The video below on the probability version of suffering was written by William Lane Craig and produced by his staff at Reasonable Faith. The question is whether an omni-god exists or not. Don't allow Craig the magician to draw your eyes away from that question with the deception of misdirection. For Craig the magician cannot use the existence of an omni-god to solve the problem of suffering for the existence of an omni-god, since whether an omni-god exists is the issue. Nor can he use his unevidenced believing background indoctrinated information.
Furthermore, Christians like Craig are still focusing on the wrong problem. We keep hearing how they (i.e., Alvin Plantinga) have answered the logical problem of suffering, and it's nauseating (and probably false). But when they turn away from it to the probability version of suffering they don't answer the real problem. It's not just suffering we're talking about. The real problem is that the amount of horrific suffering in the world makes the existence of an omni-god improbable.<-- See the link then ask yourself if the video addressed the points made there. While the video gives lip service to the phrase "so much pointless suffering", it expresses the problem like this: "Suffering provides empirical evidence that God's existence is highly unlikely."
So there are two kinds of misdirection going on. Craig the magician 1) uses an omni-god, at least in part, to solve the question of the existence of an omni-god given the existence of so much horrible suffering, and he does so 2) with a strawman version of the real problem. If you don't see what's going on you're not paying close enough attention. With this magician's trick exposed for what it is, enjoy the show:
I was asked to talk on best advice I ever received for Hall's podcast, Laughing in Disbelief. I wanted it to be different so I chose something GK Chesterton said (14:37 minutes).
Dr. Nick Trakakis, one of the most important philosophers of religion in today's world, and author of "The End of Philosophy of Religion," surprised me recently with the following message:
Hi John, I'm currently reading your book Unapologetic book and thoroughly enjoying it. Suffice it to say that I am in wholehearted agreement with you. I actually find it very sad to see a discipline (the philosophy of religion) I have cherished for many years being debased and distorted by so-called Christian philosophers. Like you, I have now finally and happily found my place in the atheist community.
I seem to be moving towards a strange kind of atheism, whereby (i) the personal theistic conception of God is rejected as incoherent, but (ii) even if it turned out that I was wrong and there is such a God after all, I still think that such a God should be rejected, in Ivan Karamazov style: “no thanks, you can have your ticket back”.
I’m slowly making my way through your "Unapologetic book", it’s quite fascinating, loving the Nietzschean hammer style."
John Constantine lives in Johannesburg, Gauteng. On Facebook he did me an honor by posting my words into a list of "ten presuppositions of atheism." As you might guess I love them! I was meaning to do this same thing but never got around to it. I'm not claiming to have originated these concepts. But someone is reading my works! As a quibble, I wouldn't call them "presuppositions" but rather axioms. What other axioms are foundational to atheism? Below I'll suggest a few more. Let's be creative and find some new ones.
Look how long William Lane Craig's answer to this question is! LINK. It appears that the more words required then the more obfuscation we see. It shows how much he needs his "answer" to be true as opposed to the correct answer.
The correct answer to this question is simple and easy. Professional historians are held to the standards of probabilities. So it stands to reason that a miracle like a resurrection from the dead is extremely improbable, to say the very least. Neither Jewish nor Christian historians conclude otherwise, even though they are theists. It takes the special pleading of an apologist to do so. Don't just take my word for it. See Bart D. Ehrman's argument.
Christians turn to the gospels to read the story of Jesus, and they assume that the stories are God’s honest truth—so to speak. Scholars, however—even devout scholars—want to know where the gospel accounts came from; after all, they were written decades after the events described. But it’s good enough for believers that God inspired the authors, so how could they not be accurate? In Caravaggio’s superb depiction of divine inspiration, an angel guides the right hand of Matthew as he writes.
But insistence on “scriptural inspiration” is an example of special pleading, that is: our documents don’t have to meet standards of evidence that are expected of other histories—because, in effect, God wrote them. No scholar would accept that argument to prove the accuracy of, say, David McCullough’s biography of John Adams, i.e., God inspired him. No: especially with someone as important as Jesus, rigorous standards of evidence must be used. Special pleading is cheating.
If you were indoctrinated into your religion, why doesn't that make you suspicious? Why don't you recognise that indoctrination is not evidence that a belief is true? On the contrary, why don't you treat indoctrination as a red flag? Why don't you see beliefs that are not supported by evidence but have to be drummed into small children as prime candidates to be questioned? Why don't you see that beliefs you are instructed NOT to question are the very beliefs you SHOULD question? If you think at all, indoctrination should be the trigger to doubt a belief, not to double-down and defend it with your life. Indoctrination works on children but only works on grown-ups if they let it. Don't let it. --On Facebook.
