Honest Sermons on the Gospel of Mark: Chapter 7

The devout must hope Mark was wrong about Jesus here

 
If the Judeo-Christian god truly had the welfare of humanity at the center of attention, it’s hard to understand why he/she/it didn’t include a major book in the Bible about health and hygiene. This missing book could have included detailed information about germs, exactly why we get sick, and ways to stay healthy and fit. Was this god satisfied that it would take thousands of years for humans to discover the realities of disease? In the meantime, we suffer, so what? So much of the Bible is useless nonsense: what harm would it have done to include a major book explaining the realities of human biology and contagion?

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New Chapter: The Emotional Problem of Evil

Inside the 2nd edition of "God and Horrendous Suffering" will be the first ever full chapter on "The Emotional Problem of Evil."

A Christian Defends Popular Theobabble with Amateur Theobabble

Religious personal opinion doesn’t replace epistemology 

 

In my article here last week, I explained exactly why He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands—popular though it might be—is nonetheless theobabble. It makes no sense whatever when we honestly admit that there is so much pain and suffering in the world. But devout folks have devised ways to divert attention from these realities. It was no surprise, therefore, a Catholic jumped into the debate. One of his earliest comments was:
 
“God has a plan. Human beings act freely within that plan. People committing acts of violence and mass murder are acting against God’s Plan. God’s divine providence makes sure that good comes from the evil. So basically, if had not been for Gods plan, the human race would have destroyed itself long ago.”

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The Evil God Challenge, Part One: Introduction

John W. Loftus asked me to write about Steven Law’s Evil God challenge (Wikipedia link). The topic turns out to be rather large, and it ramifies into several related topics that should be familiar to readers of this blog.

The Evil God challenge spawned a sizable literature, with articles that expand on it, and articles from theists that attempt to rebut it or nullify it. To keep the subject manageable, I’ll split my coverage across several articles. This article introduces the subject and provides references and a video.

• Wikipedia articles:
  • Steven Law
  • Evil God challenge (Wikipedia link)
• Steven Law’s blog pages:
  • The Evil God Challenge, February 12, 2010, announcing his original paper:
    • Law, Stephen. “The evil-god challenge.” Religious Studies 46, no. 3 (2010): 353-373.
    • PDF link to the paper
  • God, Evil, and Theodicies - Evil God and Mirror Theodicies, January 10, 2016
• Scholarly links:
  • The Evil God Challenge, Google Scholar entries
  • The Evil God Challenge, Google Scholar search result (original paper plus responses)
• And on Debuking Christianity:
  • What is the Likelihood That a Trickster or Evil God Exists?, 1/22/2010

Now that AI is here, check out my brief chat with Google Gemini on the Evil God challenge. Here is Gemini’s initial response:

Steven Law’s “Evil God challenge” is a philosophical thought experiment that questions the traditional concept of an all-good, all-powerful God. Here’s a summary of its core ideas:

• The Challenge:
  • Law presents the challenge of explaining why believing in an all-good God is more reasonable than believing in an all-evil God.
  • He argues that many arguments for God’s existence don’t inherently prove God’s goodness, and could equally support the existence of an evil deity.
• The Symmetry Thesis:
  • A key component is the “symmetry thesis,” which suggests that if the existence of good in the world is used to argue against an all-evil God, then the existence of evil should similarly argue against an all-good God.
  • Essentially, he questions why the “problem of evil” is considered a strong argument against a good God, but the “problem of good” isn’t considered an equally strong argument against an evil God.
• The Goal:
  • The challenge aims to provoke deeper consideration of the attributes ascribed to God, and to examine the logical consistency of theistic arguments.
  • It also forces examination of why we define good and evil in the way that we do.
• Responses:
  • There have been many responses to Laws challenge, including arguments that good is a positive reality, and evil is a privation of good, therefore not symmetrical. Also there are arguments that an all evil god, would not allow any good to exist.

