of the Qur’an, taught him the exact opposite—that Jesus was “no more than a messenger” (Q al-Ma’idah 5:75), that “[i]t is not befitting to (the majesty of) God that He should beget a son” (Q Maryam 19:30-35), and that it would have been blasphemy for Jesus to have claimed to be God (Q al-Ma’idah 5:116-117). Of course, similar disparities among those who have religious experiences abound. A Buddhist’s religious experience will likely teach him that there is no God, no persons, and no afterlife, whereas a Christian’s will teach him that there is a God and if a person worships him properly, one can enter Heaven.

These facts seem to raise serious doubts about the ability of religious experiences to justify religious beliefs, especially for the modern academic theist who is aware of them. Why this is true, however, has not yet been clearly identified. To be sure, many have attempted to argue that these facts do not threaten the justificatory power of religious experience; but those say they do have yet to accurately articulate why.[4] It is the goal of this essay to do so. The author will argue that, at least for those aware of such facts, such as the modern academic theist, the diversity of religious experience and the existence of neurological explanations for religious experience entail that religious experience cannot justify religious belief. First, the author will define and identify the significance of religious experience. Then, the author will argue that the diversity of religious experience establishes its unreliability, rendering its justificatory value moot. Lastly, the author will argue that modern scientific explanations for religious experiences do the same by presenting an alternative and preferable natural explanation of those experiences. The author will do so utilizing two epistemic theories that are prized by theistic philosophers of religion: reliabilism and virtue epistemology.

Defining and Using Religious Experience

Before establishing that religious experience cannot justify religious belief, it is important to define religious experience and the role theists claim it plays in justifying their belief. Religious experiences can be defined as encounters with “the divine” that are ultimately caused by the divine—in which “the divine” is broadly defined to encompass as many religious notions as possible (e.g., the Christian God, the Hindu Brahman, and the Buddhist Void). Some are professed to be visual or auditory experiences not brought about by the ordinary senses; others are simply intellectual realizations (without accompanying experiences). Still others are reactions to worldly stimuli—perhaps an ordinary stimulus (e.g., seeing God in a sunset) or a seemingly miraculous stimulus (e.g., witnessing a faith-healing)—while others are what one might call mystical experiences, which William James said were ineffable (i.e., they cannot be accurately described).[5] Most are likely passive (one cannot will them to occur) and transitive (they only occur for a short period of time). And while most are also noetic (convey insights into deep truths), others may simply consist in what Jonathan Haidt called “uplift” (something one might feel while singing a hymn at church).[6] It is difficult to say more than that but, presumably, that does not matter—because, supposedly, when one has a religious experience, one will know it.[7]

Religious experience has played a significant role in justifying religious belief throughout the history of religion. In addition to the aforementioned role it played in the production of both Christian and Islamic texts, religious experiences appear in Scripture as well: Moses, via his burning bush experience, comes to believe that he should lead the Israelites out of Egypt. Mary and Joseph, via angelic announcement, learn of Jesus’ miraculous conception. The apostles, in Acts 2, after receiving the Holy Spirit, learn how to speak in different languages. Nonbiblical religious experiences include the conversion of C. S. Lewis and the visions of Bernadette Soubirous.[8] The political and historic significance of religious experience also cannot be forgotten. The Roman Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity after a religious experience and tried to influence the entire empire to do likewise. In 2005, George W. Bush told Palestinian ministers that a religious experience inspired him to invade Afghanistan and Iraq.[9]

The role that religious experience plays in justifying religious belief is probably most clearly made by the Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga. In his 2000 book, Warranted Christian Belief, when articulating his “Aquinas/Calvin (A/C) model,” Plantinga spoke of humans possessing a sixth sense, the sensus divinitatis, which is attuned to the divine. Through it, the Holy Spirit can instigate beliefs in selected believers through what amounts to a religious experience. As an example, Plantinga has spoken of looking upon a mountain vista and coming to believe that it, and the universe, was designed by God.[10] According to Plantinga, such beliefs are “properly basic.” They are justified (even though they are not based on evidence), not because the religious experience provides “evidence” for the belief in question (which it does not), but because it justifies theistic belief in the same way that seeing a tree can justify one’s belief that a tree exists.[11] In fact, most defenses of religious experience’s ability to justify religious belief rely on some kind of “sense of sight” analogy.[12]

The ability of religious experience to justify religious belief is important because many theists (although not all) admit that evidence for God’s existence, and other religious beliefs, can be found nowhere else.[13] The classic arguments for God’s existence, for example, fail. The justification provided by religious experience can also help theists who admit to having no good answer to the evidential problem of evil. Plantinga has even argued that beliefs instigated by religious experience are immune to evidential challenge.[14] But let the reader now consider two arguments that religious experience cannot justify religious belief for the modern academic theist—an inductive argument based on religious diversity and another derived from natural explanations for religious experience.

The Diversity of Religious Experience

The fact that devotees of different religions have religious experiences that lead them to contradictory conclusions seems to threaten the ability of religious experience to provide justification for religious belief. But exactly how this threat should be understood is not straightforward. David Silver articulates it in terms of the individual; the justification that X is true provided by one person’s religious experiences can be nullified by the trustworthy testimony of a friend who also had a religious experience but instead came to believe ~X.[15] But there are a few flaws with his account.

First, it is not clear that even trustworthy testimony can “transfer” the justification provided to someone who has a religious experience to someone else. William James, for example, would argue that the friend’s religious experience can only provide justification for the friend’s religious belief—not the original person’s.[16] So the original person may still have more reason to believe X than ~X and thus not be in the epistemic bind Silver describes. More importantly, Silver’s individualistic account does not seem to fully appreciate the threat posed by the realization that there are millions of epistemically virtuous, morally upstanding people, who belong to other religions and have religious experiences that teach lessons contrary to one another. Lastly, Silver’s argument does not show that religious experience fails to provide justification for religious belief. It just shows that the evidence initially provided by a religious experience can be counteracted by contrary evidence, leaving one in an epistemically neutral position. The problem that arises from the diversity of religious experience, however, seems to entail something more: that religious experience cannot provide justification for religious belief in the first place.

Theistic philosophers, like Plantinga, are fond of reliabilism—the notion that beliefs are justified if they are produced by “reliable processes” (i.e., processes that are trustworthy, that usually lead to true belief). This is why Plantinga, for example, thinks that his religious experiences justify his religious belief—because they were processes instigated by the Holy Spirit, and any such process must be truth-preserving. But the diversity of religious experience calls into question the reliability of religious experience itself.

To understand why, suppose there are only two religions in the world, with half the world’s population belonging to each, and that the religions are mutually exclusive (only one can be true). Suppose also that religious experiences, which tell the experiencer that their religion is true, are had by adherents of both. Since both religions cannot be true, the religious experiences of at least half the world’s population are leading them astray— producing false belief. Consequently, one must conclude that religious experience is not reliable; half of the time, it results in incorrect conclusions. In such a situation, one could not be justified by a religious experience to believe what it suggests is true; it is just as likely, as not, that it is leading the experiencer astray.

The problem, of course, is that the conditions in the real world are even less favorable. There are five major world religions, only one of which can be true, and there is at least one major split in each. So, without adjusting for the popularity of certain religions, religious experience produces wrong belief 90% of the time. And even taking popularity into account, and assuming the best case scenario in which the most adhered to religion (Christianity at 31%) is true, and the generous assumption that Christian religious experiences are uniform, religious experience still leads the experiencer astray two-thirds of the time. That hardly makes it a reliable truth-preserving process.[17] So, since the diversity of religious experience entails that religious experience is not a reliable truth-preserving process, and if it is not it cannot justify religious belief, the diversity of religious experience entails that religious experience cannot justify religious belief.

To respond, one cannot merely claim one’s religious experience is stronger than someone else’s; no one has access to how strong the religious experiences of others are. In fact, the others could simply in turn claim that theirs is stronger—and that leads right back to the same problem.

One might also try to divide religious experience into different kinds, and claim that one kind—one’s own kind—is reliable. Unfortunately, attempts to do so will either beg the question (one cannot claim to know so via one’s religious experience) or undermine the epistemic authority of the kind of religious experience being argued for. For example, if one provides additional evidence for the beliefs produced by a certain kind of religious experience (to show that kind of religious experience reliably leads to true beliefs), then it will be that evidence—not the religious experience—that is doing the justificatory work for the beliefs in question.

Erik Baldwin and Michael Thune, defenders of Silver’s thesis, point out that theists fond of Plantinga’s A/C model are likely to respond to threats posed to the reliability of religious experiences by observing, “If indeed one’s religious experience is reliable, then the belief is still justified.”[18] But, although that conditional is true, it does not help one defend religious experience’s ability to justify religious belief. As already shown, there is good reason to think the antecedent of this conditional is false—and if it is false, there is no good reason to think that religious experience can justify religious belief. Indeed, there is good reason to think that it cannot. Because religious experience leads the experiencer astray at least two-thirds of the time, one knows it is not an accurate determiner of religious truth.

The truth of this conditional does entail that, for any given process that justifies a belief, one does not need to know that process is trustworthy (what Plantinga would call “reliable”) in order for it to justify the belief in question. For example, even if one does not know that one’s faculty of sight is trustworthy—after all, one might be dreaming—if it is indeed trustworthy, then it does in fact reliably produce true belief and thus can justify one’s belief that the world is real (at least according to reliabilism). But if one’s faculty of sight is not in fact untrustworthy—suppose it regularly produces hallucinations—then it cannot justify one’s belief. What’s more, if one has good reason to think that it is untrustworthy (suppose one knows that it produces hallucinations two-thirds of the time), then it certainly cannot justify one’s belief! And in such a situation, pointing out “if it were reliably accurate, it would justify belief” does not change this fact, nor does it make one’s sight-based beliefs justified.