Exactly! This! If you were indoctrinated then that's a very strong reason to investigate your indoctrinated religion for the first time, as if you were a non-believer. In fact, doing so should be considered a rite of passage into adulthood. All you have to do is start by honestly admitting you were indoctrinated!
Jack and Andy talk interview me about the fallacious nature of religious thinking, and my upcoming anthology, “The Case against Miracles”. I've never liked my own interviews but there is a lot of good information in this one! Enjoy.
Parasites like mosquitoes kill and kill again. Praise Jesus!
"Mosquitoes are our apex predator, the deadliest hunter of human beings on the planet. A swarming army of 100 trillion or more mosquitoes patrols nearly every inch of the globe, killing about 700,000 people annually. Researchers suggest that mosquitoes may have killed nearly half of the 108 billion humans who have ever lived across our 200,000-year or more existence." LINK. Isn't your god good!
Bart Ehrman, with several best-selling books about the Bible to his credit, has taught undergraduates:
“… part of the deal of teaching in the Bible Belt is that lots of my students—most of them?—have very conservative views about the Bible as the Word of God. A few years ago I used to start my class on the New Testament, with something like 300 students in it, by asking the students a series of questions, just for information:
• How many of you in here would agree with the proposition that the Bible is the inspired Word of God (PHOOM! Almost everyone raises their hands)
• OK, great: Now, how many of you have read the Harry Potter series? (PHOOM! Again, almost everyone raises their hand).
• And now, how many of you have read the entire Bible? (This time: scattered hands, here and there, throughout the auditorium)
Marty Sampson, formerly of the worship team "Hillsong" is in the throes of doubt. I know one other person who became a blogger here at DC, who eventually emerged from doubt as a Christian. Check his story out right here. So I don't predict how Sampson's journey will go. I wish him well on his journey. I know that belief is powerful and bolstered by a whole lot of very strong social ties that can be extremely hard to break away from, even if there are an overwhelming number of good solid reasons to walk away from it. So I won't accept praise or blame for his final decision even though I'm in contact with him.
I was honored to join in a discussion with apologists Gary Habermas and Mike Licona, known as experts resurrection apologetics, at Marty's request. I like Gary and Mike both as persons. I've met them both on two or three occasions. Habermas even recommends my last book to his PhD students LINK. But they are wrong. I think I made that case.
I was a teen-age Bible geek, way back in the 1950s, in rural northern Indiana. My devout mother was not a fundamentalist, however, so I escaped that infamy. Quite the contrary, even at that early age I developed as aversion to the letters of the apostle Paul. There was no one to tap me on the shoulder and warn me: if you don’t like Paul, Christianity probably isn’t for you. My dislike for Paul had not diminished years later when I selected my major in the PhD program at Boston University; I chose Old Testament to escape excessive study of Paul. I would realize my mistake many years later, since Paul’s theology plays a major role in the falsification of Christianity.
Marty Sampson of "Hillsong" posted this on Instagram. See what Cameron Bertuzzi thinks is a sufficient response:
CC:
A few thoughts:
(1) Interesting use of legos.
(2) This is why it’s important that we continue to emphasize that questions aren’t arguments.
(3) Maybe I should start saying that incredulity isn’t an argument either.
(4) Christians have not been silent on passages like these (e.g., see Copan and Flannagan’s book).
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Kit Alcock:
I think it's obvious what the implicit argument here is, or at least one can do a charitable construction of such an argument
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CC:
The most that we’d have is a syllogism, there certainly wouldn’t be a defense of the premises.
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Kit Alcock:
Right I agree with that, I just think that that can often be achieved by setting out the argument for them
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CC:
But this is kind of missing the point. The point is to get the person asking questions to think logically. To help them think about the connections between their statements and their conclusions. To get them to consider whether their statements are supported by more than their own credulity.
It depends on the situation. Just giving them a reconstruction that’s valid isn’t necessarily going to help them give valid arguments in the future.
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John Loftus:
This final answer of yours makes no sense if you're trying to actually help the doubter. The goal isn't to teach them to offer articulate arguments. Your goal should be to answer their objections.
