Tag: John Loftus

What Would Convince Us Christianity is True?

Here’s the link to this article.

By John W. Loftus at 6/30/2023

We atheists are asked to imagine what would convince us that Christianity is true. The short answer is this: We need sufficient objective evidence that can transform the negligible amount of human testimony found in the Bible into verified eyewitness testimony. But it does not exist. Given the extraordinary nature of the miracle tales in the Bible, this requirement means the past has to be changed and that can’t be done. Let’s explore this.

Consider the Christian belief in the virgin-birthed deity. Just ask for the objective evidence. 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 by one person, Mary, as reported in two later anonymous gospels, or two people if we include Joseph, who was incredulously convinced Mary was a virgin because of a dream–yes, a dream (see Matthew 1:19-24).[1] We never get to independently cross-examine Mary and Joseph, 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 word for it, or Joseph’s word. 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?

Christian believers accept ancient 2nd 3rd 4th 5th handed-down testimony to the virgin birth of Jesus, but they would never believe two people who claimed to see a virgin give birth to an incarnate god in today’s world!

On this fact, Christian believers are faced with a serious dilemma. If this is the kind of research that went into writing the Gospel of Matthew–by taking Mary’s word and Joseph’s dream as evidence–then we shouldn’t believe anything else we find in that Gospel without corroborating objective evidence. The lack of evidence for Mary’s story speaks directly to the credibility of the Gospel narrative as a whole. There’s no good reason to believe the virgin birth myth, so there’s no good reason to believe the resurrection myth either, since the claim of Jesus’ bodily resurrection is first told in that Gospel.[2]

In a recent online discussion fundamentalist apologist Lydia McGrew suggested I got it wrong. Her knee jerk reaction to me was that the author of Matthew’s gospel merely reported that Joseph’s dream convinced him Mary’s tale was true, and nothing more. But if so, why is Joseph’s dream included in Matthew’s gospel at all? It doesn’t do anything to lead reasonable people to accept Mary’s story, as her testimony would still stand alone without any support. It would be tantamount to showing that Joseph was incredulously convinced by less than what a reasonable person should accept. So what? It would also encourage readers to consider their own dreams as convincing on other issues.

So let us imagine what could have been…

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.[3] 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.[4] 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, uncorroborated testimonial evidence alone 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 have panned out.[5]

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. It’s not our fault it doesn’t exist. 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? Reasonable 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 miraculous claim. But I know what does not count. Second-, third-, or fourth-hand hearsay testimony doesn’t count. Nor does circumstantial evidence. Nor 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, private 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. That should be good enough. Chasing the definitional demand for specific criteria sidetracks us away from that which matters. Concrete suggestions matter. But if Christians want more they should learn to examine the miracle claims in the Bible from the perspective of a historian.[6]

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 2023. 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 the heavenly sky 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 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.[7]

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.

Anthropology professor James T. Houk has 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.”[8] This is exactly what we find when Christians believe on less than sufficient objective evidence.

——–

[1] Joseph’s dream is used in the Gospel of Matthew’s narrative to help explain why Mary was not put to death for dishonoring him because of adultery. There are five other dreams in this gospel account which were all intended to save someone’s life. So, Joseph’s dream was probably meant to save Mary’s life too (Matthew 1:19-23; 2:12; 2:19-23; & 27:19). Matthew J. Marohl shows in Joseph’s Dilemma: “Honor Killing” in the Birth Narrative of Matthew (Wipf & Stock Publisher, 2008), that “Joseph’s dilemma involves the possibility of an honor killing. If Joseph reveals that Mary is pregnant, she will be killed. If Joseph conceals Mary’s pregnancy, he will be opposing the law of the Lord. What is a ‘righteous’ man to do?” Marohl: “Early Christ-followers understood Joseph’s dilemma to involve an assumption of adultery and the subsequent possibility of the killing of Mary.” This was part of their culture. Honor killings were justified in both the Old and New Testaments. Jesus even agreed with the Mosaic Law (Exodus 21:17; Leviticus 20:9) against his opponents on behalf of honor killings of children who dishonored their parents (Mark 7:8-13). The tale of the woman caught in adultery, where Jesus exposes the hypocrisy of her accusers, doesn’t change what Jesus thinks of the law either (John 8; Matthew 5:18).

Don’t be surprised by the possibility of honor killings. Jesus affirmed their legitimacy. The Pharisees accused Jesus of being too lenient in his observance of the law. So Jesus counterpunches them in Mark 7:9-12: “You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions! For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and mother,’ and, ‘Anyone who curses their father or mother is to be put to death.’ But you say that if anyone declares that what might have been used to help their father or mother is Corban (that is, devoted to God) then you no longer let them do anything for their father or mother.” (NIV) Corban is an Aramaic word that refers to a sacrifice, oath, or gift to God. The Pharisees allowed for this loophole so someone could make an oath to offer a gift to the temple, like one would set up a trust fund, in order to avoid giving it for the care of one’s aging parents.

Jesus’ first scriptural quote to “Honor your father and mother” is one of the Ten Commandments. Jesus’ second scriptural quote that “Anyone who curses (literally dishonors) their father or mother is to be put to death”, is found in Ex. 21:17 and Lev. 20:9. Jesus says the Corban loophole sets aside these two commands of God. For such a son would be disobeying a direct command of God by dishonoring his parents, while the Pharisees would be disobeying God’s command by not putting him to death. Deuteronomy 21:18-21 elaborates (i.e., the second law): “If someone has a stubborn and rebellious son who does not obey his father and mother and will not listen to them when they discipline him, his father and mother shall take hold of him and bring him to the elders at the gate of his town. They shall say to the elders, ‘This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a glutton and a drunkard.’ Then all the men of his town are to stone him to death.”

In this Jesus is affirming the Old Testament law of honor killings by stoning, for only if both of the laws Jesus cites are to be obeyed can his analogy succeed, that the Pharisees have set aside the laws of God in order to observe their traditions. For more on the harms of Christianity see my anthology, Christianity is not Great (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2014).

