The hoops the Christian has to jump through to believe the Nativity

[First published by Jonathan Pearce on 7/19/12] I was recently talking in a thread or two, about the historical implausibility of pretty much all of the claims in both Luke and Matthew with regards to the infancy accounts of Jesus' birth.

The situation is this. I maintain that, to hold to the notion that the accounts are historical, one has to jump through hoops. However, the Christian might say that one or two claims in the accounts may be false, but that does not mean that the other claims are false. But in this approach lie many issues. For example:

1) If we accept that some claims in the accounts are false, does the Christian special plead that the other claims are true?
2) The claims are so interconnected that to falsify one or two of them means that the house of cards comes tumbling down.
3) If we establish that at least some of the claims are false, how does this affect other claims within the same Gospel? How can we know that claims of Jesus' miracles are true given that the reliability of the writer is accepted as questionable?

And so on. In my book, The Nativity: A Critical Examination, I think I give ample evidence that allows one to conclude that the historicity of the nativity accounts is sorely and surely challenged. All of the aspects and claims, that is. There are problems, for sure, if one accepts that some claims are false but others are true. But the simple fact of the matter is that all of the claims are highly questionable.

The Birth of Jesus in History & Legend (Bart Ehrman with Michael Shermer)

A Pop-Quiz for Christians, Number 9

Tis the season to carefully study the Jesus birth stories

A few years ago I attended the special Christmas show at Radio City Music Hall. It ended with the famous tableau depicting the night Jesus was born: the baby resting on straw in a stable, shepherds and Wise Men adoring the infant, surrounded by farm animals—and a star hovering above the humble shelter. Radio City did it splendidly, of course, but the scene is reenacted at countless churches during the Christmas season. The devout are in awe—well, those who haven’t carefully read the birth stories in Matthew and Luke. This adored tableau is actually a daft attempt to reconcile the two gospel accounts—which cannot, in fact, be done.

“Keeping Secularism in the Holidays” by Edouard Tahmizian

“Keeping Secularism in the Holidays” by Edouard Tahmizian, Vice President & Social Media Manager of Internet Infidels (The Secular Web). He wrote a little 50-second piece dedicated to keeping Secularism alive. Happy Holidays! Sheet Music by Edouard Tahmizian for Piano/Keyboard. Noteflight (click on the play button on the digital score). LINK.

An Excerpt From Chapter 2, From "The Outsider Test for Faith", pp. 33-44

Chapter 2: The Fact of Religious Diversity

This chapter supports my first contention—that people who are located in distinct geographical areas around the globe overwhelmingly adopt and justify a wide diversity of mutually exclusive religious faiths due to their particular upbringing and shared cultural heritage. This is the Religious Diversity Thesis (RDVT), and it is a well-established fact in today’s world. The problem of religious diversity cries out for reasonable explanation, something that faith has not provided so far. Attempts to mitigate it or explain it, as we’ll see, either fail to take it seriously or explain religion itself away.

Disestablished: Goodbye Church of England? But Meanwhile in America… by Robert Conner

New legislation scheduled to be introduced in Parliament on

December 6, 2023, proposes to finally, officially, separate the British government from the Church of England: 
 
“Perhaps the distressing sight of King Charles III kneeling before a bible and kissing it at his coronation ceremony hastened the decision to introduce this legislation. The coronation took place at Westminster Abbey, where Charles swore an oath before the bible to uphold the Church of England’s privileges during the ritual led by the Archbishop of Canterbury. The National Secular Society, which has been campaigning for the church’s disestablishment since its founding in 1866, reports that a cross claiming what was purported to be shards from Jesus’ crucifix (sic) was part of the ritual.”^[1]
 
The new king’s oath “to preserve the Church of England, guarantees Church of England bishops and archbishops 26 seats in the House of Lords, and means state schools can be required to hold Christian worship.” Dr. Scot Peterson of Corpus Christi College remarked, “It’s been difficult to defend having an established church since the beginning of the 20th century but it is now becoming a figment of the imagination. The king being the head of the Church of England made sense in 1650, but not in 2022.”^[2]
 

How Did Christianity Get to Be Such a Mess?

