Faith is Not an Acceptable Answer
We’ve argued against the concept of faith many times before, but let me try again. I have argued that the Christian faith originated as a purely human religion completely accountable by humans acting in history without needing any divine agency at all. But setting that important discussion aside, faith is a cop out, especially when it comes to the number of things Christians must take on faith in order to believe. Let’s recount some of them.
1) No reasonable answer can be given for why a triune God, who was perfect in love neither needing nor wanting anything, created in the first place. Grace and Love are non-answers, especially when we see the actual world that resulted. For Christians to say God wanted human creatures who freely love him is nonsense, for why did he want this at all? If love must be expressed then God needed to express his love and that implies a lack.
2) It’s hard enough to conceive of one person who is an eternally uncaused God, much less a Godhead composed of three eternally uncaused persons. There are some Christians who maintain the Father eternally created the Logos and the Spirit, while others claim that three persons in one Godhead is simply an eternally brute inexplicable fact. Why is that brute fact more reasonable to accept than accepting the brute fact of the laws of the universe, which is all that’s needed to produce the universe? There are social Trinitarians and anti-social Trinitarians. Both sides accuse the other side of abandoning the Chalcedon creed, either in the direction of tri-theism, or in the direction of unitarianism.
3) This triune Godhead is also conceived of as a timeless being who was somehow able to create the first moment of time. How a timeless being could actually do this is extremely problematic. For if his decision to create a first moment of time is an eternal one, then there could be no temporal gap between his decision to create the first moment of time and the actual creation of the first moment of time. If there was no temporal gap between God's eternal decision to create a first moment of time and the creation of that first moment, then his decision to create would alone be sufficient for a first moment of time to be created. God could not eternally decide to create at any future point since there is no future point for him to create. So if a timelessly eternal God decided to create at all then the universe is eternal and never had a first moment in time.
4) This timelessly eternal triune God who parodoxically created time must now forever be subject to events in time. He cannot become timeless again, for to do so would destroy all that happened in time as if these events never happened at all. So although God somehow existed outside of time before creating the first moment of time he must now forever experience a sequence of events. Whereas before creation he was a timelessly existing being he is now going to forever experience a sequence of events that is never ending.
From here it only gets worse.
5) We are told that the Logos, the 2nd person of the trinity, became a man. No conception of this God-man in the flesh has yet been able to stand scrutiny. How, for instance, can such a being be 100% God and 100% man with nothing left over? All attempts to solve this problem have failed.
6) But we’re not done, for we’re told this God-man atoned for the sins of man. No sense can be made of how the death of Jesus actually forgives sins. There is no relationship between punishment and forgiveness at all. We forgive people who have not been punished and sometimes we won’t forgive people even after they've been punished. To say that in order to forgive someone they must first be punished does not describe forgiveness at all, anyway. It describes revenge. Revenge can never be a moral reason for acting and revenge has nothing to do with offering forgiveness. We don't even need for people to ask forgiveness in order to forgive them. Sometimes it's better for our mental health to forgive someone regardless of whether or not they're even sorry for what they've done.
7) This God-man was a unique never-before-existing being who is described in the creeds as one unified person. Here an additional problem surfaces. Where is the human side of this God-man now (i.e. the human nature of Jesus)? Since this human side of the God-man was sinless he couldn’t be destroyed, nor could this human side of the God-man be separated from the divine side, for such a being was now one person according to the creeds. So theologians have concluded that the trinity includes an embodied Logos. Now we have a trinity with an embodied 2nd person in it. Picture this if you will!
8) Stepping forward a bit, sinners sent to hell retain their free will, since it’s argued they continue to rebel in hell, while the saints who enter heaven have their free will taken away to guarantee there will be no future rebellion in heaven. If free will is such a great gift why reward people by taking it away from them and punish people by having them retain it? That makes little sense to me.
I’ve only touched on a few of the beliefs needed to make sense of Christianity. There are many others, and some Christians have different scenarios. But who in their right mind would embrace Christianity if he or she heard about them all when first being challenged to believe? Very few people. That’s what I think.