Perhaps one might continue the point further, suggesting: Even though the diversity of religious experience provides evidence that religious experience is untrustworthy, it still might be that one’s religious experience is reliably accurate—maybe one’s religious belief really is instigated by the Holy Spirit—and thus, contrary to the claim of this paper, it is at least possible that religious experience can justify religious belief despite the diversity of religious experience. But this seems patently false. To see why, consider another analogy with sight.

If one has good reason to think their faculty of sight is untrustworthy (perhaps one has good reason to believe one is living in a computer simulation), even if it turns out their sight is accurate (one is, in fact, not in a computer simulation), one’s doubt about the trustworthiness of one’s senses erases any justification that their faculty of sight can provide. In fact, if one has good reason to doubt their sight, one should not believe what it tells them, even if it is telling them the truth. In the same way, even if it turns out that one happens to belong to the one true religion and their religious beliefs were bestowed by God via a religious experience (and they are thus reliable), the diversity of religious experience still gives one good reason to doubt the reliability of the religious experience. Thus, it cannot justify one’s religious belief, and one should not believe what it purports to be true.

If one is unaware of the reasons to question the trustworthiness of religious experience (e.g., the diversity of religious experience) and it also happens that one has the kind of religious experience that is accurate (e.g., an experience caused by God)—in that very special circumstance, religious experience would likely justify religious belief. But this will not help the academic theist (or anyone reading this paper) for they cannot claim such ignorance. Thus, the paper’s thesis still stands.

The other solution to this problem is to look for overlap to thus defend “the unanimity thesis”: Yes, the doctrines supported by religious experience throughout the world’s religions are contradictory, but that is because people interpret their religious experiences through the lens of their culture and religious traditions. A Christian will see Jesus; a Hindu, Brahman. But the “core” of all religious experience is the same: it is an encounter with an indescribable reality (often called “the Real”) which gives rise to feelings of peace and blessedness that tends to make one less selfish. So, while religious experience may be untrustworthy as a means to true belief about specific religious doctrines, it does reliably produce accurate beliefs regarding these “core” elements. So, religious experience can justify those beliefs.

The idea that there is a common core of religious experience has been defended by Peter Byrne, Aldous Huxley, Bertrand Russell, C. D. Broad, and John Hick (just to name a few).[19] Ironically, however, their accounts of this core are largely incompatible. For example, Hick claims that “the Real” is indescribable and incomprehensible by human language and understanding, while Byrne says it can be described and understood by human concepts both negatively and relationally.[20] By itself, this fact seems to refute the unanimity thesis. But even setting such disagreements aside, another problem remains. To sensibly claim that such a core is common amongst those who have religious experiences, the phrases used to describe this supposed “core” are so amorphous and ambiguous that they are meaningless. “A distinction-less reality gave me a feeling of peace and made me less selfish.” This could mean so many different things that two people could have two completely different experiences, which share no core at all, yet describe them in exactly this way.

But even if one is willing to concede that all religious experiences have a common core and justify such beliefs, this paper’s thesis is only slightly weakened. It is still the case that religious experience cannot justify most of the religious beliefs that religious adherents claim they do—beliefs specific to their particular brand of religion. What’s more, the fullest version of the author’s thesis can still be defended because even those defending the unanimity thesis will not be able to avoid the objection of the next section: the problem of natural explanations for religious experience.

Natural Explanation for Religious Experience

Readers saw, in the introduction, a natural explanation for some religious experiences: focal seizures within the temporal lobe. This has actually helped identify the part of the brain responsible for the production of religious experiences. But epilepsy is not the only way one’s temporal lobe can become appropriately stimulated to produce religious experiences. Fasting, illness, meditation, stress, sleeplessness, drugs—even expectation and the right circumstances (e.g., going to church camp) will alter one’s temporal lobe and produce a religious experience. Michael Persinger has even invented a transcranial magnetic stimulator that, when applied to one’s temporal lobe, reportedly produced religious experiences in his test subjects. His device has come to be known as “The God helmet.”

To understand the argument of why potential natural explanations for religious experience reduce their justificatory power, let one consider the case of someone who had a religious experience while wearing the God helmet and subsequently came to believe in the existence of “the Real” based on that experience.[21] Would one say that belief was justified? Of course not. Why? Because in order for it to reliably convey accurate knowledge about the Real, and be genuine, the religious experience must ultimately be caused by the Real. Yet the idea that it was caused by Persinger’s God helmet is a much better explanation (most notably, it is more parsimonious since it does not invoke any extra entities or assumptions) and is, thus, the explanation that a rational person should prefer.

Notice that it will not do to suggest the subject coincidentally happened to have a religious experience that was caused by the Real while wearing the God helmet, and that the God helmet did not play a causal role in producing the religious experience. This is clearly just an unfalsifiable ad hoc excuse to save the religious experience’s justificatory power. Notice also that it will not do to suggest that the Real somehow used the God helmet to produce the religious experience, thus actually being its ultimate cause. Not only is this explanation also ad hoc, and not only is its explanatory power low—because it invokes the inexplicable and raises more questions than it answers—but it also multiplies entities unnecessarily by invoking extra outside influences when none are needed.[22] One need not invoke the Real to explain the experience; the God helmet alone will do. In addition, “the Real” explanation also contradicts known physical laws—like the causal closure of the physical, the conservation of energy, and the conservation of momentum—by having a nonphysical entity interact with the physical world. As Ted Schick, author of How To Think About Weird Things, would undoubtedly point out: The purely natural explanation should be preferred because it is more “adequate.” It has wider “scope” (because it explains more), it is “simpler” (because it requires fewer assumptions and entities), and is more “conservative” (because it does not conflict with established facts).[23] Given that one should conclude that the Real was not involved in the production of the experience, one should conclude that the religious experience was not genuine and thus does not justify the belief it produces.[24]

All this makes abundantly clear why the religious experiences of Paul, the Goodwill store assistant manager, cannot justify religious belief. Since one has good reason to think that religious experiences can be produced by temporal lobe seizures, and one knows that Paul has temporal lobe epilepsy, temporal lobe seizures are the best explanation for the religious experiences he has. Invoking God as an explanation of the seizures would, for the same reasons as above, be a less parsimonious, less wide scoping, and less conservative ad hoc excuse.

But what about religious experiences in other circumstances when one is not wearing the God helmet or does not have temporal lobe epilepsy, so one does not have direct awareness of what is going on inside the experiencer’s brain at the time of the experience? Should one still favor the natural explanation? Of course. Consider someone who has a religious experience of the Real while fasting, meditating, highly stressed, ill, on drugs, or depriving themselves of sleep. For example, when I attended Southern Nazarene University, a chapel speaker once said that, after not eating for two weeks, he saw Jesus walk through a wall and convey divine truths to him. Sure, one cannot directly observe what their brain was doing at the time of the experience, but one can still ask, “What is the best explanation for the cause of their experience?” Has their physical condition altered their brain and produced the experience, or has the Real reached down from the great beyond to teach them a lesson? The latter multiplies entities beyond necessity, raises more questions than it answers, invokes the inexplicable, and is not conservative. The natural explanation, on the other hand, is quite simple, coheres with how the brain works (and malfunctions), and offers a robust explanation. And it will not do well to suggest that God somehow “used” the altered physical state to produce the experience, for the same reason it will not do to suggest that God used Paul’s seizures, or the Real used the God helmet. Clearly the natural explanation should be preferred.

This is true even for the spontaneous religious experience that one has merely in a conducive environment, such as church camp or a church service. Although it is possible that the Real reached down from outside the physical realm to bestow knowledge of its existence, it is still more likely that one’s own expectations and environment overstimulated their temporal lobe or otherwise influenced their brain to cause the experience.[25] The latter explanation should be preferred, and as such, the religious experience in question cannot justify the belief it produces.

Of course, one cannot prove that the religious explanation is false, but that something cannot be proven false is no reason to think it is true. That would be an appeal to ignorance. In the absence of proof, the best explanation should be preferred, and clearly the natural explanation will always be the best since it will always be simpler, have wider scope, and be more conservative. If a religious experience is produced by purely natural means, it is not a genuine religious experience and cannot justify religious belief. So, in short, since the academic theist can likely never be justified in believing that a religious experience is genuine, religious experience can likely never justify their religious belief.

To reinforce this line of reasoning, consider phlogiston—a substance that was once thought to account for heat by flowing in and out of objects as they became hotter and cooler. Once it was discovered that heat is merely a result of the movement of molecules, it became irrational to believe in phlogiston. One could invoke phlogiston to explain the movement of the molecules, but doing so is less simple, less explanatory, not conservative, and the movement of the molecules can be accounted for without it. If one can explain something with less, one should. Likewise, since one can explain religious experiences with less, one should.

Understanding this argument reveals why the most famous attempts to circumvent the problem of natural explanation for religious experience are insufficient. For example, Robert Ellwood argues that identifying the neural correlate of a religious experience cannot establish it is illusory; if it did, then identifying the parts of the brain responsible for visual sensations would force one to conclude that everything one sees is illusory.[26] But the argument that has been presented by this paper does not merely identify a neural correlate of a religious experience. It also identifies the cause of the experience as something else besides what must cause it in order for the experience to be genuine—a seizure, drugs, or the environment. Yes, the realization that visual sensations are correlated with activity in the visual cortex does not give one reason to think that they are illusions; but that is because this realization does not give one reason to think that visual sensations are not ultimately caused by the objects they are reported to be of. If one found out, however, that the most likely ultimate explanation of a visual sensation was something besides the objects one was apparently perceiving—for example, suppose one realized that the best explanation for why one was seeing pink elephants was the work of alcohol on one’s visual cortex—then one should conclude that their visual sensation was illusory. In that case, one would not be justified in believing in the existence of what one’s visual sensations were suggesting was there (in this case, pink elephants). Potential natural explanations for religious experiences provide a better explanation for religious experience that is not ultimately caused by the object that the experience is reportedly of. Since to be genuine (and to justify belief) a religious experience must be caused by the object that the experience is reportedly of, natural (neural) explanations make religious experiences incapable of justifying that belief.

