While I was in the process of writing my 2016 book, Ten Tough Problems in Christian Belief, I set up a Facebook page to promote it. When the book was published, I did weekly paid boosts to help sales. I specified the target markets, e.g.. atheists, secular, humanist. Even so—don’t ask me how—my boosts showed up on Christian Facebook pages. What horrible reactions! None of the enraged Christians showed the least interest in engaging in the issues I raised. It was all hate and hasty conclusions, e.g., you were never a real Christian, you’re a terrible person, you’re going to hell. I eventually gave up on the paid boosts. So I guess the Christians won that round.
I also resolved never to go onto Christian blogs or websites to advocate atheism. This would be akin to me walking into a church on Sunday morning, going up to the pulpit and arguing with the preacher. Among other things, this would be bad manners.
But does this mean that Christians arguing with atheists on the Debunking Christianity Blog is bad manners? No, not at all.
However, there are a few Standards of Honesty that should be observed, respected. On 11 August, I published an article here, “My overdosing on religion was becoming a serious problem.” I offered my comments on a 2016 essay by Josiah Hesse, in which he confessed the agonies he suffered because of childhood indoctrination, in an apocalyptic Christian cult; it had been a brutal experience. This prompted a Christian apologist—I assume—RosAnarch, to dive in with very long comments, which provoked heated exchanges with regular followers of this blog. To date, there have been 209 comments. I wondered what Standards of Honesty should apply.
Standard of Honesty One: Don’t remain anonymous
Anyone who wants to take on a major role as expert and critic should identify themselves. Why hide behind a pseudonym? Especially since being a defender of religion is not, in the current climate, dangerous. Why RosAnarch instead of your name? Who are you, what are your credentials and your profession? What Christian brand do you represent—if indeed you are an apologist? If I were to walk into that church on a Sunday morning to argue with the preacher, I’d state my name and credentials: Ex-clergy atheist, nine years a Methodist pastor, PhD in Biblical Studies. My business card, which I give to anyone who seems interested, reads David Madison, Atheist Author and Advocate.
Standard of Honesty Two: Address the primary point of an article, i.e., avoid diversionary tactics.
The point of my 11 August article was that early childhood indoctrination—these days called grooming—had done considerable damage to Josiah Hesse. RosAnarch set out to show that I was misrepresenting religion, and cited studies showing that evils can derive as well from folks who are not religious at all. How can there be any debate about that? Greed, territoriality, lust for power, and just plain being terrible people has caused so much evil and suffering. But when you add fervent conviction that there is a god justifying horrible acts,the evil can be intensified. In the 11 August article I mentioned the Crusades, and anti-Semitism fueled by the gospel of John and Martin Luther’s deranged rants against the Jews. For the role of religion in rage against Jews, see especially Hector Avalos’ essay, “Atheism Was Not the Cause of the Holocaust,” in The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails, edited by John Loftus.
“…pitched Christians against Christians. Roman Catholicism and Protestant Calvinism figured prominently in the opposing sides of this conflict…Estimates show that one-third of the entire population of Germany was killed…we’re talking about a Christian bloodbath.” (The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails, p. 194)
But enough of this diversion. My article was about the harm done by Christian grooming. Even if Sunday School, catechism, and parental coaching don’t cause the extreme damage that Josiah Hesse endured, what do the clergy construe as a positive outcome? They’re delighted if the children in their charge grow up accepting a bundle of ancient superstitions. Christian theology is grounded in the brutal, rampaging god of the Old Testament—with little improvement in the New Testament. Required animal sacrifices in the ancient scriptures were replaced—after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE—by a single human sacrifice, as a way to get right with god. Some Christian theologians added the ghoulish idea that eating the flesh and drinking the blood of the human sacrifice was proper ritual for gaining eternal life. That is, magic potions. The apostle Paul added magic spells, e.g. Romans 10:9. If you believe—and say it—that the human sacrifice rose from the dead, you’ll be saved.
How in the world does accepting this bundle of superstitions help people function in our world today? I suspect many of them just park it in the backs of their minds, and get on with life. And if any of them were asked for evidence to verify what their clergy/parents had taught them, they would be at a loss. Their response might be, “Gee, isn’t it in the Bible?”
I recommend reading Josiah Hesse’s article, to get a full grasp of what he went through. That was the damage done by religion I hoped to convey.
On the issue of damage caused by religion, there are historical realities that it is helpful to recall—and difficult to dismiss. Theologians have found it necessary to knock the rough edges off the god depicted in the Bible, and in their flights of speculation and fantasy, they came to portray their god as all-powerful, caring, loving—and in the bargain—aware of everything that goes on with every human. It takes a great deal of gerrymandering to make this god look good. In the face of so much suffering—genetic diseases, plagues, mental illness, very high infant mortality rates for millennia—it’s indeed a great mystery that a wise, competent god neglected to give humanity crucial information that could have helped enormously. We have a Bible—more than a thousand pages of it—with no information on why we get sick, and how to prevent it.
In fact, there are Bible texts that are quite misleading. In the famous story of the Jesus healing the paralytic who had been lowered through the roof to reach Jesus, we find this Jesus-script:
“Which is easier: to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Stand up and take your mat and walk’? But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”—he said to the paralytic—“I say to you, stand up, take your mat, and go to your home.” (Mark 2:9-11)
The concept here is that sin causes illness. And at the time of the Black Plague in the 14th century, this idea provoked extreme behavior. Barbara Tuchman describes the behavior of the flagellants:
“In desperate supplication for God’s mercy, their movement erupted in a sudden frenzy that sped across Europe with the same fiery contagion as the plague. Self-flagellation was intended to expressed remorse and expiate the sins of all. As a form of penance to induce God to forgive sin, it long antedated to plague years. Flagellants saw themselves as redeemers who by re-enacting the scourging of Christ upon their own bodies and making the blood flow, would atone for human wickedness and earn another chance for mankind.
“Organized groups of 200 to 300 and sometimes more (the chroniclers mention up to 1,000) marched from city to city, stripped to the waist, scourging themselves with leather whips tipped with iron spikes until they bled. While they cried aloud to Christ and the Virgin for pity, and called upon God to ‘Spare us!’, the watching townspeople sobbed and groaned in sympathy.” (p. 119, Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century)
This is religion-induced misery.
Tuchman mentions another example of religion-induced rage. RosAnarch criticized me for stating that religion can result in rage—but this makes my point:
“In February 1349, before the plague had yet reached the city, the Jews of Strasbourg, numbering 2,000, were taken to the burial ground, where all except those who accepted conversion were burned at rows of stakes erected to receive them.” (p. 119, A Distant Mirror)
Why didn’t god show up in some fashion, get the word out in some way? “No, no, no, you’re not getting sick because of sin or rebellion against Christ. It’s microbes, it’s the fleas!” How do theologians/clergy make sense of this divine neglect/incompetence? “God works in mysterious ways” is a useless cliché —it doesn’t work at all.
Standard of Honesty Three:Try to offer balanced evaluations
At the beginning of my 11 August article, I mentioned the volcano of Christian rage that erupted on social media when Christopher Hitchens died in 2011. This was when many pious folks learned for the first time about his famous title, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. This set off RosAnarch, who referred to the book as “a big pile of garbage”—and provided links to a couple of very negative reviews. The review in the New York Times was candid in acknowledging Hitchens’ eccentricities, but failed to mentioned that the book was a pile of garbage. Links to a few positive reviews might have been helpful. No doubt, all those alarmed Christians who fumed on social media would have been egged on by anyone who called the book garbage—which would have been all the more reason not to read it.
Standard of Honesty Four: Avoid behavior that resembles a toddler tantrum
At one point, after being challenged and critiqued by many readers,
RosAnarch declared, “This whole blog is truly a clown circus.” So, the resort to ad hominem. No surprise, after his “pile of garbage” remark. Hey, I won’t try to defend the atheists here who might have been unkind in their responses to RosAnarch. But he—assuming it’s not she—came on the blog posing as a scholar/specialist on religion. So: behave accordingly, act like it.
Standard of Honesty Five: Admit that Christianity is a blend of superstitions
Well, apologetics is a major industry, so we can assume this Standard of Honestly will never gain traction. Apologists are part of the faith bureaucracy, dedicated to making sense of the superstitions, miracle folklore, magical thinking, and fanciful/bad theology preserved in the New Testament. Even the problematic Jesus-script in the gospels has become a headache, and efforts to verify any events in the life/ministry of Jesus have stalled because of the utter lack of contemporaneous documentation. Some moderate/liberal brands of Christianity are making the effort to put much of the superstition (e.g. human sacrifice) behind them.
But apologists are dedicated to creating scenarios that overcome all these difficulties. The church bureaucracy has two thousand years of momentum, and has managed to get away with promoting the blend of superstitions. Honesty shows no signs of surfacing.
Last Thursday, the Southern Baptist Convention’s top-ranked Executive Committee got a shocking bit of news about their Interim President, followed by his resignation.
The next day, they appointed a new Interim President with a strong link to its last real president, and likely some loyalty to him.
Reading Time: 5 MINUTES
The Executive Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) just can’t get away from nonstop drama. This time, it involves fabricated credentials, a swift resignation, and an equally swift replacement appointment.
At least it’s not another sex scandal!
Situation report: The Executive Committee
The SBC contains a dizzying array of groups and sub-groups. Some are seminaries, others missionary organizations, and still others part of Lifeway, the denomination’s printing-and-research arm. Others still are mostly administrative, like one offering health and life insurance to pastors and their families.
The Executive Committee rules over all of them. It sets their annual budgets and handles the day-to-day decision-making for the SBC as a whole. It is the most powerful group within the SBC, answering only, really, to its president. In a very real sense, the Executive Committee is the visible face of the SBC.
Over the past 20 years, this committee got packed full of a stalwart, ultraconservative, ultratraditionalist faction of the SBC that I’ve come to call the Old Guard. But their control began to fray in 2019, when the denomination’s staggering “Abuse of Faith” crisis made national news. Its president at the time, Ronnie Floyd, was an Old Guard power player. But rather than cooperate with outside investigations, he simply quit the job.
The committee appointed Willie McLaurin to be its Interim President.
Since then, the Executive Committee has been trying to find an official president. They organized a search committee and held a vote to confirm the candidate they’d found. Somehow—and against expectations—the vote failed. So they had to dissolve the search committee, organize a whole new one, find another candidate, and hold another vote.
Another drama has hit the Executive Committee amidst this new search.
If you’re squeamish, don’t prod beach rubble
Very suddenly last Thursday, Willie McLaurin quit. It sounds like this is another classic Southern Baptist case of a big-name leader quitting before he could be fired. But this time, there’s a lot less doubt about that being the case.
His reasons remind me a lot of the 1994 movie Renaissance Man. In it, Danny DeVito teaches English literature to some new Army recruits who are about to wash out of basic training. While he’s there, he discovers that a gifted young man in his class nurses a secret family tragedy: he doesn’t know what happened to his Army-enlisted father, who apparently died or disappeared many years earlier. DeVito decides to do this young man a favor, so he looks into the situation without clearing it with him first. Unfortunately, this help creates some very unexpected problems.
In the case of the Executive Committee, McLaurin became one of the potential candidates for its official presidency. And that meant that the search committee had to do a bunch of background checking of his resume.
One idly and innocently wonders if this kind of deep fact-checking occurs with every candidate. Obviously, nobody had ever checked McLaurin’s background out very carefully during his rise through the ranks. But now suddenly there had to be a full background investigation like he was running for the United States presidency or something.
A wild resignation appears!
Regardless of the answer to that idle, innocent question, the search committee discovered that McLaurin had faked his educational credentials.
