Two Challenges for Christians

We have a couple of pests here at DC whom I consider ignorant Christian defenders. Not all Christians are this ignorant, of course, since some are quite knowledgeable (usually the more they know the more liberal-secular they are). One Christian here goes by the name Jason, and the other one goes by the name Dan Marvin. They think they have answers for almost everything, and yet it's clear from reading what they write they have not had a background in some basic level apologetics. Okay. Fine. So here are my two challenges to them...

Why don't each one of you truly test your faith? If you are as cocksure of it as you say you are such that nothing can move you off your faith then you should have no fear in taking the Debunking Christianity Challenge along with the Outsider Test For Faith. No excuses will do here. I invite all Christians to take up these two challenges. That's what I would've done had I been challenged to do so as a Christian, if they were made known to me. I would want to know what the best arguments are against my faith just in case I was wrong. I would try to argue why I shouldn't take The Outsider Test, and I would take up the DC challenge. I challenge you, Jason and Dan Marvin, and all other Christians. Or, you can keep spouting off prooftexts without a good grasp of what they mean.

My claim is that most Christians defenders do not understand how we got the Bible, and that they do not understand it. My claim is that most Christian defenders do not fully appreciate the nature of historical studies when it comes to believing something miraculous took place in the past, nor the true nature of interpreting a given text, any text, much less one among high context societies in the Biblical era. My claim is that most Christian defenders do not understand the results of biblical archaeology. My claim is that most Christian defenders do not understand the nature of science and how it makes us all different than the superstitious people of the past. My claim is that most Christian defenders do not understand how psychology undermines the the free will defense to the problem of evil, and a wrathful God. My claim is that most Christian defenders do not understand the full impact of global religious diversity that is caused by "when and where" people are born. My claim is that most Christian defenders are simply ignorant and that's one major reason why they continue to believe, and this includes Jason and Dan Marvin.

Sorry, but that's what I think. Prove me wrong.

New Site: "Lying for Jesus."

Link. Do you think Christian apologists knowingly lie to defend their faith. I think some do. What evidence can support such a claim? The purpose of the site "is to expose the false claims of Christian apologists one lie at a time." The video below is from "Lying for Jesus."

Faith in America: A Consequence of the Declining Middle Class?

The rise of the so-called "New" Atheist movement in America and elsewhere has coincided with a decrease in religious adherence throughout the world. From an estimated size of 0.2% of the world's population in 1900, non-believers now number over 900 million. Yet how much influence has the "New" Atheist movement had in this increase? Or is the New Atheist movement just a symptom of growing non-belief? Belief has been on the decline in America and Europe for decades now, which seem to indicate the latter; the New Atheist movement is a response to the growing momentum of the non-beliver demographic. But why has non-belief progressed so far in Europe, yet continues at a much more plodding pace here? Gregory Paul and Phil Zuckerman have an idea, and it's a doozy; because Americans aren't as secure and content with their lives as their European bretheren.

The so-called "New" Atheist movement consists of what I have referred to as "atheists who refuse to know their place". By and large, the so-called New Atheists are not saying much new; most of their arguments have been around for decades to millenia. However, the novel feature of the New Atheist movement has been a distinct loss of meekness that previous generations of atheists have had to affect. Atheists have become more vocal, more outspoken, and less deferential to religion in their modern dialogues than previous generations. And it is undeniable that religious society is changing, especially here in the US. Biblical literalism has dropped from almost 40% in the mid-70's to less than 30% today, while Biblical skepticism (aka fableists) has increased from ~12% to over 20% over the same period. However, the rise of New Atheists seems to be more of a response to the loss of faith in America. For example, the proportion of people who thought religion was very important in their lives dropped from over 65% in the 1960's to just over 50% in the 70's and 80's. In their article, Gregory Paul and Phil Zuckerman argue that this loss in religion is also correlated with a loss in spirituality in general, and reflects a population that is more content and secure in their material lives, and therefore more materialistic. This conclusion builds on multiple studies that show that danger and insecurity increases affinity not only for religion, but for authoritarian systems in general.

Paul and Zuckerman argue that it is secure access to what are normally thought of as middle-class amenities like adequate health care, consistent food supply, employment, and egalitarian status with one's peers that drive the process of secularization. One of the most intriguing problems in the sociology of comparitive religion has been the question of why a wealthy democracy like the US has remained relatively religious, while other wealthy democracies have seen a steady decline in religion spanning decades, and are now overwhelmingly secular. What Paul and Zuckerman argue, with some merit I think, is that it is the insecurity of existence in America that supports religion. To compare, in Europe it is very difficult to lose the amenities of middle class. Health care in many cases is government-supported. Labor laws are much more weighted toward the worker. Food supplies and the means to obtain them are secure. There is relatively little gap between the wealthy and the middle-class, which reduces materialistic competition--the Jonses' are likely to be about as well-off as you are, and anyone in the middle class is fairly close to the apex of their society's socioeconomic status. These factors result in a society that is comfortable in their material lives, which causes them to forsake spiritual outlets.

In contrast, in America the hold on the middle class is more tenuous. Health care is not government mandated, and access to health care is readily revokable in cases of prolonged illness or loss of employment. Health care costs remain the number one cause of individual bankruptcy in America. Labor laws in America are largely weighted toward so-called "at will" models, where employee termination does not have to be justified by the employer. Access to adequate food is not secure for those not in the middle class (and recently not always for those IN the middle class--can anyone spare a tomato?) These scaricities have a two-fold effect. First of all, they render people insecure and amenable to authoritarian systems, including religion, that promise to alleviate their problems. Second, they open the door for well-meaning religious charities to attempt to fill in the needs of the underserved, bringing prosetylization (often second-hand, but there nonetheless) in their wake. (How many of you live in a town that has a large hospital? Of those that said yes, how many of those hospitals are run by an arm of a religious group? We have two hospitals, the largest of which is Catholic.) Unfortunately, even the largest religious group in America does not have the resources or the mandate to handle the needs of a large and shifting underclass (our healthcare system is a prime example), which leaves people insecure in their materialistic lives. Additionally, even among the middle class, the gap between wealthy and middle class in America is ENORMOUS and widening. Even those in the middle class who are secure in their material lives are very often not content, as they have not reached even close to the apex of socioeconomic strata in America.

The panic in America that followed 9/11 allowed for an excellent chance to look at the kinetics of insecurity-induced religion--how fast or slow do people as a whole turn to religion as a result of a short-term panic, and how lasting is that change. The results show that church attendence and religiosity surged briefly after 9/11...then quickly returned to pre-tragedy levels. I would argue that, while the 9/11 tragedy and the following attacks did shake our nation to the core and cause widespread panic, it did not have a lasting effect on our religiosity because it did not have a lasting effect on our security or contentment in our material lives. We still had the same access to medicine, food, housing, etc. Our jobs were just as secure as they were before.

Conventional wisdom has often stated that religion is a counter-materialistic phenomenon; it is a rebellion against the materialism that drives the culture of America, and its adherents tend to be less materialistic in nature. However, Paul and Zuckerman argue fairly convincingly that it is the other way around; spirituality is a reaction of our materialistic nature to a failure to securely acheive material contentment, and that in societies where material contentment can be acheived securely, spirituality inevitably peters out. It is not that the spiritual tend to be less materialistic by nature; it is that those that fail to acheive secure material contentment tend to turn to spirituality. While Paul and Zuckerman do not exactly put it this way, I envision it as a kind of "sour grapes" phenomenon; they can't get what they REALLY want, so they decide to want something else that will help them cope with their lack.

If this is true, then it suggests that all of this debating and rational (and sometimes irrational) argument and apologetics and proofs, etc., are all just a sideshow to the main event in deconversion. If we were honest about it, we would be able to admit this already; Europe has the same number of apologetics as we do, they have access to the same evangelists, they have churches of every variety, and yet they are and remain secular. Why are we different? China has a large atheistic class AND widespread materialistic insecurity, but they also very recently had atheism as an unjustly enforced state religion, and since loosening of religious restrictions are experiencing an upsurge in religious belief, especially among the oppressed female population. Face it; there is something about American society that acts to preserve religion, and I think the data are strong enough to entertain the hypothesis that materialistic insecurity is one major factor in sustaining a religious culture. Given that hypothesis, then the biggest blow we could give to religion in America is the establishment of a more egalitarian socioeconomic structure. If you make people happy and content in this life, they are less likely to blow up people looking to find contentment in the next life.

A Review of Antony Flew’s “Divine Omnipotence and Human Freewill”

Antony Flew shows the Freewill Defense theodicy fails since it is the case that existence of compatibilist free will is not a logical impossibility relative to what is generally thought of as Omnipotence in his essay “Divine Omnipotence and Human Freewill” featured in Peter Angeles' anthology, “Critiques of God”.