C. D. Broad argues that the fact that altered physical states correlate with religious experiences does not mean they are illusory because:

[If] there is an aspect of the world which remains altogether outside the ken of ordinary persons…. It seems very likely that some degree of mental and physical abnormality would be a necessary condition for getting sufficiently loosened from the objects of ordinary sense perception to enter into cognitive contact with this aspect of reality. Therefore, the fact that those persons who claim this peculiar kind of cognition generally exhibit certain mental and physical abnormalities is rather what might be anticipated if their claims were true. One might need to be slightly “cracked” in order to have some peep-holes into the super sensible world.[27]

There are a few problems with this argument, however. First, as Jeff Jordon argues, it seems quite odd to suggest that there are necessary conditions for having a religious experience.[28] Divine presence is a divine prerogative. But in addition, as a response to the argument presented, Broad’s critique is insufficient. While it is possible that temporal lobe seizures open up a cognitive gateway to the great beyond, that explanation is not more adequate than the purely natural one for all the reasons cited above: it is a less simple, nonconservative explanation with narrow scope.

But what if there is not an immediately available natural explanation? What if there was no fasting, meditating, or anything else that one can think of which could alter the brain in the right way? Can one conclude, in such a situation, that one had a genuine religious experience? No. The fact that one cannot think of a natural explanation is not reason to think that there is not one; again, that would be an appeal to ignorance. It is more likely that one’s inability to think of a natural explanation is due to one’s ignorance than it is to there being no natural explanation. This is akin to reasoning made by medical doctors when they cannot diagnose a disease. Their inability to come up with a natural explanation is not good reason to appeal to divine wrath or demonic possession; it is much more likely that the natural explanation is just hidden because of their lack of knowledge. Besides, something like undiagnosed temporal lobe seizures will always be a better (simpler, wider scoping, more conservative) hypothesis than a supernatural one.

But what if one does not know that religious experiences have potential natural explanations? What if one is ignorant of the developments of neuroscience? Can one be justified in believing their religious experience has a supernatural origin then? Perhaps, but this is not going to help the modern academic theist justify their religious belief via religious experience. First, the author doubts many actually are ignorant of such things. Second, even if they are, this does not allow them to justify their religious belief in this way. Why? The answer lies in an epistemic theory often defended by theists: virtue epistemology. To see why, return once again to the disease analogy.

Suppose that an academic theist has somehow remained ignorant of the germ theory of disease. He then contracts the flu but does not understand why, and does not even know that there are natural explanations for such illnesses. Can he justifiably believe that the infection is caused by a demon? No, for even though he does not know there are natural explanations, he should. By remaining ignorant of the germ theory of disease, he has neglected his epistemic duty. He is epistemically blameworthy and, as a result, his ability to be justified in this belief is nonexistent.

In the same way, an academic theist who has remained ignorant of the natural explanations for religious experiences cannot hide behind this ignorance. He should be aware of such things; at the least, it is his duty to learn about things directly relevant to his theistic belief—and this is obviously one of them. He has neglected his epistemic duty. He is thus epistemically blameworthy, and his ability to be justified in this belief is nonexistent.

Interestingly, however, religious experience might have been able to justify religious belief in earlier times. If natural explanations are not completely available (e.g., undiscovered), one cannot be expected to know about them and, thus, be derelict in one’s epistemic duty. The Apostle Paul, for example, could have been justified in thinking that disease was caused by demons and that his religious experience on the road to Damascus was one of supernatural origin. But if he were alive today, he could not—for he should know the germ theory of disease and that his conversion experience mirrors exactly the symptoms of temporal lobe epilepsy.

So perhaps the Apostle Paul could have been justified, by his religious experience, in believing that Jesus was the Messiah. He did not know about the better natural explanations for his experience, nor could he have been expected to. But an academic theist cannot be so justified, either by their own religious experience (they should be aware of the better natural explanations) or by relying on Paul’s (for one knows it is much more likely that Paul was a temporal lobe epileptic). And the same holds for all religious experiences; they cannot, for the modern academic theist, justify religious belief.

Conclusion

Ramachandran, in his chapter about Paul the Goodwill store assistant manager, essentially dodges the obvious questions regarding the legitimacy of Paul’s religious experience: “But why do patients like Paul have religious experiences?….One [possibility] is that God really does visit these people. If that is true, so be it. Who are we to question God’s infinite wisdom? Unfortunately, this can be neither proved nor ruled out on empirical grounds.”[29] While he is right that it can neither be proved nor disproved that God visits Paul (because nothing in science can be proved or disproved), it would be an appeal to ignorance to suggest this is a reason to accept the hypothesis that God does. It also does not mean that evidence and scientific reasoning cannot be brought to bear on the question, nor does it mean that there is not good reason to reject this possibility. And clearly, since the neurological explanations for religious experience are more adequate, they should be preferred. To not accept them is unscientific and irrational, just as it would be to think that demons cause disease. As seen, one could lump God on as an additional causal mechanism, where God is the cause of the neurological state, but this is unnecessary. Such states can be, and are, accounted for completely by natural mechanisms—the effects of God helmets, seizures, drugs, fasting, illness, stress, and even the environment—on one’s brain. Lumping God onto the explanation makes it less simple, raises more questions than it answers, invokes the inexplicable, and conflicts with existing knowledge. Therefore, it should be avoided.

Ramachandran also wrote that natural explanations for religious experience have no bearing on whether or not God exists: “My goal as a scientist … is to discover how and why religious sentiments originate in the brain, but this has no bearing one way or the other on whether God exists or not.”[30] However, again, while it is true that neurological explanations for religious experience do not disprove God’s existence, it is clearly false that they have no bearing on it since natural explanations for religious experiences negate their ability to provide evidence for God’s existence. If one relies on religious experience to provide justification for one’s belief in God, as many theists do, clearly discovering natural explanations for religious experiences has great bearing on one’s justification for belief in God. In addition, if it can be effectively argued that belief in God (or religious belief in general) originally arose because of religious experience, but religious experience has a purely naturalistic cause, then significant doubt arises about God’s existence.

One might reply that such reasoning commits the genetic fallacy, but such a reply misunderstands that fallacy. The genetic fallacy entails that one cannot dismiss evidence for a theory by identifying the origin of that theory. For example, one cannot dismiss the hypothesis that the structure of Benzene is circular (“ring shaped”) based on the fact that the idea came to Kekule in a dream because the subsequent evidence that he was right is insurmountable. But the genetic fallacy does not mean that the origin story of a thing is irrelevant to whether or not that thing exists. One could, for example, provide good reason for not believing in El Chupacabra by pointing out that the myth started when Madelyne Tolentino confabulated a story after watching the movie “Species” in 1995.[31] Identifying the belief’s origin cannot be used to dismiss the subsequent “evidence” for El Chupacabra (there are other ways of doing that); but the fact that belief in El Chupacabra does not actually originate from an genuine sighting of a blood-sucking, goat-killing cryptocreature—but instead from a confabulated story—is good reason to think that there is no such thing. Likewise, without good evidence for God’s existence—something that many who rely on religious experience admit—the fact that belief in God does not originate in God, but instead in naturally caused religious experiences, would be good reason to think that there is no God.

Swinburne has defended the ability of religious experience to justify religious belief with the “principle of credulity”: “(in the absence of special considerations), if its seems (epistemically) to a subject that x is present (and has some characteristic), then probably x is present (and has that characteristic).”[32] In other words, unless there is some reason to think otherwise, if a person has an experience which seems to be of x, then it is rational to believe that x exists. This paper has not argued that this principle is false. It has shown why (when x = God), there are indeed “special considerations.” The diversity of religious experience and the existence of natural explanations for religious experience entail that, when it comes to whether religious experiences are genuine, there is always some reason to think otherwise.[33]

See article for Notes and References.

Suffering in the Two Books of Job. Two Books?

Here’s the link to this article by Bart Ehrman.

March 8, 2023

After I finished my short thread of posts about the problem of suffering a couple of weeks ago, I realized that it might be helpful for me to discuss one or two of the books of the Bible that deal with the issue head-on — in part because many people don’t read these books much, even if they know about them, and in part because many people who *do* read them don’t know how expert interpreters have explained them.

For no book is this more true that that gem in the Hebrew Bible, the book of Job. Or rather those two books, the two books of Job.

To talk about Job and what it is really about will require several posts. This is the first, an introduction to the single most important issue connected with the book that most people have never heard and that completely affects how the book is to be interpreted.

This is how I discuss it in my book God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question — Why We Suffer (HarperOne, 2008).

The Book of Job: An Overview

Most people who read Job do not realize that the book as it has come down to us today is the product of different authors, and that these different authors had different, and contradictory, understandings of why it is that people suffer. Most important, the way the story begins and ends – with the prose narrative of the righteous suffering of Job, whose patient endurance under duress is rewarded by God – stands at odds with the poetic dialogues that take up most of the book, in which Job is not patient but defiant, and in which God does not reward the one he has made to suffer but overpowers him and grinds him into submission. These are two different views of suffering, and to understand the book we have to understand its two different messages.^[i]

As it now stands, with the prose narrative and the poetic dialogues combined into one long account, the book can be summarized as follows: it begins with a prose description of Job, a very wealthy and pious man, the richest man in the eastern world. The action moves up to heaven, where God speaks with “the Satan” – the Hebrew word means “the adversary” – and commends Job to him. The Satan claims that Job is pious toward God only because of the rewards he gets for his piety. God allows the Satan then to take away all Job has: his possessions, his servants, and his children; then, in a second round of attacks, his own health. Job refuses to curse God for what has happened to him. Three friends come to visit him and comfort him; but it is cold comfort indeed. Throughout their speeches they tell Job that he is being punished for his sins (that is, they take the “classical” view of suffering, that sinners get what they deserve). Job continues to insist on his innocence and pleads with God to allow him to present his case before him. At the end of the dialogues with the friends (which take up most of the book), God does show up, and overwhelms Job with his greatness, forcefully reproving him for thinking that he, God, has anything to explain to Job, a mere mortal. Job repents of his desire to make his plea before God. In the epilogue, which reverts to prose narrative, God commends Job for his upright behavior, and condemns the friends for what they have said. He restores to Job all of his wealth, and more; he provides him with another batch of children, and Job lives out his life in prosperity, dying at a ripe old age.