Some angry Catholic apologist has been tagging our posts with his angry long-winded responses. I know of no other blog, Christian or atheist, that allows for arguments by links, especially to plug one's failing blog or site. I've allowed it for about a month with this guy but no more. He's not banned. He can still come here to comment. It's just that we don't allow responses in the comments longer than the blog post itself, or near that. If any respectful person has a counter-argument or some counter-evidence then bring it. State your case in as few words as possible and then engage our commenters in a discussion. But arguments by links or long comments are disallowed. I talked with David Madison who has been the target of these links and he's in agreement with this decision. He's planning to write something about one or more of these links in the near future. So here's how our readers can help. I've deleted a few of these arguments by link. There are others I've missed. If you see some apologist arguing by link flag it. Then I'll be alerted where it is to delete it. What's curious to me are the current posts he's neglecting, like this one on horrific suffering. If he tackles that one I'll allow him a link back.
The universe has defied what scientists have expected time after time. Even so, no ancient pre-scientific book contains the answer to the beginning of the universe. Not one important scientific discovery was learned by reading the Bible. So the odds it might do so in the future are abysmally low. In fact, most scientific discoveries were opposed by people who read the Bible. What needs to be understood is that a scientific fact consistent with the Bible is not one that was predicted by the Bible, or considered established by the Bible. So if science discovers there is a creator after all, it would be a finding consistent with the Bible and other sacred religious texts. But since the Bible never told us how to discover it, or predicted the scientific method would lead to this discovery, it wouldn't confirm the Biblical claim of creation by the biblical god. It would be a discovery that accidentally coincided with it, that's all.
In “The Explanatory Emptiness of Naturalism” (another essay in Gilson & Weitnauer's anthology True Reason, which I mentioned a couple of posts back), religious philosopher and “former atheist sociopath”* David Wood, argues that, in order for there to be science, naturalism must be false. There are various reasons why he claims this is the case. These include the usual suspects, such as that naturalism is inconsistent with our ability to reason and that it cannot account for the uniformity in nature which science requires. (I've previously covered these issues, or something closely related to them, and rather than repeating myself have placed links below.)
Some of the other reasons he offers also involve common complaints against naturalism, but in ways that are odd in this context. For example, he argues that naturalism is incompatible with the existence of the universe, and from this concludes that under naturalism it would be impossible to practice science! (After all, there first has to be a world before anyone can be a scientist.)
I think Ferrer has his PhD now. He has learned the ways of the Jedi well with the goal to obfuscate. Say it isn't so! I began a FB wall post with these words:
I have found that the important questions are always epistemological ones not metaphysical ones. For when discussing metaphysical issues what we conclude should never be stronger than the probabilities. We should think exclusively according to the probabilities, which are epistemological in nature and evidence based. Discuss.
James K. Walker “For when discussing metaphysical issues what we conclude should never be stronger than the probabilities.” What metric do you use to determine the probabilities that your statement is true?
John W. Loftus, James K. Walker philosophical gerrymandering and obfuscationism aside, let's focus on the so-called virgin birth of a redeemer baby/god in the ancient world where plenty of virgin born heroes and demi-gods were supposedly born. What we want is not mere testimonial evidence, and much less 2nd or 3rd hand hearsay testimonial evidence we cannot cross-examine for inconsistencies, colusion, disavowals, lies and distortions. We need objective evidence. And yet there is no objective evidence to be found!
Don't tell me people are not indoctrinated to believe. It happens to most all of us. Given that most people remain in their culturally indoctrinated faith and that most religious faiths are false at best, indoctrinating children is wrong! Teach your children to think like scientists instead, to question everything, to seek objective evidence before accepting a cultural or familial faith. In fact, reject faith itself. Accept only objective evidence for religious tales. If enough of it doesn't exist then suspend judgment. If there's a true faith it should have nothing to fear from this requirement:
Knowing what we do about the Cosmos, what happens with cherished Bible stories? The British scholar A.N. Wilson remarked, about the Ascension of Jesus in Act 1, “…a man ascending vertically from the Mount of Olives, by whatever means of miraculous propulsion, would pass into orbit.” (Jesus, p. 3) In response to my Flash Podcast on the ascension, Scott McKellar wrote, “In the course of his ascension, at around 15,000 feet, Jesus began to wish he had brought a sweater. At 30,000 feel he felt weak from lack of oxygen. By 100,000 his bodily fluids were boiling away from every orifice. If he ever did return, it would be as a fifty-pound lump of bone and frozen jerky.”
