Attendance is Up

I would like to start a Church. Not because I have any interest in power, or accolades, or wealth. Rather for the reason that what I believe is authentic, and important to share with others. Of such import that my highest priority will be to obtain as many followers of my church as possible. Promulgation of this church will be pre-eminent.

If you are interested in popularity, my church is not for you. In fact, this church is in the vast, vast minority of beliefs within my country. The other religions are even a bit jealous of my church, and are being very aggressive in an attempt to close it down. You may be placed in some very uncomfortable positions.

If you are interested in power, or recognition—again you would be best suited to look elsewhere. We have a very loose structure, and not much of an organizational chart. Anyone can preach in my church, just about any time.

If you think that my church would be a great way to get rich—try one down the street. We tend to cater to the poor and working person. The few wealthy that enter my church distribute their wealth among the poorer members. The poorer members often take collections to help the even less fortunate. We try to share and share alike. In joining my church you will not starve, but you will not become rich by any means.

How do you think my church will do?

Oh, I forgot one detail. Minor, and really hardly anything to mention at all. If you join my church, and subscribe to my beliefs you will be healed.

When I say “healed” I mean of every imaginable disease. If you have arthritis, even rheumatoid arthritis—it is gone. Instantly. If you are blind—you will be able to see, perhaps for the first time in your life. Crippling bone disease or muscles wasted away from the inability to use them? Gone.

You will even lose the diseases you don’t know you have! You may be unaware, thanks to poor genes; you are prone to heart disease or diabetes. No more. In joining my church, your blood pressure will be regulated, cholesterol level corrected, and your electrolytes balanced. Any chemical imbalances will be fixed. Mental illness caused by these imbalances will be no more.

Sure, we will cover the big ones. You will not die of cancer, pneumonia, bird flu, or AIDS. A Stroke? Won’t happen. Heart Attack? Not possible. Alzheimer’s? Never in my church.

We take care of the small ones. No flu, upset stomach, diarrhea, minor aches and pains. No coughs, sore throats, earaches, or headaches.

Every single disease, every single illness will never happen in my church. You can even come back daily, weekly, monthly or yearly for a “check-up” in which you are healed of diseases creeping about your body you did not know of. We safely served spinach quiche at our meals.

You will have to have this thing called, “Faith,” of course. That is the belief that you will be healed. Don’t worry; all you have to do is sit in my church for a few services. You will see clouded eyes clear up. People crippled with osteoarthritis straighten up. Gangrene disappear. After you see one or two (thousand) of these examples, it would be hard to not have belief that people are cured in my church.

Now how do you think my church will do?

One of the interesting studies is the development of the Christian church in the First Century. Regardless of where one stands as to the historicity of Jesus, we all agree that a religion came into being within the First few centuries within the Roman Empire that eventually became the various sects of Christianity.

It seems to me, there are basically four (4) main theories as to how it progressed (with, as always) variations within the four theories:

1) Explosion. The common Christian theme that takes Acts literally in that following the Pentecost, 3000 believers were added to the 120, (Acts. 2:41.) Fairly quickly, this number rose to 5000. (Acts 4:4) By 64 C.E. there are so many Christians that Nero is persecuting whole groups as far away as Rome.

2) Gradual Development. The proponents of this theory is that Acts is way over-blown, that the Neroian persecution was minimal (if at all) and Christianity developed over the course of time at a fairly regular process.

3) Combination. That Christianity exploded in Judea, and under persecution, became a gradual to slowing development, then exploding into Gentile nations, and, again, gaining numbers in a gradual uphill climb.

4) Conspiracy. That Christianity’s entire history was essentially “created” by later writers, possibly as late as Eusebius.

Of course, there is no “bright-line” distinction between each of these theories, and much possible cross-over. In all of these possibilities, the Acts of the Apostles must be addressed.

Is it literal history? Is it legend? Is it a combination of both? The author of Acts must constantly dance between the concept that the early church was so popular that it was gaining believers by the thousands, yet on the other hand was so insignificant that it was possible to persecute the believers that it contained.

One curious section attempting to balance this is Acts 5:12-16:

“And by the hands of the apostles were many signs and wonders wrought among the people; and they were all with one accord in the temple in Solomon's porch. But of the rest durst no one join himself to them; howbeit the people magnified them. And were the more added to them, believing on the Lord, multitudes both of men and women: insomuch that they [even] carried out their sick into the streets, and laid them on beds and couches, that, as Peter came by, at the least his shadow might overshadow some one of them. For they were set free from every sickness which each one of them had. And there came [also] together into Jerusalem a multitude from the cities round about, bringing sick folk, and them that were vexed with unclean spirits: and all were cured. “

(I quoted the section from the Western Text not so much that I need the added language, but more to spike any interest of Christians that did not know there was more than one text of Acts.)

This appropriately demonstrates the dichotomy. One the one hand we have “multitudes” of people believing the religion, on the other, “no one” was joining them. It is not like it is a big secret.

People (a “multitude”) were flocking in from nearby cities, lining the streets, so that if Peter’s shadow fell on them, that (and their faith) would heal them. “All were cured.” Is that hyperbole? Or is it history?

Go back to the church I described. Without the use of our technology, but just word-of-mouth, how fast would such a church grow? Ever go to a social function and mention a specific illness? Soon you will hear numerous home remedies, medicines, doctors, surgeries—you name it—all from people eagerly desiring to provide “the cure” for your problem. How much MORE so, if there was a church that cured everything!

People would be clamoring to get the closest seat near the road. If you were just a little too far back, and Peter’s shadow only grazed the person ahead of you, could you have missed your one chance to be cured? Or what if some larger person stood up at just the inopportune moment, blocking you (and others) and sealing your fate? Or you show up on a cloudy day? Or Peter walks by at noon? How treacherous to be relying on just a fickle shadow!

If his shadow was sufficient, how much more to actually touch him. Or even have a piece of his clothing to take back to others, and heal them as well. Do we see a calm crowd, waiting patiently for the right moment, and if it doesn’t work out, say, “Oh well. Try again tomorrow”? Or a mob stripping him naked within minutes.

Anyone attend a parade in America recently? The idea that has grown over the past decade is for the people on the floats to throw candy to the crowd. It started off with small Tootsie Rolls. Now it includes stickers, candy bars by the handful, gum, necklaces, balls and small toys. I attended a parade this past summer, and they were handing out these things to the children, with notepads, small plants and even golf balls to the adults in the crowd!

As I watch, I see a crowd mentality develop. First my kids start off by the curb next to the other kids. Then some candy is thrown. It does not all make it to the curb. They begin “the wander.” ‘Course if the person next to you is one step ahead, they will get the best candy, so the next child starts to “wander” out. By the fifth float, they are dodging in and out from under the wheels of the fire trucks, trying to get even closer for the best candy.

What if a person on a float offered healing? We would be bringing our young, our old, our relatives, our friends—every one of us knows someone we would bring. One person surges forward to guarantee being in that shadow. The next would as well. Soon, the float would come to a grinding halt. Peter could never have walked the streets.

In and of itself, this “healing by shadow” appears to be legendary.

Even by the slow process of word-of-mouth, a church that cures everything would explode. There would be no slowing it, let alone stopping it! So in the story created by the author, we have a church that is skyrocketing. At that rate, Christianity would encompass the world within the matter of decades.

Clearly it did not, so how to slow down the progress? Simple—introduce persecution. In the chapter before, the author talks of the first arrest by the Sadducees of the apostles. (Acts 4:3) There is a shift between the Gospel accounts and Acts. In the Synoptics, the primary antagonists to Jesus were the Pharisees. But in Acts, the Pharisees are portrayed as sympathetic to the Christian cause. (Acts 5:34; 15:5; 23:9) It is the Sadducees that are seen as the enemies of early Christianity.

The problem for the Sadducees, is that they held the positions of power, but not the popular support of the people. Josephus reported at times they were obliged to adhere to the notions of the Pharisees, due to the Pharisees’ popularity.

We start this scene with historically background of the Sadducees unwillingly forced to cave into the requests of the Pharisees. Enter the Christians. A lot of ‘em. The Sadducees decide to quash this troublesome new idea, but even at the very first arrest, already find they are unable to do so because of the popularity of the belief. (Acts 4:21) The Sadducees are uncomfortably beholden to the Pharisees on one hand and the Christians on the other.

Christianity becomes even more popular. Neighboring townspeople are pouring in to get healed. Imagine the crowds, the shoving, the pushing, and the near riots, just to be in the shadow of a fellow walking by. If the Sadducees were afraid to punish the apostles before, now that “all were healed” they would be terrified!

Despite this popularity, the Sadducees arrest the Christians again. This time the Pharisees side with the Christians. We have the two most popular religious sects banding together against the religious leaders who have demonstrated in the past they will back down from what the populace wants.

I ask you—How would the Christians be persecuted? If they were popular, PLUS healing everybody in sight, PLUS had the tacit approval (or at least neutrality) of the Pharisees—the Sadducees would never dare touch them. Never.

The author of Acts could not possibly be writing history. There must be legend sprinkled within the book. If the healing account of Acts 5 was accurate, there could never have been a persecution. If the persecution accounts of Acts 6-9 were accurate, there could never have been this healing.

Christianity must have developed differently than what is accounted for in Acts. How, is a matter of open question.

