“The Bible Is a Self-Destructing Artifact”

The resurrection can be found in the rubble

The appeal of holy books, according to John C. Wathey, is that

“…it does not matter what they say. As long as they are perceived as imparting divinely inspired instructions and wisdom, they will evoke in readers the infantile solace and comforting emotions of a small child receiving help and instruction from a parent—the less comprehensible, the better.” (p. 133, The Illusion of God’s Presence: The Biological Origins of Spiritual Longing)

Of course, preachers and priests draw attention to Bible texts that make the faith look good. These texts are read from the pulpit, set to sacred music, and embedded in stained glass—and the Bible itself, in splendid binding, is adored on the altar. None of which means that it is comprehensible—in fact, far too much of defies comprehension, which doesn’t take too much digging to discover. But the laity commonly settle for devotional study of the Bible, hence they are in a category Randel Helms has called “inattentive readers,” those who would be

Doesn't It Take Just as Much Faith to Be an Atheist?

[The following is an excerpt from my small book, Atheism: Q & A, the Kindle version of which is, for promotional purposes, free December 4 through December 8. The book consists of short entries (like this one) that answer common criticisms of atheism. The paperback isn't free, but it is inexpensive — and might make a nice Winter Solstice gift for anyone who holds misconceptions about your views.]


The complaint that it takes just as much faith to be an atheist is a strange one. After all, it seems to imply that there’s something wrong with believing on faith — even though in every other context faith is regarded by believers as a virtue. Maybe all that is meant, however, is that everyone is in the same boat, ultimately basing their views on something other than reason and evidence, and that the atheist therefore has no right to single out the religious for criticism.

But is this really true? Does atheism rest on no firmer foundation than religion?

The Real Reason God Is a Perfect Being

The God most theists believe in isn't merely a powerful non-physical being who created the universe; he is an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, perfectly good and perfectly free being. And apparently male. Theologians might claim that he is also immutable, timeless, perfectly simple, impassible (that is, not affected by anything), and several other things besides. But what reasons could anyone possibly have for believing in such a God?

The standard arguments for God's existence — even assuming that they worked — do not support the above claims. For example, design arguments at best conclude that some intelligent being is responsible for the characteristics found in the universe (or for some of these characteristics). They don't say that this being is all-powerful or all-good; they don't even show that this being created the universe out of nothing (she might only have rearranged previously existing matter), or that this being still exists. Nor do they show that monotheism is more likely than polytheism. Cosmological arguments fare even worse: at best, they show that there is some ultimate cause that is itself uncaused, or that necessarily exists. But by themselves, these arguments do not support the idea that this ultimate cause is an intelligent being, much less that it is a perfectly just and benevolent heavenly father, or one who has any of the other properties claimed by theists.

On the Divine Command Theory, Part 2

In Part 1, we saw that the Modified Divine Command Theory (MDCT) attempts to avoid the Euthyphro dilemma by postulating that God's nature is such that he would never command, say, torturing babies (and thus make torturing babies good). However, it was argued that this solution doesn't work, for in place of the original dilemma, we can now ask, is what God commands good only because he has that specific nature, or would his commands still be good if his nature were different?

If the former, then what makes his commands good is that they are compatible with the particular nature that he has, and not merely because they are his commands. But then God is not needed as a basis for morality, since in this case what makes something moral is just that it conforms to what any being with that nature would want (whether such a being exists or not). And that is inconsistent with the MDCT.

If the latter, however, then his commands would still be good even if his nature were entirely different. And that means that if he did command torturing babies, it would be good to do so — and thus we have not avoided the problem that plagued the traditional Divine Command Theory.

Unsurprisingly, the above criticism has itself come under attack by proponents of the MDCT. Their attempts to fix the theory, however, reveal a deeper problem — namely, that they have two incompatible views as to what is essentially moral. Like almost everyone else, they believe that what's essentially moral are acts that are kind, fair, etc. Yet they also believe — or want very much to believe — that what's essentially moral is whatever God wants.