He’d lied.
He had told them that he’d earned degrees from North Carolina Central University, Duke University Divinity School, and Hood Theological Seminary. Alas, none of those schools corroborated his claims. I don’t know if he dropped out or simply never attended them at all. It seems to be a mixture of both. But he definitely didn’t earn degrees from any of them.
In fact, he’d even submitted fake diplomas to bolster his false claims.
Apparently, the other Executive Committee officers confronted McLaurin with their findings. He admitted that he’d lied, then resigned.
The Executive Committee quickly appointed a new Interim President
In September 2019, Jonathan Howe became the committee’s Vice President of Communications. He’s been there ever since. Though he’s quiet by SBC leadership standards, he’s popped up twice in my writing:
Just a few months before he landed his Executive Committee position, Howe appeared on a podcast with Thom Rainer. At the time, Rainer himself was just about to retire-before-he-got-fired. They were talking about the various ways that church congregations disappoint and frustrate their pastors. To put it very mildly, Howe revealed a lot of damning contradictions to evangelicals’ fanciful claims about their churches. But then, so did Rainer.
Then, in 2021, he shows up in one of the two emails that Russell Moore leaked as he was quitting-before-he-could-be-fired. Moore headed the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC). Interestingly, Moore didn’t particularly praise Howe in that email. Moore just said that when he told Howe that he’d be talking about the sex abuse crisis at the ERLC’s Caring Well Conference in October 2019, Howe was fine with it.
It now makes sense that Moore might have told Howe that. As VP of Communications, Howe handled the various news sites related to SBC doings, like Baptist Press itself. Howe presumably would know if Moore’s plan would be a public-relations disaster.
Whither now, Executive Committee?
Jonathan Howe is apparently a Ronnie Floyd appointee. In fact, Floyd himself recommended Howe for the role, held a conference call with the other committee officers, and confirmed his appointment then and there. Given what a deeply polarized and tribalistic bunch the Old Guard are, it’s hard to imagine Floyd going to that kind of trouble for anyone in the Old Guard’s enemy faction, which I call the Pretend Progressives.
Moore was a Pretend Progressive. The last few SBC Presidents have been as well: J.D. Greear, Ed Litton, and now Bart Barber. They are slowly making steps toward reforming the denomination and resolving that sex abuse crisis, and they’re nowhere near as rigidly regressive or misogynistic as the Old Guard.
That said, don’t make the mistake of thinking they’re really progressive. They aren’t. They keep making the mistake of thinking they can maintain rigid gender roles, their culture wars against human rights, and dysfunctional authoritarian social structures throughout the denomination, while still keeping out all the scandals and hypocrisy that keep popping up in their ranks.
The vote that the Executive Committee held this past May involved a candidate who should have appealed to both factions, Jared Wellman. Even the nastiest Old Guard leaders had nothing bad to say about him. In fact, he’d really seemed like a shoo-in. But at the last second, the vote to confirm him failed.
McLaurin himself seems to lean Pretend Progressive as well. He certainly seemed to approve of various courses of action that the Old Guard condemned, like publicly releasing a formerly-top-secret database of accused and confirmed sex abusers in SBC churches. That move seemed to set the Old Guard off like rockets!
So to me, it looks like the Old Guard is not prepared yet to give up the most powerful role in the denomination. Presidents? Oh, they come and go. Every year there’s a vote for the SBC presidency. It’s dizzying to watch them go through the revolving door!
But Executive Committee Presidents are a different duck entirely. They seem to wield the real power behind the throne. The resolution of the entire sex abuse crisis might hinge on whoever gets the role, and there are lots of other faction squabbles that the person in this role will inevitably shape. If I found out that the Old Guard had anything to do with McLaurin’s resignation, like slipping a rumor to the background checkers, then I wouldn’t be surprised at all.
If Jonathan Howe is careful, he might just end up in Ronnie Floyd’s old office one day soon.
Beginning today, and every Monday morning that follows, I’ll be posting submitted essays, excerpts from my books, and some of the best posts of the past. Today is a post by Professor David Eller. He’s no stranger to readers of my books. He’s one of our best and important scholars on religion.
So as the author of an excellent book on Donald Trump, I asked him to write something for us all to ponder, especially in light of being a twice impeached one-term multiple indicted president. Dr. Eller sent me this:
———–
Trump’s greatest trick is convincing Christians he is not a trickster.
The slavish and really obscene worship of Donald Trump by his misguided acolytes is incomprehensible from a purely political or personal perspective: Americans do not typically grovel at the feet of politicians or erect golden-calf images of them, and Trump is obviously a more despicable person than most would-be leaders.
However, as others have commented, Trump’s Svengali hold on his “base” makes more sense from a religious viewpoint: Christians and conservatives, who have been programmed to genuflect to power and who see him as a perfectly-flawed suffering servant display the same unquestioning commitment to him and his untruths as they do to their god and its untruth.
It goes without saying that Trump has the most un-Christ-like persona we can imagine, conspicuously guilty of the sins of lying, adultery, gluttony, and covetousness and who has bragged about the sin of murder, which he knows his devotees would forgive or even celebrate, as they forgive and celebrate their god’s murder of his own son and of nearly the entire human population in the mythical flood. But he does resemble a different, older, and darker supernatural character, one with a paradoxical appeal across culture and history. This figure is the trickster, who appears in various guises in the world’s mythologies, as a god, a human culture hero, or even an animal. What unifies the fractal face of the trickster, as I write in Trump and Political Theology, is his (for tricksters are usually, at least initially, male) thrilled and thrilling violation of norms and boundaries. He is the personification, not of good and order, but of transgression.
Trickster tales abound in African, Native American, and ancient Greek, Roman, and Norse cultures among others. Hermes was a trickster god, whose first act after birth was to steal from his brother; Prometheus was the trickster who fooled the gods into giving fire to humans. In Native American stories, the trickster is sometimes an animal like the coyote, who plays tricks on other beings as he gets tricks played on him. Throughout religions, tricksters are commonly messengers, mediators, and conduits of knowledge, often forbidden knowledge; in any such role, they are the source of much of humans’ way of life. They are changelings (sometimes shifting form between human and animal or male and female), frequently associated with crossroads, thresholds, marketplaces, and other anomalous or anomic spaces. They are not ultimate creator-gods like Yahweh (not even gods at all in many instances), but they come along to alter or distort the creations of those gods, either intentionally or unintentionally, with their clever/buffoonish selfishness and often unlimited appetites.
Scholars of mythology Scott Leonard and Michael McClure summarized the trickster thusly:
He possesses a funny, absurd, iconoclastic sort of playfulness, yet the Trickster’s playfulness can carry with it serious, even tragic or transcendent, overtones. Tricksters provide the comic relief in the world’s mythologies, but they do so by embodying all the infinite ambiguities of what it is to be alive in the world. Tricksters are characters with attention deficit disorder, sacred clowns, carefree as children, obscene lechers, and generous companions. No single character type embodies so many, often contradictory, qualities. The Trickster is as likely to betray a friend as he is to set the stars in heaven or to become the victim of his own pranks. (Myth and Knowing: An Introduction to World Mythology 2004, p. 250)
This brief portrait should sound familiar, and other observers have noticed the trickster quality of Trump’s rule, over his business empire, his media presence (as the master of apprentices), and our United States of America. If Trump is anything, in one word, he is iconoclastic (the word “unprecedented” applies to too many of his utterances and actions), a violator of tradition, norm, decency, and—as is finally catching up with him—law. He can be funny, at least to his target audience, but his humor is serious and tragic, often cruel. He is definitely carefree, not caring what critics, opponents, journalists, scientists, or rational people think of him; he also suffers from an infamously short attention span. He is overtly absurd, obscene, and contradictory, and he has a long track record of betraying friends and allies, just as he repeatedly demonstrates—and his disciples seem to believe and applaud—that he sets the stars in the sky.
Trump is not the only trickster on the global political stage. Indeed, it is fair to say that the contemporary crop of right-wing populists are all tricksters after a fashion. The description certainly fits Putin, Trump’s pal and role model. Putin too is iconoclastic, mercurial, obscene, cruel, and quick to turn on his former friends and allies, most recently Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, but before that any individual who would dare to challenge his authority or even compete with him in Russia’s (sham) democracy. More than anything else, Putin lies; he lies promiscuously, and he lies not only to misinform us but to portray his power over truth itself. Masha Gessen labeled it “the Putin paradigm,” this readiness to “use language primarily to communicate not facts or opinions but power: it’s not what the words mean that matters but who says them and when. This makes it impossible to negotiate with them and very difficult for journalists to cover them.” What others have called the firehose of falsities is a strategic trickster maneuver, which not only overwhelms listeners with untruth and bullshit but announces to the world that he is, in Gessen’s words, “able to say what he wants, when he wants, regardless of the facts. He is the president of the country and king of reality.”
This is the ultimate power of the modern trickster. A trickster like Trump or Putin replaces law with will, political process with personality, institutions with instincts. Such a trickster is a destroyer (“burn it all down”) but also a creator: if he succeeds, tomorrow the country, the world, reality itself will be his reflection. (American society, and especially the Republican party, is already too much in Trump’s image.) In his populist costume, he speaks for, represents, even embodies “the people,” and anyone who stands against him is not “the people” but rather the enemy of the people, to be shouted down if not gunned down. Tricksters in myth are agents of creative destruction, but they are seldom if ever leaders. It is difficult follow leaders who are so unpredictable, self-absorbed, inattentive, disrespectful, vengeful, and plain dangerous—bringers of chaos and promoters of self.
Throughout history, Christianity has actually vilified the trickster-figure. Christianity, lacking almost entirely a sense of humor—and definitely any sense of humor about its god and his vicars on earth—has tended to demonize disorder and willfulness (after all, messing with the god’s perfect creation can only make it imperfect). The devil acquired all the attributes of the trickster, becoming the master of lies and the prince of trickery. It is not hard to say, then, that Trump-the-trickster more closely resembles Satan than Yahweh or Christ. So what is the appeal to Christians?
I think, deep in their psyche, certain kinds of persons in America (and in other countries, where their own demagogues prowl the society) perceive the archetypal power of trickster-Trump. He is, to them, power incarnate, but they have a very limited vocabulary and conceptual toolkit to understand him. “Trickster” is not a term that Christians are fluent with or that they would endorse if they recognized it. All they have in their restricted language for that kind of overbearing stalking power, that kind of aspiring leviathan, is “god” or “savior,” and so they immediately default to that interpretation. And a trickster, without conscience or commitments of his own, is happy enough to let the masses wallow in their delusion, so long as they follow him, obey him, and ideally adore him. Christians, a few of whom are finally waking to the truth of the matter, have so far been disastrously willing to fall into step behind and pledge their fealty to a leader and savior who in fact is Loki in red, white, and blue garb.
This really is a puzzle: why haven’t decent devout believers—by the millions—founded an organization called Christians Against Televangelism? They should be so appalled/enraged that televangelists have turned the faith into a showbusiness money-grab, enabling so many of them to become multi-millionaires. They’ve reimagined Jesus as big business, exploiting magical thinking found in the New Testament: believe in Jesus to get eternal life. This turned out to be a major made-for-TV gimmick.
But televangelism is actually the crass culmination of the church’s centuries-long embrace of show business. Millions of churches have been built, the theatres—the stages—for performances. Among these are the spectacular cathedrals, with magnificent stained glass, paintings and sculptures. No one has been able to surpass the Catholic church, in terms of costuming, props, and ritual. All this makes it so easy to get away with magical thinking.