I did not write this blog to provide brilliant insight as to how Christianity grew within its first years. Rather, to have the reader ask themselves the question—does what the author of Acts say make sense as to persecution vs. growth? From there you will have to evaluate on your own to determine a methodology as to determining legend from actual happenings in Acts.

Why Do Atheists Spend So Much Time on Religion?

Over at Atheist Revolution is an entry answering the question why atheists spend so much time reading/thinking/talking about religion; see here. It's another way of answering why we debunk Christianity here at DC. See what you think.

On the Possibility of a Beginningless Past: A Reply to William Lane Craig

William Lane Craig has argued vigorously that, cosmological discoveries aside, it’s reasonable to believe on purely a priori grounds that the set of past events is finite in number.[1] He offers two main types of a priori arguments for this claim: (i) that it’s metaphysically impossible for an actually infinite set of concrete things to exist, in which case the set of past events can’t be actually infinite, and (ii) that even if such a set could exist, it’s impossible to traverse it even in principle. Craig doesn’t pursue this claim for it’s own sake, however. Rather, he does so as a means to demonstrating that a theistic god exists. He reasons that if the set of past events is finite, then the universe as a whole had an absolute beginning with the first moment of time[2]. But since nothing can come into existence without a cause, the universe as a whole has a cause. From here, he goes on to argue that such a cause must be timeless (at least sans creation), immaterial, immensely powerful, and a person of some sort.

I intend to show that one of Craig’s most popular versions of (ii) is unsound. In this essay, I’ll state this argument, prefacing it with an explanation of the concepts crucial to understanding it. Then, I’ll examine a common objection to his argument, along with Craig’s response to it, in order to shed light on an unstated assumption of the argument. Finally, I’ll show that the unstated assumption is false, and how this is fatal to his argument.

I
As I mentioned above, several concepts that are crucial for understanding the argument need clarification.[3] First of all, one needs a fairly perspicuous idea of a set and of a proper subset. A set is a collection of entities, called members of the set. The precise number of members contained in a set is its cardinal number. A proper subset is a part of another set, the former lacking at least one member which the latter contains, and which contains no other members (e.g., from a totally distinct set). More formally, a set A is a proper subset of a set B if and only if every member of A is a member of B, and some member of B isn’t a member of A. To illustrate: Suppose you have ten bottlecaps, five of which are from Pepsi bottles and five of which are from Coke bottles. Then we can call this the set of bottlecaps, the cardinal number of which is 10. Let’s call this set, A. Furthermore, the set of Pepsi caps (call it B) is a proper subset of A, since B consists in a collection of members that belong to A, and A has members that B does not (i.e., the Coke caps).

Another concept that plays an important role in the argument is that of a one-to-one-correspondence. This is a concept used to determine whether two sets have the same number of members (or, the same cardinal number). So there is a one-to-one correspondence between two sets, A and B, if and only if each member of A can be paired up with exactly one member of B, and each member of B can be paired up with exactly one member of A. To illustrate this concept, consider our set of bottlecaps. Now suppose that you didn’t know how to count, but you wanted to know if your had just as many Coke caps as you had of Pepsi caps. You could accomplish this task by pairing each Coke cap with each Pepsi cap, and each Pepsi cap with each Coke cap. If this can be accomplished with no remaining bottlecaps, then there is a one-to-one correspondence between the set of Pepsi caps and the set of Coke caps. If follows that the respective sets of bottlecaps have the same cardinal number.

The concept most important for our purposes is that of actual infinity. To obtain a grasp of this concept, consider the set of all the natural numbers (i.e., {1, 2, 3, …}). This set, as well as any set that can be put into a one-to-one correspondence with it, is an actually infinite set (It’s actually the “smallest” of the infinite sets, but we won’t be concerned with “larger” infinites here). An actual infinite has several interesting features. First of all, it is complete, in the sense that it has an infinite number of members; it is not merely increasing in number without limit. Second, any actually infinite set (of the “size” we’re here considering) can be put into a one-to-one correspondence with one of its proper subsets. This can be demonstrated by putting the set of natural numbers in a one-to-one correspondence with its proper subset of even numbers:

1 2 3 4…
2 4 6 8…

This example shows that a part of an actually infinite set can have as many members as the whole set! The cardinal number of an actually infinite set that can be put into a one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers is called “aleph null” (let’s use ‘A0’ for brevity).

The final concept relevant to our discussion is order-type. I won’t talk at length about this concept here. Rather, I’ll barely do more than mention the order-types of certain sets containing A0 members. Four our purposes, it will suffice to know that sets can be sequentially ordered according to certain patterns or types. The order-type given to the set of natural numbers so ordered that, beginning with 1, each natural number is succeeded by the next largest natural number – i.e., {1, 2, 3, …} – is ‘omega’, or 'w’, and the set of negative integers so ordered that they are sequentially the opposite of w is w* (i.e., {…-3, -2, -1}). Sets with A0 members can have other order-types, however. For example, an A0 set can have the order type w+1 (i.e., {1, 2, 3, ..., 1}), or the order-type w+2 (i.e., {1, 2, 3, …, 1, 2}), etc. In fact, a set with A0 members can have the order-type w+w (i.e., {1, 2, 3, …, 1, 2, 3, …}), or the order-type w+w+w (i.e., {1, 2, 3, …., 1, 2, 3, …, 1, 2, 3, …}), etc.! To see this, recall that any set that can be put into a one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers has a cardinal number of A0. But sets with the order-types mentioned above can be put into such a correspondence. So, for example, a set with the order-type w+1 can be put into a one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers as follows:


1 1 2 3…
1 2 3 4…

Similarly, a set with the order-type w+w+w can be put into a one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers as follows:

1 2 3…1 2 3…1 2 3…
1 4 7…2 5 8…3 6 9…

Therefore, since sets with such order-types can be put into a one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers, it follows that their cardinal number is A0.

At this point, an interesting feature of certain sets with A0 members emerges. For consider any A0 set with an order-type other than w. For example, consider a set of A0 offramps on an infinitely long freeway, such that a distance of one mile separates each offramp from its predecessor and successor (except, of course, the first offramp, since it has no predecessor). Suppose further that the order-type of the offramps is w+1 ({1, 2, 3, …, 1}). The offramp assigned the first 1 would seem to be infinitely distant from the offramp assigned the second 1. Such a set has the interesting feature of being non-traversable in principle – it cannot, even in principle, be exhaustively counted through one offramp at a time. This is because it is logically impossible to count to a number that has no immediate predecessor. But the offramp assigned the second 1 has no immediate predecessor. Therefore, a driver on such a freeway could never reach the offramp assigned the second 1. Call this particular logical ban on traversing sets with w+1 or “higher” order-types ‘LB’.

Now it may be tempting to think that this consideration is decisive for the view that the past must be finite, since any set with A0 members can be ordered according to the order-type w+1. In this way, one might think, LB infects all actually infinite sets, and thus no set with A0 members is traversable. This reasoning can be expressed as follows:

1. A set is LB non-traversable if and only if it contains at least one member A0 distant from at least one of the other of its members.
2. Any set with the order-type w+1 is such that it contains a member A0 distant from at least one of the other of its members.
3. Therefore, any set with the order-type w+1 is LB non-traversable.
4. Any set with A0 members can be assigned the order-type w+1.
5. Therefore, any set with A0 members is LB non-traversable.

But this would be rash. For the inference from (3) and (4) to (5) is a non sequitur. For consider a set with A0 members that is assigned the order-type w. A set with this order-type is such that (i) no member is infinitely distant from any other member, and (ii) each member does have an immediate predecessor, as so is immune to LB. But any set with A0 members can be assigned the order-type w. So if the inference from (3) and (4) to (5) were valid, then by similar reasoning the following inference should go through as well:

3’. Any set with the order-type w is not LB non-traversable.
4’. Any set with A0 members can be assigned the order-type w.
5’. Therefore, any set with A0 members is not LB non-traversable.

But (5’) contradicts (5). Therefore, since the same pattern of reasoning yields contradictory results, it’s faulty. So, just because an A0 set can be assigned a non-traversable order-type, it doesn’t follow that such a set is non-traversable. What really follow from (3) and (4) is rather

5’’. Any set with A0 members can be assigned an LB non-traversable order-type.

Which, needless to say, doesn’t help to establish the finitude of the set of past events.