A few weeks ago bestselling author Joshua Harris announced he's renounced his religion, saying "I have undergone a massive shift in regard to my faith in Jesus. The popular phrase for this is 'deconstruction', the biblical phrase is 'falling away.' By all the measurements that I have for defining a Christian, I am not a Christian." LINK. Then more recently Marty Sampson of the worship team Hillsong announced his religious faith "is on incredibly shaky ground." LINK. He names a few atheists he's been listening to. Guess who is one of them!
After Marty made his announcement I contacted him, and we're messaging a bit. I told him I know it's a struggle. I was there at one time. It's gut wrenching with lots of confusion and disappointment to consider my life was build on a delusion. I wept and prayed daily to god for months to help me and even send me a sign if he would. I received nothing in response.
For the record, in the years 1992-98 when I was in the throes of doubt myself, there was one song I played hundreds of times in hopes my god would reach out to me as I shouted out to him, "Shout to the Lord" (1994) by Hillsong:
Frank Turek...believes that, in order to make any meaningful claims, atheists have to appropriate concepts that only make sense if there is a God. That is why we “steal” from God — and why on his view atheism is self-defeating.
But even though presuppositionalism strikes me as rather desperate, I have to admit that the idea behind Turek’s book is pretty clever. In six chapters, he considers six areas in which the atheist supposedly steals from the Christian worldview: causality, reason, information and intentionality, morality, evil, and science. These six form (well, almost) the acronym C.R.I.M.E.S. – the crimes against theism.
If you want to read a blow by blow rebuttal of these atheist "CRIMES" then read what Kiekeben said (first published here on DC). LINK. Pass it on. Refer to it when these claims come up. Refer to it often.
A review of Tim Sledge’s Four Disturbing Questions with One Simple Answer
The Richard Dawkins 7-point scale, for rating the strength of belief or non-belief, has been widely referenced. Number 1 is Strong Theist, “I do not question the existence of God. I know he exists.” Number 7 is Strong Atheist, “I am 100% sure there is no God.” This is a useful guide, far more than many atheists realize. I am sometimes scolded by other atheists for ‘wasting my time’ debunking Christianity. “They never listen,” so I’m told. But note that Number 3 on the Dawkins Scale is Weak Theist, “I am very uncertain, but I am inclined to believe in God.”
I’ve long maintained that Christians exist on a scale of 1 to 10, although I’ve never bothered to define each of the numbers, other than to say that the 10s are probably unreachable; these are the evangelicals and fundamentalists. Good luck trying to penetrate. But then there are the 5s, those who go through the motions out of habit, show up at church, but who have unvoiced doubts. They have noticed things that don’t make sense, and are skeptical of Preacher Answers. Just one book, just one article—about a big flaw in the faith—coming to their attention, somehow, can start the process of walking away.
All it would take is for you to be born in a Hindu family in Prayagraj, India. Then you too would worship snakes! You would be convinced they heal you when ill. You could not be talked out of your culturally adopted religion. And you would be going to hell for not believing in Jesus, according to theology. Wouldn't you want to know which religion is true, if there is one? There is a way. Reject it at your own peril.
“Religion was invented when the first con man met the first fool.” There is some truth to this claim, but not enough. Our distant ancestors—those who first believed that priests could channel gods—were not fools: they managed to survive in perilous environments, and that took some doing. Fools no, but not gifted with critical thinking skills either. They did have imaginations, however, and were thus very susceptible to stories—as we are today.
It seems we’re wired to become heavily invested emotionally in stories; modern examples include The Hobbit, Game of Thrones, Downton Abby, Harry Potter, and comic book superheroes; the characters grab us. We can’t get enough. But what if you can convince people that God himself had written a particular story? And that believing the story is the key for escaping death: you win eternal life if you accept the story with all your heart, mind, and soul. Religious professionals of all genres exploit this level of emotional investment.
Recently I participated in an online debate on an omni-god and suffering. My Catholic opponent mostly quoted from the Bible and Church fathers. Like so many others he had a strategy of nitpicking and using up my time in the cross-examination. Here are my opening and closing statements.
My 10 minute Opening Statement:
Believers will argue that not even a god could create a world without some minimal level of suffering in it. But what about the amount of horrific suffering that exists? That’s my focus.
Here’s the problem: If a god exists who is all-knowing, all-powerful and perfectly good, then the amount of horrific suffering in our world needs an explanation. Either this god isn’t smart enough to eliminate it, or isn’t powerful enough to eliminate it, or doesn’t care enough to eliminate it. The reason is that an all-knowing god would know how to eliminate it, an all-powerful god has the power to eliminate it, and a perfectly good god would want to eliminate it.
For the sake of argument what if such a god exists?
