Revealing the Reasoning of the Believer: A Review of Jason Long's Book, The Religious Condition

I really liked fellow team member Jason Long’s book, The Religious Condition: Answering and Explaining Christian Reasoning. In some ways he has done for the average person what I have done in my book for the college student, and for that I can only congratulate him. His book begins by taking a good hard look at why people believe and what believers must do in order to defend their beliefs. This encompasses the first half of the book, or 94 pages (5 chapters). The second half of his book (5 chapters) through to page 248 deals with answering a wide range of specific Christian objections, most of which came from believers who emailed him about his previous book, Biblical Nonsense.

I like his approach very much. In the second half of his book Long’s answers to Christian objections are solid and convincing for the most part (which provides many specific examples of what Long claims in the first half about how Christians reason). If you’ve read his first book you need to read this one just to see how he effectively deals with the many objections Christians have made against it. Even if you haven't read his first book this is a good read with intelligent answers.

But the first half of Long’s book intrigued me personally the most, especially since I was very familiar with the objections Christians make to our arguments. In this first half Long gives us many examples of how people come to believe strange things and how they in turn defend them, from Virgin Mary healings to UFO sightings to ghost hunters to Mormons to Muslims. Here he includes Christian beliefs as well, since people who adopt a religious faith usually do so based on when and where they were born. One of the lessons of this first part of his book is that “Human beings are unbelievably gullible and illogical creatures. The ability to think skeptically is not innate; it requires practice.” (p. 84). In this first part I believe Long made this point very effectively and it should cause all believers to question their faith, subject it to scrutiny and demand hard evidence to believe.

But what usually happens is that rather than “initiating an honest and impartial analysis” of any new evidence, believers “simply bury their heads in the sand and continue to observe whatever beliefs…their ancestors thought they needed thousands of years ago.” (p. 12). When looking at new evidence believers get into a defense mode where they seek to defend what they believe rather than trying to impartially weigh it, Long rightly charges. Impartiality might be an elusive goal, of course, but we should at least try to look at the evidence. Consider this example from Long: “If you wanted safety information on a used car, would it be wiser to trust the word of a used car salesman or the findings of a consumer report?” (p. 23). I think the answer is obvious. But Christians routinely will only trust other Christians for their information. They don’t trust outsiders. Why? If I were interested in car safety information I want an outsider’s perspective to get a different, more objective opinion. Sometimes I’ll even get a second opinion from doctors or dentists. Why is it that Christians will not read Long's book or mine for a second opinion? I challenge them to do so, even if they might eventually disagree. At least they would be honestly looking at the other side. That’s why I’ve initiated the Debunking Christianity Challenge in the first place. Start with Long’s book if you will. It’s as good of a place to start as any, especially if you are an average reader and you think you have impartially weighed the available evidence.

In this first half of his book Long clearly articulates concepts like “Cognitive Dissonance,” “Impression Management Theory,” and "Psychological Reactance Theory” and shows how believers defend their beliefs when faced with evidence to the contrary. One story he tells from the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology is about an evangelical group who believed there was going to be a nuclear attack so they went into a bomb shelter for 42 days before coming out to find no nuclear attack had happened. So what did they conclude? Not that they were wrong. No sirree Bob. “Rather than accepting the obvious conclusion that they had erred in their prediction, group members proclaimed that their beliefs had been instrumental in stopping the nuclear attack.” (p. 48).

Citing from the most authoritative books on persuasive psychology, one written by Robert B. Cialdini, titled Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, and another one written by Richard E. Petty and John Cacioppo, titled Attitudes and Persuasion: Classic and Contemporary Approaches, Long proffers several other examples of this kind of thinking among people who do the same thing with regard to everyday examples. Human beings truly are “unbelievably gullible and illogical creatures.” We’re more likely to buy unusual items when priced higher; we’re more likely to buy items that offer coupons even though there is no price advantage; we’re more likely to agree to absurd requests if preceded by ones of greater absurdity; we’re more likely to consider attractive people to be more intelligent; and we’re more likely to agree with the crowd we hang around because we want to fit in; and so on, and so on. (pp. 84, 88-89)

All believers must do is look at these things to realize that as humans we MUST be skeptical about what we believe! In my opinion these studies reinforce my claim that the default position is skepticism. To embrace this default position is to be an adult mature thinker with regard to what we believe. Instead of being mature, Long shows us that Christians do not seek to be skeptical about what they have been taught from their parents. They seek rather to defend what they believe. They are resistant to any contrary evidence. They seek to ignore it or look for any answer that might solve the cognitive dissonance this new evidence creates just to maintain their comfort zone, even if it is a non-answer, a glib answer, a far fetched answer.

Long tells us that we believe both because of emotional reasons and because of logical reasons and he illustrates this with two people, one who has the fear of heights and another who thinks old skyscrapers are not as safe as newer ones. (pp. 76-77). The latter person has intellectual doubt about the older skyscrapers and must be given reasons to think otherwise. But the former person who has a fear of heights has an emotional problem. He knows people go up to the top of the skyscraper and come down safely. So we cannot convince him by showing him the steel beams, or the safety ratings of that building. He must face his fears. He must get to the first floor and look around. When he’s comfortable on the first floor he must then go up to the second floor, and so on until he gets to the top. This may take a long time and he must be willing to face his fears. This, Long argues, is the plight of the believer, since he thinks there isn’t any good evidence to believe in the first place, and I agree.

Believers think we’re wrong about this but I challenge them to consider the possibility they are wrong for a moment. Consider a more objective perspective coming from two former believers who have investigated the reasons to believe and found them seriously wanting. Given the overwhelming psychological data Long presents you’ve got to at least consider this as a real possibility, and if that’s the case then Long says that to free you from your religious indoctrination “we must delve into the history of the individual’s beliefs to find the avenue from which they originate.” (p. 77) This echoes what I've said about the Outsider Test for Faith. When testing your beliefs as an outsider you need to revisit what the reasons were for adopting your faith in the first place. What were they? Most of them were clearly emotional, weren't they? Were they intellectual? If so, when looking back on these reasons do you now consider those initial reasons less than persuasive? Would those same reasons convince you to believe today or are they much too simplistic? What I argue is that you initially adopted your faith for less than good reasons but from that moment onward you see the world through colored glasses by which you now analyze and examine the evidence. YOU NEED TO TAKE THEM OFF, is what Long and I argue, as best as you can. Then do what Julia Sweeney told us she did. She put on her “No God Glasses” for just a few seconds and looked around at the world as if God did not exist. Then she put them on for a minute and then put them on for an hour, and then a day. To me this would be just like climbing up that skyscraper Long wrote about. That’s one way to face your fears.

But fears they are, Long says, especially since believers think they have a “mind-reading god” always present who monitors their every thought. (p. 74). With such a mind-reading God, believers are just too fearful of being honest with themselves about their doubt. So they refuse to truly look at the evidence to the contrary. To such people Long suggests telling God you are sincerely going to look at the evidence “to determine if the Bible is really his word. Ask forgiveness in advance if you feel you must…” This is great advice. If God really cares he should allow you to be intellectually honest with yourself.

All in all, as I said, I really liked this book and I highly recommend it. It is unusual to other comparable works because it seeks to articulate the real reasons why people believe and reveals the mental gymnastic contortions needed to defend ignorant and comfortable beliefs. This type of book just may go a long way to help Christians be honest about their delusional beliefs.

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

Oh, and if you really want to test whether petitionary prayer works, and not just play games, Long offers a unique test that should surely go down in the books (something about arsenic and prayer, but I don't think any Christian should try it. pp. 86-87)

Eric On Believing Despite Not Being Able to Explain the Atonement

I'm producing several posts called: "Reality Check: What Must Be the Case if Christianity is True?" In a recent one I wrote: "17) That although there is no rational explanation for why Jesus had to die on the cross to atone for our sins, his death atoned for our sins." From this a discussion ensued between Eric, who is a Christian Ph.D. student, and me. It's interesting to see where discussions lead and I want to highlight this one out of the many other issues that were raised in the comments.

Read more »

Gen. 2-3, Normal-form Game Matrix Shows That God Chose The Worst Outcome

When presented with a choice of outcomes the rational decision maker will choose the outcome with a positive payoff, but not God.

- God is Omnipotent
- God made the universe
- God made the world
- God made Adam and Eve.
- God is Omniscient.
- The best way to understand something is to build it.

God must have known the properties and tolerances of everything he created, just like a baker and just like an engineer. Since he is omniscient and has a plan, the events that played out in the Garden Of Eden should have come as no surprise to Him.

DECISION AND GAME THEORY
Decision Theory and Game theory were developed to help make predictions about outcomes and analyze how certain outcomes come about. It is used heavily in economics and evolutionary biology. Using one aspect of them, we can assign relative values to events, organize them in a matrix, iterate through all the possible outcomes and derive a value that is equal to the relative value of the outcome. The outcome with highest value is the "dominant strategy", any outcome lower that that dominant strategy is called a "dominated strategy".

"Stochastic Dominance: If action A has a better payoff than action B under each individual state of nature, then we say that action B is stochastically dominated by action A. If the payoff matrix truly represents every thing the decision maker hopes (or fears) to receive from the decision in question, then no rational decision maker will ever choose to perform action B."
Whalen, Thomas. "Payoff Matrix and Decision Rule", Whalens.org. Date of Internet Publication Unknown. Sponsoring organization unknown. 07 Sep. 2008. [http://www.whalens.org/Sofia/choice/matrix.htm].