“If the history of religion teaches anything, it teaches that religions die. In the imagination of their adherents, religions are eternal, but they obviously aren’t—the world is strewn end to end with the temples, shrines, megalithic dolmens and stone circles, pyramids, inscriptions and images of hundreds of dead religions. No matter how completely religious belief and ritual command the present, there is never any guarantee they will command the future.” (Kindle, p. 68)
In my article here last week I commented on the first half of this excellent book, now let’s look at the last half.
Chapter 4 is titled, Certifiably Crazy for Jesus, and at the outset, Conner observes:
“Speculation about the intersection of religion and insanity has obviously been around for a while and the connections (or lack thereof) continue to be vigorously debated in the present. Whether religious belief technically qualifies as psychosis we can leave to the professionals to thrash out, but it is beyond dispute that religious belief is—as often as not—functionally insane.”
Then he cites the horrible news from Kenya earlier this year that a cult had convinced people that starving to death for Jesus was a way to earn eternal life. Within a month it was determined that 201 people had died, and that 600 were missing. It’s not hard to figure out “…that literally anything—no matter how comically absurd, abysmally stupid, completely unhinged, or easily disproved—can be asserted under the aegis of ‘sincerely held religious belief’ clearly refutes any notion that religious belief is the product of common sense.” (p. 106, Kindle)
Conner notes that so many Jesus-believers “couldn’t pass a basic quiz about what the gospels say about Jesus.” (p. 106, Kindle) He points out that “the New Testament is a cookbook of crazy,” a primary example being Jesus-script in Matthew 18:3: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” This is typical cult technique: please don’t think about what we’re telling you—just take our word for it. One result of this approach is that so many laypeople don’t bother to read the gospels, and remain unaware of so much in the cookbook of crazy.
Here’s a sample: In Mark, Jesus transfers (presumably by a magic spell) demons from a man into pigs; he glows on a mountaintop while god speaks from water vapor (a cloud); in Matthew, at the moment Jesus died, dead people came alive in their tombs, then on Easter morning walked around Jerusalem; in Luke, the resurrected Jesus appeared to two of his followers on their way to Emmaus—but they didn’t recognize him. At dinner, as he broke bread, they suddenly knew who he was, and—poof—he vanished. (See Conner’s book, Apparitions of Jesus: The Resurrection as Ghost Story) Luke also has the extreme cult teaching that hatred of family, and of life itself, is required for Jesus followers. In John, we find the ghoulish pronouncement that eternal life happens when cult members eat the flesh of Jesus, and drink his blood.
This is just a sampling—and many more examples will jump out—the more folks read the gospels carefully, confirming Conner’s verdict that the New Testament offers “crazy with a side order of extra-crazy crazy.” (p. 120, Kindle)
Maybe the death of Christian belief is on the horizon because people are reading the cookbook of crazy. “In 2022, polling showed that ‘among all U.S. adults, only 20% say the Bible is the literal word of God, which is a historic low… A record 29% of Americans say the Bible is a collection of ‘fables, legends, history and moral precepts recorded by man.’ Only 30% of Protestants and 15% of Catholics currently believe the Bible is literally true.” (p. 114, Kindle)
In Chapter 5, Where Christianity Goes to Die, Conner provides a brutal dose of reality about the state of humanity. I remember reading, some twenty years ago, the prediction that by 2025 there would be a billion Pentecostals in the world. Much of the growth that it has experienced has been at the expense of the Catholic church. Conner quotes an article by David Masci of Pew Research:
“The music that you hear in Pentecostal churches has the same rhythms that people enjoy outside of church. In fact, in only a century, Pentecostalism has become indigenous, or ‘Latin Americanized,’ to a greater extent than Roman Catholicism has in four centuries in Latin America… And the Pentecostal preachers tend to sound more like their congregants. They are often unlettered, and they speak to their flock in the same way that people in Latin America speak to each other. They also tend to look like their congregants. So in Guatemala, many preachers are Mayan, and in Brazil they are Afro-Brazilian.” (pp. 122-123, Kindle)
They are often unlettered. This is emotion-based religion, fed by the cookbook of crazy. The crazy isn’t even noticed. I am reminded of Josiah Hesse’s experience, growing up in apocalyptic evangelism (my article here on 11 August was about his painful childhood):
“I would say that some of the most emotionally rapturous moments of my life were had in Pentecostal church services, where the loud and hypnotic music, speaking in tongues, primal dancing, shaking and collapsing to the ground, caused explosions of sensory transcendence in my little body. I’ve since had glimmers of these moments on a dance floor, a rock concert, or moments of exceptional sexual climax, but nothing has come close to the indescribable high of a frenetic religious service laced with an uncut dose of pure belief.”
But indescribable highs count for nothing when we’re trying to figure out how the cosmos works. For that we need reliable, verifiable, objective evidence.
Earlier I mentioned Jesus transferring demons from a man to pigs—which we find in Mark 5. In fact, Mark’s gospel could be subtitled, Jesus and the Demons. Pentecostalism thrives on such superstitions. Conner describes the widespread belief in witch children, and the horrors they’ve suffered at the hands of exorcists. He quotes from an article by Cosima Lumley:
“Thousands of children every day are being branded witches and consequently tortured into confessing non-existent crimes, forced to undergo horrific ‘exorcisms’ by preachers, and even abandoned or killed by their own families or communities…The practice of branding children witches has also become a very lucrative one for Pentecostal preachers who are able to ‘exorcize’ children of the influence of Satan for a price, or as they call it, ‘enact deliverance.’” (p. 130, Kindle)
Conner also discusses the role that homophobia plays in the promoting of fanatical religion. American evangelicals have played a major role in stoking these hatreds in Africa especially. “Queerbaiting as a political tactic never seems to age. Fomenting hatred and violence is not a measure of last resort in societies where national politics is driven by religious fundamentalism. It’s their first move. It’s their path to power. To the extent this tactic loses traction in democratic countries, it must move to more hospitable climates to survive.” (p. 142, Kindle)
One of the major themes of Chapter 6, The Valley of Death, is the assumption among fanatics that climate change is real because it fits with apocalyptic doom scenarios. In other words, we shouldn’t even try to resist god’s plan—as outlined by the cookbook of crazy. Is such foolishness the fate of Christian belief? At the outset I asked why aren’t Christians furious with the corruption of their religion by televangelists. Likewise, Conner wants to know:
“When priests by the hundreds molest children and bishops cover it up, why aren’t Christians stunned? When Irish nuns raffle off the babies of unwed mothers, why aren’t Christians stunned? When unmarked graves of children are discovered around Canadian religious ‘schools,’ why aren’t Christians stunned? When embezzlement and sexual assault by preachers gets reported on an almost daily basis, why aren’t Christians stunned? When evangelical leaders gather to lay hands on figures like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, why aren’t Christian’s stunned?” (pp. 106-107, Kindle)
Given its ongoing degeneration, we can be sure that Christian belief will end up on the scrapheap of history:
“In the developed world, Christianity is losing traction for reasons that are now familiar: churches are dying because elderly Christians are dying, and Christian belief increasingly incorporates toxic elements of sexism, racism, and reactionary nationalism. But more importantly, the Christian gospel is simply irrelevant—thoughts and prayers don’t address poverty, discrimination, gun violence, failing government, or climate change.” (pp. 150-151, Kindle)
Here is the link to an interview that Robert Conner and I did together, with Derek Lambert of MythVision.
Surely the clergy, those most in tune with God, must be the happiest people on the planet: they enjoy a personal relationship with their creator, nurtured through years of prayer and pious study. How can their constant refrain not be, “This is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it”? (Psalm 118:24) But this doesn’t seem to be the way things are working out. A few weeks ago I published an article here titled, The Morale of Christian Clergy Is Taking a Big Hit,
“A survey of 1,200 United Methodist clergy found that half have trouble sleeping, a third feel depressed and isolated, half are obese, and three-quarters are worried about money…[they] feel worse and worry more than they did a decade ago.”
I suspect that the vulnerability of Christianity might be a contributing factor—and its weaknesses had not been so openly discussed just a decade ago, although that discussion had been stimulated in 2001 with the publication of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. Sam Harris followed in 2004 with The End of Faith, and Christopher Hitchens in 2009 with God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Never before had the Christian faith been critiqued so publicly, so devastatingly—and other secular authors have been encouraged to add their insights. There are now well more than five hundred books—most published since 1999—that explain, in detail, the falsification of theism, Christianity especially. And, of course, the Internet has provided a platform for atheist/secular thinkers to spread the word that belief in god(s) is hard to justify.
In this new book, Conner describes Christianity as we find it in the world today, but it’s not a pretty picture. In his opening chapter, Fade to Black—a theatrical term meaning that the lights go out at the end—Conner describes the struggle, the losing battle, of Christianity to survive in its traditional strongholds. In Europe, above all. This is hardly a mystery, since Europe was devastated by two world wars, with tens of millions of people killed—six million of whom were brutally murdered during the Holocaust. How can god-is-good theology maintain its grip in the face of such horrors?
Conner mentions watching the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II, with all the pageantry, ritual, and costuming that royal funerals entail—and the pious assurances that she must now be with God:
“Yet as I watched these solemn ceremonies, I wondered how many of those gathered really believed the queen had entered the Pearly Gates. Based on recent polling, almost certainly less than half—including the child choristers—at best. Some 2000 churches in the UK have closed in the past ten years and a recent survey paints a bleak picture of current Christian belief…church membership in the UK has plunged to less than ten percent…” (p. 7, Kindle)
Conner notes that, “Across most of western Europe the numbers are similarly grim.” (p. 8, Kindle) He provides statistics about the situation in Belgium, France, Spain, Ireland. Even in super-Catholic Poland there is slippage in belief. He also mentions the hit Catholicism has taken in Canada, in the wake of the residential schools scandal, which even prompted a papal visit to apologize for what had happened: “Priests and nuns from various religious orders systematically brutalized and sometimes raped these children, some 3000 of whom died of disease and neglect while in the custody of the Church.” (p. 11, Kindle) Connor mentions the dramatic decline in church membership and attendance in America as well.
In Conner’s giant Chapter Two, Death by a 1000 Cuts, he describes the really ugly manifestations of Christian belief. He lists the Seven Deadly Gospels, i.e., the gospels of hate, grift, lawlessness, lies, division, submission, and violence. Given the wealth of information that Conner provides here, it can surely come as no surprise to devout nice Christians that their church and their faith are in deep trouble.
For example, the gospel of hate has been horrifying, in our modern era demonstrated by Fred Phelps, founder of the Westboro Baptist Church:
“The Westboro Baptist’s ministry of hate rose to national attention in 1998 when Westboro members picketed the funeral of Matthew Shepard, a gay university student abducted, tortured, and left tied to a fence outside Laramie, Wyoming. Shepard died of his injuries in a hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado. Westboro Baptist, which preaches that AIDS represents God’s righteous judgment against homosexuals, often picketed the funerals of AIDS victims where members held up placards that displayed their trademark, GOD HATES FAGS.” (pp. 16-17, Kindle)
Just one more example, from the gospel of violence. There is quite enough in the New Testament to fuel violent behavior, including Jesus-script: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace but a sword.” (Matthew 10:34) This results in “Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war…” and worse, as Conner notes:
“Gospel Jesus told his disciples, ‘You are the light of the world.’ (Matthew 5: 14) Sadly, there is little evidence from history to support that claim. Indeed, the history of Christianity is a nearly unbroken history of moral darkness. In the 1930s, Das Licht der Welt in Germany united behind an authoritarian regime that unleashed the darkest era in world history. The leading German theologians of the day threw their support behind Hitler’s rise to power, and soon German forces invaded their Christian neighbors, repeating a slogan from the Thirty Years War, Gott mit uns, ‘God with us.’” (p. 59, Kindle)
Perhaps Christianity has been losing ground because there is growing awareness that theology can manifest in such destructive ways. But die-hard believers tend to shy away from facing realities. And one of the major realities is that the New Testament itself is failed theology.