Flew begins by wrongfully, but inconsequentially so since many falsely think the following to be from Augustine’s “Confessions”, quoting [1] St Augustine : "Either God cannot abolish evil, or he will not; if he cannot, then he is not all-powerful; if he will not, then he is not all good." [2] An elegant summation nonetheless, Flew rightly pigeon holed the saying by noting that this is “Perhaps the most powerful of all skeptical arguments, this has appealed especially to the clearest and most direct minds, striking straight and decisively to the heart of the matter.” Actual EVIL, existing in contradistinction to actual moral goodness, is the substantive core of the question at issue. How can the God of classical theism exist when the world, and even more so the Universe (ie: all existence), is saturated with a cold indifference to life? Not only does observed empirical existence reveal man’s inhumanity to man, but the unimaginable sickening horror from natural disasters evidenced by an ever growing list of causalities dimly echoes within a grand canyon of animal suffering. The predator-prey and parasite-host relationships in a brutally uncaring, mechanistic, evolutionary context screams “Humans are not the point.”

In large measure, the history of human civilization has been recorded in step with efforts to understand our existence. By crafting myths, we encode ways we try to reconcile seeming contradictions between life and brutal reality. Such is the case of the world's oldest story. When Gilgamesh, the king, sends the woman Shamhat, a temple prostitute, to Enkidu, the wild-man, their sexual liaison civilizes Enkidu. After six days and seven nights of love making, he is no longer a wild beast who lives with animals. [3] Upon visiting the water hole, the animals flee from the sight of Enkidu, puzzled he asks Shamhat what it means. She wisely informs the anti-hero, “Behold Enkidu, you are become wise like unto a god.” [4] As the knowledge of sexual procreation transformed the wild Enkidu, we ordinary mortals, when we become aware of the absolute nature of existence and its identity, become transformed by recognizing that objective good arises from objective existence while evils anticipates a dearth of goodness. While these ethical qualities share a relationship like up and down or big and small, good and evil are nonetheless objective. And, even though, mutually required to make sense of the other, they can be understood in light of what is meant by values and why they are important to living beings. The Objectivist philosophers offer clear and cogent definitions.

“In ethics, one must begin by asking: What are values? Why does man need them?” Wrote Ayn Rand, and she continued: “Value” is that which one acts to gain and/or keep. The concept “value” is not a primary; it presupposes an answer to the question: of value to whom and for what? It presupposes an entity capable of acting to achieve a goal in the face of an alternative. Where no alternative exists, no goals and no values are possible.

I quote from Galt’s speech: “There is only one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or nonexistence—and it pertains to a single class of entities: to living organisms. The existence of inanimate matter is unconditional, the existence of life is not: it depends on a specific course of action. Matter is indestructible, it changes its forms, but it cannot cease to exist. It is only a living organism that faces a constant alternative: the issue of life or death. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. If an organism fails in that action, it dies; its chemical elements remain, but its life goes out of existence. It is only the concept of ‘Life’ that makes the concept of ‘Value’ possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil.” [5]

Even so, the broad scope of animal suffering, a vast ocean of pain and terror, is like the Great Barrier Reef of objective evil, for if anything diminishes the “process of self-sustaining and self-generated action”, it is the pain, suffering, and terror of being eaten or burned alive. “Suppose in some distant forest lightning strikes a dead tree,” wrote William L. Rowe in describing the problem of evil: “resulting in a forest fire. In the fire a fawn is trapped, horribly burned, and lies in terrible agony for several days before death relieves its suffering. So far as we can see, the fawn's suffering is pointless. For there does not appear to be any greater good such that the prevention of the fawn's suffering would require either the loss of that good or the occurrence of an evil equally bad or worse. Nor does there seem to be any equally bad or worse evil so connected to the fawn's suffering that it would have had to occur had the fawn;s suffering been prevented. Could an omnipotent, omniscient being have prevented the fawn's apparently pointless suffering? The answer is obvious, as even the theist will insist, An omnipotent, omniscient being could have easily prevented the fawn from being horribly burned, or, given the burning, could have spared the fawn the intense suffering by quickly ending its life, rather that allowing the fawn to lie in terrible agony for several days. Since the fawn's intense suffering was preventable and so far as we can see, pointless, doesn't it appear that premise one (See note 6.) of the argument is true, that there do exist instances of intense suffering which an omnipotent, omniscient being could have prevented without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse? [6]

There is a problem of evil, and we recognize it concurrently with our awareness of objective morality from absolute existence. Perhaps that may be why Flew found it useful to cite John S. Mill’s posthumously published “Three Essays on Religion” to further refine the problem and challenge theology by noting Mill did not imagine “the impossible problem of reconciling infinite benevolence and justice with infinite power in the Creator of such a world as this. The attempt to do so not only involves absolute contradiction in an intellectual point of view but exhibits to excess the revolting spectacle of a jesuitical defense of moral enormities.” [7] Amen! Mill’s bold words are, however, not conclusive, for the Christian believer has faith that ways to reconcile the existence of objective evil with their God’s omni-loving, omni-compassion attributes can be found.

For that purpose theodicies have been devised. Flew notes that: “Several determined efforts have been made to escape from the dilemma. One favorite – which might be dubbed the ‘Freewill Defense’ – runs like this. The first move is to point out ,via citing Thomas Aquinas, “Nothing which implies contradiction falls under the omnipotence of God.” [8] Flew elucidates, “even God cannot do what is logically impossible; that is, if you make up a self-contradictory, a nonsense sentence it won’t miraculously become sense just because you have put the word God as its subject.” Flew follows up on this by predicating that theologians find the third formulation superior because it pinpoints the essential quality of logical impossibility as being no restriction upon the Omnipotence of God. Antony rightly disagrees with Aquinas, however, that God’s Omnipotence is indeed limited by logical impossibility. Flew could have pointed out that the forth and fifth century superstars of Christian Theology, St. Augustine, [9] and St. Jerome [10] both disagreed with Aquinas and implicitly asserted that God being all powerful means God can do anything without regard to logic. How or why the Christian view of Omnipotence evolved in the centuries between Jerome and Aquinas Flew does not ask, but it would be an interesting study.

He could have followed that thread down a rabbit hole. Instead, and to his credit, he continued to state the position he argues against. “The second move in this defense is to claim, “God gave men free will”; and that this necessarily implies the possibility of doing evil as well as good, that is to say, that there would be a contradiction speaking, it would be nonsense to speak of creatures with freedom to choose good or evil but not able to choose evil. (Which, no blame to him, is what his creatures, men have done.)” [11] Generally, Christians will not seek to specify the nature of free will and will equivocate by assuming it is understood that they mean contra-causal libertarian free will.

Antony could have, but did not, include the scriptural proof texts Christians predicate as a basis for their contra-causal and libertarian view of free will. It is interesting that the Johannine writer’s midrash in John 10:34-35 “Jesus answered them, "Is it not written in your law, 'I said, you are gods'? If he called them gods to whom the word of God came (and scripture cannot be broken),” refers back to Psa 82:6 where is read: “I say, "You are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you;” . In the later passage, Elohiym is in the council of the elohiym and is exhorting his fellow gods to do justice and righteousness; and then in a fit of hissy, Elohiym condemns his fellow gods to mortality. Elohiym, in 82:6, is very clearly addressing his fellows in the council of the gods. The Johannine midrash tortures the text to make it apply to human beings (ie: the Jews). A truly brilliant man, Richard Carrier, explains what this means to Christianity. “...the Libertarian notion of free will assumes that one's own desires (among other things, like one's own reason and knowledge) also constrain one's will, rendering it unfree. In other words, our personality, knowledge, wishes, are themselves chains that bind our will. But your proximate, causing desire is your will. It therefore cannot be considered as something “outside” of the will that constrains it – your strongest desire and your will are one and the same.” [12] Later, as we will see, Flew’s argument hinges on the fact that human free will is not Libertarian.

The third premise of the free will defense listed by Flew is: “…certain good things, namely, certain virtues, logically presuppose not merely beings with freedom of choice (which alone are capable of either virtue or vice), and consequently the possibility of evil, but also the actual occurrence of certain evils. That what we might call the second-order goods of sympathetic feeling and action logically could not occur with out (at least the appearance of) the first-order evils of suffering or misfortune. And the moral good of forgiveness presupposes the prior occurrence of (at least the appearance of) some lower-order moral evil to be forgiven.” [13] Flew goes on to elaborate and explain this premise by noting the subjective nature of good and evil assumed by the F.W.D. Certain moral virtues “logically presuppose the possibility of correlative evils” [14] This leads to the conclusion that it “makes no sense to suppose that God “might have chosen to achieve these goods without the possibility in the one case, the actuality in the other of the correlative and presupposed evils.” [15] Flew's acceptance of subjective definitions of good and evil is contrary to Objectivism; that notwithstanding, his argument still has value to those humans who seek to live and thus make a conscious choice not to lie down and die. (It is beyond the scope to this brief essay, however, to show how Flew and Objectivism can be harmonized.)