Some of the basic discrepancies between the prose narrative with which the book begins and ends (just under three chapters) and the poetic dialogues (which take up nearly forty chapters) can be seen just from this brief summary. The two sources that have been spliced together to make the final product are written in different genres: a prose folktale and a set of poetic dialogues. The writing styles are different between these two genres. Closer analysis shows that the names for the divine being are different in the prose (where the name Yahweh is used) and the poetry (where the divinity is named El, Eloah, and Shaddai). Yet more striking, the portrayal of Job differs in the two parts of the book: in the prose he is a patient sufferer, in the poetry he is thoroughly defiant, and anything but patient. Correspondingly he is commended in the prose but rebuked in the poetry. Moreover, the prose folktale indicates that God deals with his people according to their merit, whereas that the entire point of the poetry is that he does not do so – and is not bound to do so. Finally, and most important, the view of why the innocent suffer differs between the two parts of the book: in the prose narrative, suffering comes as a test of faith; in the poetry, suffering remains a mystery that cannot be fathomed or explained.

To deal adequately with the book of Job, then, we need to look at the two parts of the book separately, and explore at greater length its two explanations for the suffering of the innocent.

[i]. As you might imagine, the literature on Job is vast. For introduction to some of the most important critical issues, see the discussions and bibliographies in Collins, Hebrew Bible, 505-17; Coogan, Old Testament, pp. 479-89; and James Crenshaw, “Job, Book of” in Freedman, Anchor Bible Dictionary, vo. 3, pp. 858-68.

Inference to the Best Explanation and Rejecting the Resurrection

Here’s the link to this article by David Kyle Johnson–December 31, 2021

(2021)

[This article was originally published in Socio-Historical Examination of Religion and Ministry, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Summer 2021), pp. 26-52. The version presented here has been slightly modified.]

William Lane Craig has argued that it is rational to believe that God raised Jesus from the dead because the hypothesis that such an event happened provides the best explanation of the available evidence (e.g., the biblical witness and the martyrdom of the apostles).[1] According to Craig, if you consider what an explanation must do—the criteria it should meet—the resurrection hypothesis meets them better than its naturalistic competitors. Robert Cavin and Carlos Colombetti, however, very skillfully refuted his argument by revealing not only the problems with Craig’s criteria and his criteria-based approach, but also how the resurrection hypothesis actually fails to meet the criteria Craig proposed.[2]

Later, in the pages of SHERM Journal, Stephen T. Davis tried to defend Craig’s argument[3], but Cavin and Colombetti (again, in SHERM Journal) not only refuted his argument as well, but fully explained why the resurrection hypothesis cannot be the best explanation.[4] The standard model of physics “entails that God never supernaturally intervenes in the affairs of the universe that lie within its scope”[5], and thus the resurrection hypothesis is necessarily implausible and has low explanatory power. They even go on to give a rigorous Bayesian analysis of why the legend hypothesis—the idea that “the New Testament Easter traditions that relate group appearances of the Risen Jesus did not originate on the basis of eyewitness testimony but arose, rather, as legend”[6]—is a much better explanation of the available evidence than the resurrection hypothesis.

Their argument is devastating for those who claim to believe in the Resurrection because it is the best explanation of the evidence. From start to finish, however, the debate between Craig, Davis, and Cavin and Colombetti is difficult to follow—most definitely for the lay person, and even for some professional philosophers. Not everyone is familiar with the relevant nuances of inference to the best explanation and philosophy of science, and Bayesian analysis can go over the head of even analytically trained philosophers. It is the goal of this essay, therefore, to explain in more easily understandable terms why the resurrection hypothesis cannot be the best explanation for the evidence that those like Craig and Davis offer in its favor. To do so, I am going to use a method of reasoning, a version of inference to the best explanation, I teach to college students every semester—one popularized by Theodore Schick, Jr. and Lewis Vaughn in their textbook How To Think About Weird Things. They call it the SEARCH method. I will explain the criteria it utilizes and how the method works before going on to apply it to the resurrection hypothesis and its competitors.

In doing so, I do not take myself to be breaking new ground, or even presenting an argument that is immune to objection. Indeed, while Cavin and Colombetti would undoubtedly agree with the conclusion of my argument, they would also point to shortcomings of the SEARCH method and argue for the superiority of the Bayesian approach. I would not presume to argue that they are wrong (although, as I will explain, I do not think the shortcomings prevent my argument from establishing its conclusion). But I believe that the following is an argument that the average person, and average philosopher, can more easily wrap their head around—and having such an argument, clearly articulated, is not only useful, but can do nothing but provide further reason to think that Cavin and Colombetti are right. The resurrection hypothesis not only fails to be the best explanation, but it is not even a good one.

Abduction and Inference to the Best Explanation

The procedure for identifying and embracing the best explanation for something is very appropriately named: “inference to the best explanation” (IBE). When employing IBE, one compares multiple possible explanations for something, and then infers (i.e., accepts) what is determined to be the best one. In the literature, IBE is often equated with “abduction,” but as William H. B. Mcauliffe explained in “How did Abduction Get Confused with Inference to the Best Explanation?,” the person who coined the term abduction, C. S. Peirce, did not originally conceive of abduction as IBE.[7]

As Mcauliffe demonstrates, according to Peirce, abduction is the process by which one generates hypotheses or explanations to be tested, considered, or compared. Now, as Harry Frankfurt points out, the process Peirce describes does not actually generate any new ideas; and what Peirce is most concerned with are the criteria by which one can determine which hypotheses we should bother to consider or test (once they have been generated).[8] Peirce did argue that “the only way to discover the principles upon which anything ought to be discovered is to consider what is to be done with the constructed thing after it is constructed”[9], so perhaps “the problem of constructing a good hypothesis is … analogous to the problem of choosing a good hypothesis.”[10] But, strictly speaking, the actual formulation or creation of hypotheses to explain certain phenomena does not really follow a pattern; it must truly be creative, like art.[11] Nevertheless, since some of the criteria Peirce described are also useful for determining which explanation is the best one, later philosophers like Harman[12], Lipton[13], and Thagard[14], folded those criteria into their articulations of IBE, and also used the term “abduction” to refer to IBE.[15]

One shortcoming of IBE is the so-called “best of a bad lot” problem; if the list of hypotheses you are considering does not include the true one, determining which among them is the best cannot reveal the truth.[16] This is where recognizing and developing what Peirce called abduction could be very useful; a process aimed at generating hypotheses that are likely to be true would make “bad lots” less of a threat. Fortunately, however, for our purposes, we do not have to worry about this. Not only are the hypotheses we will consider already generated—they are already discussed in the literature and even anticipated by some of the Gospel authors—but to prove that the belief in the resurrection hypothesis is irrational, all we have to do is find one that is better. It need not even be true. If even one possible explanation that we consider is better than the resurrection hypothesis, we will have shown belief in the Resurrection to be irrational.

In my opinion, the clearest, easiest to understand, and most useful articulation of IBE belongs to Theodore Schick, Jr. and Lewis Vaughn. In their book How To Think About Weird Things, they divide IBE into steps that they call the SEARCH method. State the claim. Examine the evidence for the claim. Consider Alternative hypotheses. Rate, according to the Criteria of adequacy, each Hypothesis.[17] Because I take this to be relatively easy to understand, this is what we shall use. Before we begin, however, it will be useful to clarify each step.

When stating a claim, one needs to be as specific and precise as possible. This will make clearer what evidence should be considered. When evaluating the evidence for the claim, one must determine whether the cited evidence is relevant and then bring to bear all the critical thinking lessons that philosophers should know (and that Schick and Vaughn teach in their book). What is the nature and limit of the evidence? Could the shortcomings of our perception and memory be at work? Are there logical fallacies involved? Are there probabilistic or statistical errors? One must be very careful to not be fooled by bad evidence. Considering alternative hypotheses really involves two steps: stating alternative hypotheses and evaluating the evidence for them as well. A person can state one, or many, but of course, it is most efficient to restrict oneself to the hypotheses that are most likely. And when rating the hypotheses, to figure out which one is the best, one must use the criteria of adequacy.

The criteria of adequacy are what a good explanation should be (or do), by definition. A good explanation should:

be testable: make novel predictions by which the explanation can be falsified.
be fruitful: get the novel predictions it makes right.
be wide-scoping: explain a variety of phenomena without raising unanswerable questions or replacing one unexplained thing with another.
be simple/parsimonious: not make more (especially existential) assumptions than are necessary.
be conservative: cohere with that which we already have good reason to believe (e.g., established scientific knowledge).

Now a good, or even the best explanation, need not always be or do all these things. Indeed, scientific revolutions happen when nonconservative explanations become accepted because they proved themselves to be more testable, fruitful, wide-scoping, and simpler than their “established” competitor. Einstein’s theory of relativity, for example, was not conservative when it was first proposed because it contradicted Newton’s, which was the established theory at the time. But relativity proved itself by being testable, more fruitful,[18], wide-scoping[19], and simple[20] than Newton’s theory. Or take the germ theory of disease. It introduced new entities, and thus was not simple, but it proved itself by successfully predicting things like the efficacy of handwashing[21], vaccines[22], and explaining how diseases spread.

That is also not to say that there cannot be ties. In my opinion, this is why it is currently impossible to delineate between the major interpretations of quantum mechanics. For example, neither David Bohm’s pilot wave theory nor Hugh Everett’s multiverse theory make any new novel predictions; and both seem to have the same explanatory power. But whereas Everett’s multiverse interpretation is not simple (because it requires the existence of multiple universes), Bohm’s interpretation is not conservative (because it violates relativity by requiring faster than light signaling). Which is better? It is a matter of preference. Which do you think is more valuable: simplicity or conservatism?