[2] On the resurrection, see Loftus, The Case against Miracles (United Kingdom: Hypatia Press, 2019), chapter 17.

[3] 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).

[4] 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.

[5] Loftus, What Would Convince Atheists To Become Christians? The Definitive Answers! (April 4, 2017).

[6] See Bart D. Ehrman on the Historian and the Resurrection of Jesus.

[7] See my anthology, God and Horrendous Suffering for more.

[8] James T. Houk, The Illusion of Certainty (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2017), p. 16.

————–

John W. Loftus is a philosopher and counter-apologist credited with 12 critically acclaimed books, including The Case against Miracles, God and Horrendous Suffering, and Varieties of Jesus Mythicism. Please support DC by sharing our posts, or by subscribing, donating, or buying our books at Amazon. As an Amazon Associate John earns a small amount of money from any purchases made there. Buying anything through them helps fund the work here, and is greatly appreciated!

On Thanking God for Cruel Randomness, by Rob J. Hyndman

Here’s the link to this article. And, here’s the link to Hyndman’s website where you can read his book, Unbelievable, for free.

By John W. Loftus at 7/02/2023

What follows comes from an online book by Rob J. Hyndman, titled Unbelievable. He says of himself: “I was a Christian for nearly 30 years, and was well-known as a writer and Bible teacher within the Christadelphian community. I gave up Christianity when I no longer thought that there was sufficient evidence to support belief in the Bible. This is a personal memoir describing my journey of deconversion….In this book, I reflect on how I was fooled, and why I changed my mind.”

On Thanking God for Cruel Randomness

The practice of thanking God for safety and protection, for food and drink, for health and well-being, or for any other “blessings”, might appear to be a commendable habit, but it is actually deeply troubling because of what it implies.

A miraculously intervening God is an unjust capricious God, sparing some and saving others, apparently on a whim.

If God really was selecting people to protect on the basis of some bigger picture, then you would not expect the number of people who are killed in various ways to be subject to the rules of probability. However, I can predict with remarkable accuracy the road toll each year, the number of people who will be struck by lightning, the number of people who will be killed by shark attacks, and so on. Each of these causes of death has a certain rate of occurrence that is quite predictable.

It is not just the number of deaths that is predictable, it is the whole probability distribution of deaths that is predictable. If you know the average number of deaths by car accidents in a city, then it is possible to calculate all the percentiles for that city. For example, you can estimate the numbers of deaths that would be exceeded only once every ten years. When you do this for many cities, you find that the 1-in-10-year extremes are exceeded in approximately 10% of cities each year. This is exactly what you would expect if the world was random, but not what you would expect if anyone was in control.

Car accidents, diseases, and industrial accidents all follow the same probability distribution, known as the “Poisson distribution”. The Poisson probability distribution is based on the assumption that accidents happen randomly. It is simply not possible for tragedies to appear to follow the Poisson probability distribution while actually being controlled by God. Any interventions of God that interfere in the random processes would be detectable. If they are not detectable, then they are random and God is not involved.

If we accept that the world is random, and that bad things happen to everyone by chance, where does that leave God? Either he does not exist, or he has no power, or he does not care. Whichever of those answers you prefer, God does not deserve our thanks

What Would Convince Us Christianity is True?

Here’s the link to this article.

By John W. Loftus at 6/30/2023

We atheists are asked to imagine what would convince us that Christianity is true. The short answer is this: We need sufficient objective evidence that can transform the negligible amount of human testimony found in the Bible into verified eyewitness testimony. But it does not exist. Given the extraordinary nature of the miracle tales in the Bible, this requirement means the past has to be changed and that can’t be done. Let’s explore this.

Consider the Christian belief in the virgin-birthed deity. Just ask for the objective evidence. 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 by one person, Mary, as reported in two later anonymous gospels, or two people if we include Joseph, who was incredulously convinced Mary was a virgin because of a dream–yes, a dream (see Matthew 1:19-24).[1] We never get to independently cross-examine Mary and Joseph, 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 word for it, or Joseph’s word. 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?

Christian believers accept ancient 2nd 3rd 4th 5th handed-down testimony to the virgin birth of Jesus, but they would never believe two people who claimed to see a virgin give birth to an incarnate god in today’s world!

On this fact, Christian believers are faced with a serious dilemma. If this is the kind of research that went into writing the Gospel of Matthew–by taking Mary’s word and Joseph’s dream as evidence–then we shouldn’t believe anything else we find in that Gospel without corroborating objective evidence. The lack of evidence for Mary’s story speaks directly to the credibility of the Gospel narrative as a whole. There’s no good reason to believe the virgin birth myth, so there’s no good reason to believe the resurrection myth either, since the claim of Jesus’ bodily resurrection is first told in that Gospel.[2]

In a recent online discussion fundamentalist apologist Lydia McGrew suggested I got it wrong. Her knee jerk reaction to me was that the author of Matthew’s gospel merely reported that Joseph’s dream convinced him Mary’s tale was true, and nothing more. But if so, why is Joseph’s dream included in Matthew’s gospel at all? It doesn’t do anything to lead reasonable people to accept Mary’s story, as her testimony would still stand alone without any support. It would be tantamount to showing that Joseph was incredulously convinced by less than what a reasonable person should accept. So what? It would also encourage readers to consider their own dreams as convincing on other issues.

So let us imagine what could have been…

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.[3] 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.[4] 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, uncorroborated testimonial evidence alone 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 have panned out.[5]

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. It’s not our fault it doesn’t exist. 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? Reasonable 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 miraculous claim. But I know what does not count. Second-, third-, or fourth-hand hearsay testimony doesn’t count. Nor does circumstantial evidence. Nor 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, private 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. That should be good enough. Chasing the definitional demand for specific criteria sidetracks us away from that which matters. Concrete suggestions matter. But if Christians want more they should learn to examine the miracle claims in the Bible from the perspective of a historian.[6]

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 2023. 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 the heavenly sky 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 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.[7]

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.