Antony assesses the argument as disconcerting to the skeptic, and yet he excuses the usual counter arguments as lacking simplicity or a decisive presence compared to the original dilemma in that they allow the believer room to counter argue. Having set up a dissonance, in dialectical fashion, he then offers a penetrating foil towards coherent synthesis. His attack is directed at the central idea of the F.W.D.; it would be fatal to the notion of the Christian God that if it were not the case that a contradiction obtains such that God could not create a free will where people always choose to do the good. If it is logically possible for God to make a free will that is truly free and also determined so that people always freely choose to do good, then Omnipotence could have “made a world inhabited by wholly virtuous people.”[16] Then the F.W.D. collapses, and the problem of evil destroys any reasoned basis for God belief.

This idea is reinforced by Raymond D. Bradley, who argued from international criminal law: “according to the moral principles concerning Command Responsibility as recognized by Ping Fa around 500 B.C.E., principles that were eventually enshrined in the Hague Conventions of 1907, the Geneva Conventions of 1948, and the Nuremberg Charter of 1950 (Principles III and VI of which explicitly assign responsibility to Heads of State who have "planned" and "initiated" crimes against humanity). And, quoting from Article 7 (3) of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, they pointed out that the fact that a subordinate committed crimes does not relieve his superior of criminal responsibility if he knew or had reason to know that the subordinate was about to commit such acts or had done so and the superior failed to take the necessary and reasonable measures to prevent such acts. This principle, they observed, is a particular instance of the more general moral truth:

If a person knows that evil of any kind (natural or moral) will occur or continue to occur unless they prevent it from occurring, and has the ability to prevent it from occurring, then that person is morally culpable for the occurrence of that evil. By virtue of his omnipotence and omniscience, God was found to be an accessory, before, during, and after, the fact of all evils.” [17]

This sets the stage for Flew's blitzkrieg. The first pincer entails defining what it means to act freely. He asks what is meant by “being free to choose”? His insight is that being free to choose does not necessarily mean the choice is unpredictable or uncaused. Paradigmatically, he spins a touching tale about two young lovers with nothing better to do than get married. Murdo exercised his freedom by asking his love, Mairi. Being madly in love with Murdo, she gladly acquiesced. Murdo's and Mairi's actions were not uncaused or in principle unpredictable, nor were they compelled. Yet even if in an all too near future, it becomes a predictable norm that such pairings or nascent behaviors are completely predictable , still Homo Sapiens will be able to choose to do what they want. They will still be able to choose between alternatives that are most appealing. Flew argues that “Unless they (advocates of hard determinism) produce evidence that there was obstruction or pressure or an absence of alternatives, their discoveries will not even be relevant to questions about his freedom of choice, much less a decisive disproof of the manifest fact that sometimes he has complete, sometimes restricted, and sometimes no freedom.” [18]

When we use expressions that characterize an action as either freely chosen or compelled in some fashion, we are not saying that what was done was in theory unpredictable and neither are we asserting that the action was contra-casual. But we are saying that there were viable alternatives. Pivoting on the phrase “could have helped it”, Flew explains that by examining simple “paradigm” cases where writers freely choose from a variety of lexical tools to craft their missives, we can find a wealth of examples of free actions. And if not, then they'll do till the real thing comes along.

Flew's prophecy was fulfilled. Behold - brilliance. “Even if my choices are entirely determined in advance,” expounded Dr. Richard Carrier regarding what free will actually means: “I still make decisions, and my decisions are still caused by who I am and what I know – my thoughts and desires and personality - just as they must be if I am to be “free” in any sense that matters. And because I am still their cause, I can still be praised or blamed for them. This is why compatibilism makes more sense: free will is doing what you want – nothing more, nothing less. And being responsible is being the cause - nothing more, nothing less.”[19]]

Plop-plop-fizz-fizz goes the cathode! After such crafty word smithy, for Flew to just pour his premise like Alka-Seltzer is almost anti-climatic, yet soothing. “...there is no contradiction involved in saying that a particular action or choice was: both free, and could have been helped, and so on; and predictable, or even foreknown, and explicable in terms of caused causes.” He admits that he cannot here demonstrate the premise sound, but he does note that Hume, Hobbes and even Aristotle took a similar line of reasoning. Meanwhile back at the anode, the Catholic Church predicates that it's God has foreknowledge that is not incompatible with human freedom. Raising the bet, he turns the kicker and amusingly observes that, if compatibilism is error, then human free will hitch hikes on God of the Gaps arguments and like God hides in human ignorance. Flew's spartan rhetorical question polishes the first pincer. “... if it is wrong, then it is hard to see what meaning those expressions (“could have helped it”) have and how if at all they could ever be taught, understood, or correctly used.”

Having saved his Panzer divisions, he now deploys them into the other pincer and closes on the salient. “... not only is there no necessary conflict between acting freely and behaving predictably and/or as a result of caused causes; but also Omnipotence might have, could without contradiction be said to have, created only people who would have already as a matter of fact freely have chosen to do the right thing.” [20] Observing that a person's endocrine glands are not the same as a person, and that whatever physiological cause may be accorded responsible for a person's action, it is not contradictory to say that if people can sometimes help doing what they do, they still act freely. He argues against the objection that physiological causes of actions exclude the possibility of doing what is desired. Emphasizing that the absence of proposed physiological causation would imply absence of effect, he contra-distinguishes mental motives to accent a disconnect between the two. By way of analogy he points out that “... if I think as I do because of such and such physiological causes or because of such and such motives; then it cannot also be the case that there are, and I have sufficient reasons, arguments, grounds for thinking as I do.” This hinges on how “because” equivocates multiple ambiguities. There are many explanations which do not exclude one another.

Carrier speaks to the fallacy here identified by Flew when he argues in defense of compatibilism against J.P. Moreland. “Moreland says, for example, that on compatibilism “a reason for acting turns out to be a certain type of state in the agent, a belief-desire state, that is a real efficient cause of the action”. He (Moreland) argues this excludes the possibility of final causes. But since a belief-desire state is an intention, and an intention is a final cause, it follows that final causes can and do exist under compatibilism. A final cause is simply a thought process: a prior calculation form ends to means, which in turn participates in the causal chain that ends in acting. The visualized 'end' is caused by a desire (“I want the second ball to land in the corner pocket”), and the conceptualization of the 'means' is caused by an application of reason and knowledge to that desired end (“If I collide the first ball into the second just so, then I will achieve what I want”). That is all a final cause is, a thought process, and that's an efficient cause: without the final cause (the desired end) there would be no act. So Moreland is attempting to state a tautology (A is B) as if it were a distinction (A is not B), a fundamental violation of basic logic.” [21] The same fallacy was committed by those determinists Flew argued against who claimed physiological causes precluded mental motives. If it is objected that Murdo and Mairi were influence by their glands, again it is pointed out that glands are not people. Murdo and Mairi made their own decision. Despite this it is also true that we can do what we want but that we cannot want whatever we want.

At this point in his essay, Flew serves the 800 pound Gorilla. What becomes of the keystone of the Freewill Defense, if there does not exist a contradiction in thinking that God could have arranged things so that human beings always freely choose the good? If it really is possible for a person's action to be freely chosen and fully determined by caused causes, then doesn't the theodicy collapse? All goods of whatever order presuppose not only corresponding lower order evils but also freedom. Even virtues like honesty and intellectual integrity while not parasitic upon antecedent evils are still contingent to freedom. If there is no contradiction, then there is no need for any soul making theodicy either. The resultant people, no matter the challenge, would always choose the right without the evils of those who choose damnation or that required for higher order goods and virtues. The deity could have evolved humans trustworthy in all situations without need for acquiring trustworthiness via fortitude, suffering, or pain. However, in that case it would be senseless to suggest that God would still be required to forgive or display fortitude.
Nonetheless, subtly reworded versions of Predestination or Determinism could be hurled at the argument. “...but that there is not contradiction in speaking of a world in which there are always antecedent conditions of all human action sufficient to ensure that agents always will as a matter of fact freely chose the right.” [22] The distinction turns on crucial differences in the character of the deity. If the former is asserted, then God's character would be that of a quasi-personal being that has fixed everything that everyone will do, choose, and suffer. If the latter, then the deity is not thought of a puppet master or master hypnotist, rather it just happens to be the case that antecedent conditions predisposing humans to act in a particular, instead of some other, fashion always have, do, and will always obtain. The counter thesis would specify that determinism is perhaps compatible with human freedom and responsibility, but that predestination is assuredly not.