In essence, Law’s challenge forces us to consider why we prioritize belief in a good God over an evil one, and to scrutinize the reasoning behind our theological assumptions.

Gemini’s summary is pretty good, but could do better at framing the Evil God challenge as a tool for showing how weak the standard theodicies are. (A theodicy is an attempt by a Christian apologist to solve the Problem of Evil, i.e. to explain how there can be so much evil in a world supposedly created by an omni-God.) Steven Law says that for many of the standard Christian responses to the Problem of Evil, there is a “mirror theodicy” that equally well (or poorly) tries to explain how there can be so much good in a world created by an omni-malevolent God. If the theist views the theodicy as a valid justification for the omni-God, why then isn’t the mirror theodicy an equally valid justification for the Evil God?

Alert readers will recognize similarities to parody religions and Street Epistemology, topics I’ll address in following articles. To very briefly summarize, both of those things aim to stimulate critical reflection by showing a person how the arguments they give to support their own religious claims work equally well, mutatis mutandis, to support a wide variety of other claims, such as the claims of other religions, or of parody religions.

This notion of analyzing the form of an argument, and plugging different terms into it, to see if the argument form still seems to work, is central to critical thinking. Around 2400 years ago, Ancient Greek thinkers began to analyze arguments this way. Presumably people had been making arguments for as long as they had language (which might have been for as long as people had anatomically modern vocal organs). Critical thinking began when people realized that arguments aren’t just things you assert when you want to make some specific point, but things that have forms you can analyze. The Evil God challenge is a clever case study in this kind of critical thinking.

Here’s a video to finish off this short introduction to the Evil God Challenge. Enjoy!

Visit My Page at The Secular Web!

You should already know of my 13 critically acclaimed books as I described them here. Avid readers will pardon me for reminding others of my page at The Secular Web. I've published on some key issues there. They cover the major faith responses to those of us who value reason and science. My next paper will probably be something to do with an atheist morality without a God, gods, or goddesses. In no particular order:

Is Atheism a Religious Faith? A Definitive Answer:

What is faith, atheism, and agnosticism? How should these words be understood? Why is this debate important? Who is right, and why does it matter? In this essay John Loftus tackles these issues, offering insights that are sure to enlighten us all.

Hail Mary: Was Virgin Mary Truly the Mother of God’s Son?:

In this essay John Loftus explores the most important questions regarding the belief that the 'Virgin Mary' truly was the mother of God's son. In short, he argues that no virgin ever gave birth to a son of God, citing sources for those who want an even longer argument. The argument begins by exploring a noteworthy Christian sect that questions whether, in fact, Mary was indeed a virgin, and whether God had a body through which conception could be achieved. The questions and issues that he goes on to explore should challenge what Christians believe about God, Mary, the Gospels, and their entire faith.

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Actual Pain vs. Remembered Pain - A Crucial Difference for the Problem of Evil

You might wonder what this article has to do with zebras. Spoiler: they teach us how pain is not necessary for soul building, even if we allow for the baseless metaphysical projection of souls from the merely physical psychology of learning. Unlike Bruce Springsteen, Zebras are literally born to run.

In his blog post entitled My Paper on Morality without God is finished of March 1, 2025, John W. Loftus mentions his visit to Notre Dame University to meet James Sterba. A photo accompanying his post shows a reprint of Sterba’s article An Ethics without God That Is Compatible with Darwinian Evolution (Religions 2024, 15(7), 781; doi.org/10.3390/rel15070781). Religions is an Open Access journal, so Sterba’s paper is free to read online. (Read it now! I’ll wait.) The paper overlaps considerably with Sterba’s recent book:

Could a Good God Permit So Much Suffering?: A Debate by James Sterba, Richard Swinburne, OUP Oxford | 2024 | ISBN: 9780192664693, 0192664697 | Page count: 160.

Publisher’s blurb:

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Another Chapter by Dr. David Eller: "Christianity Does Not Provide the Basis for Morality"

This is his Chapter 13 from my anthology "The Christian Delusion." Enjoy.

