Asking for EVIDENCE for God: Why Is that So Hard to Grasp?
Sentiments about Jesus do not qualify
According to the devout, evidence for their god is so obvious, “I feel Jesus in my heart!” “Just open the Bible, it’s right there.” “People all over the world have seen visions of the Virgin Mary.” “Every day I receive guidance from my god in prayer.” “The holy spirit fills me with joy during Sunday worship.”
Please note these claims are usually made by people who have been groomed from a very young age to accept what they’re been told by preachers and priests. Or maybe they converted to Christianity as adults—which is no surprise, since the marketing of Jesus is a multi-billion-dollar business. There are thousands of churches ready to welcome converts into their grooming communities.
It doesn’t take much thought to see the doubtful quality of these pretend examples of evidence. Devout Jews and Muslims, for example, don’t feel Jesus in their hearts—they were trained much differently. Nor do devout Jews or Muslims see much evidence for god in the New Testament—it fails utterly as their scripture. It’s very common for Protestants to ridicule the very idea of the Virgin Mary showing up around the world: all those visions are obviously Catholic delusions. Devout theists of so many varieties receive very different “guidance” during their prayer experiences; for example, on any major social issue, theists will tell us their god has offered conflicting advice. And the joy derived from worship services? That especially is derived from years of careful grooming and conditioning.
So what’s going on here? Theists themselves deny/doubt the “evidence” that other theists brag about! In fact, there is scandalous disagreement about god among the world’s most devout, fervent theists—because they’re not using valid data in depicting their god. Full Stop: when we ask for evidence for god(s), we want to see reliable, verifiable, objective evidence. Sentiments about Jesus, confidence in the Bible, visions, prayers, worship emotion simply do not qualify.
Reliance on the Bible is especially misplaced. In an article published here on 30 June, What Would Convince Us Christianity Is True?, John Loftus asks readers to consider the problems historians face when they evaluate Matthew’s account of the Virgin Birth. Here’s what we read in Matthew 1:18-20:
“When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be pregnant from the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to divorce her quietly. But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, ‘Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.’”
How would the author of Matthew’s gospel—writing perhaps eighty years after the conception of Jesus—know any of this information? What were his sources? Historians look for contemporaneous documentation, i.e., records that were made very close to the time of events described. My question has always been: did Joseph keep a diary—in which he wrote about his dreams—and, if so, how could Matthew have accessed such a diary? It’s much more likely that Matthew belonged to a community of Jesus believers in which this tale had been handed down for a couple of generations. Loftus correctly calls this “2nd 3rd 4th 5th handed down testimony.” And this is crucial, as Loftus points out:
“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.”
Moreover, dreams fail utterly as reliable, verifiable evidence. Loftus quotes the skepticism voiced by Thomas Hobbs (1588-1679): “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.”
It’s also just a fact that the virgin birth of Jesus is a minority opinion in the New Testament. It’s not found in Mark’s gospel, and the author of John’s gospel probably saw no need for it whatever. His Jesus had been present at creation, so his divine status was beyond reproach. Nor do we find virgin birth mentioned in the epistles. Would it have meant anything at all to the apostle Paul, for whom the resurrection was essential event?
Since virgin birth—that is, a woman impregnated by a god—was a common theme in myths about heroes in the ancient world, we can suspect that Matthew and Luke thought that virgin birth would give a boost to their hero.
No matter where we turn in the gospels, we run into the lack of contemporaneous documentation, a missing element that doesn’t seem to bother lay people at all: they’ve been trained not to evaluate the gospels critically, skeptically. Question everything is not what they’ve been taught. The clergy know very well there’s too much danger in that approach.
Loftus forcefully drives home the point:
“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.”