A Review of R. G. Price’s Deciphering the Gospels Proves Jesus Never Existed
It’s standard practice for art dealers to provide documentation that the works they sell are the real thing; ideally there will be a paper trail showing ownership back to the original artist. At the end of movies there are several minutes of rolling credits, hundreds of names, of all the people who helped make the film. At the end of any biography, the reader can find the sources used, commonly hundreds of them: this is where the information comes from—and any curious researcher can find them as well.
A couple of hundred years ago, Bible scholars began to grapple with the inconvenient truth that the gospels—those iconic titles, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—have no such anchors: No documentation, credits at the end, or identified sources. They seem to position themselves as history, but what’s the evidence for that?
Instead of answering atheists' arguments, some believers just deny that there is such a thing as atheism. On their view, everyone knows that there is a God, and so-called atheists simply block out that fact because they don't want there to be someone who makes moral demands on them. (As everyone knows, we atheists just want to be able to do whatever we feel like, morality be damned — which explains why we are always robbing banks and torturing puppies.) But what reasons are there for thinking this is the case? Several have been suggested.
One common argument states that no one can consistently live like an atheist. So-called atheists obey moral rules, for example, which they should have no reason to obey. For according to atheism, it is said, it is no better to be kind and help those in need than to be a serial rapist and murderer. Yet many so-called atheists speak out against injustices in the world, and in doing so reveal that they are not true heathens.
Some say I haven't considered liberalism. Hogwash! My major professor for my PhD program at Marquette University was Daniel C. Maguire, author of this book: "Christianity Without God: Moving Beyond the Dogmas and Retrieving the Epic Moral Narrative" (SUNY, 2014). Forget William Lane Craig. Maguire is much closer to the truth. LINK. My problem with him is that he's an enabler to the kinds of Christianity that cause harm.
World renown biblical scholar Robert M. Price just stunned me by dedicating his latest book to me (see below)! I have to admit what he said is also a brilliant two-way slam against the Bible and William Lane Craig! Thanks Bob, it means a lot to know you love what I do! I never saw that coming. The book looks fantastic too. I hope others get it and read it. LINK. I must say Bob is a super duper wonderful guy as well as a first class biblical scholar whom I consider a personal friend.
Heads up, together we're making plans for an anthology on Jesus Mythicism. So stay tuned!
More photos. When asked why one's religion is true over others, believers will typically point to their unique differences. But religious differences are only evidence of differences.
Differences don't show the truth of a religion, since all different religions have differences by definition!
…as long as Christians are reigning-champion flaunters?
I think it would be really cool to have a T-shirt made for myself: Front: ATHEIST AUTHOR & ADVOCATE. Back: A picture of the cover of my book.
But where could I wear it without running the risk of getting beat up? Especially these days when religious folks are enflamed about being persecuted. At the very least, I’m sure I would be scolded for flaunting my atheism. “Why do you have to be so in our faces about it? Please keep it to yourself!”
Christians have enjoyed majority status for so long, it’s hard for them to grasp that they are champion flaunters: it’s part of what they do! They want to be noticed, they insist on being noticed, and they spare no expense getting noticed. Atheists have a long way to go before we can match flaunt for flaunt.
Now this is a hilarious question, which now claims the title to a book, Was Jesus Potty Trained? Professor Dale Allison recommends it. Here is the description:
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One hundred twenty-six million American citizens have stated they believe Jesus will return to this earth by 2050. Most of them await his arrival with mental pictures and images obtained from the blockbuster Left Behind series of books of LaHaye and Jenkins, or Hal Lindsey's portrayals in his book The Late Great Planet Earth. Both books are fictional images of the end of the world created from the nightmarish and ghoulish descriptions of the author of the book of Revelation who wrote of events he believed were to occur in the Roman world before the return of Jesus. It was to be a time of unimaginable horrors to come upon the world. We read daily of alleged apocalyptic signs occurring now which individuals believe point to the end of the age of which Jesus spoke.
It’s my view that the simplest explanation is that there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realisation: there is probably no heaven and afterlife either. I think belief in an afterlife is just wishful thinking. There is no reliable evidence for it, and it flies in the face of everything we know in science. I think that when we die we return to dust. But there’s a sense in which we live on, in our influence, and in our genes that we pass on to our children. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that I am extremely grateful.
Hawking also explains himself in his last book of questions and answers, which can be seen in this excellent write up by Maria Popova of Brain Pickings.