But the fact that there can be ties does not mean that, when there is not, one explanation is not the best. If you compare competing hypotheses according to the criteria, and one clearly turns out to adhere to them the most, then that is the best explanation and it is irrational to embrace the others. You might refrain from endorsing it, in hopes of an even better one coming along, but that possibility cannot make embracing the worse hypotheses rational. Or, alternately, if one hypothesis does not emerge as the best, but others are clearly demonstrated to be inferior, embracing the inferior one(s) cannot be rational. And as we shall now see, among the proposed explanations for the cited evidence of Jesus’ resurrection, the resurrection hypothesis is the worst. Thus, it cannot be rationally accepted.

State the Claim and Evaluate the Evidence

In the case of Jesus’ resurrection, stating the hypothesis that we need to evaluate first, clearly and precisely, seems easy enough to do: “God supernaturally raised Jesus from the dead.”[23] But Craig also believes that Jesus’ postresurrection body was a “soma pneumatikon” (spirit body image) that was immortal, imperishable, and able to de- and re-materialize. So, to align with Schick’s suggestion that one should state the hypothesis as precisely as possible, it should be stated like this:

The resurrection hypothesis: A first-century Palestinian apocalyptic preacher named Jesus was crucified and then raised from the dead; this was accomplished by the supernatural powers of a supernatural being we now call “God,” who gave him a spiritual body that was immortal, imperishable, and able to de- and re-materialize.

In other words, Jesus’ resurrection happened pretty much as the Bible described. Evaluating the evidence for this claim, however, is a bit more complicated than stating it.

The first piece of evidence is the biblical account itself, and its report that Jesus was crucified, died, was placed in a tomb which was later found empty, and then appeared to the apostles (by, for example, just appearing out of thin air in a room they were in). But this piece of evidence must be rated as low, given that the Bible is in no way a reliable historical document. For example, scholars generally agree that the Old Testament is mostly ahistorical[24]; neither Abraham, nor Moses, or even King David, for example, likely ever existed.[25] The New Testament does not fare much better. Even if one sets aside the (often convincing but unpopular) view that Jesus never existed either, the New Testament is not considered by most biblical scholars to be historically reliable.[26] Indeed, it is especially unreliable when it comes to the details of Jesus’ life. It is full of historical contradictions. The two nativity stories in Luke and Matthew, for example, are impossible to reconcile historically.[27] And the same is true for the different gospels’ accounts of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection.

The latter is worth elaboration. The Gospels say two things about when Jesus was crucified. Mark (Mark 14:12; Mark 15:25) says he was crucified on the day of Passover at the third hour, but John (19:14-16) says it was the day before Passover at the sixth hour.[28] In the synoptic Gospels (Mark 15:23; Matt. 27:48; Luke 23:36), Jesus refuses to drink while on the cross, but in John (19:29-30) he does not refuse. Historically, the Romans usually did not crucify thieves—crucifixion was reserved for enemies of the state—but the synoptics say the men crucified with Jesus were thieves. Additionally, those the Romans did crucify were not taken down and put into a grave but were instead left up to rot and later thrown into a pit.[29] Indeed, the list of discrepancies in the story is vast and numerous.[30] More importantly, for our purposes, discrepancies also exist in the biblical account of the Resurrection.[31] How many people saw the resurrected Jesus, for example? Paul says it was over 500 (1 Corinthians 15:6), but the Gospels never mention this crucial event. Were the women joyful or sad? Could the apostles touch Jesus, or not? Was he recognizable? Did he appear in Galilee or Jerusalem? Different gospels say different things. If two people told you so such wildly conflicting stories about anything, you would know that one is lying, and would not be able to believe either without corroborating evidence.

Such discrepancies are not surprising given that we now know the Gospels were not written by followers of Jesus named Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John right after the events happened—but instead by noneyewitnesses decades after Jesus would have lived.[32] (The first clue was that the Gospels are written in Greek and the apostles and other followers of Jesus would have spoken Aramaic.) Mark was written first, and whoever wrote Matthew and Luke used it as source material, but John was written independently—that is why it is so different and contradictory. Therefore, the resurrection accounts in the Gospels cannot be considered a reliable account of what happened after Jesus’ death because the people who wrote them were not around when Jesus’ resurrection supposedly happened. The Gospel accounts, therefore, do not provide good evidence that a resurrection occurred.[33]

Of course, some have claimed that the Gospels are simply written accounts of oral traditions that were started by the apostles and perfectly preserved by the Christian community. But as Bart Ehrman proves in his book Jesus Before the Gospels[34], there is no way that actually happened.[35] Oral traditions are no different than rumors; all research suggests that they change and are added to drastically as they are passed on. Add to that how unreliable our senses and memories are to begin with, and we have every reason to not take this notion seriously.[36] To put it simply, I would not believe my neighbor if he said he saw someone raise from the dead with his own eyes yesterday—and justifiably so. How much less should I believe noneyewitness accounts passed through multiple languages for 2000 years?

Outside the biblical witness, proponents of the Resurrection will often cite other factors—like the tradition that the apostles died as martyrs for their faith. “Why would they be willing to do that,” the argument goes, “if they were not convinced the Resurrection happened?” But there are two things to say in response.

First, the evidence that the apostles actually died for their faith is poor. In his book, The Fate of the Apostles, Sean McDowell lays out the evidence and argues that (at best) Peter, Paul, James (son of Zebedee), and Jesus’ brother (James) were martyred.[37] But even the evidence he mentions for their martyrdom was written down decades after it would have happened—which means the stories would have been preserved by oral tradition and thus are not reliable. It is just as likely that all such stories are Church traditions that were invented to try to convince skeptics. Indeed, as we shall soon see, Christians confabulating stories to convince skeptics was quite common.

Second, and more importantly, the apostles being convinced that the Resurrection occurred would not be good evidence that it happened—even if they were so convinced that they were willing to die for it.[38] Some people are convinced Elvis still lives, and people in cults die for (demonstrably and obviously) false things they are convinced are true all the time.[39] Again, as we shall soon see, there are many (more likely) reasons the apostles could have been that convinced that Jesus rose, even though he did not.

Something similar could be said about the “success” of Christianity. The fact that Christianity spread and is still thriving today is not a testament to the fact that Jesus indeed rose—any more than the fact that Islam is thriving today is testament to the fact that Muhamad was Allah’s prophet and rode a flying horse named Buraq up to Heaven. Religions succeed or fail primarily because of historical accident (e.g., the conversion of Constantine), not because they are (or are not) rooted in historical events. Besides, to think that something is true because it has been believed by a lot of people for a long time is a doubly fallacious argument: one that combines “appeal to tradition” with “appeal to the masses.”

So the evidence for the resurrection hypothesis is not convincing.

Consider Alternative Hypotheses

To consider an alternative hypothesis is to state it and to evaluate the evidence for and against it. Of course, given how far back in the past the Resurrection would have occurred, no evidence we will consider here will deductively settle the matter. But the discussion will be very useful when comparing the hypothesis to the criteria of adequacy in the next step.

The obvious alternative hypothesis is that Jesus did not actually raise from the dead, but people ended up believing that he did anyway. But that is far from specific, as there are a number of ways that could have happened. So, let us consider the four specific hypotheses that seem to be the most likely.

The lie hypothesis: The apostles lied and said that Jesus rose; they knew he did not but made it seem like he did. The disciples stole his body out of his tomb and buried it somewhere else, so that the women who went to the tomb on Sunday morning would find it empty and conclude that Jesus rose from the dead. People believed them, and the story grew.

The best reason to doubt this hypothesis is the suggestion that the disciples were martyred; although it’s not impossible, it seems unlikely that they would be willing to die for a lie that they knowingly told. But, as was mentioned above, the evidence for the suggestion that the disciples died as martyrs is unreliable, and so this cannot be a reason to dismiss this hypothesis.

The best evidence for this hypothesis is the fact that the author of Matthew felt it necessary to try to knock it down.

While the women were on their way, some of the guards went into the city and reported to the chief priests everything that had happened. When the chief priests had met with the elders and devised a plan, they gave the soldiers a large sum of money, telling them, “You are to say, ‘His disciples came during the night and stole him away while we were asleep.’ If this report gets to the governor, we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble.” So the soldiers took the money and did as they were instructed. And this story has been widely circulated among the Jews to this very day. (Matthew 28:11-15, NIV)

Given the low historical value of the Gospels, and since there is no way the author of Matthew could have been privy to this secret meeting[40], these verses cannot be good evidence against this theory. Indeed, clearly the idea that this meeting took place was invented by the author to “shoot down” this alternative explanation. As the author makes clear, “the disciples stole the body” was a retort that early Christians often heard when they tried to convince people that Jesus rose from the dead. So this passage actually provides at least some reason to think this hypothesis is true.

At the same time, however, the mere fact people were saying the disciples stole the body is not good evidence that they did. It probably just occurred to people as a better explanation for the stories about an empty tomb. And we will have to wait until later in this process to determine whether it actually is.

One thing this does demonstrate, however, is that elements that seem to have been added to the story—like secret meetings and the guards and stone in front of the tomb—which were clearly designed to “head off” objections or alternate explanations, do not actually provide good evidence against the alternative explanations in question (and thus for the resurrection hypothesis). Yes, it is possible that there was a giant boulder in front of Jesus’ tomb, but it is at least equally possible (indeed it is more likely) that such notions were fabricated by someone in response to people saying that the apostles lied. As Christian origins scholar James Tabor put it, “What is clearly the case is that neither Matthew nor Luke are relating history, but writing defenses against charges that are being raised by opponents who are denying the notion that Jesus literally rose from the dead.”[41]

The second alternative explanation would be along these lines.

The coma hypothesis: Jesus did not die on the cross, but was sent into a temporary coma due to his wounds. This was mistaken for death, and he later awoke and left his tomb, leaving it empty.

This hypothesis is sometimes chidingly called the swoon theory, but the condition described would be much more serious than Jesus simply passing out.

