Clint Heacock’s new book shines a bright light on this reality
[This article is forthcoming in the Trinity Journal of Natural & Philosophical Theology, Vol. 2, Issue 2 (Fall 2024) in collaboration with the Trinity Graduate School of Apologetics and Theology. The version presented here is slightly different in formatting from the print version. Used with permission.]
Let's highlight my magnum opus, per a comment by Dr. Jim Sterba, Professor of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame: "I think your book 'Why I Became an Atheist' is unsurpassable." Amazon LINK.
Maybe the historical Jesus was a real person, but given the nature of the so-called evidence no one can possibly know objectively.
Or a montage of real people, plural.
In the New Testament alone, there are at least four individuals named Jesus.
The Jesus worshipped, and another three individuals named Jesus, who are Jesus Barabbas, Jesus son of Eliezer, and Jesus called Justus.
Josephus mentions a few Jesuses [Jesus', Jesus's, Jesi?] too.
War
2:566 Jesus, son of Sapphias – Governor of Tiberias.
3:450 Jesus, son of Shapat – Principal head of a band of robbers controlling Tiberias.
4:160 Jesus, son of Gamala – Best esteemed, with Ananus ben Ananus, of High priests.
4:459 Jesus [Joshua] son of Nun.
6:114 Jesus, no patronym – High priest, deserts to Vespasian.
6:300 Jesus, son of Ananus – Common man prophesied destruction of the temple.
6:387 Jesus, son of Thebuthus – One of the priests, desert s to Titus.
Ant.
03:049 (& numerous other instances) Jesus [Joshua] son of Nun (successor of Moses).
11:298 Jesus, (son of Eliashib), brother of John – friend of governor Bagoses.
12:237 Jesus, brother of Onias III – High priest.
15:322 Jesus, son of Phabes – High priest.
17:341 Jesus, the son of Sie – High priest.
18:063 Jesus, no patronym – Condemned to cross by Pilate. He was [the] Christ. [Christian interpolation]
20:200 Jesus, brother of Jacob – Called the Christ.
20:203 Jesus, son of Damneus – High priest.
20:213 Jesus, son of Gamaliel – High priest.
20:234 Jesus, son of Josadek – High priest.
Life
1:066 Jesus, son of Sapphias – Governor of Tiberias.
1:105 Jesus, no patronym – Captain of those robbers in the confines of Ptolemais.
1:178 Jesus, no patronym – Brother of Justus of Tiberias.
1:193 Jesus, son of Gamala – High priest & Josephus’ friend.
1:200 Jesus, no patronym – Galilean at head of a band of 600, sent to depose Josephus.
1:246 Jesus, no patronym – Owned a house big as a castle. Governor of Tiberias?
Apparently, Jesus was the sixth most popular name at the time.
The English name Jesus, from Greek Iēsous, is a rendering of Joshua (Hebrew Yehoshua, later Yeshua), and was not uncommon in Judea at the time of the birth of Jesus. Popular etymology linked the names Yehoshua and Yeshua to the verb meaning "save" and the noun "salvation". The Gospel of Matthew tells of an angel that appeared to Joseph instructing him "to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins".
There's a handy coincidence.
Chance are, no Catholic priest is going to pause in the middle of his sermon to say, “Oh, by the way, I want everyone here today to go to another church next Sunday. Pick another denomination—Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, Episcopal, Pentecostal, whatever—and try to find out if their version of Christianity is better than ours. Is it the right one?” Nor are preachers from any of these other brands going to do this. The devout seem not at all bothered that there are many thousands of conflicting, bickering Christian divisions and sects; these reflect profound disagreements about Jesus, god, the best ways to get to heaven. If we could convene a meeting of theologians from each of the brands, they would never be able to agree—among other reasons, because the theologians who wrote the New Testament didn’t agree either. Even the very earliest Christians were arguing.