Anthropology professor James T. Houk has 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.”[8] This is exactly what we find when Christians believe on less than sufficient objective evidence.

——–

[1] Joseph’s dream is used in the Gospel of Matthew’s narrative to help explain why Mary was not put to death for dishonoring him because of adultery. There are five other dreams in this gospel account which were all intended to save someone’s life. So, Joseph’s dream was probably meant to save Mary’s life too (Matthew 1:19-23; 2:12; 2:19-23; & 27:19). Matthew J. Marohl shows in Joseph’s Dilemma: “Honor Killing” in the Birth Narrative of Matthew (Wipf & Stock Publisher, 2008), that “Joseph’s dilemma involves the possibility of an honor killing. If Joseph reveals that Mary is pregnant, she will be killed. If Joseph conceals Mary’s pregnancy, he will be opposing the law of the Lord. What is a ‘righteous’ man to do?” Marohl: “Early Christ-followers understood Joseph’s dilemma to involve an assumption of adultery and the subsequent possibility of the killing of Mary.” This was part of their culture. Honor killings were justified in both the Old and New Testaments. Jesus even agreed with the Mosaic Law (Exodus 21:17; Leviticus 20:9) against his opponents on behalf of honor killings of children who dishonored their parents (Mark 7:8-13). The tale of the woman caught in adultery, where Jesus exposes the hypocrisy of her accusers, doesn’t change what Jesus thinks of the law either (John 8; Matthew 5:18).

Don’t be surprised by the possibility of honor killings. Jesus affirmed their legitimacy. The Pharisees accused Jesus of being too lenient in his observance of the law. So Jesus counterpunches them in Mark 7:9-12: “You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions! For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and mother,’ and, ‘Anyone who curses their father or mother is to be put to death.’ But you say that if anyone declares that what might have been used to help their father or mother is Corban (that is, devoted to God) then you no longer let them do anything for their father or mother.” (NIV) Corban is an Aramaic word that refers to a sacrifice, oath, or gift to God. The Pharisees allowed for this loophole so someone could make an oath to offer a gift to the temple, like one would set up a trust fund, in order to avoid giving it for the care of one’s aging parents.

Jesus’ first scriptural quote to “Honor your father and mother” is one of the Ten Commandments. Jesus’ second scriptural quote that “Anyone who curses (literally dishonors) their father or mother is to be put to death”, is found in Ex. 21:17 and Lev. 20:9. Jesus says the Corban loophole sets aside these two commands of God. For such a son would be disobeying a direct command of God by dishonoring his parents, while the Pharisees would be disobeying God’s command by not putting him to death. Deuteronomy 21:18-21 elaborates (i.e., the second law): “If someone has a stubborn and rebellious son who does not obey his father and mother and will not listen to them when they discipline him, his father and mother shall take hold of him and bring him to the elders at the gate of his town. They shall say to the elders, ‘This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a glutton and a drunkard.’ Then all the men of his town are to stone him to death.”

In this Jesus is affirming the Old Testament law of honor killings by stoning, for only if both of the laws Jesus cites are to be obeyed can his analogy succeed, that the Pharisees have set aside the laws of God in order to observe their traditions. For more on the harms of Christianity see my anthology, Christianity is not Great (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2014).

[2] On the resurrection, see Loftus, The Case against Miracles (United Kingdom: Hypatia Press, 2019), chapter 17.

[3] 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).

[4] 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.

[5] Loftus, What Would Convince Atheists To Become Christians? The Definitive Answers! (April 4, 2017).

[6] See Bart D. Ehrman on the Historian and the Resurrection of Jesus.

[7] See my anthology, God and Horrendous Suffering for more.

[8] James T. Houk, The Illusion of Certainty (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2017), p. 16.

————–

John W. Loftus is a philosopher and counter-apologist credited with 12 critically acclaimed books, including The Case against Miracles, God and Horrendous Suffering, and Varieties of Jesus Mythicism. Please support DC by sharing our posts, or by subscribing,donating, or buying our books at Amazon. As an Amazon Associate John earns a small amount of money from any purchases made there. Buying anything through them helps fund the work here, and is greatly appreciated!

Anselm “Faith Seeking Confirmation”

Here’s the link to this article.

By John W. Loftus at 5/18/2020

I think Anselm’s dictum “faith seeking understanding” is to be understood in the history of theology and philosophy to be equivalent to “Faith Seeking Confirmation.” If that’s how it’s historically used then that’s what it means. Below is an updated edit from chapter 2 of my my book, Unapologetic: Why Philosophy of Religion Must End.

There is a common theme among St. Anselm’s work and the work of other obfuscationist theologians and philosophers that needs to be highlighted. It’s called faith seeking confirmation. We see this in Anselm with regard to his new atonement theory and his ontological argument.

Anselm therefore is exhibit “A” in defense of what atheist philosopher Stephen Law said: “Anything based on faith, no matter how ludicrous, can be made to be consistent with the available evidence, given a little patience and ingenuity.”1 If I could pick one sentence, one aphorism, one proverb that highlights the main reason philosophy of religion (PoR) must end, it’s Law’s. I’ll call it Law’s law of faith.–Begin Excerpt:

Faith Seeking Confirmation

Anselm’s most enduring legacy just might be his statement, credo ut intelligam (“I believe in order that I may understand”), or in its most famous form, Fides quaerens intellectum (“faith seeking understanding”).26 While others have expressed this idea, the point is that people first believe then seek to understand. First they believe then they seek data. First they believe then they seek to confirm their beliefs. No one in the history of the confessional church probably said anything different, or if they did, faith was surreptitiously smuggled in the back door. Few if any Christian intellectuals ever said “understanding seeks faith,” because the obvious sequitur is that if they achieved understanding they wouldn’t need faith. Seeking confirmation of one’s religious faith rather than truth reverses what reasonable people should do with one’s religious faith. In fact, it goes against science since science is based on the search for truth. So in this sense, faith should be recognized as a known cognitive bias sure to distort any honest inquiry into the truth, confirmation bias.