OTHER RELATED LINKS
- Wikipedia, Stochastic Dominance
- Answers.com, Stochastic Dominance

IF ADAM HAD GOTTEN SICK AND DIED AFTER EVE HAD GOTTEN PREGNANT, THEY PROBABLY WOULD HAVE LEARNED THEIR LESSON AND ADAMS OFFSPRING WOULD HAVE POPULATED THE WORLD ANYWAY.
Adam and Eve are like a cake. The Baker knows what it takes to make them turn out a certain way. God must have known what it takes to make Adam and Eve turn out a certain way. For example if god had made the fruit smell like week old road kill with maggots living in it, chances are they would not have eaten the fruit or would have gotten sick and died. If they had gotten sick, threw up and one of them died, then that probably would have taught them the lesson God wanted them to learn without any ambiguity, but since the fruit was fashioned in a way that appealed to them, they ate it. In fact god built desire into Eve and therefore into Adam (since Eve was derived from Adam) and since she didn't know the difference between good and evil, she couldn't know that disobeying god was evil. However, she did have the desire and an agent telling her what she desired and liked to hear (1, 2, 3). Liking something is neither right or wrong, good or evil, it just simply is. Separate the "like" from what is right and wrong. Good and Evil, for the most part, are cultural judgments. They underwent some sort of transformation which caused them to realize they were naked, good from evil and introduced sin into themselves and therefore indirectly to the world.

KEY EVENTS IN THE FALL OF MAN RELATIVE TO THIS ARTICLE
- God made the man
- planted the garden
- then made the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil grow in the garden
- and placed the man in it
- warned the man about the tree
- by telling him he would die using the word die in an ambiguous non-standard way.
in that order.

2:7 Then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.

2:8 The LORD God planted a garden toward the east, in Eden; and there He placed the man whom He had formed.

2:9 Out of the ground the LORD God caused to grow every tree that is pleasing to the sight and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

2:15 Then the LORD God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it.

2:16 The LORD God commanded the man, saying, "From any tree of the garden you may eat freely;

2:17 but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die."

DERIVING THE NORMAL-FORM GAME / PAYOFF MATRIX
To derive the Normal-form game payoff matrix, we use analytical schemes (AKA "thinking tools") known as a Time-line chart, a weighted ranking matrix, a causal diagram and an event tree. It would take too much time and space to do some of them here, but I have already done some of them in my other articles referenced below. However, since they aren't very complicated, we can do them in our heads for now and create the matrices. We broke the events down and sorted them chronologically. Then we made an event tree, a causal diagram and then assigned values to them in the weighted ranking scale.

In the weighted ranking, it is necessary to place a value on events relative to each other. In other words, an obedient Adam in the garden is more valuable than a disobedient Adam in the garden, so the Obedient Adam gets a higher value. Systematically iterating through the possible combination's yielded the weighted ranking scale shown below.


Now we derive the columns and rows based on the causal flow diagram and the event trees to create our Normal-form game / Payoff Matrix.



In the first row and first column cell, we can see that the combination of "No Adam" ( equivalent to 0 according to our weighted ranking) and the "Tree in" [the garden] (equivalent to 1 according to our weighted ranking) results in a score of 0, 1 for a total value of 1. In the second cell in that row, we get a score of 0, 0 for a total value of zero. The chart below reflects the total value with regard to Adam in each row. As we can see, God clearly chose the worst outcome for Adam in his plan.



The question we are left with after thinking this through is "why?". Some possible reasons are

- that the story is folklore
- that god artificially created a problem so he could solve it as Jesus

I'll explore more of them in my follow on articles.

REFERENCE AND FURTHER READING

Articles supporting Non-Historicity of Adam and Eve
A. Disqualifying Adam And Eve

Articles supporting Internal Inconsistency in the story of the Fall of Man
1. Gen. 2:16-3:24, Adam And Eve Were Mentally Incompetent
2. Gen. 2:7-3:6, God Should Have Known That Adam Would Disobey
3. Gen. 2:7-3:6, Adams Sin Was An Emergent Behavior
4. Gen. 2:6-9, God Ignored Adams Admonishment Option

PRIOR COMMENTS FROM FIRST POST DATE
This post was reformatted and the comments were lost. It was reposted and the comments were included as part of the text.

bahramthered said...
How many times are we going to debate the graden around here?

Lets move onto something new before people start moving onto new blogs.
3:47 PM, September 07, 2008

oliver said...
While I do appreciate the use of Game Theory, we have to realize that Game Theory will only convince those who are Game Theorist (i.e. not people like my mother who will read the Genesis account and then tell me a beautiful story about why it's bad to disobey God.)
4:20 PM, September 07, 2008

charles w. said...
Thanks for another useless post, Lee.
4:25 PM, September 07, 2008

lee randolph said...
No one is forcing you to do anything, and I recommend that you read other blogs to make you a more well rounded person. Are blogs mutually exclusive? If you don't understand the significance of something, just ask.

I'm writing for the fence-sitter and casual believer.
There's no point in preaching to the choir is there?

do me a favor. Write out romans five (so you understand it as well as possible), then cross out all references to adam and tell me what you have left over.

FYI, I have a plan and a strategy for this argument that takes me out to thanksgiving if I do one a week. After that I'll move on to Cain and Abel and keep on until I get to the end of Gen. 11.

So I guess I won't be your favorite blogger.

In my opinion christianity is never going to be debunked until the source is discredited. Fighting a battle on multiple fronts, rarely succeeds. Debating hard to grasp concepts that leave wiggle room for christians, in my view, is not going to do it, especially when some of them don't get that fact that god having a plan and being omniscient negates free will.

Adam is at the root of christianity. As long as there is credibility for adam, there is credibility for christianity.
4:36 PM, September 07, 2008

lee randolph said...
forewarned is forearmed.

Just so you know,
here is my plan for "the fall of man" articles for the coming months. the date in brackets is the estimated publish date, the name of the article follows along with its viewpoint.

[20080914] Blaming the Victim, psychology related

[20080921] God Caused The Problem of Sin so He could Solve it, psychology related

[20080928] Talking Snake, humor, paleontology related

[20081005] God Was Not Omniscient in the Garden, Logic Related

[20081012] Comparing The History Of The Needle, anthropolgy related

[20081019] Comparing The History of Agriculture, anthropology related

[20081026] Sex and Death, You Can't Argue With Success, psychology related

[20081102] Adam and Eve are FOLKLORE, summary of the previous articles

[20081109] Analyzing Romans 5, argument analysis, informal logic related
4:49 PM, September 07, 2008

lee randolph said...
Hi Oliver,
I'm not a game theorist either, but if I get it, so will other people.

I think that you do a dis-service to your grandmother by underestimating her.

people surprise you when you think you know what they're capable of, which weakens your position.

the take home is that we can see by thinking it through, that the outcome was what was intended. Now we have to figure out why.

and besides that, I'm trying to introduce some tools of thinking and demonstrate how to apply them to real life problems.
5:12 PM, September 07, 2008

richard said...
This theory and the post in general is nonsensical to say the least!
6:23 PM, September 07, 2008

lee randolph said...
Hi Richard,
well, you did say the least,
so why is it 'nonsensical'?
6:33 PM, September 07, 2008

stan, the half-truth teller said...
I'm just guessing, but perhaps Richard thinks it nonsensical because he doesn't get it?

Perhaps he doesn't understand how it could be that god's alleged decision to create this world is worse than choosing not to create anything at all.

Perhaps he doesn't realize that because he chose to create (assuming the existence of god for the sake of argument), god is culpable in both the successes and failures of his creations (if he is omnipotent and omniscient).

Perhaps, rather than any of this, he is lazy and a fool.

--
Stan
8:42 PM, September 07, 2008

bahramthered said...
Lee; I like this blog since I've been here I've learned a lot. New arguments and such.

But still on the garden I havn't learned anything in the last two posts and honestly am starting to get bored with it.

I don't know about anyone else but I don't have time to keep coming back to blog that's not exploring something new.

But it's your blog (among others).
8:48 PM, September 07, 2008

lee randolph said...
Hi Bahram,
what topics would like to see explored?
brainstorm a little bit, give me some topics.

maybe i have something in draft that I can finish up post for you. I have lots of scraps of ideas and notes in my googledocs.
12:20 AM, September 08, 2008

tigg13 said...
I say, keep it up Lee!

Providing several arguments from different sides of the question only solidifies your position.

And providing alternate arguments just makes those of us who find ourselves crossing swords with christians better prepared.
1:26 AM, September 08, 2008

lee randolph said...
tiggers are wonderful things!
your check is in the mail.
;-)
6:42 AM, September 08, 2008

bahramthered said...
Tig; last couple of these feel the same, just explained differently. Least to me.

Lee;

So far your adam theory been intresting I just think it's kinda beating a dead horse at this point.

Topics I'd like to explore;

Why the bible is so pro slavery.

God's war with the egyptian gods (I only know a little based on a couple semi factual movies)

Some of the more ridiculous genisis claims (always fun). Mainly what happens after the ark (Like a drunk Noah cursing one of his kids into slavery forever and god backing him on it)

And exactly how god reconciles the claim that witchcraft (the wiccan kind) is evil
7:25 AM, September 08, 2008

lee randolph said...
Hi bahram,
if you want to see what has been written on DC about a topic, you can use the search field in the top left of the screen.