Christianity Does Not Provide the Basis for Morality by Dr. David Eller.

            Imagine someone said to you that English provided the only basis for grammar.  After you overcame your shock, you would respond that English is certainly not the only language with a grammar. You would add that grammar is not limited to language: understood broadly as rules for combination and transformation, many phenomena have a grammar, from sports to baking. Nor is grammar the sole or essential component of language: language also includes sound systems, vocabularies, genres, and styles of speech. And you would remind the speaker that grammar does not depend on human language at all: some nonhuman species, including chimps and parrots, can produce grammatical—that is, orderly and rule-conforming—short sentences. Ultimately, you would want to explain that English does not “provide a basis” for grammar at all but rather represents one particular instance of grammar. English grammar is definitely not the only grammar in the world and even more definitely not the “real” grammar.

            The person who utters a statement like “English provides the only basis for grammar” either understands very little about English (and language in general) or grammar, or the person is expressing his or her partisanship about language (i.e., pro-English)—or, more likely, the speaker is doing both. Thus, the person who utters a statement like “Christianity provides the only basis for morality” either understands very little about Christianity (or religion in general) or morality, or the person is expressing his or her partisanship about religion (i.e., pro-Christianity)—or, more likely, the speaker is doing both. But, as a savvy responder, you would answer that Christianity is certainly not the only religion with morality. You would add that morality is not limited to religion: understood broadly as standards for behavior, many phenomena have a morality, from philosophy to business. Nor is morality the sole or essential component of religion: religion also includes myths, rituals, roles, and institutions of behavior. And you would remind the speaker that morality does not depend on human religion at all: some nonhuman species demonstrate moral—that is, orderly and standard-conforming—behavior. Ultimately, you would want to explain that Christianity does not “provide a basis” for morality at all but rather represents one particular instance of morality.  Christian morality is definitely not the only morality in the world and even more definitely not the “real” morality.

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David Eller On Morality and Religion

Once again cultural anthropologist Dr. David Eller has granted us access to a large amount of text, from his excellent book, Atheism Advanced: Further Thoughts of a Freethinker, pp. 365-390. If you want to learn about morality this is very good, as is the whole chapter 10, "Of Myths and Morals: Religion, Stories, and the Practice of Living."

 On Morality and Religion by David Eller.

            There is no doubt much more stress in Western/Christian cultures on morality than on myth.  Again, Christians would insist that they do not have “myth” but that they definitely have morality, or even that their religion is morality above all else.  Atheists, often taking their lead from Christianity and literally “speaking Christian,” tend to allow themselves to be swept along with Christian thinking on this subject.  Atheists do not much trouble ourselves with myths (for us, all myths are false by definition, since myths refer to supernatural/religious beings and we reject the very notion of such being).  But we trouble ourselves very much with morality, down to trying to prove that we “have morality too” or that we can “be good without god(s).”

            Given the amount of time and energy that Christians and atheists alike—and not just them but philosophers, politicians, lawyers, and social scientists—have devoted to the problem of morality, it is remarkable that so little progress has been made.  As the famous early 20^th-century moral philosopher G. E. Moore wrote almost one hundred years ago, morality or ethics “is a subject about which there has been and still is an immense amount of difference of opinion….  Actions which some philosophers hold to be generally wrong, others hold to be generally right, and occurrences which some hold to be evils, others hold to be goods” (1963: 7).  Surely any topic that has resisted progress and agreement for so long must be being approached in the wrong way.

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David Eller On Freeing Ourselves (and Others) From Misunderstandings of Atheism

David Eller, as many of you know, is pretty much my favorite scholar/author at this point, next to just a very limited number of others. As a friend he's allowing me to publish the very best, next to none chapter, on what the words atheist and agnosticism mean. It comes from his most recent book, Liberatheism: On Freedom from God(s) [GCRR, 2024], one that I was honored to write the Forword. Enjoy!