But we’re not done yet. For there is the additional problem of the lack of evidence for these beliefs. Archaeology disconfirms the flood and Exodus stories. What we have are the claims of people who wrote the books that later were accepted into the Bible. Why should I believe what they wrote? Why should I believe that the sun stood still, or that a star pointed down to a specific place, or that a virgin gave birth, or that a man walked on the water just because of what a person in the superstitious past wrote? Even in the Bible itself we see how the people of that same era believed in the actions of gods and goddesses like Apollo, Zeus, Baal, Artemis, and others, which hardly anyone accepts today. So why do Christians accept one set of claims in the past but reject the others? The same evidence supports them all: Testimonies by superstitious people in the past.
Christians must defend too many beliefs, any one of which, if incorrect, would be fatal to their whole worldview. These beliefs are based upon the conclusions of historical evidence which is extremely problematic given the nature of that evidence and the nature of the superstitious pre-scientific people in the ancient past.
Christians must defend things like the existence of the social Trinitarian God (versus an anti-social Trinitarian God) of the Bible (which had a long process of formation and of borrowing material from others) who never began to exist and will never cease to exist (even though everything we experience has a beginning and an end), who never learned any new truths, who does not think (for thinking demands weighing temporal alternatives), who is not free with respect to deciding his own nature, who revealed himself through a poor medium (history) in a poor era (ancient times), who condemns all of humanity for the sins of the first human pair, who commanded genocide, who allows intense suffering in this world (yet does not follow the same moral code he commands believers to follow), whose Son (the 2nd person of the trinity) became incarnate in Jesus (even though no one has ever made sense of a person who is 100% man and 100% divine) to be punished for our sins (even though there is no correlation between punishment and forgiveness) who subsequently bodily arose from the dead (even though the believer in miracles has an almost impossible double-burden of proof here) and now lives embodied forever in a “spiritual” human body who will return to earth in the parousia (even though the NT is clear that the end of all kingdoms and the establishment of God's kingdom was to be in their generation), who sent the 3rd person of the trinity to lead his followers into "all truth" (yet fails in every generation to do this), who will also judge us based upon what conclusions we reach about the existence of this God and what he has done (paralleling the ancient barbaric thought police), and who will reward believers by taking away their freedom and punish the dammed by letting them retain their freedom?
Since the larger the claim is the less probable it is, the Christian faith is simply too improbable to be believed by reasonable people. Period.
1) No reasonable answer can be given for why a triune God, who was perfect in love neither needing nor wanting anything, created in the first place. Grace and Love are non-answers, especially when we see the actual world that resulted. For Christians to say God wanted human creatures who freely love him is nonsense, for why did he want this at all? If love must be expressed then God needed to express his love and that implies a lack.
2) It’s hard enough to conceive of one person who is an eternally uncaused God, much less a Godhead composed of three eternally uncaused persons. There are some Christians who maintain the Father eternally created the Logos and the Spirit, while others claim that three persons in one Godhead is simply an eternally brute inexplicable fact. Why is that brute fact more reasonable to accept than accepting the brute fact of the laws of the universe, which is all that’s needed to produce the universe? There are social Trinitarians and anti-social Trinitarians. Both sides accuse the other side of abandoning the Chalcedon creed, either in the direction of tri-theism, or in the direction of unitarianism.
3) This triune Godhead is also conceived of as a timeless being who was somehow able to create the first moment of time. How a timeless being could actually do this is extremely problematic. For if his decision to create a first moment of time is an eternal one, then there could be no temporal gap between his decision to create the first moment of time and the actual creation of the first moment of time. If there was no temporal gap between God's eternal decision to create a first moment of time and the creation of that first moment, then his decision to create would alone be sufficient for a first moment of time to be created. God could not eternally decide to create at any future point since there is no future point for him to create. So if a timelessly eternal God decided to create at all then the universe is eternal and never had a first moment in time.
4) This timelessly eternal triune God who parodoxically created time must now forever be subject to events in time. He cannot become timeless again, for to do so would destroy all that happened in time as if these events never happened at all. So although God somehow existed outside of time before creating the first moment of time he must now forever experience a sequence of events. Whereas before creation he was a timelessly existing being he is now going to forever experience a sequence of events that is never ending.
From here it only gets worse.