- here is a link to all the articles with a "slavery" label
- I've never heard of gods war with egyptian gods, maybe you could be more specific?
- I plan on doing an article on why the noahs ark is folklore, but you can see what my schedule is so it'll be a while
- do a search for witches in the search field.

another option is that you can research one of these topics on your own and submit an article to us for publishing. If you're interested in that, I'll give you an email address to submit it to.
8:15 AM, September 08, 2008

rich said...
Hi Lee,
I wanted to explore a possibility that the assigned values for Adam in obey and Adam in disobey. If these values are based on a payoff, then what payoff do you base these values on? It seems as though they are placed on Adam obeying and remaining in the garden and disobeying and being kicked out. So if that is the payoff then I would agree with the values. But if the payoff is something further down the road then the garden, maybe it changes things.
First you must realize that I am looking at this from LDS doctrine, which differs a bit from evangelist doctrine with regard to the fall. I did post a link to another blog article in one of your other posts that I hope you had time to read.
LDS say that Adam was in a state of innocence in the garden, didn't know good from evil, they wouldn't have a reference to understand joy and sorrow, maybe some other differences. They would remain in this state until they gained knowledge of good and evil. I also began to argue before that they didn't understand that they were naked, which is a key factor, in having offspring. I would agree that at some point they could figure out how to have kids but then the kids would be in the same innocent state.
In the plan of salvation that I know, our goal is to become like God. We have to have the knowledge of good and evil, be able to make choices and learn through those choices that consequences come of all choices, good or bad. As we make bad choices, we see the negative consequences and make changes. If we make good choices we see good consequences. We gain a working knowledge of good and evil, through the choices we make here. If we succeed in learning to make good choices and correct the mistakes, then we can become perfect, eventually, like God is. So if we are left in the garden in a state of innocence without the knowledge and experience necessary to progress.
You spoke before about your dogs. I also have dogs, and I leave them inside when I am not home. I hate coming home and cleaning piles up. Lots of people told me to use the old newspaper rub their nose in the pile method to train the dogs. I don’t like that because I doubt the dog wants poop on his nose. Instead when I come home and find a pile, I give the dog no attention, completely ignore it, since he likes to play and have my undivided attention, this is not desirable to the dog. When I come home to no pile, I over emphasize my attention and play time with him. It wasn’t very long before I had no stinking piles to clean up when I got home. This is true freedom to the dog, he can roam around the house when I am gone, doesn’t have to be locked in some room, and I can trust that he will want to please.
Now in your dog story, you effectively removed your dogs from the kitchen of Eden, and keep them from entering the kitchen, some might even suggest that you force them out because they have no choice in the matter, so they won’t put their nose on the table of life. I’m not proposing that I am a better dog God than you, but your dogs are restricted in their behavior, being removed from the room, and they have no choice but to chew toys or sleep until you grant them access to the kitchen again. I’m sure you would rather have the dogs free to come and go as they please and choose not to put their nose on the table. Once again, true freedom to the dogs.
God would like the same from us, being able to have every choice available to us and be trusted to always make the right choice. Coming here, removed from his presence, to learn the consequences of our choices is our time to learn from our mistakes, keep our noses off the table and piles off the floor because we choose to.
If this is correct then I would swap the two values because being innocently oblivious to the knowledge of good and evil means we would never be able to become like God, which would be more desirable than existing in a garden forever without experiencing joy.
3:11 PM, September 08, 2008

rich said...
Just a note I thought of, the same trick hasn't worked to keep my dog of the furniture while I'm gone.
3:13 PM, September 08, 2008

lee randolph said...
Hi Rich,
welcome back,
It sounds like you are a better Dog God than I am and a better Dog God than god is.

How does the way you handle your dogs compare to the way god handled adam?

It sounds like your dogs get the extended version of the prisoners dilemma, they get a chance to react to subsequent encounters. Like a training phase or something. Or have I misunderstood?
4:28 PM, September 08, 2008

lee randolph said...
doGs will be doGs won't they? what to do, what to do?
4:45 PM, September 08, 2008

anonymous said...
I think the problem here is that virtually every mainline religion that maintains the Hebrew scriptures regard this story as allegorical? I always thought that the main idea here is that there is that we are imperfect and incapable of perfecting ourselves. I rather like that "lesson".

If you are off arguing with the crazies about a literal reading of the Old Testament, I can think of a billion other ways to spend time productively. On the other hand, if you can read a literary myth for its intrinsic worth, perhaps you'd contribute something useful.
9:37 PM, September 08, 2008

evan said...
Anonymous ... you're simply wrong.

40% of AMERICANS believe the earth is less than 10000 years old.

That means a majority of Christians in the US (about 75-80% of the US population is Christian) believe in the literal story of Genesis.

If you think we ought to argue against a minority position rather than target overtly crazy beliefs that are held by the majority of Christians, you don't understand the purpose of this site.
11:08 PM, September 08, 2008

lee randolph said...
anonymous,
yea, what evan said,
and moreover you didn't read this comment above
"do me a favor. Write out romans five (so you understand it as well as possible), then cross out all references to adam and tell me what you have left over. ....Adam is at the root of christianity. As long as there is credibility for adam, there is credibility for christianity."

if you cross out all references to adam, what you have is an empty assertion that the killing of Jesus had some mystical meaning.

If you've ever worked in security, crowd control, you know that, theoretically, to handle a riot, you have to take out the leaders. That was a tumultuous time in jerusalem, the romans needed to maintain control, and so when jesus showed up with his gang of merry men carrying swords, the authorities caught him and hung him out to dry.

Paul used some pre-existing biases to create this rationalization out of cognitive dissonance that created a nice neat frame put Jesus in for the rest.

does that clear it up for you?

Its not about arguing over myths, its about stopping FRAUD.
11:30 PM, September 08, 2008

richard said...
Bahramhered,

Yes, I agree. To quote Einstein, "Insanity means doing the same thing over and over expecting different results."
12:21 AM, September 09, 2008

lee randolph said...
Richard,
of course you would because you have no rebuttal to my argument so you just attack me personally.

typical christian strategy.
Might makes right. Biblical principle.
12:24 AM, September 09, 2008

richard said...
Ha, ha, do you honestly believe that you can disprove the God of the universe by using a silly game matrix?
12:43 AM, September 09, 2008

lee randolph said...
Hi Richard,
bad move #2,
ridicule.
Got any rebuttals handy?
1:21 AM, September 09, 2008

lee randolph said...
oh and richard,
in case you didn't get the memo,
"disprove" presumes there is something proven. No one has proven any "god of the universe", but feel free to try your hand at it. Maybe you can get him to roust me out of bed in the morning.
3:57 AM, September 09, 2008

lee randolph said...
Triablogue has a response to this article. They really seem to have put a lot of work into it, but in the end its really only nay-saying.
Heres the link to it.
However it is a good example of an argument from ignorance premised by a conclusion drawn from unverifiable sources.
I recommend you go take a look at it and see what I had to say about it.
9:40 AM, September 09, 2008

Answering Objections to Visions: Part Three

Answering Objections-Part Three

In my previous essays, I did my best to answer the objections raised to the hypothesis of visions that I advocate for Christian origins. My previous essays, however, do not exhausively answer all the objections that are usually raised and so more essays are needed. In this essay, I will address an objection raised by William Lane Craig, in his book Assessing the New Testament Evidence for Historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus.

This objection is that the New Testament differentiates between visions on one hand and appearances on the other hand. Any hypothesis or theory of visions (which I argue for) or hallucinations (which I do not argue for), or what-have-you, doesn't explicate this difference and so any visionary hypothesis cannot in principle account for appearances because they do not fit the nature of a vision. In fact, Bill Craig, goes as far as to say that he believes that this is a fatal flaw to the vision hypothesis, like the one that I advocate. More than this, he explicitly challenges skeptics to explain the difference. While I willingly accept such a challenge, I hope that such a challenge is not stated with the intention of forcing a conversion among skeptics. I regret that Bill Craig is wasting his breath if he thinks a skeptic like me would gladly and cheerfully convert if I could not meet such a challenge. I have already spoken elsewhere what the personal consequences for me would be if I came to conclude the Christian gospel was valid: I would take my own life; I would see no reason to delay the inevitability of Hell. Never-the-less I enjoy a challenge and the more confrontational it is, the more I love to rise to the challenge, especially if answering it means putting confrontational Christian apologists in their places and just shutting them up! Craig puts forth this distinction in his book Assessing the New Testament Evidence for the Historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus, as follows:

"On the difference between visions and appearances of Christ, see the discussion by Grass, Ostergeschehen, pp. 189-207. Although Grass discounts most of the visions recorded in Acts as legendary, he nevertheless concludes, primarily on the basis of Paul's testimony, that the Easter appearances took place within a community that enjoyed visions, revelations, and estatic experiences (I Cor. 12-14; II Cor. 12: 1-5; Gal. 2:1; Acts 16:9). The community recognized, however, that the appearances of Christ were restricted to a small circle designated as witnesses and that even to them Jesus did not continually re-appear, but appeared only at the beginning of their new life.