The arguments above suffer from another problem as well. For (2) is clearly false. To see this, consider again our infinitely long freeway. No suppose that it only has one lane, and that it has an infinitely long traffic jam. Finally, suppose that each car in the jam is assigned a number from the order-type w+1. Does it follow that there is a car A0 distant from any other car? No. For the car assigned the second 1 could be immediately in front of the first car. This illustration shows that the order-type assigned to a set of objects doesn’t necessarily affect the distances between its members. To drive this implication home, suppose that the cars of the traffic jam were assigned the order-type w. Would it follow that no car is A0 distant from any other car? Not in the least. For the first and second cars may be infinitely distant from one another. One might reply that we could just stipulate that the distances between the cars and the order-type assigned to the cars correspond. In such a case, each car would only be finitely distant from every other car when assigned the order-type w (e.g., the second car is 2 meters from the end of the traffic jam, the third car is 3 meters from the end of the jam, etc. [these are small cars!]). One could then reassign the cars with the order-type w+1, but then the correspondence between the order-type and the distances of the cars would break down. This is because no car assigned a number from the w order-type in our scenario is infinitely distant from any other car. Therefore, the second 1 of the newly assigned w+1 reordering would be assigned to a car that is only finitely distant from any other car. These illustrations show that (i) some sets assigned the order-type w+1 are such that no member is infinitely distant from any other, and (ii) we can know a priori than an A0 set of concrete objects cannot be reordered from w to w+1 in such a way that the distances between the members of such a set correspond to their order-type. Therefore, if a set of objects has A0 members (arranged linearly), it does not follow from this that it has members infinitely distant (whether in time or in space) from other members (and is therefore LB non-traversable).[4] Thus, to show that an A0 past is non-traversable, Craig must show that no A0 set with either the order-type w or w* (and is such that no member is infinitely distant from any other) is traversable. Let’s consider one of Craig’s main attempts to do this.
II
Craig advances an argument for the proposition that one cannot traverse a beginningless past and end at the present moment.[5] To do this, Craig assumes, for the sake of argument, that there could be a beginningless past, conceived as a set of events with the cardinal number A0 and the order-type w* (i.e., {…,. -3, -2, -1}), where each negative integer represents an event of the past. He then argues,

“…suppose we meet a man who claims to have been counting down from eternity and who is now finishing:…,-3, -2, -1, 0. We could ask, why didn’t he finish counting yesterday or the day before or the year before? By then an infinite amount of time had already elapsed, so that he should already have finished. Thus, at no point in the infinite past could we ever find the man finishing his countdown, for by that point he should already be done! In fact, no matter how far back into the past we go, we can never find the man counting at all, for at any point we reach he will already be finished. But if at no point in the past do we find him counting, this contradicts the hypothesis that he has been counting down from eternity.”[6]

Craig’s argument is a reductio ad absurdum, where we suppose that a beginningless past is possible in order to show that it entails a contradiction. The argument can be expressed as follows, with (1) as the premise set of for reduction:

1. The past is beginningless (conceived as a set of events with the cardinality A0, and the order-type w*).
2. If the past is beginningless, then there could have been an immortal counter who counts down from such a past at the rate of one negative integer per day.
3. The immortal counter will finish counting if and only if he has an infinite number of days in which to count them.
4. If the past is beginningless, then there are an infinite number of days before every day.
5. Therefore, the immortal counter will have finished counting before every day.
6. If the immortal counter will have finished counting before every day, then he has never counted.
7. Therefore, the immortal counter has both never counted and has been counting down from a beginningless past (contradiction)
8. Therefore, the past is not beginningless (from 1-7, reductio)


In short, Craig argues that the past must -- logically must -- have a beginning. For the very notion of traversing a beginningless past entails a contradiction. Craig’s underlying intuition here is that if the past is beginningless, then it must contain an actually infinite proper subset of events that was not formed by successive addition, and that this is absurd.

Critics typically attack (3), arguing that Craig mistakenly assumes that to count an infinite number of negative integers is to count all of them. However, critics of Craig’s argument point out that one can count an infinite set of numbers without counting them all.[7] For example, suppose our eternal counter just finished counting all the negative integers down to -3. Then it would be true that he has counted an infinite number of integers, and yet he has not counted all the integers. This can be demonstrated by the following one-to-one correspondence:

Days counted: -3 -4 -5…
Nat. numbers: 1 2 3…

In this case, the set of days counted has the cardinal number A0, since its members can be put into a one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers. Yet he clearly hasn’t counted all the negative integers, since he has failed to count -2 and -1. Therefore, since counting an infinite number of things is not synonymous with counting them all, Craig’s (3) is based on an equivocation.

Craig has denied that he is guilty of this charge[8]:

“I do not think the argument makes this alleged equivocation, and this can be made clear by examining the reason why our eternal counter is supposedly able to complete a count of the negative numbers, ending at zero. In order to justify this intuitively impossible feat, the argument’s opponent appeals to the so-called Principle of Correspondence…On the basis of the principle the objector argues that since the set of past years can be put into a one-to-one correspondence with the set of negative numbers, it follows that by counting one number a year an eternal counter could complete a countdown of the negative numbers by the present year. If we were to ask why the counter would not finish next year or in a hundred years, the objector would respond that prior to the present year an infinite number of years will have elapsed, so that by the Principle of Correspondence, all the numbers should have been counted by now.

But this reasoning backfires on the objector: for on this account the counter should at any point in the past have already finished counting all the numbers, since a one-to-one correspondence exists between the years of the past and the negative numbers.”[9]

From this passage, we see Craig’s rationale for (3):

(R) The counter will have finished counting all of the negative integers if and only if the years of the past can be put into a one-to-one correspondence with them.

Furthermore, from the passage cited, we see that Craig thinks that the defender of an A0 past agrees with (R). But since the type of correspondence depicted in (R) can be accomplished at the present moment, it follows that the counter should be finished by now. Therefore, Craig’s opponent is committed to a view that entails the absurdity surfaced by the above reductio.
III
It isn’t clear that Craig hasn’t made his case, however. For consider the following scenario. Suppose God timelessly numbers the years to come about in a beginningless universe. Suppose further that He assigns the negative integers to the set of events prior to the birth of Christ, and then the positive integers begin at this point. Then the timeline, with its corresponding integer assignment, can be illustrated as follows:

…-3 -2 -1 Birth of Christ 1 2 3…

Suppose yet further that God assigned Ralph, an immortal creature, the task of counting down the negative integers assigned to the years BCE, and stopping at the birth of Christ. Call this task ‘(T)’. With this in mind, suppose now that Ralph has been counting down from eternity past and is now counting the day assigned (by God) the integer -3. In such a case, Ralph has counted a set of years that could be put into a one-to-one correspondence with the set of negative integers, yet he has not finished all the negative integers. This case shows that, while it is a necessary condition for counting all of the events that one is able to put them into a one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers, this is not sufficient. For if the events that are to be counted have independently “fixed”, or, “designated” integer assignments set out for one to traverse, one must count through these such that, for each event, the number one is counting is the same as the one independently assigned to the event. In the scenario mentioned above, God assigned an integer to each year that will come to pass. In such a case, Ralph must satisfy at least two conditions if he is to accomplish (T): (i) count a set of years that can be put into a one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers, and (ii) for each year that elapses, count the particular negative integer that God has independently assigned to it. According to Craig’s assumption (R), however, Ralph is supposed to be able to accomplish (T) by satisfying (i) alone. But we have just seen that he must accomplish (ii) as well. Therefore, being able to place the events of the past into a one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers does not guarantee that the counter has finished the task of counting all the negative integers. In other words, (R) is false. But recall that (R) is Craig’s rationale for (3). Thus, (3) lacks positive support. But more importantly, (3) is false. This is because the scenario above is a counterexample to both (R) and (3). For (3) asserts that it is sufficient for counting down all the negative integers that one has an infinite amount of time in which to count them. But our scenario showed that one could have an infinite amount of time to count, and yet not finish counting all of the negative integers (e.g., one can count down to -3 in an infinite amount of time, and yet have more integers to count).

To sum up. We’ve looked at an argument that Craig repeatedly gives for the impossibility of a beginningless past. We then saw that one of its premises is false, in which case it is unsound. Thus, this argument, at least, cannot be used to offer a priori support for the key premise in his Kalam argument.


[1] See, for example, his The Kalam Cosmological Argument (London: Macmillan, 1979); Craig and Quentin Smith, Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). See also Craig’s popular-level book, Reasonable Faith (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 1994).
[2] I should mention a wrinkle here: the possibility that the universe did not begin to exist with the first event of time, but rather existed eternally in a quiescent, eventless mode of existence “prior” to the first event. Craig addresses this worry in “The Kalam Cosmological Argument and the Hypothesis of a Quiescent Universe”, Faith and Philosophy 8 (1991), pp. 104-8.
[3] My discussion of the following set-theoretic concepts is indebted to J.P. Moreland’s Scaling the Secular City (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1987)
[4] The points and illustrations are similar to those made and conceded by Craig in “Reply to Smith: On the Finitude of the Past”, International Philosophical Quarterly 33 (1993), pp. 228-9.
[5] Actually, he advances two arguments for this proposition. One is a variation on the famous Tristam Shandy Paradox. In Craig’s construal of it, Shandy writes his autobiography from the beginningless past at the rate of one year of writing per day of autobiography. It seems that Shandy would never finish his autobiography, getting farther behind with each passing day. But since one can put the days of his life into a one-to-one correspondence with the set of past years, it (paradoxically) seems that he should have finished his autobiography by now. The other version is virtually the same as the one I consider here. It asserts that Shandy should be finished by now, irrespective of the rate at which he is writing. However, I won’t consider the former version here. See Craig and Smith’s Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology, pp. 99-100, and Craig’s “Feature Review of Time, Creation, and the Continuum”, International Philosophical Quarterly 25 (1985), pp. 319-26. For a briefer exposition, see Craig, Reasonable Faith, pp. 98-9.
[6] Craig, Reasonable Faith, p. 99.
[7] This objection can be found in David A. Conway. “’It Would Have Happened Already’: On One Argument for a First Cause”, Analysis 44 (1984), pp. 159-66; Richard Sorabji. Time, Creation, and the Continuum (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), pp. 219-24.
[8] See, for example, Craig and Smith, Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology, pp. 105-6; Craig, “Review of Time, Creation, and the Continuum”, p. 323.
[9] Craig, “Review of Time, Creation, and the Continuum”, p. 323.