Conner deals with this in his Chapter 3: The Clothes Have No Emperor, which opens with the heading, “The New Testament isn’t history.” There is commonly a knee-jerk reaction among the pious to such an assertion: “Yes, it is—who in his right mind would make such a claim?” The blunt answer is: New Testament scholars themselves, many of them devout Christians. Conner traces some of the history of critical analysis of the gospels. He mentions Bart Ehrman, who has published so many books describing the faults and failures of the gospels especially (check out his list of books on Amazon).
For a long time, devout scholars have been trying to justify taking the gospels as history, but without much success. The first three gospels share so much in common, because Matthew and Luke copied so much from Mark. Conner points out that the author of John’s gospel added
“…a thick layer of theology to the stories, but we’re still left with a question that has no answer: where did Mark get his information? If Mark was written about 70 C.E. and Jesus died around 30 C.E., at least a generation passed before anyone thought to collect the stories about Jesus and put them into a gospel. To make matters worse, in the years between Jesus’ death and the writing of the first gospel we know a destructive war supervened that devastated the cities of Galilee and Judea, killed thousands, and scattered the survivors which presumably included potential witnesses to the career of Jesus.” (p. 73, Kindle)
Conner also discusses the confusion added by the apostle Paul, who never met Jesus, and bragged that he didn’t find out anything about Jesus from the disciples. His knowledge of Jesus came from his visions (= hallucinations). This undermines the claim that the New Testament is history.
The very helpful information in Chapter 3 is precisely what Christians don’t want to hear, acknowledge, or think about. When I was working on my first book (Ten Tough Problems in Christian Belief), I asked a few devout believers to review and critique a few of the chapters. Oh, no, they couldn’t do that! They had to focus on strengthening their faith. I sensed their doubts lurked just below the surface—and they didn’t want to check below the surface. I gave copies of my 2022 book, Ten Things Christians Wish Jesus Hadn’t Taught, to several Christian friends. The response was silence. They didn’t want to think about the issues I raised.
But they’re not alone, as Conner notes:
“In many cases the problem with Jesus Studies begins with scholars merely seeking confirmation for their presuppositions, but arguably in every case a related problem lies in the very nature of the evidence, evidence that has passed through multiple hands, is possibly (or definitely) corrupted, or evidence that it was simply a pious story to begin with.” (p. 81, Kindle)
I would say that Conner’s Chapter 3 is a must read—but I fear that devout readers will consider it a must not read.
In my article here next week, we’ll take a look at Conner’s next three chapters: Certifiably Crazy for Jesus, Where Christianity Goes to Die, and The Valley of Death.
No, not even 2,000 years of momentum can save the faith!
I’ll close today with this insight from Conner:
“Churches retain power partly by keeping believers in the dark about the crazy stuff the New Testament says, as well as keeping their financials opaque and concealing the sexual predators within their ranks. “The wisdom of the world is foolishness with God” (I Cor. 3:19) is an affirmation of ignorance and an inadvertent admission that knowledge is the mortal enemy of belief.” (p. 104, Kindle)
In my previous Skeptic column, Deconstructing the Decalogue, I offered a personal view on how to think about the Ten Commandments from the perspective of 3,000 years of moral progress since they were first presented in two books of the Old Testament (Exodus 20:1-17 and Deuteronomy 5:4-21). Here I would like to reconstruct them from the perspective of a science- and reason-based moral system, a fuller version of which I developed in my 2015 book The Moral Arc, from which this material is partially excerpted.
Note: This is a purely intellectual exercise. I am not a preacher or teacher of moral values, nor do I hold myself up as some standard-bearer of morality. Since I do not believe in God, nor do I think that there are any rational reasons to believe that morals derive from any source outside of ourselves, I feel the necessity to offer an alternative to religious- and faith-based morality, both descriptively (where do morals come from if not God?) and prescriptively (how should we act if there is no God?), which I have done in 30 years of publishing Skeptic magazine and in a number of my books, including How We Believe (1999), The Science of Good and Evil (2004), and the aforementioned The Moral Arc. Here I am building on the work of secular philosophers and scholars from the ancient Greeks through the Enlightenment and into the modern era where a massive literature exists addressing these deep and important matters.
Galileo Demonstrating the New Astronomical Theories at the University of Padua. Painting by Félix Parra, 1873. Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City.
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The problem with any religious moral code that is set in stone is just that—it is set in stone. Anything that can never be changed has within its DNA the seeds of its own extinction. A science-based morality has the virtue of having built into it a self-correcting mechanism that does not just allow redaction, correction, and improvement; it insists upon it. Science and reason can be employed to inform—and in some cases even determine—moral values.
Science thrives on change, on improvement, on updating and upgrading its methods and conclusions. So it should be for a science of morality. No one knows for sure what is right and wrong in all circumstances for all people everywhere, so the goal of a science-based morality should be to construct a set of provisional moral precepts that are true for most people in most circumstances most of the time—as assessed by empirical inquiry and rational analysis—but admit exceptions and revisions where appropriate. Indeed, as humanity’s concept of “who and what is human, and entitled to protection” has expanded over the centuries, so we have extended moral protection to categories once thought beneath our notice.
Here are some suggested commandments for our time. Feel free to add your own in the comments section below.
1. The Golden-Rule Principle: Behave toward others as you would desire that they behave toward you.
The golden rule is a derivative of the basic principle of exchange reciprocity and reciprocal altruism, and thus evolved in our Paleolithic ancestors as one of the primary moral sentiments. In this principle there are two moral agents: the moral doer and the moral receiver. A moral question arises when the moral doer is uncertain how the moral receiver will accept and respond to the action in question. In its essence this is what the golden rule is telling us to do. By asking yourself, “how would I feel if this were done unto me?” you are asking “how would others feel if I did it unto them?”
2. The Ask-First Principle: To find out whether an action is right or wrong, ask first.
The Golden Rule principle has a limitation to it: what if the moral receiver thinks differently from the moral doer? What if you would not mind having action X done unto you, but someone else would mind it? Smokers cannot ask themselves how they would feel if other people smoked in a restaurant where they were dining because they probably wouldn’t mind. It’s the nonsmokers who must be asked how they feel. That is, the moral doer should ask the moral receiver whether the behavior in question is moral or immoral. In other words, the Golden Rule is still about you. But morality is more than just about you, and the Ask-First Principle makes morality about others.
3. The Happiness Principle: It is a higher moral principle to always seek happiness with someone else’s happiness in mind, and never seek happiness when it leads to someone else’s unhappiness through force or fraud.
Humans have a host of moral and immoral passions, including being selfless and selfish, cooperative and competitive, nice and nasty. It is natural and normal to try to increase our own happiness by whatever means available, even if that means being selfish, competitive, and nasty. Fortunately, evolution created both sets of passions, such that by nature we also seek to increase our own happiness by being selfless, cooperative, and nice. Since we have within us both moral and immoral sentiments, and we have the capacity to think rationally and intuitively to override our baser instincts, and we have the freedom to choose to do so, at the core of morality is choosing to do the right thing by acting morally and applying the happiness principle. (The modifier “force or fraud” was added to clarify that there are many activities that do not involve morality, such as a sporting contest, in which the goal is not to seek happiness with your opponent’s happiness in mind, but simply to win, fairly of course.)
4. The Liberty Principle: It is a higher moral principle to always seek liberty with someone else’s liberty in mind, and never seek liberty when it leads to someone else’s loss of liberty through force or fraud.
The Liberty Principle is an extrapolation from the fundamental principle of all liberty as practiced in Western society: The freedom to think, believe, and act as we choose so long as our thoughts, beliefs, and actions do not infringe on the equal freedom of others. What makes the Liberty Principle a moral principle is that in addition to asking the moral receiver how he or she might respond to a moral action, and considering how that action might lead to your own and the moral receiver’s happiness or unhappiness, there is an even higher moral level toward which we can strive, and that is the freedom and autonomy of yourself and the moral receiver, or what we shall simply refer to here as liberty. Liberty is the freedom to pursue happiness and the autonomy to make decisions and act on them in order to achieve that happiness.
Only in the last couple of centuries have we witnessed the worldwide spread of liberty as a concept that applies to all peoples everywhere, regardless of their race, religion, rank or social and political status in the power hierarchy. Liberty has yet to achieve worldwide status, particularly among those states dominated by theocracies and autocracies that encourage intolerance, and dictate that only some people deserve liberty, but the overall trend since the Enlightenment has been to grant greater liberty, for more people, everywhere. Although there are setbacks still, and periodically violations of liberties disrupt the overall historical flow from less to more liberty for all, the general trajectory of increasing liberty for all continues, so every time you apply the liberty principle you have advanced humanity one small step forward.
5. The Fairness Principle: When contemplating a moral action imagine that you do not know if you will be the moral doer or receiver, and when in doubt err on the side of the other person.
This is based on the philosopher John Rawls’ concepts of the “veil of ignorance” and the “original position” in which moral actors are ignorant of their position in society when determining rules and laws that affect everyone, because of the self-serving bias in human decision making. Given a choice, most people who enact moral rules and legislative laws would do so based on their position in society (their gender, race, class, sexual orientation, religion, political party, etc.) in a way that would most benefit themselves and their kin and kind. Not knowing ahead of time how the moral precept or legal law will affect you pushes you to strive for greater fairness for all. A simpler version is in the example of cutting a cake fairly: if I cut the cake you choose which piece you want, and if you cut the cake then I choose which piece I want.
6. The Reason Principle: Try to find rational reasons for your moral actions that are not self-justifications or rationalizations by consulting others first.
Ever since the Enlightenment the study of morality has shifted from considering moral principles as based on God-given, Divinely-inspired, Holy book-derived, Authority-dictated precepts from the top down, to bottom-up individual-considered, reason-based, rationality-constructed, science-grounded propositions in which one is expected to have reasons for one’s moral actions, especially reasons that consider the other person affected by the moral act. This is an especially difficult moral commandment to carry out because of the all-too natural propensity to slip from rationality to rationalization, from justification to self-justification, from reason to emotion. As in the first commandment to “ask first,” whenever possible one should consult others about one’s reasons for a moral action in order to get constructive feedback and to pull oneself out of a moral bubble in which whatever you want to do happens to be the most moral thing to do.
7. The Responsibility and Forgiveness Principle: Take full responsibility for your own moral actions and be prepared to be genuinely sorry and make restitution for your own wrong doing to others; hold others fully accountable for their moral actions and be open to forgiving moral transgressors who are genuinely sorry and prepared to make restitution for their wrong doing.
This is another difficult commandment to uphold in both directions. First, there is the “moralization gap” between victims and perpetrators, in which victims almost always perceive themselves as innocent and thus any injustice committed against them must be the result of nothing more than evil on the part of the perpetrator; and in which perpetrators may perceive themselves to have been acting morally in righting a wrong, redressing an immoral act, or defending the honor of oneself or family and friends. The self-serving bias, the hindsight bias, and the confirmation bias practically ensure that we all feel we didn’t do anything wrong, and whatever we did was justified, and thus there is no need to apologize and ask for forgiveness.
As well, the sense of justice and revenge is a deeply evolved moral emotion that serves three primary purposes: (1) to right wrongs committed by transgressors, (2) as a deterrent to possible future bad behavior, (3) to serve as a social signal to others that should they commit a similar moral transgression the same fate of your moral indignation and revenge awaits them.