Churchgoers don’t seem to care 

Evidence of the Mess: One

When American Christians head off for church on Sunday morning, how many church buildings of other Christian brands do they pass on the way to their own denomination? Baptists would be horrified at the thought of worshipping at a Catholic church instead. And Catholics would be baffled at the style of worship at a Methodist or Presbyterian church. This is the essence of Mess One: there are, in fact, thousands of different Christian brands, i.e. denominations, divisions, sects, and cults. There has been rampant splintering for hundreds of years because the devout cannot agree on basics about god and how he wants to be worshipped.

Reality Check: What Must Be the Case if Christianity is True?

In 2011 I did a series of posts called "Reality Check: What Must Be the Case if Christianity is True?"  I put some of them in the third chapter in  The End of Christianity, and the first chapter in God and Horrendous Suffering.

Below I've put together thirty of them that most Christians agree on and why they are all improbable:

1) There must be a God who is a simple being yet made up of three inexplicable persons existing forever outside of time without a beginning, who therefore never learned anything new, never took a risk, never made a decision, never disagreed within the Godhead, and never had a prior moment to freely choose his own nature.

2) There must be a personal non-embodied omnipresent God who created the physical universe ex-nihilo in the first moment of time who will subsequently forever experience a sequence of events in time.

The Metastability of Faith

Quick summary: atheism is easier than religious faith, and people are lazy, so why does anybody bother with the hard option? Why don't human brains seek a kind of lowest-energy state, by analogy with dynamical systems that tend to run downhill? This post explores, rather speculatively, whether the human brain on faith gets stuck in a kind of higher-energy state, and becomes unable to get to the bottom, similar to what many dynamical systems actually do.

Upcoming Virgin Birth/Miracles Debate, December 21st

In this debate I'm going to focus on the alleged miracle of the virgin birthed incarnate god. Dr. Slade, of the Global Center for Religious Research, will focus on Mary's apparitions and on testing miracles in general. I'm told this will be a two hour program.

A Big Item on God’s To-Do List: Kill as Many People as Possible

Yet the church gets away with “God is love” 

Those who have been assured since childhood that God is Love—and

have been coached to pray to their loving father well into adulthood—seem immune to many Bible texts that contradict this idea, for example, these pieces of Jesus-script:

 

“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother,
and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law, and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.”  (Matthew 10:34-36)

 

Luke’s version of this text is prefaced with, “I have come to cast fire upon the earth, and how I wish it were already ablaze!” (Luke 12:49)

 

In his letter to the Romans, the apostle Paul taught that “wrath and fury” awaited people who were disobedient to god. (Romans 2:8)

The Magic Self-Authenticating New Testament, Robert Conner

It can be asserted with little fear of contradiction that every literate

adult the world over has a mental image of Jesus of Nazareth. After all, Christianity is the largest religion — an estimated 2.4 billion adherents — and has existed for 2000 years. For centuries, laymen and scholars alike assumed the gospel stories were history and that Jesus and his apostles were verifiably historical characters like Caesar Augustus (Luke 2:1), Herod the Great (Matthew 2:1), or Tiberius Caesar and Pontius Pilate (Luke 3:1-2). However, in the early twentieth century, when German scholars began to question the reliability of the New Testament texts, that assumption came under challenge, particularly after 1909 when the philosopher Christian Heinrich Arthur Drews published Die Christusmythe, The Christ Myth, that claimed there was no reliable independent evidence for the Jesus of the gospels — Jesus, Drews asserted, was a product of the imagination. Could Drews have been right all along?

David Eller, "Is Religion Compatible with Science?" An Excerpt from Chapter 11 in "The End Of Christianity"

IS RELIGION COMPATIBLE WITH SCIENCE? by Dr. David Eller (pp. 257-278). [This is a 4000 word excerpt out of 8600 words. Get the book!]

  In most of the squabbles between religion and science, religion is never defined, because, since most of the squabbles are occurring in majority-Christian societies, the assumption is that “religion” means “Christianity.” Worse yet, the assumption is usually that “religion” means “traditional Chris­tianity” or “evangelical/fundamentalist Christianity.” Substituting one of these terms for “religion” in our original question yields the highly problematic inquiry: Is traditional/evangelical/fundamentalist Christianity compatible with science?