My Debate With David Wood on the Problem of Evil

As many of you know I've been preparing for my public debate with David Wood of "answeringinfidels.com" on the problem of evil. The question is this: "Does the extent of suffering in our world make the existence of God implausible?" The debate is not far away. It takes place on Saturday October 7th at 7 PM, in Norfolk VA, at the Old Dominion University, BAL 104. If you're in the area and can make it please do. The transcript (and video) will be available afterward with comments by Victor Reppert and probably Paul Copan on his side, and Andrea Weisberger and Richard Carrier on my side (plans still in progress). If anyone has a book or essay or link on either side of this question, please share it here.

Jason Engwer Responds to Evaluating the Evidence

Jason Engwer at Triablogue has taken the time to respond to my post on evaluating the evidence for the resurrection. He thinks I have dramatically understated the evidential value of the time of the first surviving reports, and he thinks that the parallel to Homeric epic is not significant. I’ll give him credit for taking time to address the issues, but I think there are significant problems with his analysis.

Time between the reports and the events
One of the issues he emphasizes is that Craig’s claim is that legend would not “prevail” over a core historic tradition:
"In Bill's quote of William Craig, Craig (who's citing A.N. Sherwin-White) uses the word "prevail". He's referring to widespread acceptance of an account. He isn't saying that there aren't any individuals or groups that accept unhistorical accounts of recent history. Rather, he's arguing that an unhistorical account isn't likely to be widely accepted early on if it's a claim that was of significant interest to people (a "core" fact). Thus, Bill's use of examples like Roswell and Benny Hinn are insignificant. The accounts of Roswell and Benny Hinn that Bill considers unhistorical were widely opposed early on. They didn't "prevail", to use Craig and Sherwin-White's term."

Ironically, I agree that legend has not “prevailed” over the core historic tradition in case of the Gospels. I think the core that has been preserved is the fact that there was an apocalyptic prophet named Jesus who claimed to be the messiah who was crucified. However, I don’t think that Craig (or White) have demonstrated their claim that legend doesn’t typically overcome core historic fact within three generations. Even more significant they have not shown that a surviving report within 50 years of the reported event is evidence for historicity.

Consider the problem of determining if the date of a first report of an event counts as evidence for historicity or legend (Let us say T = time between first report and the event in question). One should endeavor to determine both the distribution on T for known legends, and for known historical events. In other words, White and Craig should provided tables from which P(T | known historical reports) and P( T | Legend) can be determined as a function of T. Admittedly, this could be a fairly large study.

Now I haven’t undertaken this study either (nor has Jason), but White’s examination of selected writing of Herodotus does not accomplish this. What was striking to me is that Herodotus recording of the temple of Delphi’s defense of itself (within 55 years of the recorded event) didn’t serve to qualify the statements that Craig makes. This report in itself is enough to make me think that P(T = 40 to 50 years | Legend) is not necessarily low. The legendary developments associated with the events at Roswell seem to be about a perfect match for the timelines of the gospels.

Another significant shortcoming in the Craig’s analysis is that he didn’t analyze P(T | historicity). There is good reason to think that P(T = 40 to 50 years | historical report for an eclipse) is low. Matthew 27 states:

45 From the sixth hour until the ninth hour darkness came over all the land.
...
50 And when Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, he gave up his spirit.
51 At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook and the rocks split. 52 The tombs broke open and the bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. 53 They came out of the tombs, and after Jesus' resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many people.

54 When the centurion and those with him who were guarding Jesus saw the earthquake and all that had happened, they were terrified, and exclaimed, "Surely he was the Son of God!"

It seems extremely unlikely that such earth shattering events would have been unmentioned by Seneca, Pliny, Josephus, and other historians of the era. I think this indicates that P(T = 40 to 50 | historicity of report) is much lower than I indicated in my previous assessment. If anything I overstated my estimate of P(T | Historicity)/P(T | Legend).

Chief Priest's need of Judas
Jason presented a rationale for the chief priest’s need of Judas.:
Bill Curry".. asks why Judas would have needed to identify Jesus when He was arrested, since Jesus was such a public figure. But how do we know that all of the people with Judas had seen Jesus before? We don't. They were going to arrest a man at night, and they were expecting other people (Jesus' disciples and perhaps others in the area) to be with that man. Since people might flee once the arrest was being attempted (as Jesus' disciples did), and since they would want everybody (not just the people who knew what Jesus looked like ahead of time) to know which man needed to be arrested, and since Judas would know the relevant details (how Jesus was dressed, where He tended to go, etc.) better than others would, it would be helpful to have somebody who could quickly single out the man who needed to be arrested. To conclude that Mark's gospel is significantly unhistorical, on the basis of Judas' coming along to identify Jesus, is absurd. To then go on to argue that this element of Mark's gospel carries more weight than the earliness of the Christian claims about Jesus is likewise absurd."

One issue that I would like to emphasize is that it is not enough to present a potential solution and consider the issue settled. The plausibility of the evidence on both hypotheses must be considered before the evidential value is determined. Now Jason is presenting why he thinks why it is sensible for the chief priest to need Judas.

However, if the report is historical, it raises many questions. Before accepting Judas’ help, it must be kept in mind that Judas could have potentially betrayed the chief priest as well. This is all the more likely since he was known to be a member of Jesus’ inner circle. The information Judas was providing doesn’t seem to me to have that much value relative to the risk incurred. Keep in mind that there were many who had debated Jesus and would have are able to identify him. To think that they were all unavailable seems implausible. Note I am not saying that it is impossible, it is merely surprising.

Now on the hypothesis that Mark was writing legend, Judas’ betrayal makes perfect sense. If Mark were using Homeric epic as inspiration, it is not surprising that he would write that account regardless of what it did to the believability of his account.

Jason has not (yet) disputed my assessment of the initial implausiblity of the resurrection. In order to make the case that belief in the resurrection is reasonable, he has a very high evidential burden. He must keep in mind that offering potential scenario that make the resurrection possible is not good enough. He has to show that the some aspects of the resurrection reports are extremely unlikely under legendary development. I don't think he has come close to making the case that the "time between the reports and the event" is unlikely if the report were a legend. Similary, I certainly don't think he has made the case that the chief priest's need of Judas is unsurprising.

It's not like I murdered somebody!

In the area of criminal law, we can determine which crimes are worse by the amount of punishment available. If Jane commits an act in which she could be sentenced to 10 years in prison, and Joe commits an act in which he could be sentenced to 15 years in prison, we readily exclaim that Joe’s crime is worse.

Christians act as if there is a hierarchy of sins. Some are worse than others. Some scriptures certainly intone a hierarchy of sins.

If there was a hierarchy, would God have been clearer what, exactly, it was? Or is it more likely that each author was making up their own determination as to which sins were worse than others? That, in fact, the books of the New Testament are human creations in which, not surprisingly, humans disagree as to differences in sins.

You tell me what you have done, and I can tell you where it fits in how “bad” it is under our legal system. Lied under oath? Perjury (15-year felony) is far worse than stealing a car (five-year felony). Unless there was a person in the car (Life). All of which is worse than hitting a person (93 day misdemeanor). Even if you hit them with a knife (4-year felonious assault.)

Tell me how many grams of drugs you had, or how much you stole, or what weapon (if any) you used in the robbery, or how much monetary damage you caused, and I can conveniently plug you in to where your actions fit in our criminal system.

Ah, but I have misled you. See, I can tell you what your actions mean under Michigan Law. Take one step south into Indiana or Ohio, and all of a sudden the rules change. Perhaps perjury is NOT worse than stealing a car. Perhaps the amount of drugs you have means the difference between a life sentence in prison, or a 10-year felony.

I am aware of one county in which a first-time offender of drunk driving will get probation. A county adjacent to it has a policy of 30 days in jail, even for first time offenders. Literally, depending on which side of that little sign—“County Line”--a person is observed makes a difference of 30 days in their lives!

So I can list exactly where you actions fit, and you could read another attorney’s input from another jurisdiction and receive completely contradictory information. What is terrible in my state may not be so bad in another and vice versa.

We would expect, if the books of the New Testament were inspired by the same God; a consistent system of hierarchy of sins would emerge. We understand that county to county, or state to state, or country to country we would have different laws. But we are not talking about different jurisdictions—if there is only one set of laws from one God a pattern would become evident.

Instead, we have authors all over the board as to what sins are bad, and what are not so bad. If it is merely a matter of personal preference—doesn’t the New Testament exhibit the natural human trait of differing emphasis upon morality? Nothing cohesive or divine about it at all.

The Unpardonable Sin

Jesus was tossing demons out of humans. The religious leaders accused him of being Beelzebub, or Satan. Jesus shouts out, “A-ha! All sins will be forgiven of humans. Even blasphemy will be forgiven of humans. But blasphemy of the Holy Spirit is unforgivable and is subject to eternal damnation.” (Mark 3:28-29)

The only problem is—Jesus never exactly states what the unforgivable sin is, nor why it is unforgivable. It is reasonable to view the actions, and the response of Jesus to extrapolate that it is accusing an act of God as being an act of Satan. The leaders accuse Jesus of being Satan; Jesus says “There is this thing called the unforgivable sin.” Not a stretch to connect the two. (See also Mark 3:30)

Matthew and Luke retain the same connection when recounting the story. (Although Luke places other statements between the actions. See Luke 11:15 to 12:10)

No other author speaks of this terrible crime. What is it that is so bad, even God cannot forgive? Jesus died for trillions of sins committed by billions of people, yet there is one sin, even if committed by just one person, that God says will never be covered. Commit it and you are done. Finished. Kaput.