In Dr. David Madison’s insightful article of July 5, 2024, There’s Too Much Evil and Cruelty in the Bible, he wrote:
Very early in my serious study of the Bible I learned about “etiological myths”, that is, stories imagined to explain why things are the way they are. This is the god’s curse on the woman, to explain why childbirth is painful: “I will make your pangs in childbirth exceedingly great; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.” (Genesis 3:16)
This particular etiological myth, or just-so story, with patriarchal sexism thrown in at no extra charge, warrants further comment. How do we know the bible is wrong here? Since not everyone might know the relevant details of human evolution, I’ll expand on that here.
Giving birth, for humans, is quite unlike giving birth for most if not all other animals that give birth to live young. Imagine, for example, that giving birth were as problematic and temporarily debilitating for a zebra mare as it often is for a human female. Further imagine that a zebra foal were born as helpless as a human child (that is, imagine that zebra younglings were altricial instead of precocial). In that case, the lions that relentlessly pursue zebras would enjoy easy meals,1 although only for a comparatively brief time of bounty until they quickly hunted zebras to extinction. Because of the way zebras live, by staying constantly one step ahead of lions, they have to be almost uninterruptedly mobile to avoid becoming lion lunch. Zebra mares have to bounce back quickly after giving birth, and zebra foals must be able to run within an hour of being born. Other animals, such as nesting birds, can keep their altricial (i.e., initially helpless) hatchlings somewhat out of reach of predators, relatively safe in their nests, while giving care to them. But the parent birds must remain very fit so they can continue to collect food for their voracious young. Difficult reproduction is not a luxury many other species can afford. Among other things, it’s a testimony to the social power of humans. Humans form complex and powerful communities able to safeguard vulnerable mothers and children from threats that would wipe out many other species. Zebras, in contrast, don’t cooperate with other zebras with the same scale and sophistication as humans. Other species can’t cooperate quite like humans because their brains aren’t big enough to handle the complex computations necessary to make it work. Humans can, so we do; and because we can and do, evolution in due course sees that we must.
Given that birth or egg-laying are rarely life-threatening for other animals, why is giving birth such a problem for humans? The biblical just-so story reflects a profound ignorance of evolutionary theory and fact. (The scientific explanation wouldn’t happen for many centuries after the bible was written.) Everything about a species is a product of how it evolved and continues to evolve. The human line underwent at least two profound changes over the last 4 million to 7 million years since our last common ancestor with the chimpanzees: the switch from quadrupedalism (walking on all fours, knuckle-walking in the case of the other ground-dwelling great apes, although the exact history of that habit isn’t clear) to bipedalism (walking on our two hind feet, thus freeing our grasping hands to get us into more trouble); and the tripling of our encephalization quotient relative to our nearest cousins the chimpanzees. The great encephalization apparently occurred in response to selective pressures for greater intelligence that acted on the human line but did not act in the same way on the chimpanzee line. Exactly what that entailed is a matter of some debate, but to function as a human in any human society you have to be a lot smarter than a chimpanzee. And to get smarter you need a much larger cerebral cortex, which in turn makes you need a larger skull. Which is larger from the get-go, i.e. birth.
As the pre-human and then human neonate skull got larger, fitting it through the human female’s pelvic opening became more difficult. Accordingly the shape of the female pelvis had to adapt, by the brutal method available to evolution: killing off the females in every generation who lagged the trend by having insufficiently roomy hips. But this ran into another difficulty: our upright stance, which works better with narrow hips. You don’t see a lot of elite distance runners with extremely wide hips. And given that humans were generally nomadic until only about 10,000 years ago when some humans started adopting agriculture, anything that compromised mobility ran up against another kind of selection pressure. Thus the hominin genome and then the human genome had to do a juggling act between multiple conflicting needs for several million years - the need for ever-bigger brains, ever-wider hips for the females, and getting around efficiently on two feet. One genome also has to handle all the dimorphism - making sure the males get the traits they need while the females get the traits they need. But in reality, genetic diversity means humans exhibit distributions for many traits (and often the distributions are approximately normal). Therefore some women will be better suited than others to giving birth. This is exactly what you would not expect an omni-God3 to arrange, but which makes a lot more sense in light of mindless and indifferently cruel evolution. See my earlier post, For God So Loved the Whales for more examples of how unintelligently and uncompassionately we are designed. In that post I drew from Abby Hafer’s marvelous book The Not-So-Intelligent Designer: Why Evolution Explains the Human Body and Intelligent Design Does Not which among other godly goofs describes the horrors of pre-technological human childbearing in grisly detail.