On the Divine Command Theory, Part 1

If you ask the average believer why killing an innocent person is wrong, chances are they will say something like, “because God commanded us not to murder.” This suggests that most Christians agree with the traditional Divine Command Theory (DCT). On this theory, what makes something right or wrong, good or bad, is God's will. Thus, killing an innocent person is morally wrong because God has a rule against murder, charity is right because he wants us to love our neighbor, and so on. I doubt whether the majority of Christians actually accept the DCT, however.

On a previous post, I argued that, if people actually learned morality from The Bible, then they would not find anything in it morally problematic. Similarly, if believers thought that what makes something right or wrong is nothing more than God's will, they should not find any of God's commands disturbing. On more than one occasion, the biblical God commanded the slaughter of women and children. If the DCT is correct, then that was obviously the right thing to do. Remember, all that it takes to make something good is God willing it. And yet, even when theists bite the bullet and say that there must have been a good reason for such a command, they show by their hesitation that they do not find it obvious at all. Similarly, consider the fact that God regarded slavery as permissible. Why don't most Christians today accept that? After all, the permissibility of owning other human beings follows straightforwardly from the DCT and the claim that the Bible is the word of God. But fortunately, most Christians apply an independent moral standard, and as a result reject the pro-slavery position (even if to do so they have to make up some excuse for God).

Is Science Inconsistent with Naturalism?

In “The Explanatory Emptiness of Naturalism” (another essay in Gilson & Weitnauer's anthology True Reason, which I mentioned a couple of posts back), religious philosopher and “former atheist sociopath”* David Wood, argues that, in order for there to be science, naturalism must be false. There are various reasons why he claims this is the case. These include the usual suspects, such as that naturalism is inconsistent with our ability to reason and that it cannot account for the uniformity in nature which science requires. (I've previously covered these issues, or something closely related to them, and rather than repeating myself have placed links below.)

Some of the other reasons he offers also involve common complaints against naturalism, but in ways that are odd in this context. For example, he argues that naturalism is incompatible with the existence of the universe, and from this concludes that under naturalism it would be impossible to practice science! (After all, there first has to be a world before anyone can be a scientist.)

Do Atheists Steal Key Concepts From the Christian Faith?

This is the claim of Frank Turek, who made it into a list of the top ten Christian apologists. Franz Kiekeben, who writes here for DC, informs us that

Frank Turek...believes that, in order to make any meaningful claims, atheists have to appropriate concepts that only make sense if there is a God. That is why we “steal” from God — and why on his view atheism is self-defeating.

But even though presuppositionalism strikes me as rather desperate, I have to admit that the idea behind Turek’s book is pretty clever. In six chapters, he considers six areas in which the atheist supposedly steals from the Christian worldview: causality, reason, information and intentionality, morality, evil, and science. These six form (well, almost) the acronym C.R.I.M.E.S. – the crimes against theism.

If you want to read a blow by blow rebuttal of these atheist "CRIMES" then read what Kiekeben said (first published here on DC). LINK. Pass it on. Refer to it when these claims come up. Refer to it often.

The Claim That There Are No Atheists

Instead of answering atheists' arguments, some believers just deny that there is such a thing as atheism. On their view, everyone knows that there is a God, and so-called atheists simply block out that fact because they don't want there to be someone who makes moral demands on them. (As everyone knows, we atheists just want to be able to do whatever we feel like, morality be damned — which explains why we are always robbing banks and torturing puppies.) But what reasons are there for thinking this is the case? Several have been suggested.

One common argument states that no one can consistently live like an atheist. So-called atheists obey moral rules, for example, which they should have no reason to obey. For according to atheism, it is said, it is no better to be kind and help those in need than to be a serial rapist and murderer. Yet many so-called atheists speak out against injustices in the world, and in doing so reveal that they are not true heathens.

The Weakness of Christian Explanations of Evil

Here are a couple of the “reasonable Christian responses” (as he calls them) that apologist John M. DePoe offers for the existence of natural evils (True Reason: Confronting the Irrationality of the New Atheism, ed. Tom Gilson and Carson Weitnauer, pp. 218-219):

(1) There cannot be free will in any meaningful sense unless the world is governed by laws that make it behave in a sufficiently regular manner. These laws, however, “are also the cause of various phenomena, like hurricanes, tornadoes, and diseases.” It follows that one cannot avoid the existence of such natural disasters without eliminating our ability to exercise free will.