The error here is that predestination alleviates all human responsibility no matter what. Flew wrote: “The first reaction to the idea of God, the Great Hypnotist, is that this would mean that no one ever was or had been or would be really responsible, that none of the people who we should otherwise have been certain could have helped doing things really could. ... But this is very misleading. Certainly it would be monstrous to suggest that anyone, however truly responsible to and in the eyes of men, could fairly be called to account and be punished by the 'God who had rigged his every move. All the bitter words which have ever been written against the wickedness of the God of predestinationism – especially when he is also thought of as filling Hell with all but the elect – are amply justified.” [23] By reminding the reader that the paradigmatic cases defining key phrases exemplifying human liberty are impervious to the predestination doctrine as no theological information can alter their meaning, Flew counters the objection.

Refining the position: “...there is no contradiction in speaking of God as so arranging the laws of nature that all men always as a matter of fact freely choose to do the right.” What infuriates is still the idea that providence punishes anyone for freely choosing the wrong in the case that omnipotence had arraigned the antecedent conditions so that his victim would so act. Flew concludes: “...the Calvinist picture – the Great Hypnotist – is appropriate in its appreciation of the implications of Omnipotence; it is morally obnoxious insofar as it presents human creatures justly accountable to that Omnipotence.” [24]

Flew couldn't resist his sense of symmetry. Although his free choice was likely determined, still he wrote what he wanted, and that's compatibilist free will. As it was in the beginning, so he closes. "Either God cannot abolish evil, or he will not; if he cannot, then he is not all-powerful; if he will not, then he is not all good."

[1] Anthony Flew, ‘Divine Omnipotence and Human Freedom’, p.227, in “Critiques of God: A major statement of the case against belief in God”, edited by Peter Angeles, copyright 1976.

[2] Flew acknowledged his error in wrongly attributing the given quotation to St. Augustine, and he thanked Dr. John Burnaby of St. John’s College for pointing out that St. Augustine did not write the line. The author of the present essay was unsuccessful in finding the actual source of the quote.

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_of_Gilgamesh

[4] Dr. Robert Price makes this point in his Bilbegeek Genesis #2 podcast.

[5] Ayn Rand, 'The Objectivist Ethics,' p.15, in “The Virtue of Selfishness”

[6] William L. Rowe, 'The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism', p.253, in “The Improbability of God”, edited by Michael Martin and Ricki Monnier

(Premise 1. “There exist instances of intense suffering which an omnipotent, omniscient being could have prevented without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.”

Premise 2. “An omniscient, wholly good being would prevent the occurrence of any intense suffering it could, unless it could not do so without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.”) - quoted from Rowe, ibid., p.251

[7] John S. Mill, “Three Essays on Religion”, p.186-87 as quoted by Flew, ibid. p.228

[8] Flew, ibid. p.228 citing Aquinas from “Summa Theologica”, IA XXV, Art. 4.

[9] St. Augustine, “…for certainly He is called Almighty only because He is mighty to do all He will…”; “City of God”, Book XXI, p.458, “NPNF1-02. St. Augustin's City of God and Christian Doctrine” - http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf102/Page_458.html

[10] St. Jerome, “But I do not presume to limit God's omnipotence…”; “EPISTLE 58: TO PAULINUS”, Art. 3, - http://www.voskrese.info/spl/jerome058.html

[11] Flew, ibid. p.228

[12] Richard Carrier, “Sense and Goodness Without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism”, p.109

[13] Flew, ibid. p.228

[14] ibid. p.229

[15] ibid. p.229

[16] ibid. p.229

[17] http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/raymond_bradley/fwd-refuted.html#failure

[18] Flew, ibid. p.230

[19] Carrier, ibid., p.109

[20] Flew, ibid., p.231

[21] Carrier, ibid., p.107

[22] Flew, ibid., p.233

[23] ibid., p.235; “The recognition, for example, of the object of highest worship in a being who could make a Hell; and who could create countless generations of human being with the certain foreknowledge that he was creating them for this fate ... Any other of the outrages to the most ordinary justice and humanity involved in the common Christian conception of the moral character of God sinks into insignificance beside this dreadful idealization of wickedness.” (quoted from Mills, “Three Essays On Religion”, p.113-14)

[24] ibid., p.235

Handicapping of Skepticism

How is skepticism at a disadvantage compared to romanticism?

The practice of skepticism entails the exploration of any possible argument that would debunk preconceived notion. While some of the arguments are often strongly supportive of a skeptical position, many are only moderately convincing yet still valid. In contrast, the shallow counter-solution that “God works in mysterious ways” is widely applicable and hardly attackable. The inclusion of the moderate arguments against Christianity weakens the perceived credibility of the person presenting them. Petty and Cacioppo explain that “providing a person with a few very convincing arguments may promote more attitude change than providing these arguments along with a number of much weaker arguments.” In effect, people are prone to believe that if they can argue against a moderate message, they would probably be able to spot the fallacies of the other messages if they considered them long enough. This can be an unfortunate aspect of human psychology because the addition of lesser arguments onto a pile of already strong arguments should only add credibility to the position and not affect the veracity of the stronger arguments.

People are motivated to defend their beliefs from attacks, particularly when they are forewarned of a speaker’s intent, and even more so when the belief is closely linked with identity. Not only are religious beliefs effectively synonymous with identity for a number of people, religious followers have been inoculated from skeptical arguments because they have been forewarned and exposed to weak or patently ridiculous arguments that are allegedly offered by disbelievers. This “poisoning of the well” modifies individuals to be more resistant to attitude changes toward the position that they already believe to be fundamentally weak. Examples might include the supposed atheism of harsh dictatorships, lack of morality in an atheistic worldview, absence of atheists in foxholes, atheism requiring enormous amounts of faith, atheists being unhappy, atheism being a childish form of rebellion, atheists being mad at God, etc. You can even find such ridiculous assertions within the Bible. If it were not for these inoculations, Christianity might otherwise be vulnerable to adjustment due to its cultural nature as a truism: a belief that is widely accepted, rarely defended, and consequently malleable.

The targeted audience for the skeptic is often very large, and people tend to be decreasingly persuaded by messages as the size of the potential audience grows. Petty and Cacioppo report that subjects are often motivated by strong arguments and discouraged by weaker arguments if the subjects are under the impression that the communications were intended to be heard only by a small number of people. In contrast, when subjects believe that a larger number of people are hearing the exact same arguments, the perceived difference in quality between the strong and weak arguments shrinks dramatically. In such a situation, listeners perceive weaker arguments as stronger, perhaps because the subjects feel that the arguments must contain merit since they are going to be heard by a wide audience; and stronger arguments are perceived as being weaker, perhaps due to the perceived decrease in personal importance. The difference would normally be a wash, but in mainstream culture, where arguments against Christianity are far superior to arguments in its favor (as anyone will attest as long as you replace the word “Christianity” with someone else’s religion), skepticism is at a disadvantage because there is less perceived difference in the strength of weak and strong arguments.

There is no pressure from society to understand or defend against the position of skeptics. Petty and Cacioppo report that subjects are often motivated to understand an issue when they are led to believe that, as a part of the study, they would have to discuss the issue with someone who took a contrasting position. Without this pressure, subjects are less likely to consider the position of the opponent. Since people do not have true interest in evaluating their innermost beliefs, those who have been conditioned to believe in a book with a talking donkey will never actively seek someone to challenge this position.

Society has painted a nasty picture of atheism and skepticism in general. Even though I left Christianity several years ago, the words still carry a sort of negative connotation with me – in the same sense that the meaningless word alaria sounds soothing while peklurg sounds irritating. It is of little question that people who do not believe in God are the least trusted minority in America. Petty and Cacioppo report that the likeability of the message’s source plays a major role in the message’s capability of persuasion. The disparity in the amount of attitude change resultant from identical messages provided by a likable source and an unlikable source is comparable to the disparity in the amount of change resultant from identical messages provided by an expert source and nonexpert source. In other words, you can obtain the same amount of perceived credibility by being likable as you can by becoming an expert. This is an enormous blow to objectivity, but I suppose we have to write it off as human nature and find some way to work around it.