We can’t really blame the bible authors for making uninformed guesses about why humans are the way they are. These writers were ancient men who didn’t understand reality very well. They didn’t even know where the Sun goes at night.4 But no modern human has a strong excuse5 for continuing to be fooled by ancient misconceptions, etiological myths, and just-so-stories. In sharp contrast to the simpler (and typically shorter) lives of the ancients, modern humans mostly lead lives that would be impossible without modern science. To pick just one example, about half of the protein in human bodies today came from the Haber-Bosch process of artificial nitrogen fixation. (Without the resulting artificial fertilizers, perhaps half of the existing human population would have to gradually die, unless humans were to get a whole lot better at recycling the fixed nitrogen present in our own bodily wastes. However, even understanding how to do that safely still requires science that ancient humans did not have, such as the germ theory of disease.) No modern human should reject modern science in favor of biblical just-so stories, but many do, thanks to various psychological and cultural causes.
As anatomically modern humans spread out of Africa beginning perhaps 70,000 years ago, they took with them newly-developed and novel hunting techniques, the likes of which the megafauna (large animals) outside of Africa had never before seen. Unlike the animals of Africa, which evolved alongside humans and had time to adapt, the largest land species in the rest of the world were practically defenseless. And so paleontologists have mapped a wave of megafaunal extinctions on all the other land masses that humans reached which are suspiciously timed shortly after the first anatomically modern humans arrived in each place - Europe, Asia, Australia, the Americas, New Zealand, Madagascar, etc.↩︎
For any fans of the felon who may take offense, note carefully that I wrote “at least”. Which means I literally made no claim about what happens inside of Trump rallies. For that I defer to Jordan Klepper who has recorded several videos showcasing the towering intellects who flock to such events.↩︎
See the John W. Loftus anthology God and Horrendous Suffering, and his eponymous blog post, for more about the problems of trying to square a common Christian understanding of a caring God with the considerably grimmer reality we experience.↩︎
For the details of ancient Hebrew cosmology, which lives on in today’s Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament to Christians), see Chapter 4: “Christianity and Cosmology”, by Victor J. Stenger, in the John W. Loftus anthology, Christianity in the Light of Science: Critically Examining the World’s Largest Religion. Also see the Wikipedia articles Ancient near eastern cosmology, Firmament, Biblical cosmology, and Jewish cosmology. The history of what self-proclaimed men of God once thought about God’s alleged creation is rather awkward today. This should not instill confidence in the accuracy of divine revelation as a way of knowing.↩︎
OK, as we learned from Robert Sapolsky’s book Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, nothing is quite really anyone’s fault. Everything that happens, including everything we do, is fully determined by what happened before. And most of what happened to us before was not under our control. However, contemporary humans living lives of comparative privilege in the developed nations have easy access to the hard-won facts of science, which makes excusing instances of modern willful ignorance (or motivated reasoning) seem harder than excusing the unavoidable ignorance of the ancients. Modern ignorance is also far easier to correct, since we have modern science making its case every day by showering us with technological goodies such as smartphones and vaccines. For some reason smartphones have gotten a better reception - there are some anti-vaxxers, but no similarly organized movement against smartphones. However, not even anti-vaxxers volunteer to have themselves deliberately infected by a resurrected strain of smallpox, a deadly scourge eradicated by the very vaccination technology they disparage. Given that smallpox used to kill a large fraction of humanity, there are probably some anti-vaxxers who are only alive today because of vaccine technology, which saved either them or their ancestors. Unfortunately, science hasn’t yet found a way to impart scientific knowledge to everyone. Humans still have to learn science. Modern humans still learn in much the same way as paleolithic humans once learned - by relying almost entirely on our evolved brains to slowly and painstakingly