“Uh, Jesus? I murdered someone today.”
”That’s O.K. I forgive you.”
“To be honest, I raped her first.”
“Again, you are forgiven.”

“Actually, she was not my first.”
“All covered by the cross, my son.”
“Not even my second. Or if I was really honest, even my third.”
“Yes, that is why I died for you.”

“I keep trying to not, but this desire compels me.”
”I know….Excuse me for a minute. You! Yeah, you over there! Where do you think you are going? INTO ETERNAL DAMNATION WITH YOU!....sorry ‘bout that. Where were we?”
“Wow. What did he do?”
“Oh, he thought the devil did something that I actually did. Don’t worry, though, I didn’t forgive him.”

You would think that if there was a sin out there that was so bad, so unforgivable, once you commit it that even a Hitler gets to pass you with a grin on his way to heaven, because HE didn’t do it, that Jesus would be a little more specific as to what it was. Or how to not commit it.

What if we could still do it today? What if some Christian says “The Devil is putting me through some tribulation” but they didn’t know it was actually God—did they just do the unforgivable? What if David blamed taking the census on the Devil. (1 Chron. 21:1) Actually it was God. (2 Sam. 24:1) Did he just commit the unforgivable sin?

Due to the lack of clarity, I would think most Christians would scared to ever attribute anything to Satan, for fear that it was actually God. And doomed to eternal condemnation. Like the Harry Potter villain, Satan would become “he-who-cannot-be-named.”

Funny with this terrible, terrible sin looming out there, no other author even bothers to give it a mention. Likewise, we would think the authors of Mark, Matthew and Luke would at least mention the “sin unto death” yet they must have missed it.

Sin Unto Death

1 John 5:16-17 categorizes sin into two kinds—those that lead to death and those that don’t. Is it spiritual death? Physical death? The author says that if Christians ask, God will hear and grant their petition. If a brother sees another sinning and asks, God will grant the brother life.

However then the author says, “Hey, but if the brother is committing one of those death sins, don’t bother praying. Won’t do any good.”

I would think it would be pretty important, for both the person committing it, and the person praying for it, to at least know what the heck the author is talking about. Is Murder a sin that leads to death? Unbelief? Lying? Oh, sure, pretty clear that it is a waste of time praying for someone that committed the unpardonable sin (only we don’t know if they had). They are eternal toast already. Are there more sins Christians can stop praying for?

Can Christians stop bothering to pray for a whole list of sins, as long as they are labeled a “sin that leads to death”? Or is it more likely that the author of Mark created an unpardonable sin, and the author of 1 John created a “sin that leads to death” in an attempt to create a hierarchy of sins. Only neither seems to want to clarify what it is.

If we are to be held to this standard, a little clarity would have been nice.

(Probably time for my side note. I can hear persons chomping at the bit to claim “Ignorance of the Law is no Excuse.” Do you know why we say that? Because if we allowed “I didn’t know the law” as an exoneration of committing an act. all criminals would use it as an excuse, and we could never convict anyone of anything.

It is not that the justice system holds that there is no obligation to inform the public of the law. Far from it. It is recognition that, as humans, we cannot determine what another person actually knows, and whether they are lying about knowing the law. It becomes easier to draw a bright line, and not allow it as an excuse.

And even then it can be used an excuse on occasion. Do you see all those posted Speed Limit Signs? Most jurisdictions require notice of a speed limit, prior to imposing a ticket. Imagine if we truly implemented “Ignorance of the law is no excuse.” We could remove every speed limit sign, and write tickets left and right, claiming it was the driver’s responsibility to known the speed limit dropped from 45 m.p.h. to 25 m.p.h. upon passing Brown Rd.

In our present situation, why would God want to “hide” his law? Why would the concept of “Ignorance of God’s law is no excuse” ever come up? Humans are unable to determine what another person “knows.” God could. Humans may not effectively be able to communicate the state of the law. God could.

When I see an apologist use the platitude of “Ignorance of the law is no excuse” in talking about God’s judgment, I suspect they do not understand the underlying principle of the statement. God CAN determine what a human knows and God CAN accurately communicate the law. Imposing human limitations on God is—well—human.

On with the show.)

We would think that the author of 1 John might also mention if internal or external sins are the ones that lead to death. But he didn’t.

Inside – Outside

Paul (who never talks of sins of death or unforgivable sins) also categorizes sin into two categories—outside the body and inside the body. 1 Cor. 6:18 All sexual immoral sins he claims are against one’s own body, but all other sins are outside the body.

We are left with a grand assertive statement and no explanation. And 2 millenniums later people are still debating over what that means. Are jealousy, bitterness, and anger sins “outside” the body? Sure, they can be exhibited by external actions, but lust (internal) can also be exhibited by external (adultery).

Although Paul does not explicitly state it as such, he seems to hold sexually immoral sins as worse, by implication. Yet it is not as bad as a sin that “leads to death.” Paul, at least, thinks sexually immoral sins are repairable. And they are certainly not eternally condemnable.

In trying to line up these various books, we end up with a mess. Of all the sins, we have one that is unforgivable. Of the rest, some lead to death, some don’t. Of those that don’t, some are inside, some are outside. Yet the unforgivable sin could be inside, yet it is not sexually immoral. As sex seems to be such a large concentration of sins, what is it that is worse, committed outside the body that leads to death?

Or, if we want to align Paul with sins that lead to death, he does give a list of actions that “deserve” death in Romans 1:32. If a child tells you they disobeyed their parents (Rom. 1:30) must you tell them they committed a sin that leads to death? But not to worry, it was not the unforgivable sin. They will die, but not be under eternal condemnation. That will make for a fun Sunday School class!

Paul gives a list of who will not inherit the kingdom of God in Gal. 5:19-21. The author of Revelations gives a different list in Rev. 21:8. Paul has qualified his list with “…and the like” so it would be appropriate to presume the ones in Revelation should be included. In other words, each list adds to the other, and is not intended to be exclusive.

Many Christians seem to be under the false impression that only non-believers will be denied heaven. Revelation only includes non-belief as one of many groups of people that will not be there. If that list is not exhaustive, and we must include Galatians 5, there will be very few, if any, in heaven.

Both lists include murderers. Certainly Murder must be somewhere up there, close to unforgivable, and near “leads to death.” Yet the author of Matthew records that Jesus holds a person who is unjustifiably angry, or calls another “Fool” is equally at fault as Murder! (Matt. 5:21-22) Unjustifiable anger must also be right up there. ‘Course Jesus also seems to think internal lust is as bad as external adultery, so luckily we have Paul to straighten Jesus out of that thought. (Mt. 5:28)

In the end, there is no real way to determine what sin is worse than any other. Yet the authors provide different claims of what sin is of greater degree of punishment than another. As we read the different books, any attempt to align the assertions becomes hopelessly tangled.

Rather than one God with one rule of conduct, we have many authors all vying for what bothers them the most as being the “worse” sin.

What is more likely? That the Bible is a cohesive description of the rule of conduct as prescribed by one God? Or that it is a compilation of various human authors, and their various opinions resulting in a not surprising variety of hierarchies of sin.

A Calvinist Contemplates Walking Away From Faith

[Written by John W. Loftus] The following comes from the minutes of a freethought association meeting concerning Calvinist professor and author of 14 books, Dr. Ruth Tucker, here. 

I was struck when she said, "(I am a) heathen in my reason and a Christian with my whole heart." A Calvinist, Dr. Tucker believes in a "sovereign God" that assumes doubt and faith equally. Her faith is more a matter of "God's grace" than "personal will. Here's a Calvinist who thinks that reason does not support her faith but that God decrees her to believe anyway, or so it seems. Interesting, eh? This is a personal example of what I have argued for here.

Professor Tucker listed five myths about people who have abandoned their faith:

1) "They are angry and rebellious."

She found virtually no evidence for this. Rather, people felt sorrow, initially. They experienced pain, not anger.

2) "They can be argued back into faith." 

Because the person leaving his/her faith has carefully and painstakingly dissected the reasons behind this major worldview change, the Christian who proffers apologetics is more likely to convert into non-belief in such an exchange.

3) "Doubters can find help at Christian colleges and seminaries." 

This is not seen to be the case, she said.

4) "They abandon their faith so that they can go out and sin freely." 

Our presenter pointed out that too many people who profess faith sin more often than non-believers and that this argument was not a motivational issue in de-converting from faith.

5) "They were never sincere Christians to begin with." 

She has come across example after example of the most earnest and devout of evangelical, fundamentalist believers who became non-theists. Dan Barker was mentioned as just one of these erstwhile believers.

She then listed some actual reasons given for "losing faith in faith." Science and philosophy has eroded the faith of many former believers. The sense of absence of any caring God was another. Another reason was the myth-shattering experience of the critical examination of the scriptures. Disappointment in God (Its apparent apathy or antipathy to Its creation) and the hypocrisy of Christians were two other reasons listed. And finally, the perception of a dogmatic anti-feminist and anti-homosexual stance of fundamentalist Christianity was given for why some relinquish their faith.