In 1987 a large-scale US antinarcotics campaign by Partnership for a Drug-Free America launched. It featured two televised public service announcements (PSAs) and a related poster campaign. The original thirty-second ad showed a man who held up an egg and said, “This is your brain.” Then he showed a hot frying pan and said, “This is drugs.” Then he cracked the egg and put it in the pan. It immediately began to cook. He brought the pan closer to the camera and said, “This is your brain on drugs.” He ended the PSA by saying, “Any questions?” It was a very powerful commercial.

I want people to consider the drug metaphor for faith, taking our cue from Karl Marx, who described religious faith as the opiate of the people. When you think of the commercial you need to hear the actor say, “This is your brain on faith.” That’s what I think. Here then are five ways faith makes the brain stupid:

1. Faith causes the believer to denigrate or deny science.
2. Faith causes the believer to think objective evidence is not needed to believe.
3.Faith causes the believer to deny the need to think exclusively in terms of the probabilities.
4. Faith causes the believer to accept private subjective experiences over the objective evidence.
5. Faith causes the believer to think faith has an equal or better method for arriving at the truth than scientifically based reasoning.

Any questions?

Christian, before you mindlessly quote mine from the Bible or the theology based on it, consider what you think of other brains on faith, like those of Scientologists, Mormons, Muslims, Jews, pantheists, and so on. Clearly you think their brains are on the opiate of faith just as I do. Watch some videos about these other faiths. Study them. Talk to practitioners of them. Try to argue with the best representatives of them and see if you can penetrate their brains with reason and science. Can’t do it? Why? Why do you think their faith makes them impervious to reason and your faith does not make you impervious to reason?

I had a discussion with a person of faith not long ago where she said there was nothing I could ever say to change her mind. I simply replied that no scientist would ever say such a thing. I went on to say she should think like a scientist and recommended that she read Guy Harrison’s chapter in my anthology, Christianity in the Light of Science, titled, “How to Think Like a Scientist: Why Every Christian Can and Should Embrace Good Thinking.” I recommended it because thinking like a scientist is the antithesis of thinking with the drug of faith on one’s brain.

Scientifically minded people argue we should reason like a scientist. Believers in different faiths will demur, saying we cannot justify our own reasoning capabilities, since we accept the fact of evolution. I think my evolved brain can make reliable (though not perfect) judgments based on the evidence of course, and that should be good enough. But ignoring this for the moment, what if these believers are correct? Then what? It gets them nowhere as in no-where. They still cannot settle their differences because they are left with no method to do so. They will argue for faith over reason, which leaves them all back at the starting gate, with faith. They are special pleading and that’s it, thinking that if they can deny reason in favor of their particular faith then it follows their particular faith ends up being the correct one. No, if they deny reason in favor of faith the result is there’s no way to settle these disputes between people of different faiths. My claim is that religions debunk themselves and because this is clearly the case, the only alternative to know the truth about the world is through scientifically based reasoning.

The fact that I can say nothing to convince most of them of this is maddening. They are impervious to reason, almost all of them. This is what faith does to their brains.

Randal Rauser is an associate professor of historical theology at Taylor Seminary, Edmonton, Canada. He and I coauthored a debate-style book together titled “God or Godless?”27 He is a Christian believer. I cowrote the book to reach any honest believers since I consider him impervious to reason. I could say it of any Christian pseudo-intellectual to some degree, depending on how close he or she is to the truth (liberals are closer than progressive evangelicals who are closer than fundamentalists). I admit Rauser reasons well in other areas of his life unrelated to his faith. He could even teach a critical thinking class. So he’s rational, very much so. But like all believers his brain must basically shut down when it comes to faith. When it comes to faith his brain must disengage. It cannot connect the dots. It refuses to connect them. Faith stops the brain from working properly. Faith is a cognitive bias that causes believers to overestimate any confirming evidence and underestimate any disconfirming evidence. So his brain will not let reason penetrate it, given his faith bias. Some people have even described faith as a virus of the brain (or mind). It makes the brain sick. Maybe Marx said it best though. It’s an opiate, a deadening drug.

Alvin Plantinga has argued that what’s essential to have a “warranted belief” is “the proper functioning of one’s cognitive faculties in the right kind of cognitive environment.” I actually think he’s right. But faith, like an opiate, causes the brain to stop functioning properly in matters related to faith. Christian apologetics is predicated on a host of logical fallacies. Take away the logical fallacies they use in defense of their faith and they wouldn’t have any arguments left at all. They certainly don’t have good objective sufficient evidence for what they believe. A critical thinker like Rauser, who thinks more rationally than most others in every area unrelated to his faith, cannot see this, but it is the case. Now why can’t Rauser see this? Why can’t he come to the correct religious conclusions? Why can’t he think rationally about his faith? Because his faith, like an opiate, will not let him. The opiate of faith deadens those areas in his brain that are related to his faith. Rauser surely sees this with regard to other believers in different religious faiths. He will say the same things about them that I say about him. But he refuses to see the same drug deadening his own brain. Once again, faith is a cognitive bias, a virus of the mind, an opiate. It prevents people of  faith from connecting the dots.

Rauser admits that like everyone else he depends on “motivated reasoning” to some degree. Well then, why won’t he apply the antidote, which is to require sufficient objective evidence for what he believes? That’s the only way to overcome the cognitive bias of faith, the only way to kill that virus in his mind, the only way to nullify the opiate of faith, and the only way to stop being swayed by his own motivated reasoning. Yet he questions the need for sufficient objective evidence apart from a private subjective ineffable feeling. Who in their right mind would do this after admitting he depends on “motivated reasoning” to some degree? No reasonable person, that’s who.

Subjective private ineffable religious experiences offer believers the most psychologically certain basis for believing in a particular divine being or religion. When believers have a religious experience it’s really hard, if not psychologically impossible, to argue them away from their faith. How is it possible then for believers who claim to have had such experiences to look at those experiences as an outsider might? We can point out the mind often deceives us and provide many examples of this phenomenon (brainwashing, wish-fulfillment, cognitive dissonance). But believers will maintain their particular religious experience is real because it was experienced, despite the odds their brain is deceiving them. We can point out that countless others of different faiths all claim to have the same type of religious experiences, whether they are Mormon, Muslim, Catholic, or Jew, but believers will still say their experiences are true ones (or veridical), despite the odds that what others believe as a result of their experiences makes it seem obvious they could be wrong too (and vice versa).