"One cannot follow Grass, however, when he attempts to draw the essential distrinction between an appearance of Christ and a vision as being solely in content, viz.., in an appearance Christ was seen as exalted (Ibid., pp. 229-32) This is undoubtedly true, but surely a vision could be of the exalted Christ, too; indeed how could a Christian believer have a vision of the unexalted Christ? Both the vision of Stephen and the book of Revelation show that the visions of the exalted Lord which were not appearances were possible for the early Church. It is of no matter whether Stephen's vision be an unhistorical embellishment as Grass thinks; the point is that the church of Luke's day was prepared to accept that Stephen saw a vision of Christ. Grass' argument that Revelation is not a vision but a picture story because of the many portraits of Christ seems to presuppose that visions must be monotone. At any rate, the point is Revelation presents itself as a vision, thus showing again that the church did not object out of hand visions of the exalted Christ.

"Nor can it be said that the distinguishing element in an appearance as opposed to a vision was the comissioning, for appearances were known which lacked this element (the 500 brethren). What then distinguished an appearance from a vision? It seems to me that the most natural answer to this question is that an appearance involved extra-mental phenomena, something's actually appearing, whereas a visions, even if caused by God, was purely in the mind. Certainly this seems to be the way in which the New Testament concieves of the distinction. Visions, even veridical visions sent by God, are exclusively mental phenomena, whereas Jesus's appearances always involve an extra-mental appearing in the real, external world. The resistance to this conclusion among contemporary critics seem largely due to a philosophico-theological rejection of the physicalism of the gospels. On this basis, Grass superimposes the form of heavenly visions onto the resurrection appearances, and contemporary scholarship has followed him in this. (See Alsup, Stories, pp. 32, 54.) But if this is done, then-apart from it's being exegetically unjustified- it seems to me impossible to differentiate a vision and appearance, which the early church clearly did. It might be said that a vision, in modern parlance, a subjective vision, that is, a self-induced visionary seeing, but that an appearance is an objective vision, that is, a visionary seeing induced by God.

"This distinction, however, will not help to solve the problem, for so-called objective visions were experienced in the church and these were not ranked as appearances. For example, Peter's vision in Acts 10: 9-17 was certainly "objective" , for it was caused by God (10: 28), but it was not in the same class of phenomena as the appearances of Jesus. More the point, Stephen's vision of Jesus was probably "objective"- Luke does not want us to take it as a self-induced hallucination-, but this was not an appearance of Jesus. But what is the difference between what Stephen saw and what Paul experienced, such that the latter could be called an appearance of Jesus ( Acts 9: 17; contrast the vision to Ananias himself in 9:10 which was not an appearance)? What is the difference between Paul's opportunity on the Damascus road "to see the Just One to hear a voice from his mouth" (22: 14) and his subsequent appearance in the temple when he fell into a trance and saw Jesus speaking to him (22:17)? It is of no help to speak of subjective vs. objective visions, for the mind of the Jewish/Christian believer, all genuine visions were "objective"-anything else would be just an illusion. It seems to me, therefore, despite the modern antipathy to "physicalism," that the difference between a visions and an appearance of Jesus was that only in the latter did he actually appear in the external world. The support for this view is two-fold: 1.) exegetically this is consistently the difference between the two; 2.) if one rejects this view, then the distinction between an appearance and a vision which was made in the early church threatens to dissolve." ( William Lane Craig, Assessing the New Testament Evidence for the Historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus footnote pgs. 68-69)"

First of all, I am not all that convinced that such a distinction really exists or that it is as strong as some Christians make it out to be. Furthermore, if I was to accept that such a distinction did exist, I would have to conclude that such a distinction is no accident nor did it arise because of divine revelation. I would conclude that such a distinction evolved in the Christian community for apologetical purposes. The scope of this essay, therefore, is to illustrate why I am not convinced that the distinction is that strong and subsequently to show precisely how such a distinction originated as a matter of apologetics in early Christianity. I believe that if such a distinction exists, then its origins as an apologetic is precisely what critics like myself would come to expect on the basis that the visionary hypothesis of Christian origins is valid. In other words, I believe that the visionary hypothesis that I am advocating actually can be made to predict that such a distinction may evolve in the early Christian communities as an apologetic, especially against heretics and critics. So let me first deal with the two answers I have proposed, that 1.) such a distinction might not exist or be as strong as Christians claim it to be and 2.) that granting such a distinction exists, it originated as apologetics against heretics and critics.

First of all, I want to make a qualifying remark about this essay. I want to state my main counter-theses in order to answer Craig's thesis and then defend my theses with arguments against his objections to them. This essay is not meant to be an extensive defense of my arguments nor an extenisve survey of historical and textual evidence for my counter-theses. I simply wish to state Craig's thesis and my arguments in terms of a counter-thesis, thereby answering Craig's objections to my counter-theses. An extensive review of historical and textual evidence will be forthcoming in a later essay or essay series and will commence as soon as I feel I have completed my analysis of arguments for and against my theses in greater detail which will take some time.

Why is it that I think that such a distinction might not really exist or be as strong as some apologists make it out to be? It seems to me that if such a distinction exists, it seems to originate with the canonical gospels themselves. Going earlier into the New Testament corpus, especially the written works of apostles such as St. Paul, such a distinction doesn't seem to exist. In 1st Corinthians 15: 3-7, it has been argued that Paul is passing on a creed to the Corinthians, one that he recieved. The creed has a list of appearances of the risen Jesus to various people. Jesus died according to the Scriptures, was buried, rose from the dead according to the Scriptures, appeared to Peter, then to the Twelve, to more than 500 people, to James, to the disciples, and finally to Paul who came into the fold rather late. The Greek word for "appear" in this creed is ophthe. Is this significant? I believe that is is. In another letter, generally regarded as authentically Pauline by many New Testament critical scholars, is the letter to the Galatian Christian Church. In it, Paul recounts how he was converted by God. Paul uses a word for God revealing Christ to Paul, and the Greek word is not ophthe but a word meaning "revelation" Is this significant? I believe that it is. From what I understand, this Greek word in Galatians is used normally to denote visions. It is the same word used in the canonical New Testament book of "Revelation". The significance of these Greek words can now be understood. I take it that Paul had a visionary experience on the road to Damascus as the word suggests in Galatians. If one accepts both 1st Corinthians 15 and the creed as authentically Pauline, and furthermore, as perfectly compatible and harmonizable with what is written in Galatians, then one has to conclude that the Greek word meaning "revelation" in Galatians is describing the same exact experience as the Greek word ophthe in 1st Corinthians 15.

Futhermore, Paul uses the same Greek word ophthe to describe the appearance of Jesus to others in the 1st Corinthians 15 creed. To me, this means one of two things: that since both Greek words ophthe and the one meaning "revelation" are both used to describe Paul's Damascus experience, that it was necessarily a vision. I take this to mean that Paul had a visionary experience on the road to Damascus and that the Greek word for ophthe in this context necessarily means a visionary experience. I also conclude that it's prima facie likely that since the same Greek word ophthe is used to describe the appearance of the risen Jesus to others, then others had visionary experiences involving altered-states-of-conciousness as well. Thus I conclude that such a distinction is either weak or nonexistent. True, I am willing to grant that the Greek word ophthe can be more than a visionary experience of some sort, but I believe that additional textual indicators must exist to modify it in such a way to make it mean that more than a mere visionary experience happened. There would have to be textual indicators/modifiers to show something physically and tangeably happened that could not be otherwise if it was an actual phyiscal and tangeable encounter with the risen Jesus who ate fish and drank in front of the disciples, something no visionary experience, whether to a singular person or collectively to a group of people at a time, could cause. I don't believe that any such textual indicators or modifiers exist in the 1st Corinthians 15 creed or in the letter to the Galatians. I, therefore conclude that it's prima facie likely that all of the postmortem appearances of Jesus were, in fact, originally visionary experiences involving altered-states-of-conciousness and nothing more.

Let me grant for the sake of discussion that there really was a distinction in the early Christian Churches between visions and appearances. Does such a distinction destroy the visionary hypothesis that I advocate? Not at all. In fact, I believe that my visionary hypothesis can be made to predict that such an distinction would arise as an apologetic against heresy and criticism, especially those of Gnostics and other heretics who share a heresy in early Christian times, the heresy known as "Docetism". This was a heresy that Jesus didn't have an actual body of flesh and blood, only that he appeared to have one. For this essay, I had originally planned to use Charles Talbert's work Luke and the Gnostics but I have since learned from very recent e-mail correspondence with Dr. Talbert, that he considers this work (an expansion of his doctoral dissertation) to be "woefully outdated" and has recommended to me a very recently updated book of his Reading Luke which was published by him in 2002 and contains his updated views on the subject. I have yet to purchase this book and fully read it and so I cannot at this time incorporate his recent work into my essay. However, I do believe that however outdated Talbert's original work on the subject was, Craig's critique of Talbert's argument, that Luke's narrative served as an anti-Docetic apologetic, fails. Let me quote Craig at length and provide my own critique of his rebuttal at various points.

"Actually, there are postive reasons to think that the physicalism of the gospels is not an anti-Docetic apologetic: (1) As we have seen, for a Jew the very terms 'resurrection' entailed a physical resurrection of the dead man in the tomb. The notion of a 'spiritual resurrection' was not merely unknown; it was a contradiction in terms. Therefore, in saying that Jesus was raised and appeared, the early believers must have understood this in physical terms."