8. The Defend Others Principle: Stand up to evil people and moral transgressors, and defend the defenseless when they are victimized.
There are people in the world who will commit moral transgressions against us and our fellow group members. Either through the logic of violence and aggression in which perpetrators of evil always feel justified in their acts, or through such conditions as psychopathy, a non-negligible portion of a population will commit selfish or cruel acts. We must stand up against them.
9. The Expanding Moral Category Principle: Try to consider other people not of your gender, sexual orientation, class, family, tribe, race, religion, or nation as an honorary group member equal to you in moral standing.
We have a moral obligation not only to ourselves, our kin and kind, our family and friends, and our fellow in-group members; we also owe it to those people who are different from us in a variety of ways, who in the past have been discriminated against for no other reason than that they were different in some measurable way. Even though our first moral obligation is to take care of ourselves and our immediate family and friends, it is a higher moral value to consider the moral values of others, and in the long run it is better for yourself, your kin and kind, and your in-group to consider members of other groups to be honorary members of your own group, as long as they so honor you and your group (see #8 above).
10. The Biophilia Principle: Try to contribute to the survival and flourishing of other sentient beings, their ecosystems, and the biosphere as a whole.
Biophilia is the love of nature, of which we are a part. Expanding the moral sphere to include the environments that sustain sentient beings is the loftiest of moral commandments.
If by fiat I had to reduce these Ten Commandments to just one it would be this:
Try to expand the moral sphere and to push the arc of the moral universe just a bit further toward truth, justice, and freedom for more sentient beings in more places more of the time.
Issue 1, a cynical attempt to persuade Ohioans to vote away their own power, goes down to resounding defeat. The way is cleared for reproductive autonomy to become a protected right in the Buckeye State.
Abortion rights extended their winning streak in Ohio this summer. Progressives and freethinkers have reason to cheer as Issue 1 went down to defeat.
In 2019, Ohio governor Mike DeWine signed a total ban on abortion, which went into effect when the right-wing Supreme Court repealed Roe. It’s this law that gave rise to the infamous case of a pregnant 10-year-old rape victim who had to go to Indiana for an abortion.
(When this story was first reported, right-wingers angrily insisted it must be a fabrication intended to make them look bad. When it was proven to be true, they went silent.)
Since then, Ohio’s abortion ban has been ping-ponging between state courts. It’s currently blocked again. However, pro-choice groups saw no reason to leave the final outcome up to the discretion of a judge. Polls show that abortion rights enjoy support from a majority of Ohio residents. So they gathered signatures to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot which would make reproductive choice a human right. It will go before the voters in November, and polls say it should pass easily.
Cynical and contemptuous tactics
Sensing their looming defeat, Ohio Republicans tried to cut it off at the knees. The legislature proposed their own constitutional amendment, Issue 1, which would have raised the threshold for passing future amendments from a simple majority to a 60% supermajority. It also would have made the process for getting an amendment on the ballot more arduous.
That was a cynical tactic, since polls showed support for abortion rights at just under 60% (literally, 59%). However, what they did next showed even more contempt for voters.
The legislature hastily scheduled Issue 1 for an August special election—historically, a time of rock-bottom turnout. As recently as January, those same legislators moved to outlaw August special elections on the grounds of low turnout, only to do an about-face. Clearly, Ohio Republicans were hoping that no one would pay attention and only their backers would show up.
Instead, in a classic case of the Streisand Effect, their efforts to ensure a low-turnout election ensured massive publicity and voter interest. It shone a spotlight on their scheme, and voters responded. It didn’t hurt that pro-choice advocates had tapes of Issue 1’s sponsors, including Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, admitting that it was intended to forestall the abortion amendment.
More than 3 million voters cast ballots. That’s staggering turnout for a special election in the dog days of summer. It’s almost double the number of people who typically vote in Ohio primaries, and five times the number that showed up for the last August election.
When the votes were all in, Issue 1 lost by a resounding margin, 57% to 43%. As it turns out, citizens don’t want to vote away their own power. It’s a stinging rebuke to conservatives who are angling for permanent minority rule.
More dirty tricks thwarted
This wasn’t the only dirty trick that anti-choicers pulled to try to thwart the will of the people. They also filed a lawsuit to get the pro-abortion amendment stricken from the ballot on a technicality, arguing it should have explicitly listed the laws it would repeal. The Ohio Supreme Court unanimously rejected this argument. (The court answered one technicality with another: a constitutional amendment doesn’t “repeal” an existing law, it voids it.)
The defeat of Issue 1 is a bellwether for reproductive freedom in Ohio. It’s a sign to right-wing legislators that, for all their gerrymandering and voter suppression, they’re not above the will of the voters. They can’t expect to have their own way forever without the majority getting a chance to have its say.
It also clears the way for more progressive constitutional amendments. Next on tap in Ohio, there’s one to raise the minimum wage and another to create a bipartisan redistricting commission to fix gerrymandered congressional maps.
And more pro-choice constitutional amendments are coming soon in other states. From Politico:
Similar efforts to put abortion rights to a popular vote are also brewing in Arizona, Florida, Missouri, Nevada and South Dakota. Activists in many of these states are hoping to get the issue before voters in 2024, in which turnout will be especially high due to the presidential election.“Abortion rights won big in Ohio. Here’s why it wasn’t particularly close.” Madison Fernandez, Alice Ollstein and Zach Montellaro. Politico, 8 August 2023.
It’s now very clear that abortion is a winning issue for Democrats, even in red states. According to a PRRI poll from February 2023, almost two-thirds of Americans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, including majorities in many traditionally red states. What’s more, abortion is a motivating issue. It energizes voters and drives huge turnout.
In their single-minded drive to ban abortion at all costs, Republicans are running directly against the will of the majority. They’re setting themselves up to lose in states where by all rights they should win. If they were willing to moderate their beliefs, they’d likely be able to win many of these voters back. Instead, they’re becoming more and more anti-democratic.
This popular atheist meme values sophistication over pop atheists.
In this essay I’m going to defend what has come to be known as Hitchens’ razor: “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”[1] The point Christopher Hitchens was making is that miracle claims without any evidence should be dismissed without a further thought. Bayes’ theorem (which I’ll explain shortly) requires the existence of some credible evidence—or data—before it can be correctly used in evaluating miracle claims. So to be Bayes-worthy, a miracle claim must first survive Hitchens’ razor, which dismisses all miracle claims asserted without any evidence. If this first step doesn’t take place, Bayes is being used inappropriately and must be opposed as irrelevant, unnecessary, and even counterproductive in our honest quest for truth.[2]
From the outset I should say something about the so-called New Atheism of writers like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens, considered to be pop atheists by the philosophical elite, and not to be taken seriously when speaking of philosophical, biblical, and theological issues. The judgment of both believing and atheist intellectuals is summed up by Steven Poole, writing for The Guardian in 2019: “New Atheism’s arguments were never very sophisticated or historically informed.”[3]I hope to change that perception with regard to Hitchens’ razor. More importantly, I hope to chip away at the value elitist philosophers place on their sophistications.
I do this as a philosopher myself, one who is by no means an anti-intellectual. My difference lies in our motivations. I’m with Karl Marx, who famously said, “The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” While other motivations are valuable, such as discussing issues to further our understanding or more completely learn why people disagree, the goal to sharpen our critical thinking skills by eliminating the use of poor arguments is not one of them. For if that’s the goal, any subject matter will do. That’s like playing chess for the sake of learning to play better, which is fun and challenging, but it doesn’t change the world. Why not sharpen our critical thinking skills on the most difficult task of all, changing the world by changing minds? I’m convinced we already know enough to philosophize with a hammer, as Friedrich Nietzche argued.
I’m not alone in this. Julian Baggini echoes my thoughts in his Secular Web review of Michael Martin and Ricki Monnier’s anthology The Impossibility of God.[4] He said of it, “I just don’t believe that detailed and sophisticated arguments make any significant difference to the beliefs of the religious or atheists.” Why? Because “the unintellectual will obviously have no interest in over four hundred pages of carefully argued philosophy. Employing the arguments it contains against someone who has never seriously considered the basic problem of evil is like using a surgeon’s knife to chop down a tree.” But what of intellectuals? Baggini added: “I suspect that a statistically insignificant number of intellectuals will switch sides on the basis of the kinds of arguments contained here.” While we both admit Martin and Monnier’s anthology is valuable because bad philosophy must be answered, Baggini makes a fundamental point—that it probably benefits theists more. For all that their anthology does “is provide fresh challenges to faith, which can only ultimately show its strength. That which does not kill faith usually makes it stronger, and as a matter of empirical fact these arguments aren’t just not lethal, they barely injure.” Baggini concludes that “when we get to this level of detail and sophistication, the war has become phoney. Converts are won at the more general level.”
So much for sophistication if the goal is to change minds.
Theodore Drange says similar kinds of things when reviewing Jordon Howard Sobel’s book Logic and Theism.[5] Its sophistication is plain to see: “The book is long, abstruse, technical (making ample use of symbolic logic and Bayesian notation), and written in a rather difficult style.” While we both recommend it highly for the philosophical elite, Drange questions its value for others, noting, “The main emphasis of the book is on logic rather than theism.” For as an analytical philosopher, Sobel’s “focus is not so much on issues of fact and content as on issues of definition and logical structure.” But for people “who are more interested in theism than logic,” “who have an interest in converting others either to or away from theism,” who “seek arguments that are both cogent and persuasive,” Sobel’s book “has very limited use for such people.” Drange concludes: “Overall, the book is excellent and of great value for professional analytical metaphysicians and philosophers of religion…. But for the average person with an interest in arguments for and against God’s existence, it would be quite safe to pass it by.”
If the point is to change the world, I would rather have more popular books written by people like Harris, Dawkins, and Hitchens than philosophical elites like Martin and Sobel. It’s not that I agree with how Harris and company present their arguments, since they suffer from a lack of precision, depth, and sophistication. It’s rather that I agree with many of their main points, even defending the main point of Dawkins’ ultimate Boeing 747 gambit.[6] I’m happy those points have been thrust into the general population for discussion, especially when they argue against blind faith in bizarre unevidenced miraculous beliefs. On that score, Hitchens’ razor is all anyone needs to honestly evaluate and subsequently dismiss the miraculous claims of religion.
My specialties are theology, philosophical theology, and especially, apologetics. I am an expert on these subjects even though it’s very hard to have a good grasp of them all. Now it’s one thing for theologically unsophisticated intellectuals like Harris, Dawkins, and Hitchens to argue against religion. It’s quite another thing for a theologically sophisticated intellectual like myself to defend them by saying they are within their epistemic rights to denounce religion from their perspectives. And I do. I can admit they lack the sophistication to understand and respond point for point to sophisticated theology. But it doesn’t matter because all sophisticated theology is based on faith, blind faith, unevidenced faith in the Bible—or Koran or Bhagavad Gita—as the word of God, and/or faith in the Nicene Creed (or other creeds), and/or faith in a church, synagogue, or temple. No amount of sophistication changes this fact.
Three Important Razors
(1) Ockham’s Razor
William of Ockham (1285-1349) had previously articulated what is known as Ockham’s razor, whereby “entities should not be multiplied without necessity.” In other words, simpler explanations that explain all the available evidence should be preferred over more complex ones. Ockham cut out a path for modern scientific inquiry because the addition of supernatural entities adds unnecessary complexity to our explanations. Applying Ockham, supernatural explanations of all the available evidence are not preferred because natural explanations are simpler. The best explanations are those that make the fewest assumptions that fit the available evidence.