The evidence usually cited against it is actually, once again, some evidence for it: the part of the crucifixion story where the soldiers at the cross do not break Jesus’ legs to hasten his death, but instead stick a spear in his side to confirm he already died. This bit appears nowhere else but in the Gospel of John, the last and least historically reliable gospel to be written. It is, therefore, more likely that it was added to the story as a way to head off reasons people were giving at the time to doubt the resurrection hypothesis. After all, even given the story they were told, people at the time had good reason to suspect that Jesus did not actually die on the cross. It usually took most who were crucified days to die, and even those who were nailed to a cross would likely live up to 24 hours; and even according to those telling the story, Jesus was only on a cross for a few hours.[42] Moreover, it is not like Roman guards usually stuck around and made sure people who were crucified actually died; again, the crucified were usually just left to die (and then tossed into a mass grave if wild animals did not get to them first).

One might argue that comas are never as short as 36 hours (roughly the time that passes between Friday evening and Sunday morning). But (a) I was unable to find any evidence that comas cannot last this long, and (b) this hypothesis does not require that the time between the crucifixion and finding the empty tomb was 36 hours. It could have actually taken much longer, and the “3 days” part of the story was added later.

Evidence that such things happened in first-century Palestine is bolstered by the fact that they still happen today. Consider the many stories from the modern world where even medical professionals thought someone was dead when they were not[43]—like 29-year-old Gonzalo Montoya Jiménez, who was declared dead by 3 separate doctors before later awakening and completely recovering (even after being in cold storage).[44] How much more common must mistaking a coma (or illness) for death have been in the ancient world? How much more unqualified (than modern medical doctors) to tell whether someone was really dead must the illiterate apostles have been? The fact that Jesus’ inerudite apostles thought Jesus had died and then been raised would not be a valid reason to think that he had. (Notice that Christians would be very quick to embrace this hypothesis to explain non-Christian resurrection stories, like that of Mr. V. Radhakrishna.)[45]

The coma hypothesis does raise questions, however. For example, if Jesus did not die, and walked away from the tomb, what happened to him afterwards? Well, it is possible such an event would have convinced Jesus himself that he had risen from the dead. If so, things could have unfolded basically as the Gospels suggest: the women found the empty tomb, Jesus appeared to them and the apostles, he and they believed he had risen, and he sent them to convert the nations. But it is just as likely that Jesus simply went on to die of his wounds somewhere else, and his body was never found or identified. (It would likely have been eaten by animals and left unrecognizable.) And then the merely empty tomb convinced the apostles that he had risen.

But if Jesus did die (whether on the cross or after) but did not rise, this makes one wonder about all those postdeath appearances. How do we account for those? This brings us to our last two alternate hypotheses: the imposter hypothesis and the legend hypothesis. Let us deal with the former first.

The imposter hypothesis: Jesus died but the apostles came to believe that he rose because they came to believe that a different (live) person was Jesus.

There are a number of ways this could be true, so this hypothesis is not as specific as it should be; but the different possibilities are all about equally likely, so that should not matter for our purposes here.

On this hypothesis, the disciples may not have even known where Jesus was buried. Again, victims of crucifixion were usually just thrown in mass graves. If so, perhaps other people later claimed to be the resurrected Jesus, and without a way to prove them wrong with a body, people (including the apostles) believed it. After all, apocalyptic preachers were common at the time; and claiming to be Jesus could have been an easy way to gain a following—like gurus in India today often claim to be reincarnations of Vishnu, or others (like Texas’ David Koresh and Siberia’s Sergey Torop) claim to be Jesus.[46] Such persons could have easily excused away why they looked different. “The Resurrection changed me.” But perhaps they did not need to because Jesus had a doppelganger (or even twin brother) that people mistook for Jesus, after his death. We know that twins exist, and even unrelated doppelgangers are not that uncommon.[47] Any of these possibilities could very easily make sense of the strange biblical story (from Luke 24) where two apostles, on the road to Emmaus, did not quite recognize the person they were talking to “as Jesus” until after he was gone.

On this view, all the subsequent details—like the empty tomb, and doubting Thomas story where Thomas sticks his fingers in Jesus’ side, which were obviously later added to the story to squelch doubts—were fabricated after the fact. But this is not unreasonable at all. As we have already seen (and biblical scholars agree), those who passed them on, whether in written or oral form, embellished the Gospel stories readily, and for this very purpose. And the doubting Thomas story only appears in the latest and least historical of the Gospels: John. But that brings to mind the possibility that the entire story was fabricated, and leads us to our final hypothesis:

The legend hypothesis: The idea that a man named Jesus rose from the dead is a complete fabrication, a legend that arose in 1st-century Palestine—one that people, like the apostle Paul, came to believe, and that later inspired the writings of the Gospels, and the religion of Christianity.

One way that this hypothesis would be true is if Jesus never existed at all, and his entire story is legend—especially the part about his crucifixion and resurrection, which bears certain resemblance to the stories of other resurrected deities. On this view, Christianity was essentially invented by Paul, which accounts for why he (and not any eyewitness) was the first to write about it. Although it is not mainstream, a number of scholars have argued for this idea; as such, all the evidence they present would be evidence for this theory.[48]

The (arguably) more conservative interpretation of the legend hypothesis, however, is that an apocalyptic preacher named Jesus did exist, and was crucified and died—but that his followers were so distraught as a result that they simply began to believe that he had resurrected out of despair. Because of this belief, “sightings” occurred and oral legends emerged—and they, in turn, were believed by Paul[49], later embellished by the Gospel writers (who, again, were not apostles), and believed by the early Church.

That such a thing can and does happen, especially in cults of personality, is not uncommon. Indeed, there are modern-day examples. It could have been that the disciples, much like fans of Elvis, despite the obvious evidence, simply could not accept his death and began to believe they saw him alive as a result. Such rumors spreading (especially among illiterate first-century Palestinians) would have made “sightings” more frequent, and easily laid the groundwork for a widespread belief that Jesus was still alive. From this, the stories about an empty tomb, his subsequent appearances, and even his early miracles, could have easily emerged.

Direct evidence that any of these things happened is, of course, as impossible to obtain as direct evidence that a resurrection occurred. However, there is one bit of indirect evidence that favors the legend hypothesis over all the others: the amount of time it took for the belief in Jesus’ resurrection to take hold, to be professed in writing (by Paul), and to later be written in the Gospels. On the lie, coma, and imposter hypotheses, belief in Jesus’ resurrection would have risen immediately because the evidence (faulty as it was) would have been obvious and available. The empty tomb, the postcoma Jesus, or the imposter, would have been right there! You would have therefore expected a written account of it within a year, and for the Church to have preserved such an important document.[50] As it stands, we do not get even a bare-bones statement of the Resurrection until the writings of Paul, which were written at best 20 years later (ca. 50 CE), and the subsequent accounts proceed just as legends do: they become more grandiose over time.[51]

This last point is worth some elaboration. From Paul we just get a creed: “That Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures” (1 Corinthians 15:3-4, NASB).[52] He mentions earlier in the letter that Jesus died by crucifixion (1 Corinthians 2:1-2), but that is it.[53] It is not until twenty years later (ca. 70 CE, at least 40 years after Jesus would have died) that the author of Mark adds details to the crucifixion (Ch. 15) and resurrection story (Ch. 16). But even then, we do not get much; after the crucifixion, Jesus never physically appears again. The women just meet a young man who tells them Jesus was raised.[54] Not until still another 20 years later (ca. 90 CE), after all the eyewitnesses would have been dead, do we get Matthew’s and Luke’s accounts about the crucifixion and personal appearances made by Jesus to eyewitnesses, which add even more (divergent) details to the resurrection story. And then, as much as 20 years after that (ca. 110), we get John’s gospel, which not only neglects many details in Luke’s and Matthew’s gospels, but adds many more of its own. This is exactly how legends develop; it decidedly is not how history is accurately preserved.

Indeed, James Tabor has argued that how the stories developed indicates that the earliest Christians did not believe that Jesus was physically raised and physically appeared to the disciples, but instead that Jesus was “‘lifted up’ or ‘raised up’ to the right hand of God,” and that his followers merely experienced “epiphanies of Jesus once they returned to Galilee after the eight-day Passover festival and had returned to their fishing in despair.”[55] Only decades later, after all the original followers had died, did the belief that Jesus physically resurrected become common.[56] This comports precisely with the legend hypothesis.

According to the Criteria of Adequacy, Rate Each Hypothesis

We have five hypotheses: resurrection, lie, coma, imposter, and legend. The fact that there is no way to directly test any of these hypotheses, since they deal with far, distant beliefs and actions of first-century Palestinians, might lead one to think that we are forced to just shrug our shoulders and say we cannot know what happened. “You cannot prove one hypothesis over the other, so it is just a matter of faith.” But there are two important responses here. First, knowledge does not require proof. If one hypothesis can be shown to be much more likely than the others, belief in it will at least be justified, if not be knowledge. Second, knowing what happened is not the issue here. The question is whether the resurrection hypothesis is, as Davis and Craig suggest, the best explanation; and we can determine that even if we are not able to directly test any of the hypotheses, or even know exactly what happened.

We can do so because testability and fruitfulness—the only criteria that deal with whether a hypothesis makes correct, novel, observable predictions—are only two of the five criteria of adequacy. We can still use the other three: scope, simplicity, and conservatism. If I go downstairs to find my TV missing, but have no video surveillance or way to lift fingerprints, I can do no testing… But I can still know that “I was robbed” is a better explanation than “a ghost took my TV.” Why? Because the former is simpler, more conservative, and has wider scope. The former does not require ghosts to exist, does not contradict the laws of physics and facts of neuroscience, and does not raise unanswerable questions about how nonmaterial objects can move TVs. We can do something very similar with the above five hypotheses.