How was a "spiritual resurrection" a contradiction in terms? While I don't necessarily adhere to the theory that the earliest Christians believed that Jesus had a spiritually resurrected body, I don't see anything as particular refuting it. The best case for the spiritual resurrection, in my judgement, has been provided by historian Richard Carrier in his essay "The Spiritual Body of Christ and the Legend of the Empty Tomb". I think that Carrier has a very interesting case but I lack the scholarly knowledge to know for absolutely sure (such as a good knowlege of Greek). I am aware of some criticisms of Carrier's arguments and I believe that any produced by such folks like Michael Licona deserve serious consideration ( I find it hard to take seriously the apologetics of Robert Turkel; am I to suppose that Turkel, who thought that the Greek word for "rise", anestemi, was used "twice for emphasis" in the gospels knows more about Greek than Richard Carrier? Am I to believe that Turkel is a better intellect than Carrier? Yeah, right! If I am to accept that, why not little green men on Mars?)

I really don't buy into most of the critiques I have seen of the "spiritual resurrection". I believe that it's a mistake made by both advocates and critics of this theory of Christian origins, to see it as a matter of "physical vs. spiritual". I believe that New Testament scholars like Robert Gundry have amply shown that the Greek word for body, soma was always and necessarily a physical substance (see his work Soma in Biblical Theology). I believe that it's better to view the argument over the "spiritual resurrection" in terms of "flesh vs. a lack of flesh". If the earliest Christians really did believe that Jesus was spiritually resurrected, I don't believe the earliest Christians would've seen Jesus' body as being nonphysical. This, I consider to be an erroneous view. Rather, I believe that if the earliest Christians would've seen Jesus as being spiritually resurrected, I believe that they would've seen the body as a physical body, just one lacking flesh (because it was made of the same heavenly substance as the sun, moon, and stars were; these were also soma lacking in flesh!). If the concept of a "spiritual resurrection" really is the best way to see Paul's discussion of the resurrection in 1st Corinthians 15: 37-50, the distinction between "natural bodies" on one hand and "spiritual bodies" on the other hand, would best be understood as a distinction between bodies (soma) containing flesh (the natural, earthly bodies) and bodies (soma) lacking flesh. All are physical but not all contain flesh. I have to repeat again; I don't necessarily advocate the theory of Christian origins that Carrier proposes. I think it's an interesting theory and I don't ultimately know how to evaluate it simply for the reason that I am not, yet, a New Testament scholar myself.

I leave the argument about a "spiritual resurrection" as an open question that I would like to investigate in graduate school when I have more scholarly resources and knowledge to do so. For the time being, I would also like to say that I have no problem accepting that the earliest Christians believed Jesus to be raised with a body of flesh and I am willing to accept this as a core historical fact and that the "spiritual resurrection" was not something believed by anyone. Even accepting this, I don't exactly think that Craig has succeeded in rebutting the contention that the resurrection narratives of Luke and John were anti-Docetic narratives. He can try and try as he may wish but I hope to show that he hasn't proven his case.

"It was Docetism which was the response to this physicalism, not the other way around. The physical resurrection is thus primitve and prior, Docetism being the later reaction of theological and philosophical reflection."

This is fine; I have no qualms with this. I can accept that the earliest Christians, such as Jesus' immediate disciples believed Jesus to have been resurrected in a body of flesh. I can accept as a core historical fact that many of Jesus' disciples believed that Jesus appeared to them in a risen body of flesh and that the visionary experiences involving altered-states-of-consciousness that they had were visions of a risen Jesus with a fleshly body. I can see Docetism as emerging as a response to this and thus the resurrection narratives serving as rebuttal to this heresy and reinforcing the earlier, yet mistaken view of the earliest disciples. It doesn't mean I accept for a moment that Jesus really did appear to his disciples and ate fish in front of them on the eve of Easter in Jerusalem as Luke's gospel says. I have no problem with a belief in a risen Jesus of bodily flesh being primitive and prior to Docetism.

I believe that the point to remember is that the Greek word for "appear" in the 1st Corinthians 15 creed only means that the groups who believed that they saw Jesus, believed that Jesus simply appeared to them. Docetism would argue, later, that Jesus only appeared to have a body of flesh. The disciples mistook the apparent body of flesh for the real thing and were thus fooled into thinking Jesus had a risen body of flesh. The key point of the Docetists was that Jesus didn't have a body of flesh but only appeared to have a body of flesh. In other words, the Docetists argued, true, that Jesus didn't have a body of flesh, but argued more importantly, that Jesus only appeared to have one. No doubt that the disciples of Jesus mistook an apparent body of flesh for the real thing, but the argument of Docetists here was simple: appearances are decieving and the disciples were victims of this misunderstanding.

"(2) Moreover, had purely 'spiritual appearances' been original, then it is difficult to see how the physical appearances could have developed. For (a) the offense of Docetism would then be removed, since the Christians, too, believed in purely spiritual appearances, and (b) the doctrine of physical appearances would have been counter-productive as an apologetic, both to Jews and to pagans; to Jews because they did not accept an individual resurrection within history and to pagans because their belief in the immortality of the soul could not accomodate the crudity of physical resurrection. The church therefore have retained its purely spiritual appearances."

Once again, I believe that it's best to see any doctrine of a "spiritual resurrection" as involving a physical body yet lacking flesh. I don't believe that there would've been any denial of physicality. The point would've been that the earliest Christians, if the theory of a "spiritual resurrection" is valid, would've believed that Jesus' risen body lacked flesh. But if Jesus was believed to have had a spiritual body, then the threat of Docetism would've been removed and the necessity of anti-Docetic apologetics would've been superflous, right? Does Craig have a good point here? I am not sure that he does. I tend to agree that the earliest Christians, if they believed in a "spiritual resurrection", might have agreed with Docetists about the risen Jesus, but Docetists went further and denied that Jesus had really suffered death on the cross (something no early Christian would've been able to accept) and that Jesus never had been born or incarnated in a body of flesh (something Christians would've found insulting and offensive).

We have to keep in mind, then, that the offense of Docetism wouldn't necessarily have been removed, because Docetists weren't just denying that Jesus had a risen body of flesh- they were denying Jesus ever had any body of flesh during his whole existence on earth. Naturally, Christians would see the need to combat it. Some Christians might've been content with rebutting Docetism up to the point of Jesus' physical death as it was seen as necessary for atonement purposes, while others would probably have gone all the way to the point of completely wiping Docetism out altogether, for they would've believed Jesus to have been vindicated by God and therefore, raised from the dead in a body of flesh.

Does Craig's second objection fly here too? Would the anti-Docetic apologetic be offensive to both Jews and pagans? That depends on whom the audience of the gospels were. Craig tends to think here (lest I am mistaken) that the gospels were written as tools to help win over skeptics. I believe that the gospels were written by Christians and for Christians and no one else. If I am right, what would it matter what Jews or pagans thought? The gospels were written by Christians and for Christians and so any anti-Docetic apologetics would be to reinforce the faith of Christian believers, not to silence skeptics be they Jews or pagans or to convince them of the errors of their ways (I'm sure Craig would love it if it were; I am sure that Craig would love nothing more than to have some undeniable proof that Jesus rose from the dead to give to modern 21st century skeptics like me, so he could drag us kicking and screaming into the faith).

Moreover, I think that Craig is grossly mistaken here. The Jews would not have accepted an individual resurrection? How does Craig know this? I don't doubt that a number of Jews wouldn't have accepted any individual resurrections before the general resurrection, but Craig is really stretching if he seriously believes that this would apply universally without any possible exception whatsoever across the board when it comes to all first century Jews.

"(3) Besides, Docetism was mainly aimed at denying the reality of the incarnation of Christ (1 Jn. 4: 2-3; II Jn. 7), not the physical resurrection. Docetists were not so interested in denying the physical resurrection as in denying that the divine Son perished on the cross; hence, some held that the Spirit deserted the human Jesus at the crucifixion, leaving the human Jesus to die and be physically raised (Irenaeus Against Heresies 1.26. 1). An anti-Docetic aimed at proving a physical resurrection therefore misses the point entirely."

I disagree. I believe that the incarnation, crucifxion, and resurrection were points of denial for Docetists. Suppose that Craig is right and the Docetists were mainly denying the incarnation and not so much the resurrection and it the narratives could hardly serve as an anti-Docetic apologetic. Even if the Docetists didn't so much deny that Jesus had a risen body of flesh, there were other Gnostic groups that did. I would at least accept that the narratives were written as some kind of apologetic against those who denied that Jesus had a risen body of flesh, even if it wasn't really the Docetists. There were four general groups, such as the Docetists, Adoptionists, Separationists, and Patripassiantists, but these categories were not so clean-cut and rigid; there was variation and spectrum within the groups.

"(4) The demonstrations of corporeality and continuity in the gospels, as well as the other physical appearances, do not seem to have been redactional additions of Luke or John ( it is thus incorrect to speak, for example, of "Luke's apologetic against Gnosticism"), but were part of the traditions recieved by the evangelists. Docetisim, however, was a later theological development, attested to in John's letters. Therefore, the gospel accounts of the physical resurrection tend to ante-date the rise and threat of Docetisim."