(2) Natural evils aren’t intrinsically evil; they are only bad when they harm moral agents. It follows that “if people had not chosen to settle in an area prone to tornado activity or on a fault line, there would be no associated evil event.”

On the Naturalistic Fallacy

In addition to denying the is/ought gap (see my previous post), those who attempt to argue for the existence of a scientific morality often deny the so-called naturalistic fallacy. This is the fallacy of defining moral concepts in non-moral terms, as Sam Harris does when he says that “good” just means “that which increases the overall well-being of conscious creatures.” Other examples of the fallacy include defining the good as happiness, or as what helps promote human flourishing, or (to use a supernaturalistic example) as what God commands. And the reason this is a fallacy is that, no matter what one picks as the definition of “good,” someone can ask whether that thing is actually good without thereby making any kind of mistake.

“Ought” and “Is” Revisited

It’s nearly as predictable as if it were a law of nature: Every few years, someone argues with me online that Hume’s Law (that one cannot derive an “ought” from an “is”) is wrong. And usually, the challenge comes from an atheist who is convinced that they must set this law aside in order to defend moral realism — and thus answer critics who say that atheism cannot justify morality.

There are two basic points such people should learn about this. First, that Hume’s Law is a simple matter of logic; in the sense Hume was talking about, an “ought” cannot be derived from an “is,” period. Second, that in itself this does not show there are no moral truths. It doesn’t even show that ethical naturalism (the view that there are “natural” — and thus in principle scientifically discoverable — moral truths) is false. Anyone who wishes to maintain that there are moral facts discoverable by science is therefore welcome to attempt to do so some other way, in spite of Hume’s Law.

On the Evidence for the Resurrection

According to many Christian apologists, we have good evidence for the truth of the resurrection. Two things in particular are usually mentioned: First, that many of the followers of Jesus were willing to risk their lives in order to spread the gospel. And second, that the discovery of the empty tomb was made by women.

That the disciples risked their lives, and in the majority of cases ended up being executed, shows they really believed in Jesus’ resurrection, for who would be willing to take things that far for something they did not believe? That women were the ones who found the empty tomb shows that the story wasn’t made up, since women weren’t trusted as sources of information in those days — and thus, if anyone were making up the story, they would have said it was men who made the discovery.

These arguments are, of course, extremely weak. But rather than criticizing them directly (for that, see for example my book The Truth about God, pp. 68-72), I’d like to pose a question regarding miracle claims in other religions. Let’s take Buddhism and Islam as examples.

John Gray’s Criticism of the New Atheists, Part 2

Last time around, I wrote about Gray’s claim that religion isn’t meant as “a theory that tries to explain the universe,” but is instead “an attempt to find meaning in events.” And I pointed out one rather obvious problem with this claim — namely, that many do believe in religion as a way of explaining things. But even if Gray were right about the meaning of religion, there would be a problem with his view.

The way he sees it, religion gives us insights into the human condition. In this, it performs much the same function as certain works of fiction. The myth of the forbidden fruit, for example, teaches us, according to Gray, about the “ambiguous impact of knowledge on human freedom” — which he tells us is more realistic than the myth found in Greek philosophy “that knowledge and goodness are inseparably connected.”

John Gray’s Criticism of the New Atheists, Part 1

In Seven Types of Atheism, political philosopher John Gray, who’s an atheist himself, takes the so-called new atheists to task for their “notion that religions are erroneous hypotheses.” Treating religion this way, as if it were a kind of “primitive science,” is a mistake, he says. Rather, we must understand it as allegory and myth, as a way of imparting truths about the human condition. “Religion is an attempt to find meaning in events, not a theory that tries to explain the universe.” As evidence, he mentions St. Augustine’s fourth-century view that the Bible need not be taken literally, as well as Philo of Alexandria’s first-century description of Genesis as “an interweaving of symbolic imagery with imagined events.”

Did Jesus Predict the Resurrection?