One can see this in the work of Pierre-Simon de Laplace (1749-1827), a French mathematician, astronomer, and physicist, who wrote a five-volume work titled Celestial Mechanics (1799-1825). In it he offered a complete mechanical interpretation of the solar system without reference to a god. Upon hearing of Laplace’s work, legend has it that Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte said to him, “They tell me you have written this large book on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned its creator.” To which Laplace reputedly responded, “Sir, I had no need of that hypothesis.”
(2) Sagan’s Razor
Carl Sagan popularized the aphorism, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” (ECREE), which is sometimes referred to as Sagan’s razor. It’s based on a reasonable understanding about claims having to do with the nature, workings, and origins of the natural world. These types of claims require sufficient corroborating objective evidence commensurate with the nature of the claim being made. In my anthology The Case against Miracles, I defended this aphorism in chapter 3. I described three types of claims about the objective world and the evidence needed to accept them.
Ordinary claims require only a small amount of fair evidence.
These are claims about events that take place regularly every day and, as such, require only the testimonial evidence of someone who is trustworthy under normal circumstances. If a trustworthy person tells us there was a car accident on Main Street, we would accept it. There’s no reason not to.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary levels of evidence.
These are claims about extremely unusual events within the natural world. They require sufficient corroborating objective evidence. The objective evidence should be sufficient, regardless of whether it’s a large amount of unremarkable objective evidence, or a small amount of remarkable objective evidence. If someone claimed to have consecutively sank 18 hole-in-one’s in a row on a par-3 golf course, we would simply scoff at him. Testimonial evidence alone is always insufficient for establishing an extraordinary claim like that. Such a feat is possible, though. Art Wall, Jr. (1923-2001) holds the record of 45 lifetime hole-in-one’s on the PGA tour. But they were not sunk in consecutive order.[7]
Take for another instance the extraordinary claim that aliens abducted a man. Without any objective evidence, there isn’t any reason to believe his testimony. Objective evidence of his alien abduction would include things like him being beamed back down the very next day into a large crowd of family and friends as an older man, in full view of the alien spaceship, who now shows a superior technological knowledge beyond our comprehension, having in his hand a mysterious rock not from our planet, who was implanted with a futuristic tracking device, and is now able to predict the future with pinpoint accuracy. That’s objective evidence. No reasonable person would reject his story. But we never have this kind of strong objective evidence, and strong evidence is required.
Miraculous claims are the highest type of extraordinary claims and require the highest quality and/or quantity of objective evidence.
A miracle is an event impossible to occur by natural processes alone. Miraculous events by definition involve divine supernatural interference in the natural order of the world. Other descriptive words are appropriate here, like the suspending, or transgressing, or breaching, or contravening, or violating of natural law; otherwise, they’re not considered miracles, just extremely rare extraordinary events within the world of nature. If you recover after being told you have a one-in-a-million chance of being healed, that’s not equivalent to a miracle, one that suspends natural law. It simply means you beat the odds, and it happens every day, every hour, and every minute, around the globe. The reason believers see evidence of miracles in extremely rare coincidental events is simply because they’re ignorant about statistics and the probabilities built on them. There can be no reasonable doubt about this.
Statistician David Hand convincingly shows that “extraordinarily rare events are anything but. In fact, they’re commonplace. Not only that, we should all expect to experience a miracle roughly once every month.” He is not a believer in supernatural miracles, though: “No mystical or supernatural explanation is necessary to understand why someone is lucky enough to win the lottery twice, or is destined to be hit by lightning three times and still survive.”[8] Extremely rare events are not miracles. We should expect extremely rare events in our lives many times over. No gods made these events happen.
To believe someone’s testimony that a god suspended natural laws to perform a miracle requires enough objective evidence to overcome our extremely well-founded conviction that the world behaves according to natural processes that can be understood and predicted by scientists. David Hume put it this way: “No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavors to establish.”[9] However, human testimony of a miracle is woefully inadequate for this task, as Hume went on to argue. For if we wouldn’t believe someone’s testimony to have sunk 18 hole-in-one’s in a row on a par-3 golf course, we would all rightly dismiss and ridicule as delusional the additional testimony that the golfer flew in the air like Superman from tee to tee in scoring that perfect 18.
Both Ockham’s razor and Sagan’s razor are epistemological in nature, and both are important. Ockham’s razor has to do with the burden of proof. It’s placed squarely on anyone making miraculous claims since they require the existence of additional entities. I think all reasonable people should agree with Ockham’s razor, which explains why scientists should not invoke a god to explain the complexity of the universe, the evolution of life, or the beginnings of life. Sagan’s razor has to do with the kind and quality of evidence needed to establish one’s burden of proof. The more extraordinary the claim, the better the evidence must be. I think all reasonable people should agree with Sagan’s razor, which requires a sufficient amount of credible evidence commensurate with the type of claim being made.
(3) Hitchens’ Razor
Hitchens’ razor has to do with something more fundamental, the need for objective evidence. Lacking it, miracle claims can be dismissed out of hand without a second’s thought. The application of Hitchens’ razor, which comes from a “pop atheist,” stands in opposition to the application of Bayes’ theorem, the domain of sophisticated philosophers.
To be clear, when we dismiss miracle claims, we still have a responsibility to share the reasons why we dismiss them, depending on the number of believers in a society who hold them and how much these beliefs cause harm. We should do what judges do in a court case. They explain why the case is being dismissed so people can understand. Most of the time they simply say the evidence is not there. Judges almost never state the conditions under which they could be convinced, nor specify the amount of evidence needed. They only need to say that the case doesn’t meet the evidential standards required. So all we have to show is why the needed objective evidence doesn’t exist, and that should be the end of it. There wouldn’t be a reason to respond in much depth at all. Depending on the circumstances, ridicule and mockery are even appropriate.[10] Having said this, I will dispassionately suggest what should be convincing, starting with the Christian belief in a virgin-birthed incarnate god.
There is No Objective Evidence for the Virgin Birth So It Should Be Dismissed
All of the miracle claims in the Bible can legitimately be dismissed out of hand since there is no objective evidence for any of them. Consider the Christian belief in their virgin-birthed deity. Just ask for the objective evidence. You don’t need to do anything until that evidence is presented. Until then, such a belief should be dismissed out of hand.
There is an oft-repeated argument that marijuana is the gateway drug leading to dangerous drugs.[11] There is another gateway, one that leads to doubting the whole Bible. I focus on the virgin birth miracle because it’s the gateway to doubting the Gospel narratives, just as Genesis 1-11 is the gateway to doubting the Old Testament narratives. It was for me, anyway. The objective textual evidence from the Bible shows that, contrary to the virgin birth narratives: (1) The genealogies are inaccurate and irrelevant; (2) Jesus was not born in Bethlehem; (3) there was no worldwide census as claimed; (4) there was no slaughter of the innocents; (5) there was no Star of Bethlehem; (6) the virgin-birthed prophecies are faked; and (7) the belief that Jesus was born of a virgin most likely derived from pagan parallels in those days.[12] It was concocted in hindsight to explain how their belief in an incarnate god came into the world to redeem sinners.
The fact is there is no objective evidence to corroborate the Virgin Mary’s story. We hear nothing about her wearing a misogynistic chastity belt to prove her virginity. No one checked for an intact hymen before she gave birth, either. After Jesus was born, Maury Povich wasn’t there with a DNA test to verify Joseph was not the baby daddy. We don’t even have first-hand testimonial evidence for it since the story is related to us by others, not by Mary or Joseph. At best, all we have is second-hand testimony reported in just two later anonymous gospels by one person, Mary, or two if we include Joseph, who was incredulously convinced Mary was a virgin because of a dream—yes, a dream (see Matthew 1:19-24). We never get to independently cross-examine them or the people who knew them, which we would need to do since they may have a very good reason for lying (pregnancy out of wedlock, anyone?).
Now one might simply trust the anonymous Gospel writers who wrote down this miraculous tale, but why? How is it possible they could find out that a virgin named Mary gave birth to a deity? Think about how they would go about researching that. No reasonable investigation could take Mary’s and/or Joseph’s word for it. With regard to Joseph’s dream, Thomas Hobbes tells us, “For a man to say God hath spoken to him in a Dream, is no more than to say he dreamed that God spake to him; which is not of force to win belief from any man” (Leviathan, chap. 32.6). So the testimonial evidence is down to one person, Mary, which is still second-hand testimony at best. Why should we believe that testimony?
On this fact, Christian believers are faced with a serious dilemma. If this is the kind of research that went into writing the Gospels—taking Mary’s word and Joseph’s dream as evidence—we shouldn’t believe anything else the Gospel writers wrote without corroborating objective evidence. The lack of evidence for Mary’s story speaks directly to the credibility of the Gospel narratives as a whole. Since there’s no good reason to believe the virgin birth myth, there’s no good reason to believe the resurrection myth, either, since the claim of Jesus’ resurrection is told in those same Gospels. If the one is to be dismissed, so should the other.[13]
There are other tales in those same Gospels that should cause us to doubt, like tales of resurrected saints who allegedly came out of their tombs and walked around Jerusalem, but who were never interviewed and never heard from again (Matthew 27:52-53). Keep in mind we’re talking about miracle claims from an ancient superstitious era, as Richard Carrier described:
The age of Jesus was not an age of critical reflection and remarkable religious acumen. It was an era filled with con artists, gullible believers, martyrs without a cause, and reputed miracles of every variety. In light of this picture, the tales of the Gospels do not seem very remarkable. Even if they were false in every detail, there is no evidence that they would have been disbelieved or rejected as absurd by many people, who at the time had little in the way of education or critical thinking skills. They had no newspapers, telephones, photographs, or public documents to consult to check a story. If they were not a witness, all they had was a man’s word. And even if they were a witness, the tales tell us that even then their skills of critical reflection were lacking.[14]
In another place, Carrier is unmistakable:
When we pore over all the [early Christian] documents that survive, we find no evidence that any Christian convert did any fact-checking before converting or even would have done so. We can rarely even establish that they could have, had they wanted to. There were people in antiquity who could and would, but curiously we have no evidence that any of those people converted. Instead, every Christian who actually tells us what convinced him explicitly says he didn’t check any facts but merely believed upon hearing the story and reading the scriptures and just “feeling” it was right. Every third-person account of conversions we have tells the same story. Likewise, every early discussion we have from Christians regarding their methodology for testing claims either omits, rejects, or even denigrates rational, empirical methods and promotes instead faith-based methods of finding secrets hidden in scripture and relying on spiritual inspirations and revelations…. Skepticism and doubt were belittled; faith without evidence was praised and rewarded.
Hence, when we look closely, we discover that all the actual evidence that Jesus rose from the dead consisted of unconfirmable hearsay, just like every other incredible claim made by ancient religions of the day. Christian apologists make six-figure careers out of denying this, but their elaborate attempts always collapse on inspection. There just wasn’t any evidence Jesus really rose from the dead other than the word of a few fanatics and a church community demonstrably full of regular hallucinators and fabricators.[15]
What’s Wrong With Bayes’ Theorem?
In his writings and talks, Carrier does a good job of explaining Bayes’ theorem and is its best advocate for examining the claims of history, including those of miracles. It’s a mathematical formula that asks us to input numbers representing determinants of the probability of a given hypothesis we wish to test, say of whether a murder took place.[16] It asks us to input values for the initial likelihood of a murder based on relevant background factors that would increase or decrease that initial likelihood, such as if the suspect had a motive for murdering the victim, or if the victim was suicidal, accident prone, or had a known enemy sworn to kill him. It also asks us to input values for important factors like what we should expect to find if a murder took place compared to if it didn’t. For instance, we might expect to find a dead body that shows evidence of a struggle, as opposed to a dead body lying peacefully in bed. Then it asks us to input values for the probabilities of alternative scenarios, such as the possibility the victim died of an accident, or faked his own death in order to frame the suspect for murder. After inputting the numbers in the equation, we do the calculations, and the resulting percentage is the probability that a murder took place.