5) We are told that the Logos, the 2nd person of the trinity, became a man. No conception of this God-man in the flesh has yet been able to stand scrutiny. How, for instance, can such a being be 100% God and 100% man with nothing left over? All attempts to solve this problem have failed.
6) But we’re not done, for we’re told this God-man atoned for the sins of man. No sense can be made of how the death of Jesus actually forgives sins. There is no relationship between punishment and forgiveness at all. We forgive people who have not been punished and sometimes we won’t forgive people even after they've been punished. To say that in order to forgive someone they must first be punished does not describe forgiveness at all, anyway. It describes revenge. Revenge can never be a moral reason for acting and revenge has nothing to do with offering forgiveness. We don't even need for people to ask forgiveness in order to forgive them. Sometimes it's better for our mental health to forgive someone regardless of whether or not they're even sorry for what they've done.
7) This God-man was a unique never-before-existing being who is described in the creeds as one unified person. Here an additional problem surfaces. Where is the human side of this God-man now (i.e. the human nature of Jesus)? Since this human side of the God-man was sinless he couldn’t be destroyed, nor could this human side of the God-man be separated from the divine side, for such a being was now one person according to the creeds. So theologians have concluded that the trinity includes an embodied Logos. Now we have a trinity with an embodied 2nd person in it. Picture this if you will!
8) Stepping forward a bit, sinners sent to hell retain their free will, since it’s argued they continue to rebel in hell, while the saints who enter heaven have their free will taken away to guarantee there will be no future rebellion in heaven. If free will is such a great gift why reward people by taking it away from them and punish people by having them retain it? That makes little sense to me.
I’ve only touched on a few of the beliefs needed to make sense of Christianity. There are many others, and some Christians have different scenarios. But who in their right mind would embrace Christianity if he or she heard about them all when first being challenged to believe? Very few people. That’s what I think.
But we’re not done yet. For there is the additional problem of the lack of evidence for these beliefs. Archaeology disconfirms the flood and Exodus stories. What we have are the claims of people who wrote the books that later were accepted into the Bible. Why should I believe what they wrote? Why should I believe that the sun stood still, or that a star pointed down to a specific place, or that a virgin gave birth, or that a man walked on the water just because of what a person in the superstitious past wrote? Even in the Bible itself we see how the people of that same era believed in the actions of gods and goddesses like Apollo, Zeus, Baal, Artemis, and others, which hardly anyone accepts today. So why do Christians accept one set of claims in the past but reject the others? The same evidence supports them all: Testimonies by superstitious people in the past.
Christians must defend too many beliefs, any one of which, if incorrect, would be fatal to their whole worldview. These beliefs are based upon the conclusions of historical evidence which is extremely problematic given the nature of that evidence and the nature of the superstitious pre-scientific people in the ancient past.
Christians must defend things like the existence of the social Trinitarian God (versus an anti-social Trinitarian God) of the Bible (which had a long process of formation and of borrowing material from others) who never began to exist and will never cease to exist (even though everything we experience has a beginning and an end), who never learned any new truths, who does not think (for thinking demands weighing temporal alternatives), who is not free with respect to deciding his own nature, who revealed himself through a poor medium (history) in a poor era (ancient times), who condemns all of humanity for the sins of the first human pair, who commanded genocide, who allows intense suffering in this world (yet does not follow the same moral code he commands believers to follow), whose Son (the 2nd person of the trinity) became incarnate in Jesus (even though no one has ever made sense of a person who is 100% man and 100% divine) to be punished for our sins (even though there is no correlation between punishment and forgiveness) who subsequently bodily arose from the dead (even though the believer in miracles has an almost impossible double-burden of proof here) and now lives embodied forever in a “spiritual” human body who will return to earth in the parousia (even though the NT is clear that the end of all kingdoms and the establishment of God's kingdom was to be in their generation), who sent the 3rd person of the trinity to lead his followers into "all truth" (yet fails in every generation to do this), who will also judge us based upon what conclusions we reach about the existence of this God and what he has done (paralleling the ancient barbaric thought police), and who will reward believers by taking away their freedom and punish the dammed by letting them retain their freedom?
Since the larger the claim is the less probable it is, the Christian faith is simply too improbable to be believed by reasonable people. Period.