And how did Craig determine this? I want to know how this is any more than Craig's pontifical "say-so". Why does Craig think that the demonstrations of corporeality and continuity in the gospels are not "redactional additions"? I know for a fact that Craig accepts the Markan priority of the gospels and seems to accept that Matthew and Luke used Mark in their composition. If Luke can redact Mark's gospel and change a prediction (coming from Mark's "young man") of Jesus appearing in Galilee to a prediction of Jesus back when he was in Galilee (as Luke makes the women seem to remember Jesus' words) why can't Luke go beyond the traditions that he had in Mark (and Q?) and go onto write an apologetic against docetism, incorporating corporeality and making such narratives continuous with the rest of the narratives he composed in his gospel? How does Craig know that Jesus eating fish in front of his disciples and inviting them to touch him and showing himself to doubting Thomas were part of the traditions recieved by the evangelists? How does Craig know this?

One last point: Craig repeats himself by saying that Docetism was a later theological development, this time adding the qualifying phrase "attested to in John's letters". I don't necessarily think that Docetism originated at the time of its first mention in John's letters. I believe that Docetism was alive and well before John wrote his letters. I want to be careful here and say that I am not going to attach a precise date as to the origin of Docetism. I really don't know when it originated but I don't think it originated after Luke wrote his gospel and necessarily before John wrote his. I suspect Craig wants more than anything for this to be the case so he can make his work of trying to get modern skeptics to accept the resurrection and get them saved a lot easier. I think that perhaps Docetism originated sometime shortly after 70 C.E. and the gospels have an increasing tendency towards a more corporeal and fleshly Jesus, starting without any resurrection appearances in Mark, one which the disciples see Jesus but don't touch him in Matthew, to Jesus eating fish and inviting contact in Luke and finally a full-blown anti-Docetic apologetic in John's gospel. This may reflect various stages at which Docetism grew in strength and became a threat. Perhaps when Mark wrote his gospel, it wasn't percieved to be that much of a threat (if any) and perhaps was in its nascental stages and evolving more and more during the writing of Matthew and Luke to the point where John's opening prologue was specifically shooting down Docetism as were the letters attributed to John.

"Moreover, not even all later Gnostics denied the physical resurrection ( cf. Gospel of Philip, Letters of James, and Epistle of Rheginus). It is interesting that even in the ending of Mark there is actually a switch away from material proofs of the resurrection to a verbal rebuke by Jesus for the disciples' unbelief."

I am pleased to hear Craig say this! Not all later Gnostics denied the physical resurrection! I also believe that not all early Gnostics denied it either nor had all of them accepted it. I believe that there was a bit of variety among different sects of Gnosticism and perhaps stretching over time. Now it's question time again, boys and girls: how does Craig know that Mark's ending is meant to be a switch away from material proofs of the resurrection?

"(5) The demonstrations themselves do not evince the rigorousness of an apologetic against Docetism. In both Luke and John it is not said that either the disciples or Thomas actually accepted Jesus' invitation to touch him and prove that he was not a Spirit. Contrast the statements of Ignatius that the disciples did physically touch Jesus (Ignatius Ad Smyrnaeans 3.2; cf. Epistula Apostolorum 11-12). As Schnackenburg has said, if an anti-Docetic apology were involved in the gospel accounts, more would have to have been done than Jesus' merely showing the wounds."

I beg Craig's pardon? Eating fish in front of the disciples "does not evince the rigorousness of an apologetic against Docetism"? Was it not Craig who made this stink about the distinction between visions and appearances in the first place? How rigorous does "rigorous" have to be? Does Jesus have to take a stainless steel stake and pound it through his right hand, have his disciples verify that it penetrated by getting blood from Jesus' hand onto their hands, only to have Jesus take the stake out and have his disciples watch his hand heal itself in front of them as though Jesus is a mutant with superhuman powers like the comic book character "Wolverine" in Marvel's The Uncanny X-Men May I suggest something for readers here? May I suggest that not all anti-Docetic apologetics need be the same in terms of rigor and intensity? Docetism, I believe, just like every other heresy, started out small and grew with time. Not every apologetic designed to answer heresies like Docetism need be as rigorous as the next. Luke's apologetic is not as rigorous as would, say, John's because Docetism needn't have been considered as dangerous a heresy in Luke's time as it would've been in John's time. In fact, it may well have been in its nascental and infant stages at the time of Mark's writing which might be why Mark doesn't have any resurrection narratives designed to illustrate that Jesus really did have a body of flesh. From Mark to Matthew, Docetism might have grown somewhat and may have started to become a threat in Luke's time with it evolving to the point of a dangerous heresy in John's time. Ignatius, writing later, wants to assert that the disciples did phyiscally touch Jesus because such a level of rigorousness and seriousness would be needed to combat Docetism in his time, whereas in earlier times it probably wasn't that strong and, hence, not that big a threat and not commanding that much in terms of resources to combat it.

"(6) The incidental, off-hand character of the physicality of Jesus' resurrection appearances in most of the accounts shows that the physicalism was a natural assumption or presupposition of the accounts, not an apologetic point consciously being made. For example, the women's grasping Jesus' feet is not a polemical point, but just their response of worship. Similarly, Jesus says, 'Do not hold me,' though Mary is not explictly said to have done so; this is no conscious effort to prove a physical resurrection. The appearances on the mountain and by the Sea of Tiberias just naturally presuppose a phyiscal Jesus; no points are trying to be scored against Docetism."

Fleshly physicalism may have been a natural assumption to begin with for the earliest Christians but that needn't mean that it wasn't in need of defending by the time that the gospels were pinned. Indeed, not every minor little detail need be polemically against Docetism. These may have just been the kind of details that many Christians believe Jesus would've done had he a risen body of flesh, regardless of how much of a threat Docetism was in their minds. But the eating of fish, the showing of wounds, and Jesus preparing breakfast for his disciples are the exact sort of feats that would be expected to count aginst Docetism. Depending on the composition and the various stages in the evolution of heresies like Docetism, we can expect there to be varying accounts of anti-Docetic apologetics, with varying degrees of physical interaction and corporeality, depending on how widespread and serious the threat of Docetism or any other antiflesh heresy that existed in New Testament times was. Some accounts will not have much physical action performed by Jesus while others will have Jesus doing a lot of physical feats that a mere vision could not do. Now we come to the finale of Craig's rebuttal here...

"Together these considerations strongly suggest that the physical appearance were not as apologetic to Docetism, but always part of the church's tradition; there seems to be no good historical reason to doubt that Jesus did, in fact, show his disciples that he had been physically raised from the dead." ( Craig, William Lane, Assessing the New Testament Evidence for the Historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus pgs. 330-338)"

Craig would seriously love to think this, wouldn't he? Anything to convince a modern skeptic to become a Christian. Unfortunately, it is Craig who is mistaken here, not Talbert or anyone else. These considerations, I hope to have shown, are flawed and do not make Craig's case as strong as he would like to think that they do. Craig hasn't shown how they were always part of the Church's tradition and hasn't answered Talbert's original arguments. In conclusion, though, I want to say that the fleshly corporeality of the resurrection narratives introduce a Jesus who physically interacts with the world and is no mere vision and that there is a extra-mental phenomenon at work behind the scenes. But the gospels were not written to convince post-Enlightenment skeptics like me but I believe were designed to answer those who would deny that Jesus had risen in the flesh.

The most important part is not so much that heretics at all did deny that Jesus had a body of flesh at any point of time in his earthly existence, but that he appeared to have one but really didn't. The emphasis was on appearances and this was the big point behind Gnosticism. Those blessed with the spiritual knowledge of the Gnostics knew better. The disciples believed Jesus appeared to them and Jesus did but Jesus fooled them into thinking he had a body of flesh. Jesus only appeared to have had one and the Gnostics had this sacred knowledge that Jesus didn't inhibit a body of flesh. Even if it wasn't the Docetics per se who posed a heretical threat to the earliest Christians, there were some antiflesh heretics who would need to be seriously dealt and rebutted.

This, I believe, might adequately account for the distinction between visions on one hand, and appearances on the other. Supposing that Craig is right about the distinction, I am convinced that any such distinction was apologetic in origin. This was the best way I believe that the Christians of Luke and John's community combated heretics. What's more, it also kept the lid on heretics and not only rebutted their antiflesh heresy but also prevented them from claiming any pedigree in the Church as the true disciples of Jesus and their discipleship going back to inner circle of Jesus himself. Any true Christian, any true disciples of Jesus, would have had to talk with him, to walk with him, to touch him, to have eaten with him and to have drink with him. Thus Jesus had a body of flesh after his death and rose to the heavens in it. Only the original apostolic circle was really in a position to claim any kind of pedigree and legitimacy as to being heirs of Jesus and being his disciples, because only they walked, talked, and ate with Jesus, saw him crucified, and saw him risen from the dead, and ascend into the heavens. This, I believe, explains the witness motif of Luke's gospel: to be an apostle, you have to had been appointed by those who were witnesses to Jesus' fleshly corporeality.

Thus, I believe that Craig's third objection may be answered.

Matthew

My Conversion/Deconversion Story

In my book Why I Rejected Christianity: A Former Apologist Explains I’ve written 40 pages about my conversion to Christianity, my deconversion away from Christianity, what I believe now, and why. To read the complete story of my conversion/deconversion and what I believe today you can purchase the book here.

But let me offer the Cliff Notes version:

I grew up being taught to believe in the Christian faith. In fact, until I converted at the age of 18 I never remember encountering anyone who didn’t believe. I just thought everyone around me believed. So when I found myself down on my luck at the age of 18 there was no one else I knew to turn to but Jesus, and I did.