Loftus also provides a link in this article to one he wrote in 2017, What Would Convince Atheists to Become Christians: Four Definitive Links! Here he calls believers to account for not believing in gods other than their own, for example Allah or the ancient Jewish god, Adonai—precisely because there’s no evidence for them. Years ago, in conversation with a Catholic friend, he protested that he wasn’t an atheist. I pointed out that he indeed was. Did he believe in Neptune or Poseidon, gods of seas? No, he had been groomed to believe in Yahweh—although Christianity has abandoned that name for the god of the Bible.
On top of this huge embarrassment—that verifiable, reliable, objective evidence is missing—there have been so many tragic events that reduce the probability of a caring, powerful god to zero, as Loftus notes:
“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.”
Devout believers may be absolutely sure that their god involves himself in their lives, but without reliable, verifiable, objective evidence that this is the case, we are entitled to suspect pathetic wishful thinking. And some of the devout who get hit hard by life may come to doubt it themselves. Seventy-nine years ago, 462 women and children were murdered in a church in the village Oradour-sur-Glane in rural France, causing major slippage in belief in a good, caring god. Such a horror just didn’t make sense in the context of Christian theology.
The wars of the last century totally destroy god-is-good theology. Tens of millions of people were killed—on the battlefields and in cities that were heavily bombed during the Second World War, e.g., the blitz in England, the fire-bombing of Dresden, the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In December 1941, 50,000 people starved to death during the siege of Leningrad, six million people were murdered in the Holocaust, one of the most thoroughly documented crimes in
human history. How does god-is-good theology survive? Primarily, I suppose, because the devout aren’t supposed to think about these events—nor are they asked to consider the devastating implications.
In his 2017 essay, Loftus provided the link to an essay by Daniel Bastian, What Would Convince You? Loftus describes this “as the most comprehensive list of answers I’ve found”—that is, reasons for giving up god-belief. Bastian’s essay is indeed worth careful study and reflection. Just a couple of excerpts:
“In a world where Christians and other monotheists profess belief in a meddler god who influenced ancient texts, answers prayers, appoints semi-sane politicians to run for office, and worked all manner of miracles throughout history, the utter vacuum of evidence for such assertions begins to speak volumes.”
“…given the extraordinary claims made on its behalf, the Bible should exhibit an ethical blueprint that transcends the rate of cultural evolution observed across history. Yet on issues such as slavery, the status of women, penalties for various innocuous (and imaginary) crimes, and the treatment of unbelievers, the biblical texts are found to be par for the Bronze Age course.”
Bastian also takes aim at the weaknesses of the gospels, i.e., their failure to provide credible information about Jesus. Why couldn’t a competent god have done better?
As a preface to his presentation of twenty realities that undermine theism, Bastian notes: “My personal view is that a wider appreciation of reality reveals a universe that does not appear the way we would expect if theism were true, leaving non-belief as a supremely rational position to hold.”
The impact of all twenty is devastating, or as Loftus puts it: “Read 'em and weep Christians. Ya got nothing. You'll have to whine about something else from now on.”
What do Christians claim as the One True Faith? That their god required a human sacrifice to enable him to forgive sin, and that magic potions play a role in winning eternal life, i.e., eating the flesh of the human sacrifice and drinking his blood (see John 6:53-56). How crazy can you get? Loftus quotes anthropology professor James T. Houk, “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.”
David Madison was a pastor in the Methodist Church for nine years, and has a PhD in Biblical Studies from Boston University. He is the author of two books, Ten Tough Problems in Christian Thought and Belief: a Minister-Turned-Atheist Shows Why You Should Ditch the Faith, (2016; 2018 Foreword by John Loftus) now being reissued in a new series titled, Ten Tough Problems in Christian Belief, Book 1: Guessing About God) and Ten Things Christians Wish Jesus Hadn’t Taught: And Other Reasons to Question His Words (2021). The Spanish translation of this book is also now available.
His YouTube channel is here. He has written for the Debunking Christianity Blog since 2016.
The Cure-for-Christianity Library©, now with more than 500 titles, is here. A brief video explanation of the Library is here.
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