That said, testability and fruitfulness are still somewhat relevant. Although you cannot test any of the hypotheses in a lab—as I mentioned in the previous section—on the legend hypothesis, one would expect the development of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection story to develop a certain way: to become more elaborate over decades. That type of development is not what to expect on the resurrection, lie, coma, or imposter hypotheses. Since that is what happened, the legend hypothesis is more fruitful. Indeed, since such hypotheses have been around for centuries, but only until relatively recently (historically speaking) did we date and order the letters of Paul and the Gospels, and discover that the Gospels were written decades later by noneyewitnesses, we could even say that the legend hypothesis made a novel prediction that turned out to be right.

The simplicity of the hypotheses is much easier to compare. The resurrection hypothesis requires the existence of a supernatural entity operating with supernatural powers. That is two enormous, grandiose assumptions that none of the other hypotheses have to make. Thus, it is the least simple. (And the fact that it says Jesus was given a unique spiritual body makes it even less simple.) Yes, the lie, coma, imposter, and legend hypotheses also make certain kinds of assumptions—but they do not assume the existence of an entirely new kind of force, entity, or body. We know that lies, comas, imposters, and legends exist. Indeed, scholars already know that additions were made to Jesus’ story, how legends develop, and that misdiagnoses of death readily occurred before the advent of modern medicine.

Granted, the imposter hypothesis requires the existence of an imposter/doppelganger, and the lie hypothesis requires a bit of a conspiracy[57]; and that does make them less simple than the coma or legend hypothesis. But even the imposter and lie hypotheses are simpler than the resurrection hypothesis. At least we know that doppelgangers, twins, and conspiracies can and do exist. If Princess Diana appeared on TV tomorrow claiming to be back from the dead, saying that she had faked her death or had a long-lost twin would both be simpler explanations than, say, “aliens resurrected her corpse with advanced technology.” None of this entails that the other hypotheses we have considered are contrary to belief in God. Indeed, even if we granted that God exists, since such explanations do not require God or his supernatural powers to exist, by definition, they are simpler than the resurrection hypothesis.

The scope of the hypotheses is also easy to compare. The resurrection hypothesis has little scope because it invokes the inexplicable: an infinite, incomprehensible being who uses unknown, un-understandable powers, to create a body made of an inexplicable substance that has mysterious magic powers. As Schick might point out, this is a bit like trying to explain why a bridge collapsed by saying “a mysterious gremlin zapped it with a magical ray gun.” Such explanations actually explain nothing. (Notice that the alien explanation would not help you build a more stable bridge next time). To paraphrase Plato, to say “the gods did it” is not to offer an explanation, but to just offer an excuse for not having one.

The legend hypothesis, however, has very wide scope because it can explain not only the evidence cited for the Resurrection, but a vast number of other phenomena, like other legends, and things like Elvis and Hitler sightings.[58] It explains the contradictions in the biblical accounts of the Resurrection, and why those accounts were written so much later than the events they purport to relay by noneyewitnesses. It could even explain a host of other religious beliefs about the Resurrection of other supposedly dead persons (although the lie, coma, and imposter hypotheses could also explain those as well).[59]

The legend hypothesis is also monumentally conservative because it conflicts with nothing that we know is true. We know that (and how and why) false beliefs, even in the face of contrary evidence, can arise—even the belief that someone who has died is still living (again, like Elvis and Hitler).[60] It coheres with what we know about how and who the Romans crucified, how long it took those they crucified to die, and how the Romans disposed of their bodies. It even aligns with what Bart Ehrman revealed about how unreliable group memories and “oral traditions” are. (Even the lie, coma, and imposter theories require the unlikely assumption that the stories about Jesus’ “resurrection” were reliably preserved orally for decades.)

Most notably, however, all but the resurrection hypothesis aligns with perhaps one of the most established facts there is: the dead stay dead. And this brings us back around to Cavin and Colombetti. They argue that, regardless of whether God exists, the resurrection hypothesis is contrary to the Standard Model of physics. Defenders of the Resurrection, like Davis and Craig, argue that the Standard Model comes with a proviso: the laws operate as usual unless there is divine intervention. They thus argue that the Resurrection is not scientifically impossible. But, as Cavin and Colombetti very skillfully explain, such a proviso is either superfluous or “renders [the] laws untestable metaphysical pseudo-science.”[61] Consequently, the Standard Model “entails that God never supernaturally intervenes in the affairs of the universe that lie within its scope.”[62] And that would include raising Jesus from the dead.[63]

In other words, the Standard Model of physics—along with all of the research that has established it over the years—is in direct conflict with the resurrection hypothesis. The Standard Model thus entails that the Resurrection did not happen. This means that the resurrection hypothesis is practically as nonconservative as a hypothesis can be—not only less conservative than the lie, coma, imposter, and legend hypotheses, but even less conservative than creationism, geocentrism, and the flat Earth theory. It is contrary to all of science.

The Verdict

This, by all accounts, is one reason Cavin and Colombetti’s paper is so devastating to the resurrection hypothesis; it is its death nail. The unconservative nature of the resurrection hypothesis that Cavin and Colombetti reveal puts an evidential burden on it that it cannot overcome. If the resurrection hypothesis could prove itself—by being vastly more fruitful, simpler, and wider scoping than its competitors—it might have a fighting chance. As we have seen, that is how unconservative scientific theories win scientific revolutions. But (also as we have seen), the resurrection hypothesis is none of those things; indeed, by its very nature, it cannot be. It invokes inexplicable entities, acting in the unobservable and inexplicable ways; it is untestable, cannot be fruitful, has virtually no explanatory power (i.e., scope), and is, by definition, not simple. Even the ridiculous idea that Jesus had a long-lost twin brother who just happened to show up three days after Jesus was crucified would be a better explanation.

But, of course, as we saw above, the most likely explanation is the legend hypothesis. It is not only simpler than the resurrection hypothesis, but is also simpler than the lie, coma, and imposter hypotheses. It was more successful in predicting what we discovered about how Jesus’ story evolved over time, is more consistent with what we know about the reliability of oral traditions, and what the early Christians seemed to have believed. It is therefore, by definition, the best explanation of the evidence that Davis, Craig, and others cite for the resurrection hypothesis. That does not necessarily mean that the legend hypothesis is true; perhaps there is an even better explanation out there that we have not considered. But it certainly is better than the resurrection hypothesis, and thus belief in the resurrection hypothesis is irrational.

As I mentioned in the introduction, Cavin and Colombetti would undoubtedly point out the shortcomings of the SEARCH method and argue for the superiority of their Bayesian approach. For example, the SEARCH method does not show how the criteria of adequacy “fit” together or when and how one criterion should take precedence over another. What do you do in in case of ties, where one hypothesis is simpler, but another has wider scope? By factoring in conservatism and simplicity into prior probability, and scope and fruitfulness being a factor of Bayesian likelihood, the Bayesian approach can potentially answer these kinds of questions.[64] But this shortcoming of the SEARCH method in no way affects the strength of the argument I have presented here because there is not a tie. The legend hypothesis is the best explanation is every respect; and the resurrection hypothesis is the worst in every respect. There is no tie for the Bayesian approach to break.

But none of this should be surprising. Supernatural explanations never fare well against their competitors because, by their very nature, they do not meet the criteria of adequacy—they do the exact opposite of what good explanations must, by definition, do.[65] They invoke inexplicable, extra, supernatural assumptions that are contrary to the laws of science and are thus, by definition, nonsimple, unconservative, and cannot have scope. Indeed, Schick has argued that “God did it” can never be an adequate explanation of anything[66], and I have argued that the same is true for “a miracle occurred.”[67] Since the Resurrection would have been a miracle caused by God, it is no wonder that it fails so monumentally at being a good explanation.

See article for notes and references.

Evolution by Natural Selection Better Explains All Current Life

Chapter 12 of John Loftus’ book, The End of Christianity, is titled: “Neither Life nor the Universe Appear Intelligently Designed.” It’s written by Richard Carrier, a brilliant scholar known worldwide. Here is an excerpt from Carrier’s essay.

Bool: The End of Christianity, edited by John W. Loftus

Ever since Charles Darwin proposed the theory over a century and a half ago, science has multiply confirmed in countless ways that the apparent design of all current life is wholly explained by a process of evolution by natural selection carried out on a vast time scale.10 And that is not NID [nonterrestrial intelligent design/AKA God]. All of this evidence is vast, and vastly improbable on any other theory, to the point that now it’s simply an established fact in our background knowledge. So the complexity of current life shouldn’t even make anyone’s list of candidates for NID. Nevertheless, antiestablishment diehards persist in insisting the contrary.

I’ll set aside ignoramuses who don’t know what they’re talking about and don’t even try to know (like young-earth creationists who think the Kentucky Creation Museum isn’t lying to them), and consider only actual scholars with PhDs in some relevant field who insist some current life proves NID. All their arguments amount now to various iterations of the same general claim: that there are at least a few biological structures that can’t have been formed even by evolution, and thus must have been formed by NID. Their argument is covertly Bayesian: they are saying the probability that that evidence would exist on a hypothesis of evolution is so small (whereas the probability that it would exist on a hypothesis of design is so high), that this overcomes any prior probability to the contrary. The most famous and representative example is Michael Behe’s claim that the flagellar propulsion system of the E. coli bacterium is irreducibly complex and thus cannot have evolved.11

These critics know (and when honest, admit) that many actual instances of very elegant and complex design in living things are not the product of intelligence but are fully and most credibly explained as the outcomes of gradual evolution by nonintelligent selection.12 Their existence is thus highly probable on the hypothesis of evolution, and in fact routinely far more probable than on NID—not only when considering their design flaws (which are fully explicable on evolution but less so on NID), but also considering what is far more commonly observed: evidence of DNA ancestry. That God would allow common descent and just “tweak” DNA here and there to build new parts and systems and species out of what’s already there, and piecemeal bit by bit over vast spaces of time, is certainly “possible” but is not even remotely what we would normally expect. The probability that a god would effect his designs that way, instead of any number of countless more direct and obvious ways (like simply creating all life tout court right at once, or just generating new species sui generis when it suited him), is certainly low, whereas the probability that this is what we would observe if evolution explained it all is fully 100 percent. Even Behe cannot deny this.