collect and assimilate new information. We can haul our brains across oceans in fossil-fueled airplanes at nearly the speed of sound (to the detriment of Earth’s habitable climate), but our brains themselves are not materially much better than the brains of cave men, although some modern brains contain some better ideas now. Learning science continues to require years of hard mental work, and humans are differently able or inclined to do the work. It’s similar to learning to play the guitar, for which some people are clearly more talented than others, and which not everyone is equally inclined to pursue. Therefore, while many people consume the material benefits of science, fewer people adopt the scientific habits of mind which yielded the material benefits, such as evidentialism and critical thinking. At the barest minimum, a competent modern human should have some grasp on a philosophy of expertise, understanding that everyone must defer to experts on a vast array of things we don’t all have time or ability to fully master. That doesn’t mean that every expert is always correct, just that experts are more likely to be correct within the scope of their expertise than a non-expert would be on the same subjects. If you subscribe to a belief that requires virtually all the relevant experts to be wrong, such as young Earth creationism, or its political repackaging as intelligent design creationism, you’re way out on a flimsy cognitive limb.↩︎
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…and allow many thousands of clergy to pose as the referees?
God originally had a body (Genesis 3:8-10; 32:20-30; Exodus 33:21-22). He had sons (Genesis 1:26; 6:2; Job 1:1) and lived in the sky above, from which he looked down on the earth below (Job 1:6).[1] No omnipresence here. God needed a servant, Satan, to check on the sincere loyalty of his subjects. God subsequently allowed Job to be put to the test twice by Satan. But there was no need to test Job if God knew he would pass the test, which he did (1:22, 2:22). No omniscience here. If Job was tested for a show, then God is an egomaniac only interested in being praised at the expense of others. What we see here is the only great-making quality God had in those early days, absolute power over his subjects, just like other Mesopotamian kings.[2] He had the power to destroy people at will, including Job’s children and servants (Isaiah 45:7). This is something his subjects should never question. It’s the main point of Job (chapters 38-42). No omnibenelovence here.
[1] See the chapter on biblical cosmology by Edward
Babinski in The Christian Delusion
(2010). To read about the biblical god see my paper, “Does God Exist? A
Definitive Biblical Case” at
https://infidels.org/kiosk/article/does-god-exist-a-definitive-biblical-case/
[2] Except when it came to iron chariots (Judges 1:19).
Debunking Christianity (DC), the site you’re probably looking at now, is the blog of noted atheist author John W. Loftus, featuring blog posts by him and his stable of guest bloggers. The blog itself runs on the blogging platform Blogger, a content management system for blog sites owned by Google since 2003.
A valuable feature of DC is its lively comment section, featuring a remarkable concentration of educated, well-read, and articulate partipants. (The comment section here is the inverse of a Trump rally crowd.) The comment section runs on Disqus. For many years, the Disqus editor accepted a limited set of HTML tags for formatting text…until one day, perhaps around May 30, 2024, HTML tags simply stopped working. If you suddenly felt like a character in a Franz Kafka novel, you’re not alone. From Wikipedia:
Franz Kafka (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) was a German-speaking Bohemian Jewish novelist and writer from Prague. He is widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His work fuses elements of realism and the fantastic. It typically features isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers. It has been interpreted as exploring themes of alienation, existential anxiety, guilt, and absurdity. (…) The term Kafkaesque has entered English to describe absurd situations like those depicted in his writing.
The most pressing challenge to belief in God today is undoubtedly the problem of pain. One only needs to read the provocative array of essays in this volume of leading atheists and other non-theists to see why this is such an ongoing problem for those of us who believe that God is real. Whatever one’s beliefs or worldview, and whether one agrees or disagrees, I commend all seekers of truth to read and reflect on this significant work that John Loftus has so skillfully edited.