A challenge for Christians: If you’re so sure Jesus existed, then you have some explaining to do. A major frustration is that, while believers are indignant at all the talk about Jesus not existing, they don’t know the issues that fuel the skepticism—and are unwilling to inform themselves.
For the sake of argument, I’m willing to say, okay, Jesus was real and, yes, we have gospels that tell the story. But Christians are in just as much trouble. An observation by Dr. Jaco Gericke should snap them to attention:
It doesn’t take much for the religious impulse to kick in. The thousands of gods that humans have imagined is proof of that, and there’s an episode in the Book of Acts that shows how easy it is to say, “Hey, there’s a god at work here.” In the final chapter of Acts (28), we read that, following shipwreck, the apostle Paul made it to the shores of Malta.
“Paul had gathered a bundle of brushwood and was putting it on the fire, when a viper, driven out by the heat, fastened itself on his hand. When the natives saw the creature hanging from his hand, they said to one another, 'This man must be a murderer; though he has escaped from the sea, justice has not allowed him to live.' He, however, shook off the creature into the fire and suffered no harm. They were expecting him to swell up or drop dead, but after they had waited a long time and saw that nothing unusual had happened to him, they changed their minds and began to say that he was a god.” (vv. 3-6)
I must admit it's kind of gratifying when Christian philosophers take a look at the Outsider Test for Faith (OTF), which I've defended online and in my book. Recently Dr. Chris Gadsden decided to look at it. He has earned two master’s degrees and one PhD in philosophy (University of Missouri). He appears to be some sort of expert on proper belief formation, as seen in his PhD dissertation, Epistemic duties and blameworthiness for belief. He also appears as the kind of guy who doesn't hunker down in the trenches willing to die rather than admit he might be wrong about something. We'll see, because he begins with a misunderstanding by saying, "Lots of internet atheists promote the 'outsider test' (OTF) as a potent weapon against Christians. But how potent is it? Let’s have a look."
Summing up the main goal of my book The Outsider Test for Faith, I would say its goal is to get believers to think exclusively in terms of the objective evidence, and to proportion their beliefs based on the strength of that evidence. That's it! If it appears to be a threat to Christianity and other religions, it's not the fault of the test. It's the fault of the woeful lack of evidence for these religions. The OTF seeks to peel back the blinders of indoctrination and bias so believers can *see* for the first time that which they see when looking at other religious faiths. When looking at other religious faiths believers require sufficient objective evidence for them, or at least, they see the reasonableness of this evidential requirement. Believers need to see this same requirement with regard to their own religious faith. The OTF seeks to do away with confirmation bias as much as possible, so believers can start requiring objective evidence commensurate with the religious beliefs they were taught on their Mama's knees.
But this isn't what most believers see when it comes to the OTF. That's because they tacitly realize their faith would fail the test of objective evidence. So by disagreeing with the OTF they are disagreeing with the requirement for objective evidence for one's faith. To the degree then, that believers see the OTF "as a potent weapon against Christians", they're admitting there isn't sufficient objective evidence for their doctrines.
Professor David Eller first informed me of Darren Slade, who took some classes with him before attending and earning a PhD in theology from Liberty University, the one founded by Jerry Falwell. Dr. Slade has written a chapter for my anthology "The Case against Miracles" to be released in September (hopefully). He has also disavowed his alma mater! Read his testimony to understand why.
His testimony mirrors mine and many others who study in Evangelical colleges. It expresses the need for thinking outside the box of one's culturally adopted religious faith. He wrote:
When I was quite young I asked my mother if hell was at the fiery center of the earth. Devout Christian that she was, I never heard her talk much about hell, and she gave a hearty laugh to my question. No! was her response. She could say, about a lot of things in the Bible, “You can’t take that literally.”
Born in 1905 in southern Indiana, she had somehow escaped fundamentalism. She’d never gone to college, but read voraciously her whole life. She had picked up enough knowledge of the world to realize that neither heaven nor hell had locations in the geography of the cosmos. They were states of nearness to, or alienation from, God—or so she said. Maybe she’d heard some preachers with a touch of common sense. But alienation is watered-down hell; it is hard to deduct wrath from the Christian equation.