The first problem, of course, is that even if it is not, then perhaps some other form—some modernist or liberal form—of Christianity is com­patible with science; perhaps Christianity can be adjusted and juked to fit with science. The second and more profound problem is that even if traditional/evangelical/ fundamentalist Christianity or any version of Christianity whatsoever is not compatible with science, perhaps some other religion—say, Hinduism or Wicca or ancient Mayan religion or Scientology—is. Yet you will notice that almost no one asks, and almost no one in the United States or any other Christian-dominated society cares, whether Hinduism or ancient Mayan religion is compatible with science, since few people know or care about Hin­duism or ancient Mayan religion. The tempest over religion and science is thus quite a local and parochial brouhaha, people fighting for their particular reli­gion against (some version or idea of) science.

Christianity’s Embarrassing Apostle Paul Problem

Hallucinations are not a credible foundation for any religion

  

The church gets away with a far, far too much because most of the laity don’t bother to read the Bible, let alone study it carefully. This failure enables the clergy to nurture an idealized version of the faith—indeed, an idealized version of Jesus—unhindered by so much of the nasty stuff in full view in the gospels and in the letters of the apostle Paul. The clergy are quite content that the folks in the pews don’t go digging about in these documents. Instead, ritual, sacred music, costuming, stained glass windows—church décor in general—allow the laity to savor a false version of the faith promoted by the ecclesiastical bureaucracy.

The Christian Illusion of Rational Superiority (Part 2)

[This is one of my earliest posts, published in January 2006] Many Christians will maintain they have a superior foundation for knowing and for choosing to do what is good. They claim to have objective ethical standards for being good, based in a morally good creator God, and that the atheist has no ultimate justification for being moral.

Consider what Dr. William Lane Craig wrote: “If life ends at the grave, then it makes no difference whether one has lived as a Stalin or as a saint.…” “Who is to judge that the values of Adolf Hitler are inferior to those of a saint? “The world was horrified when it learned that at camps like Dachau the Nazis had used prisoners for medical experiments on living humans. But why not? If God does not exist, there can be no objection to using people as human guinea pigs.” [Apologetics: An Introduction, pp. 37-51].

The Christian claims to have absolute and objective ethical standards for knowing right from wrong, which is something they claim atheists don’t have. The Christian standards are grounded in the commands of a good creator God, and these commands come from God’s very nature and revealed to them in the Bible. There is a philosophical foundation for this claim, and then there is the case Christians present that the Bible reveals God’s ethical commands. Both are illusions of superiority. It is an illusion that the Christian moral theory is superior, and it is an illusion that Christians know any better than others how they should morally behave in our world.

Former Atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali Announced She's a Christian!

Wow! Christians nabbed another atheist based on faulty perceptions.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is an ex-Muslim who was a leading voice in new atheism and has now become a Christian!

How Did Paul Know What He Tells Us About Jesus?

We often marvel at Paul's lack of interest in the life and times of Jesus. He says Jesus was born of a woman but says nothing about his mother. He tells us Jesus was killed for the sins of others but tells us nothing about where the event occurred. He tells us that Jesus was buried but he tells us nothing about the gravesite. Did Paul not think the information was available in his time?

We know Paul could read the Old Testament as allegory as we see in Galatians 4:22-31:

Take It to the Lord in Prayer: More Magical Thinking

“Tonight is the night that Mary passes through your house…”

Six years ago I published an article here about a sure-fire way for

devout believers to prove, beyond a shadow of doubt, that prayer is an authentic way of communicating with god. That YES, god uses prayer as a way to let humans know his will on a wide variety of issues. I suggested recruiting 1,000—or 10,000—believers known for their intense prayer activity for a special project. But there’s a very crucial rule for the selection of these prayer experts: they must be drawn from the many different branches of theism, e.g., Catholics, Protestants—so many different kinds, including Pentecostals—Jews, Muslims, Mormons, Greek Orthodox. 
 