Sometimes in the face of such an experiential argument I simply say to the believer, “If I had that same experience I might believe too. But I haven’t. So why not? Why doesn’t your God give me that same religious experience?” At this point the believer must blame me and every living person on the planet for not being open to such a sect-specific religious experience. Depending on the religious sect in question that might include most every person, 7.4 billion of us and counting. But even this realization doesn’t affect believers who claim to have had such religious experiences. Calvinists among them will simply say, “God doesn’t want various people to have a saving religious experience.” It never dawns on any of these believers what this means about the God they worship, that only a mean-spirited barbaric God would send people to an eternal punishment because that same God did not allow them a certain type of religious experience.

Believers will always argue in such a fashion in order to stay as believers. No matter what we say they always seem to have an answer. What they never produce is any cold hard objective evidence, convincing evidence, for their faith claims. Ever. They are not only impervious to reason. They are also impervious to the evidence. They even see evidence where it doesn’t exist because they take the lack of evidence as evidence for their faith. When it comes to prayer they count the hits and discount the misses.

There is only so much a person can take when dealing with people who have lost touch with reality. Must we always maintain a patient attitude when we already know their arguments? Must we always respond in a dispassionate manner to people who are persuaded against reason to believe something delusional? We know this about them based on everything we know (i.e., our background knowledge). They are pretending to know that which they don’t know when they pretend to know with some degree of certainty their faith is true. If it’s faith, how then can something be known with any degree of probability at all, much less certainty? Faith by definition always concerns itself with that which is unsure. Something unsure involves lower probabilities. So faith is always about that which has lower probabilities to it. So again, how can something based on faith be known with any degree of certainty? It can’t, and only deluded minds think otherwise, minds that are impervious to reason and evidence. We can only hope they can function in life. It can be quite surprising they can.

Concluding Thoughts

Anselm of Canterbury’s key theological contributions in philosophy of religion highlight what reasonable people see as the need for philosophy of religion to end. He holds a preeminent place among the best philosophical theologians the Church ever produced. And yet, as we’ve seen, even among the best of the best there’s nothing here but rhetoric without substance based on his faith and the social climate of his day. His best contributions didn’t solve anything. Almost no one accepts his atonement theory today. His idiosyncratic perfect-being conception was based on nothing more than special pleading on behalf of his parochial Western concept of god. His ontological argument does not work either. Further, we’ve found that when Anselm’s perfect being is compared to the biblical god Yahweh and his supposed son, it doesn’t make any sense nor can it be reconciled. So the only reason to study Anselm seems to be one of historical curiosity. Anselm’s key contributions did not advance anything since we are no closer at getting to objective knowledge about anything than we would be if he never wrote a thing. When it comes to the history of philosophy he made no contributions that furthered understanding, the very thing he sought to do.

It does no good to say we’ve learned from Anselm what is false and cannot be defended, as if by learning what isn’t the case he advanced our understanding. He sidetracked our understanding for a millennium. He was doing obfuscationist puzzle-solving theology unrelated to the honest desire to understand. If we proportioned our intellectual assent to the probabilities based on sufficient evidence (per Hume), we would know all we need to know to know that Anselm and many other unevidenced beliefs are false and cannot be defended.

Karl Barth, considered one of the greatest theologians of the last century, who rejected natural theology with a big fat “Nein,” argued Anselm’s ontological argument was an example of his faith seeking understanding, rather than an argument proving God exists. Anselm did not seek to “prove” the truth of the Christian faith, Barth argued, but to understand it.28 Anselm’s ontological argument in chapter 2 of the Proslogion comes after asking God for help to understand his faith in chapter 1. There he prays, “I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand. For this also I believe, — that unless I believed, I should not understand.” Then just before developing the argument in chapter 2, Anselm prays, “Lord, do you, who do give understanding to faith, give me, so far as you know it to be profitable, to understand that you are as we believe; and that you are that which we believe.” So while there is disagreement about what he was doing, Anselm at least tacitly acknowledges his argument comes from faith rather than leading to faith. And that’s exactly what we find. The ontological argument depends on his Christian faith, which subsequently seeks to confirm his faith, what he already believes about his parochial god. There’s a recognized informal fallacy here I’ve mentioned a time or two. It’s called special pleading. It’s also the mother of all cognitive biases, something to avoid if we want to know the truth.

Philosophers of religion who have dealt with Anselm’s argument and developed their own versions of it, such as Charles Hartshorne, Norman Malcolm, and Alvin Plantinga, should take note. They don’t know their own theology. Or, perhaps more correctly and importantly, they fail to realize they’re doing the same thing Anselm did. He sought after arguments that confirmed his faith rather that seeking out sufficient objective evidence for his God.

What we’re led to conclude is that the problem of philosophy of religion stems from faith. If faith is trust then there is no reason to trust faith. Anything based on faith has lower probabilities to it by definition. Christian pseudo-philosophers do no more than build intellectual castles in the sky without any solid grounding to them. There doesn’t seem to be any good principled reason for not getting fed up with the pretend game of faith with its ever-receding theology.

–End Excerpt

How to Change the Minds of Believers

Here’s the link to this article.

John W. Loftus | January 31, 2023 | Editor’s Choice, Kiosk Article

After spending nearly two decades trying to change the minds of Christian believers—my focus in what follows—I still don’t fully know how to do it. Regardless, I’ll share ten helpful tips for readers who, like me, want to bang their heads against a wall. I think that it’s worth doing despite the low odds of success, for any success helps rid the world of the harms of religion. Besides, one of the greatest challenges is to change minds, and I like challenges. Plus, I’ve learned a great deal by attempting this important underappreciated task.