A Calvinist, Dr. Tucker believes in a "sovereign God" that assumes doubt and faith equally. Her faith is more a matter of "God's grace" than "personal will." The meaning, purpose, comfort and fulfillment she derives from the story of Jesus, his death and resurrection is a key part of her life and who she is, going directly to her emotional/affective state of being.

Codifying once again. Dr. Tucker gave examples of responses to the issue of belief and non-belief: Christian faith is not proven by rational proofs and apologetics. The faithful base their beliefs on a celebration of the "mystery of the Christian faith." It is the poetic, not the noetic sensibilities that are called up. Faith is a response to the tensions and challenges in life, not a means to solve them. Tucker, borrowing from Flannery O'Connor, spoke of the naturalness of unbelief and how the assault on a young mind from advanced education can displace the faith instilled in childhood, but that they are too young to decide on unbelief. She offered thoughts on the "winteriness" of faith that stands alongside the atheist in finding a silent God but with this cooler search uncovering a faith nonetheless, opposed to the "summery plaudits" of those whose faith runs warmer. Professor Tucker talked cogently about the sense of community and familiar traditions-the hymns, stories and rituals that ensconce faith and the connection with ancestors and future bridges built with younger relatives as being important elements in faith. And she talked about the necessity of the apostate turning his skepticism on unbelief to the same degree as he does on belief.

There was a marvelous writing by Stephen Dunn that Dr. Tucker shared with us called "At the Smithville Methodist Church" that speaks, in part, of outgrowing faith intellectually but subsuming it emotionally. One line from it reads: "Evolution is magical but devoid of heroes. / You can't say to your child/ 'Evolution loves you.' The story stinks/ of extinction and nothing/ exciting happens for centuries. I didn't have/ a wonderful story for my child/ and she was beaming. All the way home in the/ car she sang the songs, / occasionally standing up for Jesus/ There was nothing to do/ but drive, ride it out, sing along/ in silence."

There was a discussion following Dr. Tucker's presentation. Bishop Shelby Spong and his book "Why Christianity Must Change or Die" were mentioned and his dilemma of being in his official role in an Episcopal church, yet seeing folly in many faith claims. We discussed the importance of the institution-the structure- to believers. We can't change the institution, so we must change ourselves, or else walk away from it.

A psychologist in our group talked of the psychological needs that are met by faith. He said that non-believers can't say: "I'll pray for you" or other comforting (if devoid of meaning to the atheist) words. We can feel the sense of peace that a hymn offers but not honestly believe the message or have this message to impart to others. We have a harder time creating a sense of community, and have no deep traditions to hang onto.

The issue of predestination was brought up by one group member and how to reconcile this Calvinist tenet with genuine ethical considerations. Tucker spoke of finding peace from a sovereign God and placing a high priority on "good works." When talking of the sense of praying to a predetermining God, she said that one does not so much alter the plan of the Creator as one creates changes in him/herself. "We are in a partnership with God," Dr.Tucker stated.

Some other thoughts and questions posed to Dr. Tucker were regarded how she defined "faith" as opposed to "belief," the evil done out of emotional faith to uncritical acceptance of religious doctrines (such as was seen on September 11 and all throughout human history), is faith itself a "good" thing? Or is it only faith in what the given believer thinks is the one "true" belief system? Is it a false dichotomy to set up faith as either a belief in God or not? Is there value in group prayer even if there certainty of a divine listener? Tucker spoke of the sense of community and shared caring focused toward a person or issue and the intrinsic value therein. Does the believer hope his faith is true, or does he believe it on faith?

As she stated earlier, the solving of vexing challenges to one's faith is not the core concern, rather it is the giving in to the mystery and giving one's doubts and even unbelief to a sovereign God." With my naked intellect I cannot believe." Professor Tucker was forthcoming in stating that she swam the shallow waters-enjoying the play of tensions, struggles, etc., on the surface, rather than trying to plumb the murky depths. Talk arose of one's faith emanating from an "accident of birth(place)." How could all the diverse belief systems just in Christianity, let alone other faiths, all have it right? "There is truth in all religions but only one path to Christ," was our speaker's response. As to all the harm done out of dogmatic belief, Tucker quoted another writer who spoke of how Christians have turned many away by their bludgeoning use of faith and would garner more sympathetic supporters if they "…didn't make Christianity so darned unattractive." Another quip was that just one week with Southern Baptists would ensure no new conversions.

----------------

Thanks to Ed Babinski for pointing this out to me.

exapologist's de-conversion story

About my background and de-conversion: I should preface what follows by saying that, given the context, I’m going to focus almost exclusively on the intellectual side of my Christian life, although of course it was integrated with a significant emotional and spiritual life.

I converted to Christianity in my late teens, but evangelism led to questions, questions led to doubts and wanting answers, and these in turn led to apologetics. The apologetics thing lasted longer than expected -- 15 years (i.e., the whole span of my Christian life) and grad school pursuing a Ph.D. in Philosophy. I felt that my calling was to “be a witness” in academia by becoming a philosophy professor at a local university.

Given the likely audience of my testimony, I should probably belabor the extent to which I was an “apologetics nerd”. Within the span of my life as a Christian, I read just about anything worth reading (and not worth reading) in apologetics – aside from books that argued against theism and Christianity, probably about 120 or so books and who knows how many chapters and articles on philosophical, historical, and scientific apologetics, starting with McDowell and ending with Plantinga, Swinburne, and Alston (and “the new kids on the block” in philosophy of religion, such as Michael Rea, Dean Zimmerman and Michael J. Murray). For many years, I’d listen religiously to Greg Koukl’s “Stand to Reason” apologetics radio show on the weekends. I was an acolyte of William Lane Craig and J.P. Moreland. I read and internalized all their books. I read just about all of Craig’s debates, and attended a couple of them. I would drive for hours to attend weekend apologetics seminars when either of these two was going to be there. I even ordered virtually all of the J.P. Moreland tapes out there, and listened to them over and over until they were worn out. I used their arguments in papers for undergraduate philosophy courses. My dream was to study and get an MA in philosophy of religion and ethics under J.P. Moreland at Talbot. I partially fulfilled that dream by attending Talbot for a year (however, since Talbot doesn’t have fellowships or TA-ships for their graduate students, I couldn’t afford it for very long, and so I transferred to a “secular” university to finish my graduate studies). I was a member of the Society of Christian Philosophers and the Evangelical Philosophical Society, and read their journals (Faith and Philosophy and Philosophia Christi) religiously for several years. I would even spend many a beautiful day in musty library basements reading past issues of philosophy of religion journals.

Ok, now that I’ve bored you with the extent of my nerdiness, I should get back to the point of this exercise: my de-conversion. I must say that the experience was very similar to Thomas Kuhn’s account of the causes of paradigm shifts in the sciences. Over the years, I had internalized and mulled over the overall case for Christian theism. But over these same years, there were questions for which either the apologetic answers had prima facie but ephemeral persuasiveness, or otherwise were never satisfactorily addressed at all. The slow cumulative effect of the problems reached critical mass and hit me like a ton of bricks about the time of last Christmas break. I was absorbed in grad school, and so I hadn't noticed the implications of previous things I gradually accepted:

1. First, I realized that all of the deductive arguments from natural theology that I had accepted at one time or another had significant shortcomings (e.g. invalid; valid, but had at least one dubious premise; valid, and maybe sound, but it doesn't get us all the way to theism).

This was a major blow, because I had a common practice of "modus tollens-ing" any serious objection to theism in general or Christianity in particular by appealing to the soundness of such arguments: "If objection x is sound, then theism (or Christianity) is false. But theism (or Christianity) isn't false (because sound deductive arguments A1-An show otherwise); so, objection x must not be sound." With the realization that I no longer accepted *any* of the deductive arguments, I saw the objections in a new light.

2. This put pressure on me to reconsider the "cumulative case" approach to the arguments, and to construe them as inductive arguments, or as clues to an abductive inference to the best explanation. The problem, though, is that once you construe all the evidence as inductive or abductive, then *all* the evidence, pro and con -- must be put into the "pot" -- and the posterior probability (when construed inductively) or what constitutes the best explanation (when construed abductively) rises or falls with each piece of data. So, for example, suppose we construe the cumulative case inductively, and take the "theistic” clues to be the contingency and apparent fine-tuning of the universe, religious experience, beauty, and the irreducibility of mental properties. Well, this evidence by itself may get us a probability of around .5 or .6 – or to be generous, say .9. Unfortunately, you can't do the final calculation – i.e., you can’t determine the posterior probability of theism (or Christian theism in particular) until you throw in the contrary evidence – e.g., problems of religious diversity, religious ambiguity, the evidential problem of evil, etc. But when you do that, it sees to me that the posterior probability goes well below one-half.

3. That was enough to put me in spiritual limbo. But the straw that broke the camel's back was when I read several of the "Third Questers" of the historical Jesus, of which the apologists are currently (and, I was to find, opportunistically) speaking of favorably – indeed, some of them are “Questers” themselves (e.g., Wright and Witherington). Of course, I had no illusions that these folks accepted the total conservative evangelical picture of Jesus, but I was told that they were supposed to show that the extremes of the Jesus Seminar on the one hand, and the earlier form and redaction critics on the other, were way off on Jesus, and that on the contrary, once we put Jesus in his context of 1st century Palestine, we can see that a lot of the material in the Gospels makes sense, and is thus probably authentic. These guys are "mainstream", and their conclusions are careful and judicious.