Here is a challenge to Christian apologists. How much time do you set aside reading books and essays outside your comfort zone? Let me be specific here. I have this book coming out in the Fall. Are you planning on reading it? There is no better way to become an apologist than to know the arguments of the opposition better than they do. You should try it. Here's some other helpful advice:
Here are a couple of the “reasonable Christian responses” (as he calls them) that apologist John M. DePoe offers for the existence of natural evils (True Reason: Confronting the Irrationality of the New Atheism, ed. Tom Gilson and Carson Weitnauer, pp. 218-219):
(1) There cannot be free will in any meaningful sense unless the world is governed by laws that make it behave in a sufficiently regular manner. These laws, however, “are also the cause of various phenomena, like hurricanes, tornadoes, and diseases.” It follows that one cannot avoid the existence of such natural disasters without eliminating our ability to exercise free will.
(2) Natural evils aren’t intrinsically evil; they are only bad when they harm moral agents. It follows that “if people had not chosen to settle in an area prone to tornado activity or on a fault line, there would be no associated evil event.”
New Yorkers in a rush tend to be impatient with strolling tourists gawking at the skyscrapers…“Welcome to New York, now go home.” No, we don’t say it. But then there was the tourist I saw recently, whose t-shirt was a testimony: “You‘all Need Jesus.” So many things I wanted to say to him…but didn’t. I wanted to bang by head against the nearest wall…but didn’t.
Christians especially seem be clueless about the problem of Jesus. The glaring negatives about Jesus are on full view in the gospels. Is this the Jesus we need? Which Jesus are we supposed to believe?
Just two months into retirement Norman Geisler died Monday at age 86. See here. He will be missed. He was quite the accomplished apologist having influenced a generation of evangelical apologists, including William Lane Craig, who was my mentor for my Th.M. degree in the Philosophy of Religion, when I studied at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS) from 1982-85. you can think of this progression, from Geisler to Craig to me! Actually there were two evangelical thinkers who had a good deal of influence on Craig, Geisler and Stuart Hackett, whom I also studied with at TEDS. The biggest influence on me was James D. Strauss. [Click here to see a photo of Strauss with Craig and me in 1985.]
You can hear Geisler's story of how he became a Christian in an interview with Justin Brierley on the Unbelievable program in 2008. Listen to it here beginning at 16:40.
While I didn't study with Geisler he tried to convince me I was wrong to leave the faith in a series of back and forth emails in 2007. He read my magnum opus Why I Became an Atheist, and recommended it using these words:
A thoughtful and intellectually challenging work presenting arguments that every honest theist and Christian should face.
Below you can read William Lane Craig's indebtedness to Norman Geisler (seen on the Reasonable Faith Facebook page):
This video was posted on Facebook by Cameron Bertuzzi who interviewed apologist Greg Koukl. It was on how their god could send people to hell who never heard the gospel. How could a good god do that? It's instructive of the ways on an apologist. You should watch it. There are plenty of things to learn, most notably how to obfuscate, or hide the truth.
Yes, yes, yes, there is so much to say, and not enough time. Regardless, here are several of my comments put into one response below (along with a link):
By Robert Conner, with interpolations by David Madison
[Note from David Madison: This article was written by Robert Conner, who asked me to review it and add whatever comments I wanted. I contributed about 15 percent of what you’re about to read.]
Part 1 is here.
Part 2 is here.
In the era in which Christianity appeared, a clear majority accepted visions and the appearance of ghosts as real events, and lived in the expectation of omens, prophetic dreams, and other close encounters of the supernatural kind. Like many people of the present, they were primed for self-delusion, expecting the inexplicable, accepting the uncanny. Given the mass of contradictions and implausibility in the resurrection stories, who bears the greater burden of proof, the apologist who claims the gospels record eyewitness history or the skeptic who can point to modern “sightings” such as apparitions of the Virgin Mary?
By Robert Conner, with interpolations by David Madison
[Note from David Madison: This article was written by Robert Conner, who asked me to review it and add whatever comments I wanted. I contributed about 15 percent of what you’re about to read.]
Part 1 is here.
If you still have questions, that’s understandable. For starters, if a hoard of dead men proved Jesus had risen, why didn’t Jesus His Own Damn Self just show up in Jerusalem? What could have been more convincing than Jesus Himself back from the dead, clothed in shining raiment, appearing to the Jewish and Roman leaders? After all, when the high priest asked Jesus, “Are you the Christ, the son of the Blessed One?” didn’t Jesus finally break silence and tell the court, “I am! And you (plural) will see the son of man seated at the right hand of power and coming with the clouds of heaven!” (Mark 14:61-62) Whatever happened to all that I’ll-show-you-and-then-you’ll-be-sorry blow and jive from Jesus’ trial? Why didn’t Jesus appear post mortem to his persecutors and settle the question of his resurrection then and there, once and for all, as he promised at his trial?