But the evidence weighs even more strongly against NID. Because our “evidence” includes the fact that life began as a single-celled organism, which continued evolving for over three billion years before it ever struck upon the notion of combining forces with other single cells to make a multicellular life-form. Once life chanced upon that innovation, all sorts of new opportunities arose, and life exploded into many different pathways of multicellular organization, yet even that took over a hundred million years to develop and finally settle on a few best patterns. It took hundreds of millions of years more for these rudimentary life-forms to evolve into the much more developed forms we see all around us now, and fully five hundred million years altogether for this meandering evolution of multicellular organisms to finally chance upon becoming a human being. And throughout this process, an initially simple chemistry of relatively common chemicals (just four nucleotide molecules) underlies the entire process with purely mechanical computer programs (strings of DNA) running everything and, as a result, frequently crashing or malfunctioning and acquiring bugs and garbage code and being copied incorrectly, and so on, all without any established sign of any intelligent programmer being around to fix or prevent all this, or even tending it in any way at all.

If there is no NID, all this is the only known way life could exist at all, the only known way we could exist at all. There is no other pathway by which random chance and natural forces could go from commonplace chemistry to human beings. Thus, given that we exist (which is a well-established fact in our background knowledge), the probability that we would observe the history and structure of life to be this way if evolution is how we got here is virtually 100 percent. But if NID caused life, then this is not the only known way life could exist. Quite the contrary, there are countless other ways life could exist and be structured and tended—not least being the most obvious: instantaneous creation of uniform bodies free of needless imperfections. Unless you can prove that no “very powerful self-existent being who creates things by design” would ever create life in any other way (in any other way) than exactly the same way that happens to be exactly the only way it would be done if there were no “very powerful self-existent being who creates things by design” to begin with, you must concede that the probability that such a God would do it that way, as opposed to some other, is less than 100 percent. Indeed, quite a lot less.

We must ask, for example, why plants and animals are constructed from colonies of single-celled organisms rather than uniform tissues. Evolution makes sense of the accumulation of cooperating cells, because any other pathway to current life is absurdly improbable. But if life is intelligently designed, why did the designer need to build tissues out of cells, each one identical to an autonomous single-celled organism, complete with a full set of DNA, merely programmed to act like it’s part of a system of many such cells together? And why such a slow, gradual process of development? Why have microbes inhabited the planet six times longer than multicelled plants and animals? Not only as opposed to all life appearing at once (again the most obvious thing we should expect on NID), but even the relative timeline makes no sense: again, single-celled life has been here, evolving, six times longer than all other life. As a product of NID, this makes next to no sense at all. God doesn’t need to wait. He has no thumbs to twiddle. But as a product of evolution, this is exactly what we must expect to see: because multicellular life then requires such an advanced development of cellular machinery, only an extremely long period of evolution could get life to that stage, thereby making multicellular organisms possible. Thus all this evidence is 100 percent expected on evolution. But its probability on NID is nowhere near that.

The nail in the coffin is Behe’s ill-advised emphasis on the flagellum of the E. coli bacterium. That flagellum actually belongs to lethal varieties of E. coli, an infamously deadly pathogen. We also have benevolent forms of E. coli in our guts, but even that becomes deadly if it gets into our bloodstream. Since the flagellum Behe says must have been intelligently designed is what gives this bacteria the ability to move around, it actually greatly magnifies its lethality to humans. In fact, that’s pretty much all it does—which means that’s what it’s for. In other words, Behe is essentially saying that someone genetically engineered bacteria specifically to kill us. This should be extremely alarming. If Behe wasn’t so obsessed with “liking God” for no good reason, he would be lobbying Congress to form a national defense plan against the terrorist threat he just discovered. We should be mobilizing to identify and protect ourselves from this unknown enemy filling the earth with deviously engineered weapons of mass destruction. That’s what any rational person would conclude from making such a discovery. But more to the present point, we must ask, why do bacteria even exist at all? Why have diseases of any sort, much less lethal ones so small we can’t even see them to defend ourselves? Evolution makes this observation 100 percent expected. The God hypothesis does not make it 100 percent expected—as if we could deduce with absolute certainty from the premise “there is a very powerful self-existent being who creates things by design” that “that being would try to kill us with genetically engineered bioweapons” (and yet still not do a very good job at it).

Behe would respond by insisting that, nevertheless, the existence of the flagellum is just too improbable on the assumption that evolution produced it. But it isn’t. And he hasn’t shown it to be. Because to this very day, he has never checked. He always counts up the parts of the machine itself, yet neglects to mention that the probability of those parts existing in that arrangement is fully 100 percent…given the arrangement of the DNA that codes for its construction (because the chemistry that ensues always produces that result mechanically from its coded input, no special intelligence required). And he can’t know if that code is improbable if he never even bothers to find out what it is. He has never engaged any scientific research to locate that code or determine its length or complexity. He has done nothing to find out if the genes comprising that code also already do other things in the same bacterium besides build the flagellum. He has done nothing to locate all the correlating genes in other microbes, microbes that also have flagella and microbes that don’t (as well as duplicate ancestral genes in the same microbe)—to see, for example, if there is any evidence of stepwise evolution in those genes across species, both in the ongoing evolution of the flagellum and in its evolution from prior organs or functions. He has never tried knocking out any of the genes or nucleotides in that code to see what happens or changing them to see how much variation is possible while still producing flagella or what such variations cause to happen other than the construction of flagella (which could be a clue to what that flagellum evolved from).

The fact of the matter is, the bacterial flagellum, though composed of barely thirty parts, is actually six times more evolved than the human hand (having had three billion years to our hand’s mere half billion), which is composed of billions of parts. Yet scientists have reconstructed a very obvious and well-confirmed pathway of small stepwise evolution from simple amorphous appendages to fully complex hands. If we can get to a billion intricately arranged parts from just one, using miniscule random steps, why does Behe think we can’t get to just thirty? Since there has been a vastly longer span of time for bacteria to evolve highly efficient organs like the flagellum, which, again, are actually vastly simpler than the organs we’ve evolved in just half a billion years, Behe has a long way to go before he can prove this couldn’t have happened. Thus, in actual fact, there is no evidence of his irreducible complexity. Because Behe has never even tried to find any, much less actually done so. No one has.13 So we’re left with all that other evidence, which is evidence we actually do have. And yet on any one of those points just surveyed, and far more so on all of them together, the probability that we would have the evidence we actually have is effectively 100 percent if evolution is true, but vanishingly small if NID is true.

Certainly, no rational person can honestly believe the latter probability is anything above 50 percent. There is simply no way the odds are “50-50” that “a very powerful self-existent being who creates things by design” would create current life that way, exactly the same way evolution would on its own, rather than any other way that’s far more sensible and expected. Yet that entails the Bayesian conclusion that the probability that God intelligently designed current life cannot be any higher than 15 percent (and is almost certainly a great deal less than that).14 That means no rational person can believe the probability that God intelligently designed current life is any better than 1 in 6. Which means every rational person must conclude God probably didn’t do that. Current life thus does not appear to be intelligently designed.

Sean Carroll–Should Science Even Talk to Religion?

Life after Death: Examining the Evidence by D. Victor J. Stenger

I recently read the above-titled essay in The End of Christianity (here’s the link to the book on Amazon).

Here’s the book’s Amazon abstract: In this successor to his critically acclaimed anthology, The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails, a former minister and now leading atheist spokesperson has assembled a stellar group of respected scholars to continue the critique of Christianity begun in the first volume. Contributors include Victor Stenger, Robert Price, Hector Avalos, Richard Carrier, Keith Parsons, David Eller, and Taner Edis. Loftus is also the author of the best-selling Why I Became an Atheist: A Former Preacher Rejects Christianity. Taken together, the Loftus trilogy poses formidable challenges to claims for the rationality of the Christian faith. Anyone with an interest in the philosophy of religion will find this compilation to be intellectually stimulating and deeply thought provoking.

Here’s how Stenger’s essay begins:

INTRODUCTION

Dinesh D’Souza is a well-known right-wing policy analyst and author who recently has taken on the role of Christian apologist. He has a degree in English from Dartmouth. From 1985 to 1987, he was editor of Policy Review, a conservative journal published by the Heritage Foundation, now part of the Hoover Institution. He served as a policy adviser to the Reagan administration until 1988 and followed this with stints as a fellow for the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institution. D’Souza has summed up the cause of Christianity with books, speeches, and high-profile debates with famous atheists such as Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Peter Singer, Michael Shermer, Dan Barker, and John Loftus. His recent books include What’s So Great About Christianity1 and—the primary reference for this essay—Life After Death: The Evidence? In Life After Death, D’Souza insists that he is making the case for an afterlife purely on the basis of science and reason and not relying on any spooky stuff. He promises “no ghosts, no levitations, no exorcisms, no mediums, no conversations with the dead” and a case that “is entirely based on reasoned argument and mainstream scholarship.”3 Although he does not always stick to this promise, he does give a good summary of arguments for life after death, some of which I had not heard before. So the book provides a framework from which to discuss both evidentiary claims and claims that rely more on extrapolations from observed facts. D’Souza revels in his role as a “Christian cage fighter,” challenging “the honest and thoughtful atheist to consider the possibility of being wrong, and…open his mind to persuasion by rational argument.”4 I am perfectly happy to accept that challenge. Life after death can be identified with the ancient notion that the human mind is not purely a manifestation of material forces in the brain but has a separate, immaterial component called the soul that survives the death of the brain along with the rest of the body. This is a hypothesis that can be scientifically tested. Evidence for its validity could be provided by a verifiable glimpse of a world beyond obtained while communicating with the dead or during a religious experience. All the believer claiming such knowledge has to do is provide some knowledge that neither she nor anyone else could have previously known and have that information later confirmed. Let us investigate whether such evidence has been produced.

Hopefully, it’s obvious that my purpose here is to whet your appetite to dig deeper into this/these subjects, which means to ‘read-to-death’ any false positions you may hold.