Now prior to this, I had read a bunch of the historical apologetics literature (Blomberg, Craig, Habermas, Boyd, Marshall, etc.), and had internalized their case for the reliability of the New Testament and the resurrection of Jesus. But nothing they wrote prepared me for what I was about to read. It turns out that the normal, mainstream view about Jesus, for at least the last century or so, is that Jesus is some sort of failed eschatological prophet, on a par with John the Baptist. And there’s a good reason for why it’s mainstream: their case is very careful, judicious, beyond persuasive -- I think anyone who reads their arguments yet remains unpersuaded is either not very bright or resisting the evidence to the point of cognitive dissonance. Such an interpretation follows even if you take the New Testament documents largely at face value. E.g. (i) Jesus repeated prediction of “the end” in his generation, (ii) the successive watering down and back-pedaling re: this prediction, and of Jesus' obvious eschatological message of repenting in light of the kingdom being "at hand", in subsequent Gospels and the epistles, as the years went by and the end didn’t come; (iii) the fact that Jesus hung out with John the Baptist and accepted his baptism of repentance in light of "the coming wrath" indicates that he accepted John's eschatological message (as opposed to the message of the Pharisees and the Saducees), (iv) the fact that the earliest church believed that Jesus taught an immanent apocalyptic end; (v) the fact that the bulk of Jesus' parables are fundamentally about an eschatological kingdom (interesting how John's gospel, written much later, drops the predictions, the kingdom-of-God language, etc., which would make sense if the first generation had died, and the message was morphing into a non-eschatological one); and on and on.


The message was as obvious as anything, but I tried to look for answers. I read up on the responses from all the theological camps, from the conservatives (Blomberg, Marshall, McKnight, Wright, Witherington) to moderates (Meyer, Brown) to the Jesus Seminar. This only intensified the problem. The conservatives gave either dismissive or implausible responses; the moderates admitted the problem but denied that theses passages are authentic; ditto with the Jesus Seminar.

And suddenly, my faith was gone. As much as I wanted to, I just could not believe anymore. Anyway, that’s my basic story. If anyone likes, they may email me to talk more about it.


-exapologist

Family Values

What do you think of when you hear the phrase "pro-family"? Or what about other political buzzwords like "pro-life" or "pro-values"? If you're like me, the first thing that comes to mind is "Christian." Christians are the pro-family and pro-values people, right?

Do a quick Google search with the terms "pro-family" or "pro-values" and here's some of the top 10 hits:
"American Family Association" - "stands for traditional family values."
"Institute for American Values" - "stands for traditional American values."
"Our American Values" - “deeply committed to defending life, traditional marriage, and equipping our children with the values necessary to stand against liberal education and cultural forces."
"Pro-Family Network" - "Promoting and defending the biblical framework of the Christian family because it takes a father and a mother to raise a child."
"Defend the Family" - "defending the 'natural' family, marriage, and family values."

Christians are good at twisting words to fit their agenda. After all, with so many denominations who all think they have the right interpretation of the Bible, they've got to be good at twisting something. And I think they've done it successfully here in the mind of the general public.

It makes my head spin to know Christians are trying to make "Christianity" synonymous with being "pro-family" and "pro-values." And because they have been able to get a corner on claiming these words for themselves, they have been allowed to define them -- "one man, one woman, no exceptions."

So, if Christians, who can't agree on much, are so staunchly united as "pro-family" (i.e. one woman, one man, etc.), and even on this there are many detractors, then the Bible must clearly teach that this is the only acceptable family structure right?

Well, the Bible does say some things about family.

What does the Bible say about polygamy, for example? Coming from an international Bible college, I ran into several Africans who came from polygamous Christian families (not Mormons but Protestant Evangelical Christians). I had never heard of such a thing and after I dealt a few puzzled looks, one asked me to show him where the Bible says a man can only have one wife. Besides Paul talking about deacons, I couldn't think of much else.

In fact, the Bible is full of examples of men marrying multiple wives. Heck, without polygamy there wouldn't have been the 12 tribes of Israel (Jacob w/ Rachel, Leah and their maidservants). There's a number of Christian polygamy sites on the net defending polygamy as well.

While I think the Bible does seem to condemn homosexuality, I do not think it specifically condemns polygamy. So, Christians are in a bind here - they seem so confident to defend the "biblical framework of the Christian family," as the Pro-Family Network states, but what is that according to the Bible? I don't think it's as clear cut as Christians and Christian politicians would have us believe.

So, if Christians are the pro-family, pro-values group, then what does that make an atheist or a secular humanist? It seems Christians would have us believe those groups are anti-family and anti-values. I'm not sure too many of these Christians would deny they think non-believers such as myself are, in fact, "anti-family" and "anti-values."

I find it outrageous that Christians are claiming to be pro-family and therefore by default or by admission, claiming that people who do not condemn alternative family structures are somehow "anti-family" and "anti-values."

It seems to me atheists, agnostics, secular humanists, and other non-believers need to stop allowing Christians to define what it means to be pro-family and pro-values. Because non-believers are just as pro-family and pro-values as Christians, if not a lot more.

Tragedy or Trial???

That the God of the Christian religion very often and severely punishes his creatures is almost an understatement.

Try something. Just flip open the bible to any page at random. Chances are you will find on one of the two pages staring at you a gruesome description of divine judgment on someone or some people. Yes, God makes it clear over and over in his holy book that he uses all manner of natural disasters and calamities to punish his sinful people...

"15. But it shall come to pass, if thou wilt not hearken unto the voice of the LORD thy God, to observe to do all his commandments and his statutes which I command thee this day; that all these curses shall come upon thee, and overtake thee: 16. Cursed shalt thou be in the city, and cursed shalt thou be in the field. 17. Cursed shall be thy basket and thy store. 18. Cursed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy land, the increase of thy kine, and the flocks of thy sheep....20. The LORD shall send upon thee cursing, vexation, and rebuke, in all that thou settest thine hand unto for to do, until thou be destroyed, and until thou perish quickly; because of the wickedness of thy doings, whereby thou hast forsaken me. 21. The LORD shall make the pestilence cleave unto thee, until he have consumed thee from off the land, whither thou goest to possess it. 22. The LORD shall smite thee with a consumption, and with a fever, and with an inflammation, and with an extreme burning, and with the sword, and with blasting, and with mildew; and they shall pursue thee until thou perish. 23. And thy heaven that is over thy head shall be brass, and the earth that is under thee shall be iron. 24. The LORD shall make the rain of thy land powder and dust: from heaven shall it come down upon thee, until thou be destroyed." (Deuteronomy 28:15-24)

So if these Old Testament passages reveal anything about the principle nature of the God of the bible, they reveal to us that God may very well have been responsible for that financial lapse of debt you fell into last month. God may have intended to take the life of a beloved family member of yours to punish you for that indiscriminate lustful thought, or your willfully missing services last Sunday. God may be the one responsible for giving your mother-in-law cancer, or allowing the aquifer in your neck of the woods to fall below the optimum level because not enough people flattered him with prayers. Don't believe me? Here the word of the Lord...

"And it shall be, that whoso will not come up of all the families of the earth unto Jerusalem to worship the King, the LORD of hosts, even upon them shall be no rain." (Zechariah 14:17)

There you have it! Now this would be an open/shut case: sickness, drought, death, or any misfortune = God is not pleased with you, but it's not quite that simple! It would be simple were it not for a conflicting message we get from the New Testament...

"That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust." (Matthew 5:45)

Now this throws a monkey wrench in everything! Whereas before we thought anytime something bad happened, it was God punishing you, from this we learn that it might not be! God says here he allows blessings to filter down to the just and the unjust, leaving us to spend our lives, wracking our brains trying to figure out exactly when we are suffering for our sins, and when we are suffering merely from sporadic natural calamities and accidents. The mental agony believers go through even today, wondering ceaselessly whether or not their trials and afflictions are God-sent is not nearly as bad as actually being cursed by God to go through these things, but who can deny that being left without answers is painful in it's own right?

At the first church I ministered at, I sat at a potluck luncheon and began a discussion that lasted several hours on the subject of divine providence. One of our elders was debating me on whether or not the Titanic was given to tragedy because of the pride people took in it. He argued that God was offended at people's attitudes towards the ship, so loving Jesus decided to make the graves of over 1,500 people in the frigid waters of the Atlantic. I disagreed with this brother in the Lord, but little did I know that according to the scriptures, we were both right!

It's awfully interesting how sophisticated and well-cultured believers of today will very seldom make claims about God unleashing his wrath in the catastrophes of the world. Those few who dare make such claims are usually of the ultra-fundamentalist variety, like Pat Robertson, who thinks 911 happened because of the abortionists and homosexuals in America. But this is too strong a stand for many Christians. Instead, they seem more interested in devoting themselves to disassociating their God from acts of causality in nature. They want you to know that if you lose an eye, a kidney fails, or you get attacked by a flesh-eating virus, Jesus had nothing to do with it! They seem adamant about reiterating what Jesus said regarding tragedy befalling the godly and ungodly. They would rather have you believe that Jesus' words are more applicable today than those spoken by Moses. I truly believe if they could, modern believers would erase most of the Old Testament's content, certainly anything that makes their god seem barbaric and cruel. Lucky for us, they can't.

The God of the Bible may have the morals and temperament of a spoiled-rotten 13 year old, but theists will defend him to the end nonetheless. They must try to harmonize everything biblically written about him and accept it all as true. This is what makes it impossible to determine whether we are suffering because of reckless tragedy, or a trial from a chastising God who wants to save us from damnation.