After a few weeks of intense prayer activity, these folks across the broad spectrum of theism would share what god had told them about such things as:

"The man of science is a poor philosopher." -- Albert Einstein

John Smith posted this quote from Einstein on Facebook. The full quote is from 1936:

It has often been said, and certainly not without justification, that the man of science is a poor philosopher. Why then should it not be the right thing for the physicist to let the philosopher do the philosophizing? Such might indeed be the right thing to do a time when the physicist believes he has at his disposal a rigid system of fundamental laws which are so well established that waves of doubt can't reach them; but it cannot be right at a time when the very foundations of physics itself have become problematic as they are now. At a time like the present, when experience forces us to seek a newer and more solid foundation, the physicist cannot simply surrender to the philosopher the critical contemplation of theoretical foundations; for he himself knows best and feels more surely where the shoe pinches. In looking for an new foundation, he must try to make clear in his own mind just how far the concepts which he uses are justified, and are necessities. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Einstein’s Philosophy of Science.

Granted he was speaking about the philosophy of science, which is a legitimate philosophical inquiry. But think on this. Maybe not, I say. Science has solved a multitude of philosophical problems, and will continue doing so. Given that success rate scientists are good philosophers. By contrast, by the same standard, philosophers have been poor scientists.

This comment of mine drew a bit of fire on Facebook.

The Christian Illusion of Rational Superiority (Part 1)

[This was one of my earliest posts here at DC] Many Christians assume a certain kind of rational superiority over any other system of belief and thought, especially atheism. According to them, their beliefs are rationally superior in the sense that Christianity wins hands down in the marketplace of ideas. They claim that a compelling case can be made for believing in Christianity over any other system of belief and thought.

This way of thinking about the Christian faith is due to what my friend and Christian scholar, Dr. James Sennett calls, “The Illusion of Rational Superiority,” in his forthcoming book: This Much I Know: A Postmodern Apologetic.

Dr. James Sennett argues against the idea that people who reject Christianity do so because they are either “ignorant,” “stupid” or “dishonest with the facts.” That is, he argues against the idea that a “fully rational rejection of Christianity is impossible.” Dr. Sennett calls this objection the Christian “Illusion of Rational Superiority." It's simply an illusion, he claims. [Although, as a Christian philosopher he argues it is an unnecessary illusion due to the fact that even though he has a reasonable faith, it is “not rationally compelling to all.”]

The Gospel Grift: Always Be Closing, by Robert Conner

A major challenge in this time of declining Christian belief is finding a

hot button issue that keeps gullible followers enraged and engaged and dropping their Social Security dollars here and there into collection plates. For decades, one reliable sales pitch for evangelicals and Catholics was the specter of the homosexual menace, but as recently noted, “When the Supreme Court declared a constitutional right of same-sex marriage nearly eight years ago, social conservatives were
set adrift. The ruling stripped them of an issue they had used to galvanize rank-and-file supporters and big donors. And it left them searching for a cause that — like opposing gay marriage — would rally the base and raise the movement’s profile on the national stage. “We knew we needed to find an issue that the candidates were comfortable talking about,” said Terry Schilling, the president of American Principles Project, a social conservative advocacy group. “And we threw everything at the wall.” I’m sure Schilling really meant to say, “We threw everything at the wall after much prayer and deliberation.”

Christianity’s Addiction to Magical Thinking

Churchgoers don’t even notice or care 

A thousand years from now, will there be people—with as little grasp of history as contemporary Christians—who worship a goddess named Minerva, because they believe that Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter stories was real? What magical powers she had! She could change herself instantly into a cat, and multiply food supplies. Will there also be a goddess Hermione, based on Hermione Granger in Harry Potter, who created a magic potion that allows the person who drinks it to assume the physical appearance of another person? Will the Fairy God Mother in Cinderella be worshipped as well, because she used a magic spell to turn a pumpkin into a splendid coach?

I've Written Three Books On How To Honestly Seek the Truth

[First Published August 2022] I've written three books to educate believers on how to honestly seek the truth and defend it: 1) The Outsider Test for Faith: How to Know Which Religion is True. In it I show honest believers how to approach their faith consistently without any double standards or special pleading.