I had a dramatic conversion as an 18 year old. I had dropped out of High School, and was arrested six different times for offenses like running away, theft, and battery. I had also hitchhiked around the country with a friend. I was heavily into drugs, alcohol, sex, fast cars, and the party scene.

But one night I gave myself over to this Jesus in repentance and faith in response to what I believed at that time was his substitutionary death on the cross for my sins. At that time I claimed to receive the gift of the Holy Spirit, and a new calling to spread God's news of salvation to anyone who will believe.

And my life radically changed. Here’s how I later described my new life and new sense of mission in a newspaper devotional column that area ministers took turns writing every week: “I can identify with the apostle Paul who said, ‘But by the grace of God I am what I am’ (I Cor.15:10). I knew I needed help, but no one could break through to me, until I turned my life over to Jesus. Only he could save me. Only he could change me. I have totally changed due to the grace of God. When I look back on those years, it’s like I’m talking about someone else. Without God I shudder where I would be today. Now, I gladly preach the message that God can change you too. Believe it. It happened in my life. Believe that it can happen to your rebellious teenager. Believe it because we serve a miracle-working God who answers prayer, and who intervenes on our behalf.” Then I ended the devotional with these words: “From out of my own personal experience my heart bleeds for the victims in our society, for I know what it’s like to be a victim and a victimizer. That’s why I fight for the unborn, the poor and homeless, those victimized by pornography, but especially for those trapped in sin. People need the Lord.” [Herald Republican, August 10, 1990].

With such a passion for my purportedly new relationship with God-in-Christ, I began to understand my faith and to minister it. I graduated from Great Lakes Christian (Bible) College, Lansing Michigan, in 1977. Afterward I became the Associate Minister in Kalkaska, MI, for two years. Then I attended Lincoln Christian Seminary (LCS), Lincoln, IL, and graduated in 1982 with M.A. and M.Div. degrees, under the mentoring of Dr. James D. Strauss. While at LCS I was the founding editor for the now defunct apologetical quarterly, A Journal For Christian Studies. After LCS I attended Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS), and graduated in 1985 with a Th.M degree, under the mentoring of Dr. William Lane Craig, considered by many to be the foremost defender of the empty tomb of Jesus and his bodily resurrection from the grave. I also took classes at Marquette University in a Ph.D. program with a double major in Philosophy and Ethics, but I didn’t finish because I lacked the needed funds to stay in school and because I wanted to be close to my Dad who was dying of cancer.

From 1987 to 1990 I was the Senior Minister of the Angola Christian Church, Angola, Indiana. I served in the Steuben County Ministerial Association, and for a year I was its President. Before that I had several ministries in Michigan, Wisconsin and Illinois. I was in the ministry for about fourteen years, or so. After leaving the church, I’ve stayed in Angola, and now I own my own business here.

I was a Christian apologist with several master’s degrees set for the express purpose of defending Christianity from intellectual attacks. I was not afraid of any idea, because I was convinced that Christianity was true and could withstand all attacks. I have taught both apologetical and philosophical classes for a few different Christian and secular colleges. I was in the “Who’s Who Among America’s Best Teachers” in 1996.

I knew most of the arguments against Christianity, and as a philosophy instructor in a secular college I could debate both sides of most any argument. As a philosophy instructor, in many ways, I am a purveyor of doubt. Too many people have a superficial faith handed down from their parents. As a teacher my goal is to cause them to doubt much of what they believe, be it atheist or believer, or in between. Doing so is what’s needed for them to develop a deeper faith, and it allows them to see points of view they’ve never considered before, thus making them more tolerant of other people’s beliefs. One thing that I must do as a philosophy instructor is to eliminate from my students a smug, simplistic, and dogmatic belief system. Such beliefs are childlike and unbecoming of the adults they should become. Anyway, I have told people time and time again that I could teach philosophy until I was blue in the face so long as I knew I had a loving, caring, and faithful Christian community to fall back on after my class is over. When that fell through the floor, the doubts crept in my life.

There are three major things that happened in my life that changed my thinking. They all happened in the space of about five years, from 1991-1996. These are the three things that changed my thinking: 1) A major crisis, 2) plus information, 3) minus a sense of a loving, caring, Christian community. For me it was an assault of major proportions that if I still believed in the devil would say it was orchestrated by the legions of hell.

Let me just briefly mention the information that changed my mind. I carried on a correspondence debate with my cousin who was a Lieutenant in the Air Force (now a Colonel) and teaches Bio-Chemistry at a base in Colorado. I handed him a book arguing for creation over evolution and asked him to look at it and let me know what he thought of it. After several months he wrote me a long letter and sent me a box full of articles and books on the subject. Some of them were much too technical for me to understand, but I tried to read them. While he didn’t convince me of much at the time, he did convince me of one solid truth: the universe is as old as scientists say it is, and the consensus is that it is 12-15 billion years old.

Now that by itself isn’t too harmful of an idea to Christian thinking. But two corollaries of that idea started me down the road to being the honest doubter I am today. The first is that in Genesis chapter 1 we see that the earth existed before the sun, moon, and stars, which were all created on the fourth day. This doesn’t square with astronomy. So I began looking at the first chapters of Genesis, and as my thinking developed over time I came to the conclusion that those chapters are folk literature—myth. You can see my studies on this later in this book.

The second corollary is this: if God took so long to create the universe, then why would he all of a sudden snap his fingers, so to speak, and create human beings? If time is not a factor with God when he created the universe, then why should time be a factor when it came to creating human beings? If God took his time to create the universe then why wouldn’t he also create living creatures with greater complexity during the same length of time? In other words, what reason can be given for the different ways God created? Is this the same God? Why did it take God so long to create the stuff of the universe, which is less valuable and presumably less complex to create, than it did to create the most valuable and highly complex creatures to inhabit that universe? Astronomy describes the long process of star, planet, and galaxy formation. It then becomes uncharacteristic of God to do otherwise with human beings. I concluded that God created human beings by the same long process he created the universe as a whole, if he created us at all.

I carried on a correspondence with Dr. Virgil Warren for about 6 months, who was a professor at Manhattan Christian College, Manhattan, Kansas. I was asking him what he thought about the issues raised by the age of the universe. In a final letter to him on March 19, 1994 I wrote: “My problem is that I earnestly desire the truth whatever the result. I do not concern myself with the results just yet, although I know I’ll have to face them sometime. Right now I just want to make sense of it all, results be what they may. When I consider the possible results, they scare me, but that’s only because they are unfamiliar to me. This is natural. The real question for me right now is the truth question. If the answers upset other cherished beliefs then I’ll have to re-examine my answers, and perhaps revise them in order to maintain those cherished beliefs. On the other hand, my answers might cause me to give up on some of these cherished beliefs—there’s no way to tell at this point which way I’ll go. But as time permits I am committed to finding answers that produce the least amount of tension among the things I believe.”

Nearly two years later and I came to deny the Christian faith. There were just too many individual problems that I had to balance like spinning plates on sticks in order to keep my faith. At some point they just all came crashing down.

I personally think more than anything else, it was a deeper knowledge that caused me to leave the faith. But it was my faith that inspired me to gain that knowledge in the first place. I was so sure and so confident in my faith that I didn't believe I could learn anything that would ever cause me to doubt my faith. I believed I served a God of reason, so I was not going to be afraid of any argument to the contrary. And with this assurance I sought to understand and argue against those who would debunk my faith.

It is quite ironic, really. I started with faith. That faith inspired me to understand. With more understanding, my faith increased to the point where I was confident no argument could stand up against my faith. So I proceeded to gain more and more knowledge for the express purpose of debunking the skeptics. But in so doing I finally realized that the arguments on behalf of the Christian faith were simply not there. The skeptics were right all along. Even though everything I studied was done from the presumption of faith, and in the service of the faith, my studies ended my faith.

My doubts were simmering these last few years. I didn't think much about them. But when Mel Gibson's movie “The Passion of the Christ” came out, it made me think about them again, intensely. Plus, while I was describing in class how, with Arthur Peacocke, I believe God could've used chance as a radar beam searching the possibilities for the direction of creation, one of my students laughed at the thought. It was these last two things that have put me on course to finally come out of the closet and tell what I think. I have always had reasons for what I believed. Only recently have I begun sharing my doubts. I want people to know that I have thought through answers for the way I life my life.

While the things I have just written might explain to some degree why my thinking has changed, I want to stress the fact that my thinking has indeed changed. You cannot explain away my present doubts by pointing to bad experiences in my life. They may be what provoked my thinking, but they don’t explain my thoughts. I am an atheist regardless of the experiences that led up to my present way of thinking. In talking with me you will have to deal with my arguments. Otherwise, I could point to your past experiences and explain your beliefs away as a product of what you have experienced too! People believe and doubt for a wide variety of reasons, and that’s all there is to it.

Now there will be those who might say I chose my theology based on how I wanted to live my life. In other words, my ethics dictated my viewpoint. But the chronological historical truth is that first my theology changed, and then I started living my life differently. My theology of doubts began to dictate my personal ethics. I started to live my life in keeping with my new set of beliefs.