So the debate continues! The next time you see on the news another seaport business or church demolished by a hurricane, or an industrious city, ripped apart by an earthquake, bringing down highways, an economy, and taking countless lives, it may well be because that city offended the almighty in some way! But we will never know for sure!

(JH)

The Trial of Galileo, 1633 AD

It's not that simple to say that the condemning of Galileo was strictly a conflict of science and religion, although it was considered a real assault by many people on their Christian faith.

By Galileo’s day in the early 17th century the Catholic Church felt compelled to take a definite stand against the Copernican heliocentric hypothesis (the Protestants had done this much earlier). Why? “If the earth truly moved then no longer could it be the fixed center of God’s Creation and his plan of salvation. Nor could man be the central focus of the cosmos. The absolute uniqueness and significance of Christ’s intervention into human history seemed to require a corresponding uniqueness and significance for the Earth. The meaning of redemption itself, the central event not just of human history, but also of universal history, seemed at stake. To be a Copernican seemed tantamount to atheism.” (Richard Tarnas The Passion of the Western Mind, pp. 253-254).

Previously Dante harmonized religion and science by “poetically uniting the specific elements of the Christian theology with the equal specific elements of classical astronomy. The Aristotelian geocentric universe thus became a massive symbolic structure for the moral drama of Christianity. All of the Ptolemaic planetary spheres took on Christian references, with specific ranks of angels and archangels responsible for each sphere’s motion. Every aspect of the Greek scientific scheme now was imbued with religious significance. If, for example, a moving earth were to be introduced into that system, the effect of a purely scientific innovation would threaten the integrity of the entire Christian cosmology.” (From Richard Tarnas, pages 195-6).

According to Diogenes Allen, the Aristotelian/Ptolemy view “included values as part of the very fabric of the universe...obligations and rights...are confirmed and supported by the physical order of the cosmos itself.” Therefore “it seemed to threaten the very foundations of the social, political, and moral order.” [Christian Belief in a Postmodern World, (John Knox Press, 1989, p. 41, 42)].

The invention by Galileo of the telescope changed the debate. It destroyed several Ptolemaic conceptions: A) They believed that the spheres of the universe were perfect, yet Galileo noticed the moon has craters; B) They believed everything rotates around the earth, yet Galileo discovered Jupiter had four moons; C) They believed the heavenly bodies were eternal, yet Galileo discovered sun spots indicating that the sun was decaying. He defended the Copernican system with observations, and thus began the rise of experimental science! He showed (contrary to Aristotle) how heavier rocks do not fall faster than lighter ones by experimentation. He even conceptualized tying a string from a heavier rock to a lighter one, thus making them one object! But would the combined rock now fall faster than either one, or would the lighter one drag? Such problems plagued the older Aristotelian view.

But look at how Galileo’s views were answered by Florentine astronomer Francesco Sizzi: “There are seven windows in the head: two nostrils, two eyes, two ears, and a mouth. So also in the heavens there are two favorable stars, two unfavorable, two luminaries, and Mercury alone undecided and indifferent. From all this, and from other such natural phenomena, such as seven metals, etc., all too pointless to enumerate, we can conclude that the number of planets is necessarily seven.” “Furthermore, the alleged satellites of Jupiter are invisible to the naked eye, and therefore can have no influence on earth, and therefore would be useless, and therefore do not exist.” “Besides all this, the Jews and other ancient peoples as well as modern Europeans have always divided the week into seven days and have named them after the seven planets. Now if we, like Galileo, increase the number of planets, this whole and beautiful system falls to the ground.”

What must be understood about the trial: 1) There was real debate about the geo-centric system--but it was to be regarded as a “hypothesis not fact.” 2) Copernicus and Galileo’s systems contained ideas that were “hopelessly inaccurate,” and there was no evidence yet for things that should be noticed. For instance a) the proper planetary orbits were not known yet--they were arguing for more complete circles revolving around the sun, also, b) There was “no observable stellar parallax”—individual stars should appear at different points in the sky when the earth is at its two farthest distances in its cycle around the sun. Either the stars were immensely more distant, which we know now is the case, or the earth didn’t move. Thus, the Copernican system was not yet established on scientific grounds! 3) The Pope, Urban VIII, felt personally betrayed by Galileo, a former friend, because he thought one of the incompetent speakers in the Dialogue of Two Chief World Systems was intended to represent him.

My Case Against Christianity

After my exchange with Jason Engwer and my resultant apologies for the tone of my posts, I have come to realize something: I have never put forth my actual case against Christianity. I have never really contributed to "debunking" in the sense of any fault-finding or critiquing Christianity. Once I tested out an argument here, and then I started a series on visions and defending them, but I haven't actually contributed to debunking Christianity.

What, then, do I consider the case against Christianity to be? What would be my case against the Christian faith?

The chief two reasons I believe that Christianiy is false is because I believe that the Bible is errant, both internally and externally, and I believe that the Christian God is logically incoherent because the attributes of such a god are logically inconsistent. Let me outline my case as follows:

Argument One: The Bible is Errant Internally

I believe that the Bible is errant in several ways. I consider many passages claimed to narrate historical events to contradict each other such as the resurrection narratives, the infancy narratives, when the fig tree was cursed, when Jesus was annointed by the woman, how the Field of Blood got its name, how exactly did Peter deny Jesus after his arrest, etc. These discrepancies, I believe are not limited to the New Testament. I believe that the creation accounts conflict in Genesis as well as the Flood accounts. I believe that the Hebrew Bible conflicts over when the name of Yahweh was known to the Hebrew patriarchs, whether or not God approved of sacrifices when he called the Hebrews out of Egypt, as well as others.

I also believe that the Bible contains failed prophecies. I believe that the land promise failed in the books of Joshua and Judges. I believe that the prophecy of an eternal kingdom for David failed. I believe that the prophecy of Ezekiel against Tyre failed as well.

I also believed that Jesus made several mistakes, assuming that the passages in question are authentically attributable to Jesus. I believe that Jesus erred in Mark chapter two, not only by saying that it was in the days of Abiathar that David went to the high priest but also in suggesting that David had men present with him. I believe that Jesus erred in suggesting that Jericho's daughter was asleep and not dead. There are other examples I could cite and most likely will.

Argument Two: The Bible is Errant Externally

I believe that the Bible teaches a flat-earth, geocentric cosmology and that this has been invalidated by modern cosmology. In fact, I believe that a chief reason that Christianity survives today is because of Galileo. It was Galileo, I believe, who suggested that the Bible be understood as having a "language of appearance". I believe that Martin Luther was justfied in condemning heliocentricism on biblical grounds.

I also believe that creationism and deluge theology have been refuted by modern science. I believe that the case for evolution and an old-earth are overwhelming. I believe that the case for evolution has been well-documented by scientists. I believe that deluge theology has been refuted and that it was originally Christian geologists such as William Buckland and Adam Sedgewick who constructed the geological column and applied the principles of stratiography to geology, in effect refuting the contextually-demanding interpretation of the flood as a universal deluge. Like Galileo, it was their attempts at compromise that have helped Christianity to surivive.

Lastly, there is the starlight problem. How can light from stars travel in such a great distance if the cosmos is, indeed, young? I have seen almost every solution proposed to date from Barry Setterfield's hypothesis to D. Russel Humphrey's "relativistic cosmology". What is wrong with all of these hypotheses, is that they are all "after-the-fact". Who would conclude purely on secular grounds that the speed of light was decreasing all these years and therefore the earth is young and radioactive decay rates were much higher in the past or that billions of years of stellar evolution took place while the flow of time on earth was much slower, making the cosmos young? Who would ever propose such schemes unless they were looking for a way out of a tight-spot? The solutions are way too late! Why would God wait until almost a century after the problem arose, for the solution to be discovered? What that means is that no one was justified believing that the Bible and science were complementary and in harmony over the starlight problem until creationists like Setterfield and Humphreys were on the scene. If Humphrey's solution, involving relativistic time dilation is right, then what that means is that no one was justified in believing that the Bible and science were harmonizable on this point until after Einstein proposed his theories of relativity and the implications of it were worked out over the next few decades with Humphreys realizing the implications of it for the starlight problem! The "starlight paradox" as I have come to call it, personally (although I am willing to give credit where it is due if someone else has called it this)

Argument Three: The nonexistence of God

Finally, a reason I believe that the Christian God does not exist is because I believe that such a Being cannot exist. I believe that some of the biblically-based and theologically-defined attributes of God contradict each other. I believe, for instance, that the attributes of volition and omniscience contradict each other. It's the same with the attributes of volition and moral perfection. I believe that other attributes contradict each other, showing that the Christian God cannot exist because of a contradiction of the attributes, making the Christian God logically incoherent. Now don't get me wrong here: I believe that some contrary-attribute arguments might indeed be flawed but there are some that I am quite convinced, do work.

My Conclusion

The errancy of the Bible, both internally and externally, as well as the theological incoherency of the Christian God, are the chief reasons I believe that the Christian faith is indeed flawed and are the reasons I disbelieve that the Christian God exists. In my next article series, I plan to examine the doctrine of inerrancy in detail and show why it is flawed with examples of contradictions, errors, and failed prophecies as well as attempts by Christian apologists to resolve them.

Matthew