Freeing Ourselves (and Others)

From Misunderstandings of Atheism

“I

do not believe in God and I am not an atheist,” Albert Camus wrote in his Notebooks 1951–1959.[1] What are we to make of that statement? Perhaps Camus was being wry and cryptic, as French philosophers are often wont to be. Maybe “atheist” meant something different to him or to 1950s-era France. Alternatively, it might have been too dangerous to avow atheism in that time and place. Or maybe he was just confused about the word.

If the latter is the case, then Camus would not be the first or the last to labor under misconceptions about atheism. Of course, theists are highly likely—and highly motivated—to get atheism wrong. Since they are not atheists and possibly have never spoken to one (at least not intentionally and civilly), they really do not know what we think; they can only see us through their own theistic eyes and assume that we are the reverse image, or, more perversely, some odd variation, of their own theism. Then, as sworn and mortal enemies of atheism, they are driven to portray us in the most unflattering light, to construct a ridiculous straw man that they can summarily caricature and assassinate. We need not take their (mis)characterizations of us seriously, except as a public relations problem.

What about atheists themselves? Surely they are accurately portraying their position. Surprisingly and distressingly, too many professional atheist writers and speakers commit a regular set of errors in describing the nature of atheism. This is a tremendously damaging tendency, for two reasons. First, we mislead current and future atheists, who are misinformed by the incautious pronouncements of prominent atheists. Second, we empower theists and other critics of atheism who use our words against us: “See, even atheists say that atheism is X, so we are justified in our criticism and condemnation of the idea.”

In this chapter, we will expose and free ourselves from recurring and systematic mistakes in the atheist literature. We will not repeat or critique “arguments for atheism,” which have been sufficiently covered, including by me[2] and are largely cogent and decisive; all but the most hard-headed theists and religious apologists (who still exist) concede that “the case for god(s)” is weak at best and lost at worst. Nor will we linger on the New Atheists, who have been thoroughly examined many times before, including in the previous chapter where we noted their unexpected and unfortunate turn toward reactionary social and political attitudes—ironically simultaneously debunking one of the pillars of Western civilization (i.e. Christianity) and defending Western civilizational traditions of sexism, racial thinking, and Islamophobia, among others. The New Atheists are broadly guilty of the common charge of scientism, not just of crediting science with the solution to all problems but of equating, as Richard Dawkins does, religion to science (albeit bad science). For instance, Dawkins wrote in his lauded The God Delusion that “‘the God Hypothesis’ is a scientific hypothesis about the universe,” and Victor Stenger actually put this “god hypothesis” business in the title of one of his books.[3] Finally, all of the New Atheists, who are quality scholars on their own turf, operate with limited (by which I mean Christianity-centric) notions of religion and god, in which “god” means the Christian or Abrahamic god and “religion” means Abrahamic monotheism. Any college freshman student of religion knows better.

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It Should Be Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, and Loftus

 

As others have said as well

Carl Sagan once said, “I don’t want to believe, I want to know.” I have encountered so many churchgoers who are satisfied with belief—and they trust that their clergy have taught them correct beliefs. There appears to be so little curiosity about Christian origins, about the complex ancient thought world in which their faith arose. Nor is there much curiosity about how the gospels came to be, and how much they are burdened with flaws, contradictions, and laughable impossibilities. The drama, ceremony, music, and ritual of weekly (or even more often) worship are enough to sustain devotion and commitment. They are happy with believing, not knowing.

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Hail Mary! Was Virgin Mary Truly the Mother of God’s Son?

 Hail Mary! Was Virgin Mary Truly the Mother of God’s Son?

 -- By John W. Loftus

Catholic Christians pray the rosary, which is a string of beads representing creeds and prayers to be recited. Devout Catholics are considered to recite it every single day. In it the Apostles’ Creed made the cut, which is recited one time. The Glory Be (Doxology) is recited five times, the Lord’s Prayer is said six times, but the Hail Mary prayer is recited a whopping 150 times!   