If you choose to follow in my footsteps, begin where you are. You may not feel qualified. But you can question. If you do that, you’ll do well. Nonbelievers are first and foremost questioners, doubters, skeptics. We are nonbelievers because we are more willing than most to question everything. You can’t go wrong in doing that. There are plenty of beliefs that are not just wrong, but palpably wrong. Question them. As you get better at asking questions, learn to use the Socratic method. Use leading questions to help believers begin to doubt their certainties.[1]

I understand the cognitive bias known as the backfire effect. It shows that challenging believers with facts makes most of them dig in deeper, causing them to double down in defense of their faith. If their faith survives, their faith is strengthened. While ridicule and satire have an effect on groups of people[2], keeping personal encounters friendly will be more effective with people that you talk to. We never know if the seed sown might eventually blossom into a changed mind. Most believers cannot be reasoned out of their faith because they were never reasoned into it, but this is still the best that we can do. With enough encounters it might have a cumulative effect, especially if the believer experiences a crisis in his/her life.[3]

Belief is a product of ignorance in varying degrees. So there’s much to inform them about. As you proceed, inform them about what you know, whatever that is. You will learn as you go. Study as you go, too. The more that you know, the better that you’ll do.

(1) I would start in some cases by informing believers of the role cultural indoctrination plays in the adoption of Christianity, and why it’s an unreliable guide for adopting the correct religious faith, if there is one. Given the accidents of when and where we were born, and how we were raised, our religious faith was unthinkingly adopted just as surely as was our nationality and preferred cuisine. So at least once in their lives, believers should seriously question what they believe. Consider it a rite of passage to adulthood if nothing else.

(2) I would inform believers how hard it is to break free from one’s cultural indoctrination, like quitting smoking but much harder. Research professor of psychology Jonas Kaplan did a study of the human brain and concluded: “The brain can be thought of as a very sophisticated self-defense machine.” He added: “If there is a belief that the brain considers part of who we are, it turns on its self-defense mode to protect that belief.” Accordingly, “the brain reacts to belief challenges in the same way that it reacts to perceived physical threats.”[4] To honestly seek the truth we must determine to disarm the brain. Analogous to Alcoholics Anonymous, the first step to recovery is to recognize that we have a brain problem. It won’t allow us to entertain facts that disrupt our comfort zone, our tribalistic beliefs. It will do everything it can to reject them.

(3) I would inform believers about the cognitive biases that act like viruses on our brains. They adversely affect the ability of our brains to honestly evaluate our religious cultural indoctrination. Just knowing this is significant. Knowledge serves as a vaccine. It helps disarm the brain.

Confirmation bias is the mother of all cognitive biases. We are in constant search of confirmation; hardly ever do we seek disconfirmation. We reject and dismiss out of hand what does not comport to existing beliefs, and easily embrace that which does. There are other relevant biases, like anchoring bias, in-group bias, belief blind spot bias, belief bias effect, illusory truth effect, agent detection bias, objectivity illusion bias, the ostrich effect, hindsight bias, and so on.

These biases lead us to reason fallaciously. Believers are susceptible to fallacies like tu quoque (“You too!”—an appeal to hypocrisy/whataboutism), possibiliter ergo probabiliter (“possibly, therefore probably”), straw man/person, argument from ignorance, appeal to popularity (ad populum), equivocation, false analogy, post hoc ergo propter hoc (Latin for “after this, therefore because of this”), cherry picking, hasty generalization, circular reasoning, red herring, non sequitur, and especially special pleading.

(4) I would inform believers that the only way to disarm the brain (yes, basically the only way) is to adopt the perspective of a nonbeliever, an outsider to our indoctrinated religious beliefs. More than anything else, this can help the brain avoid cognitive biases in the honest search for truth. It will help force the believer’s brain to follow the objective evidence wherever it leads. Treat your own religion the way that you treat all other religions, with no double standards and no special pleadings. Assume that your own religion has the burden of proof. See if your faith survives.[5]

(5) At this point inform believers about their holy book and the theologies built on it. Most believers don’t read their Scriptures, or understand the doctrines of their sect-specific faiths. So encourage Christians to read the Bible. Have them read Judges 19-21 to see what the god of the Old Testament instructed the Hebrews to do. Then ask why anyone should trust anything that these bloodthirsty barbarians wrote down. Also ask them why that god commanded genocide and child sacrifice.[6]

The Bible debunks itself.[7] It contains forgeries and borrowed pagan myths, and is inconsistent within itself. It tells a plethora of ancient superstitious tales that don’t make any sense at all. It has a god that evolved from a polytheistic one who lives in the sky above the Earth, who does both good and bad, who makes room for both angels and demons, and who thinks that a god/human blood sacrifice can magically ransom us from the grip of the Devil (the first widely accepted atonement theory).

(6) Inform believers about the Church. The history of the Church, and of the people claiming to have the alleged Holy Spirit inside of them, reveals a continuous spectacle of atrocities such that its history is a damning indictment upon the god that they profess to believe in.[8]

(7) Inform believers about science and how it works. It’s answering the very mysteries that produce religious belief in the first place. The fewer mysteries that we have in the world, then the less we feel the need to believe.[9] The crowning discovery of science is evolution. On this issue, as with everything that I’m saying, it helps to provoke believers to do further research. Ask them what would make Richard Dawkins say:

Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact…. It is the plain truth that we are cousins of chimpanzees, somewhat more distant cousins of monkeys, more distant cousins still of aardvarks and manatees, yet more distant cousins of bananas and turnips … continue the list as long as desired…. It didn’t have to be true, but it is. We know this because a rising flood of evidence supports it. Evolution is a fact…. No reputable scientist disputes it.[10]

Be sure to point out the implications of evolution: that there was no Adam & Eve, no original sin, and no need for a savior.