2) How to Defend the Christian Faith: Advice from an Atheist. In it I show Christian apologists how to correctly defend their faith, if it can be defended at all. Apologists should read it before writing another sentence in defense of their faith. In it I challenge apologists to stop doing what they're doing if they're honest about defending their Christian faith. The risk is that if they stop it they cannot defend their faith at all. But the risk is worth it if they're serious about knowing and defending the truth.

3) Unapologetic: Why Philosophy of Religion Must End. In it I show philosophers of religion and other intellectuals how to properly discuss and debate religious beliefs. What I cannot teach however, is to desire the truth. That comes from within. Taken together these three books are the antidote to the faith virus. The problem is almost none of them desire the truth, comparatively speaking. Here's hoping a few honest believers are reading who desire the truth.

For God So Loved the Whales

In her book, The Not-So-Intelligent Designer: Why Evolution Explains the Human Body and Intelligent Design Does Not (2016), Abby Hafer gives a by turns amusing and horrifying account of numerous obvious goofs in the human body that any competent designer would fix. (Or be sued by the victims.) These are all elegantly explained by evolution, and count as evidence for it. Since evolution typically proceeds by small increments of genetic change, which are often as small as a change to a single nucleotide, the corresponding changes to the phenotype are also often small adjustments to what is already there. Evolution cannot "see" that a better solution may be far away in the design space, requiring large-scale modification of the genome at many positions simultaneously. What's worse, these modifications would have to occur in multiple individuals at the same time, to maintain a breeding population! For more about the evolutionary design space, see Daniel Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995).

An egregious example of bad evolutionary "design" is the recurrent laryngeal nerve, which is a bad-enough mistake in humans, but reaches comical proportions in giraffes. As all tetrapod vertebrates have a similar arrangement, it would have been even more comical in the longer-necked sauropod dinosaurs. The nerve would have been as long as 28m (92 ft) in Supersaurus, almost all of which was an unnecessary detour.

Other popular books on evolution mention this remarkably bad design, including: Why Evolution Is True (2009) by Jerry Coyne; The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution (2009) by Richard Dawkins; and Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body (2008) by Neil Shubin.

But I'll focus on whales today, specifically their superhuman resistance to choking and cancer, two serious killers of humans. 

Which Atheist Books Do I Recommend?

Having previously linked to some reasons why philosophical apologetics is not changing very many minds, especially the most sophisticated philosophy that every serious philosophical apologist loves to recommend, because it says that they understand it! Congrats to you!! A lot of it is obtuse and obfuscationist though. As it's practiced today, it isn't that helpful if one wants to change minds. After all, the more sophisticated that philosophy is, the more sophisticated the reader is. At that level it doesn't change the minds of sophisticated readers because they are already entrenched in what they think. It also has a way of being turned around as a pat on the back! Just see how William Lane Craig responds to a very detailed and knowledgeable question about philosophical apologetics at his website, Reasonable Faith. Craig wrote:

I include your question here for the instruction and encouragement of our Reasonable Faith readers. You have masterfully surveyed for us the current philosophical landscape with respect to atheism. You give our readers a good idea of who the principal players are today.

I hope that theists, especially Christian theists, who read your account will come away encouraged by the way Christian philosophers are being taken seriously by their secular colleagues today.

The average man in the street may get the impression from social media that Christians are intellectual losers who are not taken seriously by secular thinkers. Your letter explodes that stereotype. It shows that Christians are ready and able to compete with their secular colleagues on the academic playing field.

To see this you need to read my book Unapologetic: Why Philosophy of Religion Must End. This is the first book I'm recommending, with others to follow below. If nothing else, consider the recommendation of atheist philosopher Nick Trakakis, co-editor with Graham Oppy of several important philosophy of religion books, and the author of his own book on The End of Philosophy of Religion, plus The God Beyond Belief: In Defense of William Rowe's Evidential Argument from Evil. He even wrote a chapter in my book, God and Horrendous Suffering. He said this of my book Unapologetic:

I am in wholehearted agreement with you. I actually find it very sad to see a discipline (the philosophy of religion) I have cherished for many years being debased and distorted by so-called Christian philosophers. Like you, I have now finally and happily found my place in the atheist community. I’m slowly making my way through your "Unapologetic book", it’s quite fascinating, loving the Nietzschean hammer style.