 As one who was raised a Catholic I was required to recite these things a number of times upon visiting the confessional booth, depending on the gravity of my sins. While the Hail Mary can be dated back to the 13^th century, the current prayer dates to the 16^th century: 

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen. 

Logistics and Mary the Mother of God.

We need to start by briefly considering some logistics. Consider first, the logistics of how a real mother named Mary could conceive of God (or God’s Son).

The ancients commonly believed that the woman contributes nothing to the physical being of the baby to be born. They thought the child was only related to the father. The mother was nothing but a receptacle for the male sperm, which grew to become a child.

Today, by contrast, with the advent of genetics, most Christian thinkers try to defend the virgin birth on the grounds that the humanity of Jesus was derived from Mary and that his divine nature was derived from God. They do this because they know something about genetics and know Mary must have contributed the female egg that made Jesus into a man. But this doesn’t adequately explain how Jesus is a human being, since for there to be a human being in the first place minimally requires that a human sperm penetrate a human egg. Until that happens we do not have the complete chromosomal structure required to have a human being.

Now of course, God could conceivably create both the human egg and the sperm from which to create life inside Mary’s womb. But if it’s a created human life then it’s not God, who is believed to be eternal, and the creator of everything, who came to suffer and die to atone for human sins as a sinless God. Other problems emerge when it comes to the supposed genealogies and fulfilled prophecies.

Nevertheless, what if God had a body? He did, didn’t he? Sure he did, even though later Christian theology describes God as a Spirit. God is described as walking and talking with Adam and Eve, who even tried to hide from him in the trees of the garden (Genesis 3:8-10). Later on, Jacob prevailed over God in an all night wrestling match, after which Jacob said, “I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared.” God also let Moses see his body, even his backside (Exodus 33). After monotheism arrived God was still seen as having a body. He sat on a throne (Ezekiel 1; Daniel 7; Matthew 25:31; Revelation 5:1), and he rewarded the faithful by allowing them to see his face (Matthew 5:8; 18:11; Revelation 22:3-4). The first martyr Stephen saw Jesus “standing at the right hand of God” (Acts 7:56). Even at the end of times every eye will see him—and presumably recognize him—riding on a white horse to do battle with his enemies (Revelation 1:7; 19:11-21).[1]

So perhaps it isn’t too surprising Mormons still believe God has a body. But if so, they have to struggle with the virgin conception of Jesus. Was mother Mary a virgin or not? According to Brigham Young, the second president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “The Father came down and begat Jesus, the same as we do now.” Mormon apostle Bruce McConkie agreed, saying, “Christ was begotten by an immortal Father in the same way that mortal men are begotten by mortal fathers.” Two Mormon researchers ask us if it “is so disgusting to suggest God sired a son by sexual intercourse?”[2] Inquiring minds want to know.[3] But if God’s son was produced the old-fashioned way, his son Jesus was not conceived of a virgin after all!

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Horrendous Suffering Reduces the Probability of a Loving God to Zero

The desperate scramble of theologians to rescue their deity 

In the classic American play, Inherit the Wind (by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee), about the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, we find this exchange between the characters based on William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow:
 
Bryan: “I do not think about things I do not think about.”
Darrow: “Do you ever think about things that you do think about?”

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McIntosh and Horrendous Suffering

[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.]

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Why Isn’t Membership in the Catholic Church Down to ZERO by Now?

Because it exploits magical thinking and has mastered show business

Here we go again, from the Associated Press, 25 July 2024: Missouri lawsuits allege abuse by priests, nuns; archdiocese leader in Omaha among those accused. Here are three excerpts:

“Among those named is Omaha Archbishop George Lucas. A lawsuit filed Wednesday in St. Louis County Circuit Court said the unnamed accuser was 16 when he met Lucas at the now-closed St. Louis Preparatory Seminary in the late 1980s, where Lucas was a priest and dean of education. The lawsuit accused Lucas of sexually abusing the boy multiple times and offering better grades for sexual favors.”