(8) Inform believers about the need for objective evidence in support of the miracle claims in the Bible.[11] There is no objective evidence for any of them, just a few ancient testimonies that we cannot verify.[12]

The way to honestly evaluate miracle claims is to focus on clearly obvious concrete test cases like a virgin-birthed deity.[13] It’s not to construct hypothetical miracle scenarios, to wrestle with questions over what we consider to be objective evidence, or to specify the exact demarcation point between ordinary claims and extraordinary ones.

For instance, believers will claim that nonbelievers have no objective criteria for what counts as extraordinary evidence. To cut to the chase, I respond that I know what does not count as extraordinary evidence. Second-, third-, or fourth-hand hearsay testimonial evidence doesn’t count, nor does circumstantial evidence or 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 or experiences or inner voices don’t count as extraordinary evidence; nor do tales told by someone who tells others that his writings are inspired; nor does putative divine communication through dreams or visions. Once these facts are acknowledged, call on believers to do the math. Just subtract and see what’s left.

(9) Inform believers about statistics. Statistician David Hand shows us 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. All we need is a firm grounding in a powerful set of laws: the laws of inevitability, of truly large numbers, of selection, of the probability lever, and of near enough.”[14] There is a growing list of books making this same point. Extremely rare events are not miracles. Period. We should expect extremely rare events in our lives many times over. No gods made these events happen.

(10) Inform believers about the problem of horrendous suffering. This evidence is as close to a refutation of an omnipotent, omniscience, omnibenevolent God as is possible.[15] The way to honestly evaluate the compatibility of God and horrific suffering is not to specify the exact demarcation point when the suffering in our world is too much to coexist with a perfect deity. Nor is it to fuss much about whether God and horrendous suffering are logically impossible. Those questions are interesting, but in order to honestly evaluate this difficulty, the best arguments are evidential ones about clearly obvious concrete test cases like the Holocaust, or the massive numbers of children who suffer from malnutrition and die every year, or the kill or be killed law of predation in the animal world.

Notes

[1] See Peter Boghossian, A Manual for Creating Atheists (Durham, NC: Pitchstone Publishing, 2013). Anthony Magnabosco does this on a regular basis.

[2] 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&gt;.

[3] This is one of five factors that can change minds. See Loftus, “Five Factors that Cause Christians to Lose Their Faith” (December 9, 2010). Debunking Christianity blog. <https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2010/12/five-factors-that-cause-christians-to.html&gt;.

[4] See Loftus, “The Brain Treats Questions about Beliefs like Physical Threats. Can We Learn to Disarm It?” (January 14, 2018). Debunking Christianity blog. <https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2018/01/the-brain-treats-questions-about.html&gt;.

[5] See Loftus (ed.), The Outsider Test for Faith: How to Know Which Religion is True (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2013).

[6] See Loftus, “The Hebrew Bible’s Disturbing Attitude Towards Human Sacrifice” (April 16, 2015). Debunking Christianity blog. <https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2015/04/the-hebrew-bibles-disturbing-attitude.html&gt;.

[7] See Loftus, “The Bible Debunks Itself” (March 5, 2008). Debunking Christianity blog. <https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2008/03/bible-debunks-itself-part-1.html&gt;.

[8] This is amply documented in Loftus (ed.), Christianity is not Great: How Faith Fails (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2014).

[9] See Loftus (ed.), Christianity in the Light of Science: Critically Examining the World’s Largest Religion (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2016).

[10] Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution (New York, NY: Free Press, 2009), pp. 8–9.

[11] See Loftus (ed.), The Case against Miracles (United States: Hypatia Press, 2019).

[12] See Loftus, “What’s Wrong with Using Bayes’ Theorem on Miracles?” (January 25, 2022). The Secular Web. <https://infidels.org/kiosk/article/whats-wrong-with-bayes-theorem/&gt;.

[13] See Loftus, “The Gateway to Doubting the Gospel Narratives is the Virgin Birth Myth” (March 5, 2008). Debunking Christianity blog. <https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2020/06/the-gateway-to-doubting-gospel.html&gt;.

[14] 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), pp. 197-199.

[15] See Loftus (ed.), God and Horrendous Suffering (Denver, CO: Global Center for Religious Research, 2021).

Two Fantastic Quotes from Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll: On Willful Disbelief & A Designer In Need Of Design

Here’s the link to this article.

By John W. Loftus at 5/28/2023

#1 On Willful Disbelief: Can we control our thought? Can we tell what we are going to think tomorrow? Can we stop thinking? Is belief the result of that which to us is evidence, or is it a product of the will? Can the scales in which reason weighs evidence be turned by the will? Why then should evidence be weighed? If it all depends on the will, what is evidence? Is there any opportunity of being dishonest in the formation of an opinion? Must not the man who forms the opinion know what it is? He cannot knowingly cheat himself. He cannot be deceived with dice that he loads. He cannot play unfairly at solitaire without knowing that he has lost the game. He cannot knowingly weigh with false scales and believe in the correctness of the result.

The Bible quotes Jesus with having said, “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned.” The Christians say that it is the duty of every person to read, to understand, and to believe this revelation – that a man should use his reason; but if he honestly concludes that the Bible is not a revelation from God, and dies with that conclusion in his mind, he will be tormented forever. They say,” Read,” and then add: “Believe, or be damned.” Suppose then I read this Bible honestly, fairly, and when I get through I am compelled to say, “The book is not true.” If this is the honest result, if the book and my brain are both the work of the same Infinite God, whose fault is it that the book and the brain do not agree? Either God should have written a book to fit my brain, or should have made my brain to fit his book. The brain thinks without asking our consent; we believe, or disbelieve, without an effort of the will. Belief is a result. It is the effect of evidence upon the mind. The scales turn in spite of him who watches. There is no opportunity of being honest or dishonest in the formation of an opinion. The conclusion is entirely independent of desire. We must believe, or we must doubt, in spite of what we wish. –From Col. Ingersoll to Mr. Gladstone

#2 On A Designer In Need Of Design: The idea that a design must have a beginning and that a designer need not, is a simple expression of human ignorance. We find a watch, and we say: “So curious and wonderful a thing must have had a maker.” We find the watch-maker, and we say: “So curious and wonderful a thing as man must have had a maker.”