Human beings are unbelievably gullible and illogical creatures. The ability to think skeptically is not innate; it requires practice. One-half of America believes that a person can use extrasensory perception to read another person’s mind. Nearly the same amount believes we can communicate with the dead. Otherwise sane individuals have been known to send death threats to meteorologists, not for inaccurate predictions, but for the actual weather conditions. Among other feats of incredible sheepishness, Cialdini reports that people are more likely to buy unusual items when priced higher, more likely to buy items with coupons despite no price advantage, more likely to respond to requests when empty reasons are given, more likely to agree to absurd requests if preceded by ones of greater absurdity, more likely to consider people intelligent and persuasive if they are attractive, and less likely to take an enemy prisoner during warfare if the potential captive offers them bread. If people are so prone to follow foolish patterns under such poor assumptions in order to help guide them through this complex world, should we be at all surprised when people hypothesize the existence of a personal god in order to explain intelligent life, distant galaxies, childbirth, universal physical constants, starving children, crimes against humanity, natural disasters, and suicide bombers?

(References omitted)

James White, Do You Understand What You Believe?

James White discussed a YouTube Video I made. This is my video. This is his discussion of it. Let me ask White if he knows his own theology.

Granted, I'm not so good when it comes to making videos. And granted, the picture I used is to make fun of the faith rather than be technically precise. But let me explain what I said. Let's see if I'm as ignorant as he claims that I am. I think he is the one exhibiting some ignorance about Christian theology.

Richard Swinburne argues for the Nicene subordination doctrine of the Trinity. [Richard Swinburne, “Could There Be More Than One God? Faith and Philosophy 5, no. 3 (July 1988): 225–41. Reformed thinkers like John Calvin and Benjamin Warfield argued for Trinitarian autotheos, in that the Son and the Spirit do not derive their being from the Father but are God in and of themselves. See Paul Helm, John Calvin’s Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 35–57.]

Swinburne claims that a first God could eternally “create” a second and even a third God, who “proceeds” from the first God, but that there was no reason to eternally create any other Gods since love would be complete in three Gods and no more. He concludes that “if there is at least one God, then there are three and only three Gods” since “there is something profoundly imperfect and therefore inadequately divine in a solitary God.” Swinburne’s view is but one form of the “social Trinitarian model” of the Trinity. I don’t think any account of the Trinity is plausible for the Christian, and that includes Swinburne’s understanding. I find Swinburne’s scenario wildly implausible and guided more by what he thinks the Bible says than by any philosophical reasoning. The bottom line is that no matter how an orthodox triune God is conceived, this is not a simple being.

Social trinitarianism stresses the diversity of persons within the Trinity, while anti–social trinitarianism stresses the unity of the God. According to William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, “Social trinitarianism threatens to veer into tritheism (three gods); anti–social trinitarianism is in danger of lapsing into unitarianism (one God with no distinct persons in the Godhead).” Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press), p. 583. Craig and Moreland criticize Swinburne’s view by arguing that “the Father’s begetting the Son amounts to creation ex nihilo (creation out of nothing), which . . . makes the Son a creature.” However, without this causal dependence of the Father to the Son and Holy Spirit, “then we are stuck with the surprising and inexplicable fact that there just happen to exist three divine beings all sharing the same nature, which seems incredible.”(p. 588).

A second form of social trinitarianism is known as the “group mind” theory, in which the Trinity is “a mind that is composed of the minds of the three persons in the Godhead.” Craig and Moreland tell us the specific problem they attempt to deal with: “if such a model is to be theologically acceptable, the mind of the Trinity cannot be a self-conscious self in addition to the three self-conscious selves who are the Father, the Son, and Holy Spirit, for otherwise we have not a Trinity but a Quaternity, so to speak” (p. 588).

The third form of social trinitarianism is called “Trinity monotheism,” Moreland and Craig inform us, which “holds that while the persons of the Trinity are divine, it is the Trinity as a whole that is properly God.” The problem with this view they attempt to deal with is that if it is to be considered as “orthodox,” “it must hold that the Trinity alone is God and that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, while divine, are not Gods” (p. 589).

For an excellent critique of social trinitarianism, which has become the dominant evangelical model for the trinity, see Brian Leftow’s “Anti-social Trinitarianism,” in The Trinity, ed. Stephen T. Davis, Daniel Kendal, and Gerold O’Collins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Leftow’s main point is that social trinitarianism “cannot be both orthodox and a version of monotheism” (p. 203). Moreland and Craig argue that anti–social trinitarianism reduces to unitarianism. I agree with both of these criticisms, leaving us with no plausible understanding of the Trinity.

When it comes to the Incarnation, I've discussed it here.

As far as the term "Logos" meaning the 2nd person of the trinity goes, Moreland and Craig used it this way in their book Philosophical Foundations.

When it comes to the statement "Jesus is God" goes, most theologians typically describe Jesus as participating in the divine nature, but to say "Jesus is God" is not something they want to say since the term "God" describes something larger than Jesus himself.

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Dr. White claims: "I haven't ever publicly commented on John Loftus before..." But that is simply not true. Other posts relating to James White can be found here, and here.

How LINEs and SINEs disprove Intelligent Design and Ben Stein

You can learn a lot from creationists. Attending creationist grade school, high school, college and medical school made me realize that the only possible reason to believe in creationism was if you believed the Bible simply couldn't be wrong in any way. Because even though all my teachers were creationists, the ones who knew science never really had very good arguments against common ancestry that weren't shot down by Darwin in his very first presentation of his theory of common descent by modification by means of natural selection.

In fact, one of my major professors in undergraduate once stated to me point blank, "If I didn't believe in the Bible, evolution is the only plausible explanation for life."

When people's jobs depend on their believing a certain way, they will on average tend to keep believing it, but I can't help but think the professor was tipping his cap a bit to his actual assessment of the evidence by that statement.

My professor made that statement back in the 1980s. Since then, the evidence has continued to roll in by the truckload. The only thing that seems to keep pace with it is the amount of willful denial of the facts by stubborn or misguided creationists. I try to keep track of the basic arguments for creationism and for it's bastard stepchild, Intelligent Design, so it was a surprise for me to see a post by DaveScot on Uncommon Descent (an ID blog) that tried to jiujitsu some of the strongest evidence for common descent by means of natural selection (which ID believes in to a degree not completely specified, but doesn't really believe completely explains every last detail) into an argument for intelligent design.

DaveScot makes a startling and sort of shocking admission far down the post:

Recently in a private forum where others are concerned with intelligent design I brought up the case of ERVs as evidence supporting common ancestry vs. common design. If common design instead of common ancestry the designer is evidently using existing species in situ as the template for new species. If that’s the case there’s effectively no difference whatsoever between common design and common ancestry.

Dave evidently is so ignorant he fails to distinguish between design and selection. For example. The wind blows. Which grains of sand will become blown dust that will pile up? The biggest ones or the smallest ones? Is the wind designing a sand dune? Yet DaveScot can't see that a sand dune is both non-random and not designed.

DaveScot makes a common fallacy that infuses bad thinking on the ID/Creationist side. There is no dichotomous state between randomness and design. There are things that were partly designed that have been subjected to random degeneration. If you throw your watch off a cliff, are you designing how it breaks? No. Do you intend it to break? Probably.

Is a Jackson Pollock painting designed or random? The answer is both. The painting has elements of randomness that are designed. Our genomes are the very best evidence for exactly how life works. It is a hodgepodge, a mishmash with elements of non-random natural selection vying for space with "parasitic" elements of the genome that do not actively create fitness for the organism (that we are currently aware of).

The best example of this mixture is the phenomenon of viral insertions into the genome.

The virus that strikes fear in the hearts of most people who break a condom is HIV. HIV is a retrovirus, which means that it has an enzyme, reverse transcriptase, which has a job to move the genome of the virus into the DNA strands of the host cell that it has infected. HIV does this all the time which is one of the reasons it is so difficult to eradicate or control.

The only uses of reverse transcriptase are the movement of gene sequences from one place to the other. They do not play a role in physiological processes of the body. Patients on drugs which suppress the activity of reverse transcriptase live reasonably long lives if the drugs work (Magic Johnson is, I imagine, on them).

Occasionally a retrovirus like HIV will insert itself into an egg cell of a mammal and become non-virulent but still replicate. It can place copies of itself or parts of itself back into the genome over time. These are called Endogenous Retroviruses (ERVs). ERVs show all the protein sequences of the original virus, but over time the original sequences degrade.

Some become Long Interspersed Nuclear Elements and Short Interspersed Nuclear Elements (LINEs and SINEs). Between them, ERVs, LINEs and SINEs make up about 8% of the human genome. The protein coded for most commonly in the human genome is reverse transcriptase. The LINEs and SINEs are genetic elements that are remnants of retroviral insertions. They are not used by our bodies or brains in any fashion we are aware of, although endogenous retroviruses appear to have played a role in the development of viviparity (the ability to give live birth).