In The Adventure of the Final Problem, published in 1893 in The Strand magazine, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle killed off Sherlock Holmes. Twenty thousand enraged fans canceled their subscriptions to the magazine. When Doyle published The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1901 (he set the story before Holmes’ death), there were 30,000 new subscribers instantly. It is just a fact that humans make huge emotional investments in stories; more modern examples include, of course, Downton Abby, Harry Potter, and Game of Thrones.
Good fun, right? But religion has demonstrated a particular talent for exploiting our attachment to stories; even I appreciated Father Andrew Greeley’s charming description of the role of stories in Catholic piety. Obviously, however, many different, competing religions have claimed that their stories hold the key to achieving favor with the gods, and above all, for escaping death. Christianity has specialized in the eternal life promise: “You’ll get there if you just do this.”
By Robert Conner, with Interpolations by David Madison
[Note from David Madison: This article was written by Robert Conner, who asked me to review it and add whatever comments I wanted. I contributed about 15 percent of what you’re about to read.]
Chronologically speaking, the first person in history to mention a certain Joshua from Nazareth is Paul of Tarsus. These days Joshua of Nazareth is better know as Jesus—Jesus is the Latinized form of Iēsous, the Greek rendering of Yehoshua, Joshua, meaning “Yahweh delivers.” Joshua, the hero of the conquest of Canaan, embodied the hope that Gentile overlords would be overthrown, so Joshua was understandably a popular name among the Jews in Roman-occupied Palestine. In point of fact, archaeologists have discovered over 70 occurrences of the name Joshua/Jesus in Judean burials.
There is also the rapid development of the economies of these countries, plus the explosion of the media helped break the isolation of the believers and the Church's grip on their...
But no religion would survive if its own marks were able to take an outsider's perspective to their own received faith. Therefore every religion must already contain built-in...
I think less well-educated people all over the world say with great admiration things like, "Wow ! That guy is a genius. When he talks, nobody understands a word he is saying !!"
The majority of MAGAt's are too stupid to even understand what an AI is telling them, that's even if they had the nous to be able to use it. Though I've seen enough ex-MAGAt's...
One should not confuse intelligent with knowledgeable. AI is knowledgeable because of the vast data center that supports it. It can help people who are already open to get more knowledgeable. Ditto...
You told us this story once before, and it's good hearing it again. Far out! As Charles Ryder's father says in Brideshead Revisited, "Such a lot of nonsense."
As I replied to josephpalazzo, my comment was not produced by ChatGPT alone, so its intelligence in this particular case is not to be measured by its reply. I merely asked it to structure the ideas...
There is also the rapid development of the economies of these countries, plus the explosion of the media helped break the isolation of the believers and the Church's grip on their minds.
I think everyone here is aware of that, except the Jasons of this world. I actually fed ChatGPT the content and just asked it (him?) to write it all down nicely for me. I don't know what...
It serves the interest of religious authorities that their sacred texts be obscure. For distinction between authority and clarity, Martha Nussbaum’s “The Professor of Parody,” New Republic,...
I've tried to explain that I'm neither optimistic nor pessimistic, or perhaps I am optimistic and pessimistic by turns, depending on which set of assumptions I project from. (Sort like...
I wonder how much of this erosion of Roman Catholic Church moral authority results from the collapse of geocentrism playing out. The Catholic Church took a bold stand for the geocentrism of the...
If the "I" (Intelligence) part of "AI" (Artificial Intelligence) holds true, then ever since late 2022 when ChatGPT triggered the current wave of public-facing AI LLM chatbots,...
Just a reminder: ever since I've been posting on DC, I have said many, many times that (any) religion is based on a fairy tale. So comparing religion to movies and cartoons, it's not...
Well, sadly I don't share your optimism about AI. Sure it will do away with trucking jobs and other similar jobs but it won't raise human intelligence. There's a saying going around,...
I asked Gemini for historical examples of long-standing, bitter conflicts between neighbors that eventually ended. Gemini suggested (1) the Troubles of Northern Ireland, (2) the three wars between...
Hard to believe that Spain was among the first and it has now been 20 years. Ireland was 10 years ago, still 5 years ahead of Northern Ireland. I was surprised to see that quite a few South...
Well, I've worked long enough with a wide variety of people to have encountered a fair number of not-very-bright individuals who could still take directions and learn stuff. Stupidity also...
Obviously in Palestine/Israel the dynamic has been different for decades, so there is a lot of momentum in the direction of not coexisting. But I can't imagine any logical reason...