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The Just-So Stories of the Bible

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.

Babies are cute, but their unusually big heads can be deadly to Mom

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.

Humans no longer knuckle-walk, at least outside of Trump rallies²

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.

The universe as revealed by God to ancient Hebrews

---

1. 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.↩︎

2. 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.↩︎

3. 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.↩︎

4. 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.↩︎

5. 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.↩︎

There’s Too Much Evil and Cruelty in the Bible

Topped off with bad theology and silliness

The first comment on my article here last week was offered by skepticCO, who quoted the apostle Paul in Romans 1:28-32:

“And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God decided to show them compassion and love and to do what ought to be done. They were filled with all manner of empathy, love, optimism, hope. They are full of beauty, desire, peace, reverence. They are lovers, teachers, mentors, helpers, inventors. They know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve all that is good, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.”

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What a Shame: the Writings of a Crank Got Into the Bible

Please stop calling him “saint” Paul

One particular Christian cult has dedicated itself to putting Bibles in motel/hotel rooms; by one estimate they’ve distributed more than a billion Bibles over the decades. The idea is to put the Word of God within easy reach, right there in the drawer beside the bed. This probably worked better in the era before every motel/hotel room had a TV—and when many travelers had their laptop computers and cell phones. But picking up the Bible and reading a few verses or chapters doesn’t solve the problem of figuring out the meaning of the texts. Christianity has shattered into so many warring brands because there is so much difference of opinion about meaning.

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I Forgot to Mention Paul Copan Recommended My Book

This is no big deal really, but it does get one closer to a recommendation by William Lane Craig, since Copan and Craig are pretty close friends. You see, I had sent Paul some book files of God and Horrendous Suffering for a recommendation, and he said he was still convinced God is good. I said that's not the point, and I sent him the recommendation by Chad Meister, author/ co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Problem of Evil. Meister wrote this blurb:

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.

So Paul said this:

The Cherished So-Called Evidence for God Hits Brick Walls

This is not hard to figure out

But you do have to think about what is claimed as evidence for god(s). Does the evidence hold up to careful, critical analysis? What is the evidence usually cited? At the end of the 1942 film, Casablanca, Captain Louis Renault utters the famous line, “Round up all the usual suspects.” So let’s review the usual evidence-for-god(s) suspects, starting with…
 
Scripture/Revelation
 
The problem is that devout theologians/clergy have never been able to agree on which scriptures, which portions of scriptures, actually qualify as divinely inspired word-of-a-god. Once the New Testament had become the Christian scripture, the Old Testament was downgraded, especially since it includes so much god-generated brutality. It’s still in the Christian Bible, but much of it can be dismissed with “Oh, that’s in the Old Testament…” And it’s no surprise that Jewish theologians don’t give divine ranking to the New Testament. Nor are Christians about to add the Qur’an to their Bible, though it is considered the supremely divine word of Allah. You mean the Muslim theologians have it all wrong? And it would be hard to find any Jewish, Christian, or Muslim theologians who doesn’t think The Book of Mormon is a joke. It’ll never happen that these thousands of devout theologians from different brands will come to an agreement.

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Published: Don McIntosh's Article In Response to Mine On "God and Horrendous Suffering."

Volume 2, Issue 1 (Spring 2024) of the Trinity Journal of Natural & Philosophical Theology has just been published. Included is the response by Editor-in-Chief Don McIntosh, titled, “Horrendous Evil and Christian Theism: A Reply to John Loftus” (pp. 25-44). 

With his permission I'm publishing it in its entirety below. This isn't the first time I've published a paper by a Christian philosopher, or apologist. Just click on the Tag "Christian Scholars" below to see some others. Comment as you will. Don will be reading and may respond.

If you remember, my previous article was published in an earlier issue in the TJNPT, and can be read at The Secular Web, along with a video of it on YouTube.  

I will write a response to his response which will be published at The Secular Web. 

 

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