DaveScot thinks this is evidence that God is a genetic engineer who tinkers with genomes. I am curious what John's argument from the scale of the universe would do with that deity. But the real treat on the DaveScot post is further down.

In the comments section, there's a link there to an absolute gem of a paper written by a very honest creationist named Todd Charles Wood. Todd believes in Noah's flood and thus believes that all of life descended from fixed kinds that existed less than 6000 years ago as pairs. Thus he talks about baraminology, which is the creationist term for the study of "kinds" and how they modify over time. But it gets better.

Todd examines the similarities between the chimp and human genomes. He carefully goes over the available evidence and comes out with this amazing statement:

Using a genomic argument, I previously proposed that Mycoplasma genitalium and Mycoplasma pneumoniae share a common ancestor, because both bacteria shared almost all of their genes, and the genes unique to M. pneumoniae could be explained by a chromosomal deletion in M. genitalium. As with the genetic diversity of cats, what is to preclude application of this same argument to chimpanzees and humans with the conclusion that we share a common ancestor with an animal?

To put this question another way, how can we maintain that felids or mycoplasmas share a common ancestor with their genomic differences, and deny that the smaller differences between humans and chimpanzees could not also arise from a common ancestor? The only way to do this is to favor other data in baraminology, and to deny the primacy of the genome in determining true phylogenetic or baraminic relationships. The alternative would be to scrap baraminology and revert to a position very close to species fixity.

Todd knows that species aren't fixed. That's got to be the case since there are more species alive today than could possibly have fit on the ark. But he's like my professor. The Bible comes first. This position forces Todd into the amazing statement that follows:

The similarity of the human and chimpanzee genomes offers evidence that the genome could primarily be a repository. If the fixed nucleotide mismatches between the chimpanzee and human genomes are 1.06%, then the original nucleotide identity could be as high as 99%. At that high level of similarity, perhaps it is not impossible to believe that God created humans and chimpanzees with identical genomes. The known differences between human and chimpanzee biochemistry (see Varki 2000; Varki and Atheide 2005) may well rule this out, but it is an intriguing possibility. Even at 99% identity, however, the biological and behavioral differences between chimpanzees and humans indicate that the source of these differences is not likely to be found entirely in the genome sequences. Theologically, the high similarity of humans and chimpanzees reinforces our spiritual – not physical (Ecc. 3:18-21) – distinctiveness from the animals. It is the image of God that makes us human not some intrinsically valuable genetic element.

When the facts are in your favor, argue the facts. When the law is in your favor, argue the law. When the law and the facts aren't in your favor, bang the table. In this case, Todd can't believe his senses, because the Bible tells him otherwise. So the Bible must be right, even though there's no evidence there to back it up. At least Todd is honest.

The entire premise of Intelligent Design is that it is different from modern science. Yet Ben Stein's film showed not one example of someone doing good scientific work that was contributing to a viable research program who lost a job because of it. The job of scientists is to make valuable contributions. A major difficulty in trying to make a valuable contribution to a field is not believing in its central points.

Imagine trying to get a job at CERN if you didn't believe quantum mechanics was true. Imagine trying to get a job at NASA if you thought the moon landing was faked. Imagine trying to get a job as a dentist if you thought that cavities came from masturbation.

That's all Ben Stein had to show in his film, with the exception of the insipid Hitler porn, and he tried to claim that it was discrimination. Ben didn't even have the honesty of Todd, who I hope one day quits trying to defend the indefensible.

I hope this examination of ID and creationism can show the tip of the iceberg that changed my mind.

Jon Curry Contra William Lane Craig's Opening Statement on the Resurrection

Link. Since Craig uses this opening so often, anyone who debates him should think about what can be said in reply.

Fact or Fantasy: The Mythic Past and Present Day Reality

(As a break from working on my forth coming post on human sacrifice in the Bible (which is well under way) I decided to post this topic.)

When a myth is set in the past it is protected by the passing of time, but often present day reality is infected with this world of fantasy which, inturn, creates the illogical . Thus, even today, many people who make a promise will Knock on Wood to ward off the bad Karma that might bring the Evil Eye or ill will.

Now lets look at some ways the Bible and its religions make statements to similarly inspire hope and faith, but are unfounded or un-provable claims that have more in common with nationalistic and team sport ideals than scientific fact. Here are a few:


A. George Washington threw a silver dollar across the Potomac River.

Jesus rose from the death and ascended into Heaven.


B. George Washington never told a lie. Want proof: The story about George cutting down his father’s Cherry Tree. George would rather take his punishment than to tell a lie.

C. Jesus Christ was 100% God and 100% man who never sinned.


D. There existed at one time (but are now extinct) Hoop Snakes which could bit their tails, thus forming a hoop or circle and roll down a hill at speeds up to 30 miles per hour.

Jesus walked on water and healed the sick.


E. There was a Fountain of Youth from which if one was to drink, they would never die. Proof: Ponce De Leon tried to locate it, but it must have either dried up are is still yet to be found.

Jesus said: Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; (John 6 54)



Apart from the above, both religion and folklore get themselves into trouble when, what they claims as factual truth, is placed in the here and now or present time. Again, lets look at some:

A. A Milk Snake will locate a cow full of milk (usually in a barn) and drink her dry. Need proof: Farmers have always had to deal with cows who suddenly quit producing milk and many have seen Milk Snakes in their barns.

Jesus said: Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father. (John 14:12)


B. There is a Pot of Gold at the end of the Rainbow. (If you have not been at the end of a rainbow, how do you know this is not true? Give me your proof as I accept it by faith!)

Jesus said: In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. (John 14:2)


C. If you cut the head off a snake, it will not died until the sun goes down.

Jesus said: Wherefore if thy hand or thy foot offend thee, cut them off, and cast them from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life halt or maimed, rather than having two hands or two feet to be cast into everlasting fire. And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire. (Matt. 18: 8-9)


E. Bad Blood can make you sick. George Washington was bleed to remove this Bad Blood. This “Bleeding” did not kill George Washington, but the fact they were unable to drain enough “Bad Blood” from him did.

Jesus: "said unto him, Go, wash in the pool of Siloam, (which is by interpretation, Sent.) He went his way therefore, and washed, and came seeing." (John 9 :7)


Finally:

F. If you break a mirror, you’ll have seven years of bad luck.

John the Revelator said about the book of Revelation: For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book. And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book. (Rev. 22: 18 - 19)

Gene Cook Interviewed Me in 2006

In 2006 I was interviewed by Gene Cook of the Atheist Hour, Link.

Robert Bumbalough's DeConversion Story

Greetings readers. I thank Harry McCall and John W. Loftus, Harry for suggesting to John that I be offered an opportunity to join the Debunking Christianity team and John for allowing me to post. On offer is my deconversion story....

The first part of the essay is my personal recollections of how I became a Christian and subsequently left the faith. The second part is a partial survey of some arguments critical of the Resurrection of Christ. [*] The best defense is a strong offense. Thus I attack the principle claim made by Christianity. For as Paul is alleged to have written: "And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain." 1 Cor. 15:14

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Robert Bumbalough's Deconversion From Christianity

From the time of my earliest childhood, I was indoctrinated into the Christian religion. My Aunt and Uncle who raised me after the death of my mother, were devout Christians and members of the Church of Christ. Our home was in Sparta Tennessee, and the faith was “that old time religion”. My Aunt taught me to read using a picture book Bible. I recall the beautiful medieval and renaissance paintings of Biblical heroes that illustrated the stories. I was only five years old, and I loved the painting of Elijah taken up to Heaven by Caspar Luiken (Dutch 1672-1708). The first words I learned to read were from 2 King 2:11 “And it came to pass, as they still went on, and talked, that, behold, there appeared a chariot of fire, and horses of fire, and parted them both asunder; and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven.” Aunt Grace may have chosen that passage because of her love for bright sunny days.[1] I recall how pleased she was and how I, in turn, wanted to please her. So naturally, I just prayed the sinner’s and bedtime prayers she taught me to say. Thus I was a Christian.