Believers claim that the resurrection not only happened, but did so in accordance with what Jesus taught his followers about himself and his mission. And there are several passages in God’s supposed autobiography that back up this claim. For example, Matthew 16:21 states that Jesus told the disciples he must go to Jerusalem to be killed “and on the third day be raised.” And in 27:63-64, the priests tell Pilate about the prediction, and suggest that the Romans guard the tomb lest someone steal the body to make it look like it came true. Supposedly, then, Jesus’s followers expected the resurrection, and many of his enemies knew about this.

Religion and Morality

It is often claimed that morality comes from religion — that without the Ten Commandments and such things, we would not know right from wrong. On this view, atheists can be moral, but only because we “borrow” our values from the religious principles that permeate society. Even some who aren’t religious, or aren’t in any sense orthodox about their beliefs, sometimes say such things. Thus, the influential psychologist Jordan Peterson argued not long ago that Sam Harris is “fundamentally” a Christian because “he doesn’t rob banks, doesn’t kill people, doesn’t rape.”

Yet there’s a simple argument that shows morality doesn’t originate in religion: If it did, we wouldn’t find anything in religion to be morally problematic. In other words, if we learned right and wrong from the Bible, then we wouldn’t find any of the moral pronouncements there to be disturbing. The religious wouldn’t struggle with how it could be that God commanded the mass killing of infants, for example. They would simply accept that as yet another instance of God’s perfect justice and goodness.

Doubt and the "Evil" of Nonbelief

Many believers admit to having doubts. In fact, probably most do. It is so common a phenomenon that whole books have been written about it, and in The Case for Faith, Lee Strobel interviews the author of one of them, Lynn Anderson.

Strobel asks him, “Can a person be a Christian and nevertheless have reservations or doubts?” Anderson’s answer is a definite yes: “where there’s absolutely no doubt, there’s probably no healthy faith,” he tells Strobel, adding that he rejects “the ‘true believer’ mentality — people with bright smiles and glassy eyes” who never have any questions about their religious views. Strobel also mentions other thinkers who claim that “having doubts isn’t evidence of the absence of faith; on the contrary, they consider them to be the very essence of faith itself.” Neither Anderson nor Strobel, then, see religious doubt as a problem.

In another chapter of The Case for Faith, however, Strobel asks Ravi Zacharias how it could possibly be fair for a serial killer like David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz — who like so many former criminals has now “found” Christ — to go to heaven, while someone like Mahatma Gandhi is presumably suffering in hell.

Peter Kreeft On the Nature of Morality

In the Prager University video “Where Do Good and Evil Come From?”, religious philosopher Peter Kreeft makes so many mistakes that if you blink, you’ll probably miss some. This post points out the most glaring ones.

The video’s overall purpose is, of course, to demonstrate the existence of God by means of the moral argument — that is, that objective morality exists, God is the source of that morality, therefore God exists. But there are explanations of morality that do not depend on God. Kreeft therefore begins by criticizing these “atheistic” accounts (two of which we will look at here), before proceeding to the religious one.

Aquinas’s Abject Failure

There are quite a few things wrong with the first cause argument, but the worst thing about it — Aquinas’s attempt to show that the chain of efficient causation cannot extend back to infinity — is ignored by most critics. The claim that there cannot be an infinite causal regress is often disputed, of course, but Aquinas’s bizarre reasoning to the contrary is usually passed over — maybe for fear it would just be confusing to readers. Whatever the case may be, I think it’s worthwhile to be aware of it, especially given that Aquinas’s old argument is still touted by many.

The part I’m referring to is the following:

Evil and Foreknowledge

The problem of evil and the problem of reconciling God’s foreknowledge with free will are usually treated as if they were entirely separate issues. But treating them that way hides the fact that the most popular theist views on them are in conflict with one another.

The existence of evil is most commonly explained as a consequence of free will. This is consistent with the biblical idea of the Fall of humanity. God gave humans the ability to make their own choices, and that means that he cannot prevent us from acting badly. However, most theists also want to say that God knew ahead of time what his free creatures were going to do — and thus knew we would be sinful.