I don’t object to using Bayes’ theorem when it’s applied appropriately to questions for which we have prior objective data to determine their initial likelihood, along with subsequent data to help us in our final probability calculations. It’s an excellent tool when these conditions obtain. Nothing I say in what follows undercuts its proper use. But a problem occurs when someone uses Bayes as if it is the only tool in the tool chest. To people who only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The proper tool to use on miracles before there is any objective evidence is Hitchens’ razor. Only after there is some objective evidence can we turn to Bayes’ theorem.
My contention is that using Bayes without any prior or subsequent objective data is using it in a pseudostatistical way. Just consider how you could use Bayes to evaluate my bare assertion, without any objective evidence, that I’m levitating right now. That’s all you need to consider and you can understand my point. All miracle claims must begin and end with objective evidence. Without it, there is nothing else to say or do but dismiss them. No math is needed. No other issue demands to be asked or answered.
I have five specific objections to using Bayes’ theorem to assess miracle claims.
With miracles, there is no objective data to work from.
As just explained, Bayes’ theorem is a mathematical formula that can only be useful when there is objective data to work from. We’re told every logically possible claim has a nonzero probability to it, and that’s true. But the prior probability of a miracle cannot be calculated because we have no prior probability value to input. A pig that can fly of its own power would be a miracle. So we need prior objective data to work from if we’re to use Bayes to assess a specific claim that a pig flew. How many pigs have ever flown of their own power? If anything, the only previous objective data available suggests that the answer is none. So Bayes isn’t the proper tool to use when assessing miracles that lack previous data.
I agree with William L. Vanderburgh, who defended Hume against his critics, that applying Bayes to miracle claims is inappropriate, ineffective, and unnecessary.[17] Hume knew of Bayes’ theorem, but chose not to use it when arguing against miracles.[18] That’s because his objections to miracles also serve to debunk a god of miracles.[19] Even if there is a deity of some kind, which is supposed to tip the balance of probabilities toward accepting miracle claims, Hume argues it’s unreasonable to accept miracle claims as reported by others. As Paul Russell explains, “The key issue, for Hume’s critique of miracles, is whether or not we ever have reason to believe on the basis of testimony that a law of nature has been violated. Hume’s arguments lead to the conclusion that we never have reason to believe miracle reports as passed on to us.”[20] Since there is no good reason to believe testimonies of miracles, there is no good reason to believe in a god of miracles, either. Russell again: “What really matters for assessing Hume’s critique of miracles is to keep in mind that his primary aim is to discredit the actual historical miracle claims that are supposed to provide authority and credibility for the major established religions—most obviously, Christianity.” And on that score Hume’s arguments succeed, since all we have in the Bible are ancient reports of miracles found in ancient texts. So as miracles go by the wayside, so also goes a god of miracles. Just as Hume’s previous objections to design in the universe served to debunk an intelligent, perfectly good divine designer[21], so too his objections to miracles show us there isn’t a good reason to believe in a god of miracles.[22]
When it comes to the supposed miracle of the virgin birth, much less of a virgin-birthed deity, there is no verifiable data that it ever occurred. Since there’s no reason to think any deity was born of a virgin, the odds of such a miracle is at least as low as the number of babies who have ever been born, 1 out of 120 billion! Since we can’t see into the future for the first occurrence of a virgin-birthed deity, there could be an additional 120 billion people or more before such a miraculous event takes place (if ever). So if we justifiably cannot input any numbers for the initial likelihood of this miracle, or only input a prior probability so low that it’s only negligibly distinguishable from zero, we have nothing to input into Bayes’ theorem for us to calculate.
It’s claimed we can use something called “Bayesian reasoning” on miracle claims rather than exact numbers, as with a range of numbers (i.e., not 0.4 but rather 0.4 to 0.01). But if this is true, then we would no longer be using the theorem. For by definition, the application of a theorem requires exact mathematical inputs that can be multiplied and divided. More to the point, the mathematical part of the theorem is the indispensable part of Bayes’ theorem. It’s the part considered to be the original contribution of Thomas Bayes (1702-1761). What makes it important is that the reasoning process behind it “has been quantified, i.e., made it into an expressible equation” for the first time. The “actual process of weighing evidence and changing beliefs is not a new practice.”[23]
In other words, we’ve been reasoning about objective evidence and changing our minds based on the available evidence throughout human history. We’ve also been weighing alternative hypotheses and seeking the best explanation of the evidence for as long as we’ve been reasoning well. So what ends up being called Bayesian reasoning is a cluster of separate questions reasonable people seek answers for when seeking the best conclusion from the available evidence. There’s nothing about Bayesian reasoning we didn’t already do before Bayes quantified it. Every question Bayes asks was already being asked and answered before Thomas Bayes quantified that process. So there’s nothing about what is being called “Bayesian reasoning” that’s specifically due to Bayes’ theorem. One can ask and answer these questions and call it Bayesian reasoning if they want to do so. But it’s not something that originated with Bayes’ theorem, nor is it doing any math, nor is this reasoning helpful unless there is first some objective evidence.
Using Bayes’ theorem gives undue credibility to some miracle claims over others when none of them have any objective evidence for them.
When working with numbers, all possibilities have a nonzero probability. What number should we assign to miracles, which by definition involve the suspension, transgressing, breaching, contravening, or violating of natural law? It’s argued that we should be generous with our initial probabilities for the sake of argument by inputting higher numbers than warranted when dealing with miracles. But why? Why do that if we’re seeking truth?
Some will say Bayes is useful for evaluating hypothetical scenarios—for example, if one wants to make a case that even given the best imaginable evidence, such evidence still wouldn’t support an opponent’s conclusion that a miracle occurred. But why abandon real concrete cases in favor of imagined hypotheticals? To play this language game is to pretend something false, that there is some evidence for a miracle when there isn’t. How does that serve to advance the honest quest for truth? Even if we do this, Baggini’s earlier quote is still spot on, that “a statistically insignificant number of intellectuals will switch sides” on the basis of such sophistication. So there’s little reason to think this strategy will work. Besides, what makes anyone think we can show that a specific miracle claim has no objective evidence for it, if we grant that it has some objective evidence for it? That’s counterproductive. Keep in mind Baggini also said, “That which does not kill faith usually makes it stronger.”
In my book Unapologetic, I explain why responding to fundamentalist arguments in kind gives their beliefs a certain undeserved respectability. To treat the resurrection story as if it has some objective evidence for it when it doesn’t, is to give it undeserved credibility over the other miracle tales told around the world, in previous centuries, reputedly performed by different gods and goddesses, who have had millions of devotees. It also gives it undeserved credibility for the miracle tales told in the very Gospel texts where we read of the Resurrection. Why is no one doing a mathematical analysis of the Christian virgin-birthed son of God, or the supposed resurrected saints at the time of the death of Jesus (Matthew 27:52-53)? That’s the point!
My critiques of religion focus on the lack of objective evidence for the claims of religion.[24] Imagine if every nonbeliever responded to theistic arguments as I advocate? What if every time an apologist for their sect-specific god offered an argument or quoted their scriptures nonbelievers all responded in unison, saying there is no objective evidence for what they claim? If nonbelievers all responded as Hitchens’ razor calls for, Christian apologists would be forced to consider they are pretending their faith true, just as surely as the Sophists in the days of Socrates were pretending to be wise. This is how we currently treat conspiracy theories from QAnon and others. We should treat religions likewise since they are themselves conspiracy theories made up based on no evidence but anonymous sources.
The only response to an assertion that a pig can fly of its own power is to demand to see one fly under test conditions.[25] Lacking any objective data that shows pigs can fly of their own power, the proper way to deal with such a claim is to dismiss it. To go through the motions of calculating such a probability, beginning with a completely made-up nonzero prior probability, is foolishness. It would grant pig-flying believers the credibility they so desperately crave for such a bizarre claim, just because we took it seriously.
Using Bayes’ theorem won’t help convince anyone.
Using Bayes is probably worse as a strategy to convince others, for the only people who would sludge through it are far less likely to be convinced by it, and those who use it don’t show any signs of agreeing. Even among people using Bayes’ theorem, they’re coming to very different conclusions:
Vincent Torley calculated there’s about a 60-65% chance that Jesus rose up from the dead. After reading Michael Alter’s book, Resurrection: A Critical Inquiry (Xlibris Press, 2015). Torley doesn’t think historical evidence can show that a miracle like the Resurrection took place.[26] Now, with his changed mind, the historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus is probably down to 25-30% for him.
Richard Swinburne calculated the probability of the bodily resurrection of Jesus at 97%.[27]
Timothy and Lydia McGrew calculated the likelihood ratio of the resurrection of Jesus to be 1044 to 1, or 1 followed by 44 zeros to 1.[28]
In Richard Carrier’s estimation, Bayes’ theorem leads him to think the probability that Jesus did not exist could be as high as 67%.[29] So much the worse for a resurrection of a nonexistent person!
Tools are supposed to help. If Bayes helps us, then why does it produce these wildly diverse results? The reason is clear. There are different results precisely because there is no data or evidence for miracles for Bayesians to calculate. This should be evidence all on its own that Bayes is not the right tool when it comes to miracle claims. The right tool is Hitchens’ razor, which requires some credible evidence of a miracle before we give it serious consideration.
Using Bayes’ theorem won’t help clarify our differences.
We don’t need Bayes to know where our differences are to be found. We already know. The main difference between us is that believers value faith—blind faith, the only kind of faith there is, faith without objective evidence—while nonbelievers value sufficient objective evidence, and seek to proportion their views to the strength of the evidence as best as possible. That’s why we’re nonbelievers.
Christian apologists David Marshall and Timothy McGrew scoff at my depiction of faith as “an irrational leap over the evidence.” They define faith as “trusting, holding to, and acting on what one has good reason to believe is true, in the face of difficulties.” They go on to document that “for nearly two millennia many of the greatest names in the Christian tradition have grounded faith in reason and evidence.”[30] However, it’s quite clear to me that most believers in the churches and colleges tout the virtues of faith without evidence. Just watch the many interventions that street epistemologist Anthony Magnabosco has published on his YouTube channel. There you’ll see the overwhelming anecdotal evidence. When questioned, believers on the street almost always revert to blind faith as an answer.[31]
It seems as though average Christian believers understand their faith better than Christian apologists do, just as those same apologists understood their faith before attending Christian seminaries. Average believers have read and understood their Bible, such as the Gospel story of doubting Thomas, who refused to believe without any objective evidence.[32] The whole point of the tale is that faith without objective evidence is a virtue, not a vice. The lesson to be learned comes from the character of Jesus himself: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” This is what 2 Corinthians 5:7 affirms, that “we walk by faith, not by sight,” as does Hebrews 11:1: “Faith is being sure of what we hope for. It is being sure of what we do not see” (NRSV).
In any case, how Marshall and McGrew define faith is irrelevant since there’s no objective evidence for their miracles. Not until they can produce the requisite evidence can they justifiably define faith as trust. Otherwise, their definitions of faith are pure, unadulterated obfuscations hiding the fact that they don’t have any objective evidence for their sect-specific Christian faith. They end up with a faith that trusts in nonexistent objective evidence, so there is every reason not to trust in their faith.[33]
Imagining what might convince us of a miracle is largely an exercise in futility.