Quite normally, in my teen years I rebelled against convention and all the things that were expected of me. When I was seventeen years old, that changed on Halloween night of 1973. One of my little high school buddies had found Jesus at a Church called “The Lord’s House”. Jay invited me to attend the Worship service that Wednesday evening. Since Jay was one of the cool kids and I was not, I was happy to accompany him. After the congregation would sing its hymns they all raised their hands to God and Jesus. I had never seen that in any other Worship services, but I recall thinking “When in Rome, do as the Romans do”. So I too raised my hands and told God what a swell guy he was. The faith inculcated in me had not died, rather it had only gone dormant while my teenage rebellion wore on. The sermon was a typical need for salvation exhortation based on Romans chapter 6. I went down to the front on the second verse of “Just As I Am” for the altar call along with 5 or 6 other teenagers. After leading me through the “Sinner’s Prayer”, Pastor Carlson asked me how I felt. I thoughtfully considered for a moment while thinking of the things my friend, Jay, had said to me about being “Born Again”. I decided to say, “I feel new” because I wanted to please the pastor despite not actually being personally acquainted. This satisfied Pastor Carlson. Yet I did feel something. The feeling others identified as “The Real Presence” or “The Burning In The Breast” signifying the presence of the Holy Ghost witnessing to my “soul” the truth and efficacy of the Gospel. The Lord’s House was a full Gospel Pentecostal Church. A couple of months after being “saved” I became baptized with the Holy Spirit. Speaking in Tongues seemed to me at the time to be a strong confirmation of Christian reality.

As I grew up, Christianity and Church were the most important factors in my life. I was literally living for and experiencing Jesus as what seemed like ultimate reality. I truly loved God. My life was a living sacrifice for Jesus. Time passed, and a few years later, I was staying on campus at Memphis State University in Browning Hall men’s residence. Those years on campus were delightful and fun. I was regularly attending a small Charismatic Baptist Church. I had a part time job, a car, a Christian girl friend, and many Christian pals. My mentors were the mature and mothering Christian ladies of the Church and a number of good friends who were Medical School students. Church, Bible Study, prayer meetings, Devotions and the associated social activities occupied all my free time. I was very keenly aware and motivated to please God and Jesus in all my activities.

I loved learning. Class and homework were a delight. When I learned from Geology, Physics, and Biology classes that the Genesis Creation accounts were not literally true, I was shocked since form earliest childhood, I'd been taught that Genesis was true. What, there was no Adam and Eve, no Garden, no expulsion, no original sin, no Deluge? The evidence of reality told a quite different story. How was I to determine what was real? Should I trust the evidence or the unsupported Bible stories? This was more than my mind could reasonably hold. Something had to go; I chose to accept the evidence and let Mythology go. Yet, I still had faith in God and Jesus because I felt the inner witnessing of what I thought to be the Holy Spirit.

My little job in a restaurant put me in contact with several Navy Vets, and their sea stories influenced me to join the US Navy. I wanted to see the world, so I dropped out of college and enlisted in the Navy. To my chagrin the Navy was unpleasant in its special obnoxious military manner. Despite that, when I look back on those years spent serving aboard ARS-40, USS Hoist, its plain that I was having a great and fun time. Life on the ship was hard work, but going to foreign ports of call made all the work and military nonsense worth while. During this time, I was still a Christian and completely open to whatsoever God had is store for me. My shipboard duties consumed almost all my time. To fit in with the shipmates, I kept my devotions private. But the problems of Christian mythology in light of modern science dogged my thinking.

Hoist was an ocean going tug boat with salvage capability. Fleet command ordered the ship to Haifa Israel for a job recovering an anchor lost by another US Navy vessel. The job took three weeks, and the crew got liberty several times. On a Sunday, the ships service officer arraigned for a bus tour of interesting tourist sites in Israel. The bus visited several ancient Biblical places where we got off for a few minutes to snap some pictures and hear the tour guide lecture. Then it was back onto the bus and off to the next place. The bus took us to what we were told was the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. We all got off and took the tour of the Church including a visit to the alleged empty tomb. I was still nominally a Christian, but my doubts had crystallized by leading a more secular life in the company of several non-believers.

Reflecting on my Christian Conversion and experience, the doubts engendered by learning the teleology taught to me by my Aunt and Uncle and Sunday School teachers when I was young was false occupied my mind as I walked the tour at The Church of The Holy Sepulcher that Sunday in early summer 1980. After paying the five dollars, the priest showed us about. Walking on the concave path worn down by countless Christian pilgrims back to the Edicule where the supposed tomb of Joseph of Areamathea allegedly once held the corpse of Jesus Christ, I felt a sense of awe and being very small in relation to the depth of history. Then it finally came to be my turn to walk into the tomb. While inside, I was struck by the stark barren walls and crumbling rubble strewn about. There were no carvings or graffiti, no inscriptions, no iconography of any sort, and no way to identify this particular hole in the wall as the tomb of anyone in particular. Yet there I was inside the place where the ultimate act of redemption for mankind was supposed to have occurred, so I prayed. I called on God to show me if he really was real. I recall that I said to God: “Here I am Lord. This is the place where it all took place. If your real, this is the place to show me. If you’ll reveal yourself to me, I’ll spend the rest of my life serving you in ministry. This I pray in Jesus’ name.” In my mind at that time was the sincere intention to devote the remainder of my life to service to God and mankind if God would only show me he was actually real. Then the priest shooed me out of the tomb to make way for the next visitor. As I walked out of the tomb, I thought to myself that all the religious experiences of my life were somehow no longer meaningful. The Spirit did not move me a bit while I prayed and waited. I was reminded of this when I watched the scene in "Kingdom Of Heaven" where Balian stands on the Hill of Calvary and prays for God to show him a sign. Like my own experience, Balian got only silence. Like Balian, I was open to whatsoever the Lord would have me do, but just as God was depicted hiding Himself from Balian, so also He hid from me.

Back at the Hoist, later that evening as I read my Bible, and as much as I wanted a passage to be illuminated to my understanding, none were. Later I recalled Mark 8:12 “And he sighed deeply in his spirit, and saith, Why doth this generation seek after a sign? verily I say unto you, There shall no sign be given unto this generation.” And Matthew 12:39 “But he answered and said unto them, An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given to it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas”. But why would no sign be given? If we love someone would you or I or anyone else not take time to show that our case was believable? Would not it be wrong to demand someone not only believe but base their life on a fantastic story we offered up without good evidence? So if its wrong for us why is it not wrong for God? Is morality objective? If so then that which is right for us is right for God and what is wrong for us is wrong for God. If Jesus condemns us for not believing, Jesus cannot be “good”. If we say Jesus is good despite the arbitrary and unjust demand to believe without evidence, are we not denuding the concept of goodness of any meaning.

Is a person justified in asking for confirmation from God? The Bible teaches that we are allowed to ask God for confirming signs of his will. Abraham sought a sign from Yahweh in Genesis 15:7-16 to confirm the inheritance promise Yahweh had made to him. In Judges 6:36-40 is found the story of Gideon and the sign of the dewy fleece. Gideon had earlier asked for a sign in Judges 6:17-21 too, yet in verse 39 Gideon asks for double confirmation in order to be sure Yahweh was with him in a war against the Midianites and the Amalekites. In 1 Kings 18:36-39, the prophet Elijah calls for a sign from Yahweh to demonstrate that Yahweh is God rather than Baal. Yahweh is depicted as demonstrating he is God by sending fire to consume a sacrifice that resulted in Elijah murdering lots of people. And in 2 Kings 20:8-11, King Hezekiah wanted a sign that he would be healed. Isaiah the prophet offered the King the choice of either the sun advancing or retreating 10 degrees. Hezekiah choose to see the sun retreat 10 degrees. According to the scripture: “20:11 And Isaiah the prophet cried unto the LORD: and he brought the shadow ten degrees backward, by which it had gone down in the dial of Ahaz.” In Acts 1:23-26, the Eleven Apostles pray that God show them by way of lottery who is to replace the dead Judas Iscariot. These Biblical periscopes show that one can expect God to reveal Himself when committed to obeying the will of God. But the very fact that God remains hidden in the face of open and sincere seeking is puzzling. Given that God is loving, fair, just, and is not a respecter of persons, then the vast number of non-resistant, open minded and willing seekers who fail to find or experience God in any way is a strong evidential phenomena that God probably does not exist.

John Schellenberg, author of “Divine Hiddenness And Human Reason” expressed an argument from non-resistant non-belief in an essay entitled “What Divine Hiddenness Reveals, or How Weak Theistic Evidence is Strong Atheistic Proof (2008)” [2]

1. If there is a perfectly loving God, all creatures capable of explicit and positively meaningful relationship with God who have not freely shut themselves off from God are in a position to participate in such relationships--i.e., able to do so just by trying to.

2. No one can be in a position to participate in such relationships without believing that God exists.

3. If there is a perfectly loving God, all creatures capable of explicit and positively meaningful relationship with God who have not freely shut themselves off from God believe that God exists (from 1 and 2).

4. It is not the case that all creatures capable of explicit and positively meaningful relationship with God who have not freely shut themselves off from God believe that God exists: there is nonresistant nonbelief; God is hidden.