I tried as best as I could to be a faithful Christian, and good minister. I accepted God’s grace, and it radically changed my life when I was a teenager, as you have read. After being saved I wanted to show God how grateful I was for his gift of salvation by committing my life over to him with all I had. Even though I knew it was by grace that I had been saved, I almost always felt guilty that I wasn’t doing enough in response to God’s love. Whether it was spending time in prayer, evangelizing, reading the Bible, tithing, forgiving someone who had done me wrong, or whether it was struggling with temptations of lust, pride, selfishness and laziness, I almost always felt guilty. It may just be because I was so passionate about Christianity that this was the case, and so it just might be my particular temperament. But I never could understand how Christian people could come to church every Sunday but never get involved much in the Church’s programs, because that’s what believers should want to do. To be quite frank here, if Christians really believed that the non-Christian was going to hell, and that God loved them enough to send his Son to die for them on the cross, then how would they behave? How many true believers are in the churches today?

Today I am pretty much guilt free. That is, I have no guilt in regards to the Christian duties mentioned above. I am free of the need to do most of the things I felt I had to do because I was expressing my gratitude for what God had done. And yet, I am still grateful for my present life, even more so in many ways. I love life. I’m living life to the hilt, pretty much guilt free, primarily because my ethical standards aren’t as high. In fact, I believe the Christian ethical standards are simply impossible for anyone to measure up to. Think about it, according to Jesus I should feel guilty for not just what I do, but for what I think about, lusting, hating, coveting, etc. I’d like every person who reads this book to experience the freedom I have found. It is to you that I dedicate this book.

For more about me as a Christian Minister see Nostalgic Today.

In Defense of the New Atheists: An Excerpt From My Book "Unapologetic"

    It's time for atheist philosophers of religion to end their own sub-discipline under Philosophy proper. I explain in detail what I mean in my book Unapologetic: Why Philosophy of Religion Must End (2016). Below is an excerpt from it where I defend the new atheists Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens and Stenger from the philosophical elites. A few months ago I defended Hitchens' Razor. You can see the same dismissive attitude in both of these essays. I have no personal axe to grind. It's a principled disagreement. You can comment but before I'll respond you should first read my book.

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Emotion Vs. Logic

One of the primary findings of persuasive psychology is that people are tied to their opinions through emotional and/or logical deduction. In other words, people believe that certain concepts are true for emotional and/or logical reasons. Therefore, in order to instill a new belief into an individual, we must remove the existing belief by appealing to people through the exact avenues in which they have derived their beliefs.

Let us consider a hypothetical scenario in which we are entrepreneurs who have just opened a business on the top floor of an old city skyscraper. Everything is set to go, but there's one major problem with which we need to contend. The only business consultant in the entire city refuses to take the elevator to such a high elevation because he has deduced that something tragic could possibly take place at that height.

Since our first impulse is to conclude that the man has a fear of heights, let us first consider that this is in fact the correct scenario. We must now ask ourselves whether this man has a fear of heights for emotional reasons or for logical ones. Barring the presence of a series of tragic events that have taken place while the consultant was in similar structures, it's a fairly safe assumption that the man has a fear based on emotion. This should be nothing new to us because we realize that phobias are typically emotional fears often attributed to isolated events that took place at an impressionable age. The next logical step here is to ask why the consultant is afraid of heights. If he cannot articulate a legitimate reason and relies instead on such explanations as "I just get scared when I look out," we know we have made a safe assumption that the man holds a belief for an emotional reason.

The question now becomes "How do we eliminate this fear?" Should we bring in the experts who built the structure to ensure him that it won't fall? Should we show him the evidence that the building was constructed according to the proper codes? Should we show him the statistics of how unlikely it would be for a tragic event to take place at that height? The answer to all questions presented here is the same. No. Why would such measures fall on deaf ears? The man has an emotional fear of heights, thus we cannot appeal to his senses through pleas of logic. As he's perfectly aware that millions of people go into tall buildings every day and return to the ground unharmed, what good what it do to tell him what he already knows? Instead, we must appeal to his emotion. One such recommendation would be to have the man ascend the building slowly, allow him to look outside on each floor, and let him adjust to his surroundings each time until he feels comfortable progressing up the skyscraper. Such methods are how psychologists often remove unreasonable fears in their patients.

Let us now consider a situation in which the man feels that the building will fall because he believes that old skyscrapers are not as safe as the newer ones. Instead of having an emotional fear, our business consultant has formed what he believes is a logical reason to avoid ascending the building. Do we use the same measure as we did in the previous scenario? Will having him slowly ascend and allowing him to adjust to his surroundings alleviate his fear? No. Why would such measures fall on deaf ears? The man has a logical fear, thus we cannot appeal to his senses through pleas of emotion. We must show him the evidence that the building was constructed according to code. We must bring in the experts who built the structure to ensure him that it won't fall. Such methods are how we appeal to intellect in order to remove unreasonable fears in people.

So, how does this all relate to the subject of debunking Christianity? Religious beliefs, like the beliefs of the consultant, must also be held for emotional or logical reasons. With this in mind, how should we approach the task of deconversion? As before, we must delve into the history of the individual's beliefs to find the place from which they originate. I would be confident that if we undertook this exercise in a large group of people, almost the entire sample would have built their beliefs upon emotional reasons. This is not to say that people can't be Christians for logical reasons. After all, apologists are masterminds at creating logical reasons in the defense of their emotional beliefs; and as they old saying goes, smart people believe dumb things because they're very gifted at coming up with ideas that support their notions. The reason I feel that people build their beliefs upon emotion rather than logic is that the vast majority of people are introduced to the emotional components of Christianity before the logical ones. Such notions as "God is perfect," "Jesus loves you," "Heaven is real," "Hell is a terrible punishment," and "the Bible is sacred" are consistently instilled in children long before they are approached with evidence and data that suggest the fraudulent nature of such claims.

If the conclusion is accurate that religious beliefs are primarily built on emotional reasons, we now know the avenue that we should take to change the incorrect beliefs held by Christians. This discovery, of course, does not destroy the layers of conditioning that one will have to fight through, nor does it remove the individual's propensity to invent absurd justifications to eliminate cognitive dissonance, but it does demonstrate the futility in trying to convince someone that the Gospels are unreliable by utilizing such examples as the disagreement between Matthew and Luke on Jesus' birth in order to reveal its obvious human fallibility. People with emotional ties in this instance will emotionally cling to the Gospels' veracity while their cognitive dissonance is alleviated by apologists' absurd "Quirinius held the office twice" or "Quirinius was a co-governor" explanations.

However, life is rarely as black and white as it can be made in hypothetical scenarios. The people with the most influence over maintaining Christianity are the people with all the answers – the apologists. Upon a large foundation of emotional attachments to the veracity of their religion, they have weaved a tangled web of what they believe are logical defenses for their beliefs. While simply clearing the emotional attachments before destroying the perceived logic in belief may work for common individuals, this tactic will surely not work on those who have come up with clever ways to convince themselves that their beliefs are solid. With a network of logical and emotional bonds to wade through in order to reach the apologist, how does one even begin? For the answer, I believe we should revisit the scenario offered earlier about the business consultant.

Let us now consider a hypothetical situation in which the consultant has a combination of emotional and logical reasons for not wanting to visit us at the top of the skyscraper. Not only has he developed an emotional fear of heights beginning at a young age, he has also convinced himself of the legitimacy of his fear by reinforcing his decision with a network of misinformation built upon logical inaccuracies. Now the man has created a wall of perceived legitimate reasons as to why his emotional fear is a sensible one. Well, how do we handle such a situation?

Since we wish to invoke rational thinking in order to get people to drop their misplaced beliefs, we must decide whether emotion or logic is the biggest opponent of rational thought. This choice should be obvious since emotion is often irrational, and logic is closely related to rationale itself. To put it in a much simpler way, we cannot appeal to logic when emotion is in the way. We must defuse as much irrationality as possible before we can begin to utilize logic in support of our position. We cannot simply usher the man to the top of the building by allowing him to adjust to his surroundings because there will come a time when the logical fears of being on floor three will be outweighed by the emotional fears of being on floor ten. The amount of success in this initial step of tackling emotion will vary from person to person, but through much time and effort, we might be able to force the man to make enough concessions on his emotional beliefs, which will then eliminate a bit of emotional irrationalism, so that we can illustrate how his logical fears of floors three through nine are misplaced. If this much easier step of tackling logic proves fruitful, then we simply rinse, lather, and repeat.

Admittedly, this is much easier said than done when it comes to religion. When some of the constructs of emotional beliefs include "God is perfect," we find that it can be extremely difficult to make chinks in perfect armor. All is not lost, however, because we know that it is possible to intellectually reach people who believe that God is perfect, or else we would not be gathered where we are right now. Where one should ideally begin the task is debatable, but I strongly feel that attributing human authorship to the Bible is the proper avenue to take. This does not invalidate the premise that God is perfect because it makes room for such possibilities as God allowing humans to write their history and God not concerning himself with perfection of everything. These ideas seem harmless enough on the surface, but they begin to provoke questions of bigger impact, such as why God would choose such avenues when they lead to increased doubt and logical ambiguity.

I very often hear skeptics only going after the logical misinformation presented by Christians before giving up in disgust and wondering why they can't appeal to people's intellect. I've even caught myself doing it on more than one occasion because we're often provoked with misinformation. We must remember, however, that it can be nearly impossible to alter a person's stance on an important topic by invoking the use of logic and rational thought when so much of that person's stance is protected by emotional irrationalism.