We find God, and we then say: “He is so wonderful that he must not have had a maker.” In other words, all things a little wonderful must have been created, but it is possible for something to be so wonderful that it always existed. One would suppose that just as the wonder increased the necessity for a creator increased, because it is the wonder of the thing that suggests the idea of creation. Is it possible that a designer exists from all eternity without design? Was there no design in having an infinite designer? For me, it is hard to see the plan or design in earthquakes and pestilences. It is somewhat difficult to discern the design or the benevolence in so making the world that billions of animals live only on the agonies of others. The justice of God is not visible to me in the history of this world. When I think of the suffering and death, of the poverty and crime, of the cruelty and malice, of the heartlessness of this “design” and “plan,” where beak and claw and tooth tear and rend the quivering flesh of weakness and despair, I cannot convince myself that it is the result of infinite wisdom, benevolence, and justice. –From Ingersoll vs Black, A former Chief Justice of US.

Musings of Daniel Mocsny

Here’s the link to this article.

By John W. Loftus at 5/22/2023

Lately Daniel Mocsny wrote a few separate comments for us. Here are some of them. Enjoy!

At risk of committing the No True Scotsman fallacy, I suggest that someone who deconverts from a religion and then easily reconverts probably wasn’t entirely deconverted in the first place. And the converse applies as well: a religion may attract new converts who quickly “backslide.” Religious hucksters are aware of the backsliding tendency, so they have systems in place to combat it, such as regular church attendance, and creating an entire religious environment for their marks to inhabit. A new convert is like a seedling plant – it has not reached its adult size yet and is much more vulnerable to drought and plant predators. A church may have training courses for new converts, to catch them up on the brainwashing they missed. Atheists tend to have none of that infrastructure, as we don’t normally have our own atheist churches or local communities. This may be part of the reason that religion began declining in the USA after the Internet became widely available – now we have online atheist / freethinker communities. Atheism doesn’t have to be an entirely do-it-yourself exercise now.

Removing religion from one’s brain may be like pulling weeds from your lawn. Failing to dig out every last weed root results in weeds quickly resprouting. It takes multiple sessions of weed-pulling to get all the weeds, and even then new weed seeds are constantly arriving on the wind or in bird poop, so occasional maintenance is an ongoing need.

The falsehoods of religion have been honed by thousands of years of selection – the religions that emerge from cutthroat competition tend to have the “stickiest” lies. Overcoming them, after a lifetime of brainwashing, may require a lot of cognitive work. Reading atheist books such as those written or edited by John Loftus is a big part of this. Unfortunately, many people rarely read books, or when they do, they read useless fiction, or disinformation.

Many religions declare threats for people who doubt them. Often the threats are more immediate, such as angry gods sending plagues, storms, or hostile human enemies unless we placate them with sacrifices. The concept of an eternal afterlife of unending torture at the hands of the loving God is an idea that evolved gradually. See Bart Ehrman’s Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife (2020) to learn how the concept gradually evolved within the Abrahamic tradition.

The Outsider Test for Faith always applies, of course. Probably no one among the world’s two billion Christians has ever lost sleep over the Muslim Hell, and conversely I doubt that any Muslims worry about the Christian hell. I would agree that most of the time you can’t argue an incorrect idiot into being correct, and you certainly cannot add a point to anyone’s IQ by arguing with them. But (and this is a but big enough to warrant Sir Mixalot’s scrutiny) it’s hard to win a war without showing up. The disinformation machine doesn’t worry about the difficulty of changing people’s minds. It understands that repetition is the most potent form of persuasion. Trump for example was able to fool about 30% of Americans into disblieving in our elections. For most of American history, there was no widespread doubt about our elections. People often didn’t like the outcome, but they understand that elections really do reflect the will of the people. Trump was able to destroy over 200 years of that belief in a few short years.

Christianity in the USA is losing about 1% of market share per year. So it’s clear that somebody is getting through to idiots with the voice of reason. Maybe we can speed that up a little by getting and staying in the game. Fox News doesn’t need to be the only voice they hear.

During the… COVID-19 pandemic, religious people complained loudly about the lockdowns that denied them their weekly churchy fix. Religious people have an ongoing need for group reinforcement. In contrast, once you learn some science, you don’t have to keep going back to science class every week to keep yourself convinced. Atheists may have griped about lockdowns too, but not because isolation in any way threatened to change their beliefs.

Inside every religious believer is a latent unbeliever waiting to manifest. In the modern environment, any number of potential triggers for change are constantly present. If outside influences like prayer or meddling gods cannot be excluded, then science cannot proceed – it won’t work. The same experiment will get different results depending on who was praying somewhere in the world, or on the whim of some god. Science doesn’t just assume that we only use natural explanations, it actually requires that only natural phenomena exist. Otherwise you can’t reliably replicate a result. Replication is fundamental to science, and even more important for industries built on science, which replicate the same products billions of times.

Thus the very existence of science is strong evidence against the kinds of gods people worship – gods who intervene routinely in the natural order. The burden of proof is therefore on the theist to explain how we can have science and smartphones that undeniably exist, and at the same time we have their God whose existence and behavior would make science impossible. The plain fact that during the past two centuries the intellectual elite (i.e., those who actually have some claim to expertise on matters of religion, philosophy, and science) have indeed become overwhelmingly skeptical in regard to the existence of a “conscious Creator.”

Joshi doesn’t present statistics, but it is at least anecdotally obvious that there are numerous fields of science and scholarship that are toxic to faith. The result is that people who acquire expertise in any of these fields, let alone several or all of them, rarely emerge with faith intact. At the barest minimum, the intellectually competent believer has to triangulate their way into some sort of liberal faith stripped of the most blatantly incorrect faith claims (such as Young Earth Creationism). But even the liberal believer must keep their eyes at least half-shut on their residual superstition.

If everybody could know what the intellectual elites know (that is, what the people who actually read a lot of books know), then religion would recede to the status of an oddball hobby like stamp collecting. —By Daniel Mocsny.