Bayes’ theorem asks us to imagine what might convince us of a given hypothesis. This is a reasonable request in criminal trials, and in other kinds of scenarios where actual evidence is being considered. In order to imagine what would convince us to believe that a miracle occurred, however, we will always have to imagine sufficient objective evidence, and it doesn’t exist. Given the miracle tales told in the Bible, this would require changing the past, and that can’t be done. If an overwhelming number of Jews in first-century Palestine had become Christians, that would’ve helped. They believed in their God. They believed their God did miracles. They knew their Old Testament prophecies. They hoped for a Messiah/King based on these prophecies.[34] We’re even told they were beloved by their God! Yet the overwhelming majority of those first-century Jews did not believe Jesus was raised from the dead.[35] They were there and they didn’t believe. So why should we?
If I could go back in time to watch Jesus coming out of a tomb, that would work. But I can’t travel back in time. If someone recently found some convincing objective evidence dating to the days of Jesus, that would work. But I can’t imagine what kind of evidence that could be. As I’ve argued, testimonial evidence wouldn’t work, so an authenticated handwritten letter from the mother of Jesus would be insufficient. If a cell phone was discovered and dated to the time of Jesus containing videos of him doing miracles, that would work. But this is just as unlikely as his resurrection. If Jesus, God, or Mary were to appear to me, that would work. But that has never happened, even in my believing days, and there’s nothing I can do to make it happen either. Several atheists have suggested other scenarios that would work, but none of them panned out.[36]
Believers will cry foul, complaining that the kind of objective evidence needed to believe cannot be found, as if we concocted this need precisely to deny miracles. But this is simply what reasonable people need. If that’s the case, then that’s the case. Bite the bullet. Once honest inquirers admit the objective evidence doesn’t exist, they should stop complaining and be honest about its absence. It’s that simple. Since reasonable people need this evidence, God is to be blamed for not providing it. Why would a God create us as reasonable people and then not provide what reasonable people need? Thinking people should always think about these matters in accordance to the probabilities based on the strength of the objective evidence.
Believers will object that I haven’t stated any criteria for identifying what qualifies as extraordinary evidence for an extraordinary claim. But I know what does not count. Second-, third-, or fourth-hand hearsay testimony doesn’t count. Nor does circumstantial evidence. Nor still does anecdotal evidence as reported in documents that are centuries later than the supposed events, which were copied by scribes and theologians who had no qualms about including forgeries. I also know that subjective feelings, experiences, or inner voices don’t count as extraordinary evidence. Neither do claims that one’s writings are inspired, divinely communicated through dreams, or were seen in visions.
Chasing the definitional demand for specific criteria sidetracks us away from that which matters. Concrete suggestions matter. If nothing else, a God who desired our belief could have waited until our present technological age to perform miracles, because people in this scientific age of ours need to see the evidence. If a God can send the savior Jesus in the first century, whose death supposedly atoned for our sins and atoned for all the sins of the people in the past, prior to his day, then that same God could have waited to send Jesus to die in the year 2022. Doing so would bring salvation to every person born before this year, too, which just adds twenty centuries of people to save.
In today’s world it would be easy to provide objective evidence of the Gospel miracles. Magicians and mentalists would watch Jesus to see if he could fool them, like what Penn & Teller do on their show. There would be thousands of cell phones that could document his birth, life, death, and resurrection. The raising of Lazarus out of his tomb would go viral. We could set up a watch party as Jesus was being put into his grave to document everything all weekend, especially his resurrection. We could ask the resurrected Jesus to tell us things that only the real Jesus could have known or said before he died. Photos could be compared. DNA tests could be conducted on the resurrected body of Jesus, which could prove his resurrection, if we first snatched the foreskin of the baby Jesus long before his death. Plus, everyone in the world could watch as his body ascended back into Heaven above, from where it was believed he came down to earth.
Christian believers say their God wouldn’t make his existence that obvious. But if their God had wanted to save more people, as we read he did (2 Peter 3:9), then it’s obvious he should’ve waited until our modern era to do so. For the evidence could be massive. If nothing else, their God had all of this evidence available to him, but chose not to use any of it, even though with the addition of each unit of evidence, more people would be saved.
It’s equally obvious that if a perfectly good, omnipotent God wanted to be hidden, for some hidden reason, we should see some evidence of this. But outside the apologetical need to explain away the lack of objective evidence for faith, we don’t find it. For there are a number of events taking place daily in which such a God could alleviate horrendous suffering without being detected. God could’ve stopped the underwater earthquake that caused the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami before it happened, thus saving a quarter of a million lives. Then, with a perpetual miracle, that God could’ve kept it from ever happening in the future. If God did this, none of us would ever know that he did. Yet he didn’t do it. Since there are millions of clear instances like this one, where a theistic God didn’t alleviate horrendous suffering even though he could do so without being detected, we can reasonably conclude that a God who hides himself doesn’t exist. If nothing else, a God who doesn’t do anything about the most horrendous cases of suffering doesn’t do anything about the lesser cases of suffering either, or involve himself in our lives.
This is how to properly think of miracle claims. We simply have to ask for objective evidence. If it doesn’t exist, then say so, say why if you wish to, and be done with it. Just dismiss those claims like reasonable people do to a great number of miracle claims from the beginning of time. Period!
In any case, imagining some nonexistent evidence that could convince us Mary gave birth to a divine son sired by a male god in the ancient superstitious world is a futile exercise, since we already know there’s no objective evidence for it. One might as well imagine what would convince us that Marshall Applewhite, of the Heaven’s Gate suicide cult, was telling the truth in 1997 that an extraterrestrial spacecraft following the comet Hale-Bopp was going to beam their souls up to it, if they would commit suicide with him. One might even go further to imagine what would convince us that he and his followers are flying around the universe today! Such an exercise would be utter tomfoolery, because faith is tomfoolery.
As anthropology professor James T. Houk said, “Virtually anything and everything, no matter how absurd, inane, or ridiculous, has been believed or claimed to be true at one time or another by somebody, somewhere in the name of faith.”[37] Faith-based beliefs cannot be calculated because there’s nothing to base our calculations on.[38]
Final Thoughts
Only if someone thinks there is some credible evidence on behalf of miracles can Bayes be utilized to assess miracle claims. From all I know, there isn’t any.
Again, believers should bite the bullet. We don’t concoct the rules of evidence. If there were a reasonable God, he should know to produce credible evidence for miracles that is commensurate with the rules of evidence he allegedly created.
Again, uncorroborated testimonies cannot establish an extraordinary claim, much less an extraordinary miracle claim of the highest order. Testimonies alone are not objective evidence, nor are hearsay, circumstantial evidence, anecdotal stories, subjective experiences, or claims of divine dreams, visions, or inspiration.
If nonbelievers wish to go into greater depth in dismissing an unevidenced miracle claim, even though it’s not strictly necessary, they can still use the full range of reasoning and scientific skills available by culling from the best of the best. It depends on the level of sophistication needed. Such sophistication does trickle down to the university level, and to less sophisticated educated people in the pulpit, and in the pews. Just keep in mind that the greater the sophistication, the less convincing the argument becomes, since from my experience Baggini is correct that conversion takes place on the general level.
Notes
[1] Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York, NY: Atlantic Books, 2008), p. 150.
[2] This is a significantly edited essay derived from chapter 1 (pp. 17-49) of my anthology, God and Horrendous Suffering (Denver, CO: GCRR Press, 2021). The original chapter title is “In Defense of Hitchens’s Razor” and contains nearly 15,000 words.
[6] See “Case Studies in Atheistic Philosophy of Religion,” chapter 4 of my book Unapologetic: Why Philosophy of Religion Must End (Pitchstone Publishing, 2016). An excerpt of the chapter is available online.
[8] David J. Hand, The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day (New York, NY: Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014). See also: Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 2009); Joseph Mazur, Fluke: The Math and Myth of Coincidence (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2016); and Jeffrey S. Rosenthal, Knock on Wood: Luck, Chance, and the Meaning of Everything (Toronto, Canada: HarperCollins Publishers, 2018).
[10] One misunderstanding of ridicule is that it changes the minds of the people we ridicule. It doesn’t. They double down. But they aren’t likely to change their minds anyway. It can and does change the minds of people who are undecided. Another misconception is that I’m arguing we should ridicule believers to their faces. See John W. Loftus, “On Justifying the Use of Ridicule and Mockery” (January 17, 2013). Debunking Christianity blog. <https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2013/01/on-justifying-use-of-ridicule-and.html>. See also John W. Loftus, Unapologetic: Why Philosophy of Religion Must End (Durham, NC: Pitchstone Press, 2016), pp. 211-235.
[11] I think this is largely false, but don’t get sidetracked by it.
[15] Loftus, The End of Christianity (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2011), pp. 62-63; emphasis mine. I’ll leave it to Carrier to explain why Bayes’ theorem is needed to assess the resurrection miracle even though he admits it has no evidence for it. I thank him for highly recommending my book, God and Horrendous Suffering, where my objections to Bayes are stated in chapter 1, despite his disagreement with me (so far).
[17] On this, see William L. Vanderburgh, David Hume on Miracles, Evidence, and Probability (Lanham, MD, Lexington Books, 2019), which I reviewed in the Appendix to The Case against Miracles, pp. 551-560. Vanderburgh’s book is a direct response to the criticisms of John Earman, Hume’s Abject Failure: The Argument against Miracles (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000).
[25] Craig S. Keener has touted a lot of anecdotal miracle stories in his 2-volume work, Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2011). To understand how to scientifically examine miracle claims, see Darren M. Slade, “Properly Investigating Miracle Claims” in The Case against Miracles (pp. 114-147) ed. John W. Loftus (United Kingdom: Hypatia Press, 2019). See especially: Theodore Schick, Jr., and Lewis Vaughn, How to Think about Weird Things: Critical Thinking for a New Age, now in its 8th edition (Boston< MA: McGraw-Hill, 2019); Carl Sagan, The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (New York, NY: Random House, 1996); the Amazing James Randi, An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1995); Joe Nickell, The Science of Miracles: Investigating the Incredible (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2013); and Michael Shermer, Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time (New York, NY: Holt Paperbacks, 2002).
[27] Richard Swinburne, The Resurrection of God Incarnate (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 2003).
[28] Timothy and Lydia McGrew, “The Argument from Miracles: A Cumulative Case for the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth” in The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology (pp. 593-662) ed. William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).
[29] Richard Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Phoenix Press Ltd, 2014).
[30] Tom Gilson and Carson Weitnauer, True Reason: Confronting the Irrationality of the New Atheism (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 2013), p. 149.
[33] The lack of any objective evidence for miracles is why there are five major strategies for doing apologetics. Upwards to eighty percent of Christian theologians/apologists reject the primary need for objective evidence for their faith in favor of other things. On this, see my chapter 6, “The Abject Failure of Christian Apologetics” (pp. 171-209) in The Case against Miracles.
[34] To see how early Christian’s misused Old Testament prophecy, see Robert J. Miller’s excellent book, Helping Jesus Fulfill Prophecy (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2015).
[35] The most plausible estimate of the first-century Jewish population comes from a census of the Roman Empire during the reign of Claudius (48 CE) that counted nearly 7 million Jews. See the entry “Population” in Encyclopedia Judaica, vol. 13. In Palestine there may have been as many as 2.5 million Jews. See Magen Broshi, “Estimating the Population of Ancient Jerusalem.” Biblical Archaeological Review Vol. 4, No. 2 (June 1978): 10-15. Despite these numbers, Catholic New Testament scholar David C. Sim shows that “Throughout the first century the total number of Jews in the Christian movement probably never exceeded 1,000.” See “How Many Jews Became Christians in the First Century: The Failure of the Christian Mission to the Jews. Hervormde Teologiese Studies Vol. 61, No. 1/2 (2005): 417-440.
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Richard L. Fricks 