5. It is not the case that there is a perfectly loving God (from 3 and 4).

6. If God exists, God is perfectly loving.

7. It is not the case that God exists (from 5 and 6).

A truly loving being would not make unjust, unreasonable demands, and impossible demands on those it allegedly loves. Such a being would very reasonably reveal itself in no uncertain manner to those it loves. Jesus would not expect worship, surrender of moral autonomy, or blind faith under auspices more akin to an ultimatum: "You have 'free will' to worship Jesus or not as you please — just remember that if you don't, there's a lake of fire, a burning Hell where the worm does not die with your name on it." That's more like the Mob’s protection racket than "free will." "Nice little immortal soul ya got here — be a shame if somethin was ta happen to it! Souls burn, ya know..." .

In 1 John 4:8 we’re told that “…God is Love.” This cannot be, for love is a human emotion not a metaphysical quality. It follows from the assignment of value to the love object. God is logically incapable of valuing anything as He is allegedly an eternal, transcendent, infinite, perfect, indestructible, immutable, self-sufficient, self-contained, complete being which lacks nothing. If God did exist, He would not act in the interest of a goal. He would have no basis for goal-setting whatsoever. He would always be what He is, nothing can change Him, nothing can harm Him, nothing can threaten Him, nothing can deprive Him. Nothing can be of any value to Him because value presupposes some want, or desire to be fulfilled in pursuit of continuing to live. But God needs nothing to continue to live, for that reason, He would be incapable of valuing or loving anything. If the Christian God existed, He could do nothing for any action would diminish its perfection, perturb its sufficiency and immutability.

Jesus promised the believers in Matthew 7:7 “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you:”

“Jesus said unto him,” in Mark 9:23 and continued, “If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth.”

In Luke 17:6 Jesus promised: “And the Lord said, If ye had faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye might say unto this sycamine tree, Be thou plucked up by the root, and be thou planted in the sea; and it should obey you.”

Jesus promises n John 14:12-14 “Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father. And whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If ye shall ask any thing in my name, I will do it.”

When I stood inside the alleged empty tomb and prayed, I was a believer. Yet Jesus did not answer my prayer according to his promises. Instead there was only silence, only inertness, and only the myths that had been inculcated into my child mind by those whom I loved the most. This conflicted with all the promises made by Jesus that He would not only answer our prayers but that He would actually respond to our sincere requests for confirmation and revelation of his will and presence. The confusion and doubt I felt before visiting the Tomb was only exacerbated by God’s silence. If our eternal souls are at stake, and if belief is required, and if God is Love, then why would God remain silent? If God were real, then the silence made no sense. But if God is imaginary then silence, inertness, and hiddenness is to just what would be expected especially in light of the now irrefutable fact that no one can successfully form any sort of an argument for God's existence from natural teleology or cosmology [3] For the next several years, I waited and sought for God to show me he was actually real to no avail. God was silent, hidden, and inert.

With the passage of time, I left the Navy and put Christianity on a lower priority and moved on with my life. Marriage, home life, and career occupied my time. But the questions still haunted me. If the Christian God would not respond to my heart felt earnest faith believing prayer from inside the Tomb when I was simply asking for clarity and verification, then the Christian religion could not be real so I reasoned. Why would God not respond to me in some special way that only an Omnipotent Being could such that I would have known axiomatically beyond the shadow of a doubt that He and Christianity were really true? If God is actually real and actually loves me and is omniscient knowing that I need to know and not just feign belief, then why would He remain silent, hidden, and inert? I am not a slacker. If God had spoken to me inside the Tomb, just think what a powerful testimony for Christ that would have been. If God is totally compassionate and desperately wants to save mankind, then why was He silent in the face of my solid and firm intent to offer the rest of my life in Christian Ministry Service? Many thousands could have been saved, but God was silent, hidden, and inert.

That was the reason why I fell away from the faith. Several years ago all the old feelings from my well Churched youth surfaced in my mind. Since then I’ve spent much time investigating the possibility of the existence of some sort of god, and the validity of Christianity.

Looking back on the visit to the Tomb, I can now see that was the beginning of my deconversion from Christianity to atheism. However, then I started to think that perhaps I was too hasty. There is no reason why God would have to respond to me, and there was the matter of the Empty Tomb and the Resurrection? Was it real? If so, why was the tomb empty? (This is a question I will address below.) I was more confused than ever, and I was left alone to search for answers. But how would I find the answers I sought. Faith simply would not do as faith has no way to distinguish the difference between fact and fiction. One can believe anything by faith, and be convinced by faith to the extent of delusion. Yet without validation and confirmation, the propositions believed by faith are only hollow vapid assertions. If God exists, He requires us to believe the most unbelievable propositions by faith alone. This I neither could accept or act out. I needed empirical evidence upon which to base logical acceptance of valid and soundly induced knowledge that conforms with the argument to the best explanation. Nevertheless, the question of my religious experience remains? Wouldn’t my feelings be countable as evidence? Didn’t I “feel” the Holy Ghost when I thought I was born again or when I spoke with the tongues of “Angels”? Sure, I felt something, but was it God? How can I, a mere person, made of physical matter feel the transcendent Spirit of God? He is not in space and time. An entity that is non-spatial has no dimensions, no coordinates, and no location. The entity’s non-temporality means it lacks duration and can perform no actions. Without location, duration or potential for action, it is impossible for any relation or attachment to interact with something that is spatially located and in time. Any non-located and atemporal relation or relational attachment would have to cross the boundary between the transcendent realm of God and physical existence. [4] Such boundary crossing cannot occur because an entity, relation or attachment cannot be both non-spatial and spatial, both atemporal and temporal simultaneously because the Law of Identity, A=A is in effect. The Law of Identity cannot be evaded; consequently, that which exists must exist as and only as something specific. It is impossible for a human being to feel or sense in any way the transcendent because to so do would be directly self-contradictory. Like a spheroidal-cube, that which is self-contradictory cannot exist.

My feelings come from my brain and central nervous system, and since I cannot feel that which is not in this Universe of space and time, then I cannot feel that which is Transcendent. And that means my feelings and emotions are no help in determining if God is real. How then can I account for the evidence of my Christian experience that I took to be the inner presence of the Holy Spirit?

In "Has Science Found God" Victor J. Stenger describes an experiment conducted (without a control group or statistical error accounting) by neurologist Andrew Newberg on eight Buddhists and several Franciscan nuns in prayer. The test subjects engaged in Tibetan style meditation and prayer. All participants reported transcendent feelings. The Buddhists described the feelings as a sense of timelessness and infinity as if they were [part of everything in existence while the Nuns claimed a tangible sense of the closeness to and mingling with god. None of the subjects reported any "revelations about future events or risky predictions that could be used to objectively confirm a true otherworldly reality to the experience." The subject's brains were imaged with a SPECT camera (single photon emission computed tomography). The images depicted decreased brain activity in an area dubbed, by Newberg, the orientation association area (OAA). Newberg's contends the function of the OAA is to "draw a sharp distinction between the individual and everything else, to sort out the you from the infinite not-you that makes up the rest of the universe." According to Newberg the reduced OAA activity results from a decrease in the flow of incoming sensory information during meditation or prayer. Newberg surmises that without this information the OAA cannot find the boundary between the self and non-self. Therefore the brain has no option but to detect the self as in touch with the transcendent. [5] Newberg's study was coauthored by Eugene d'Aquili and published in his book "Why God Won't Go Away", p.5 Stenger agrees with Newberg and d'Aquili that the sensation born again Christian's experience in response to their emotions of faith and belief has a neuro-physiological basis. The feeling of the presence of the Holy Spirit is most probably a brain phenomena.

Subsequently, the only tool I have to ascertain truth is my human ability to reason, to use methodological naturalism and the scientific method. Only these can actually inform me of what is truth. Therefore it is essential to turn to what can be determined from the evidence.

The defining claim of Christianity is that Jesus Christ Resurrected from the dead via supernatural miracle. The Resurrection hypothesis does not entail survival from swooning. The Resurrection is not resuscitation, or revivification. There can be no possibility of natural causation or of a statistically uncaused event that is mistaken for a miracle. Resurrection presupposes that “supernatural” is a valid concept, but what else does resurrected entail? The characteristics of the resurrected Jesus are listed as propositions by Robert Greg Cavin in his essay “Is There Sufficient Historical Evidence To Establish the Resurrection of Jesus”. Cavin list the properties of resurrection that apologists claim can be demonstrated from the Gospel accounts. Those attributes are that Jesus is unable to be injured, to die, to age, to be sick, and is able to move instantaneously from place to place at will. In order to establish that Jesus was transformed into a super being by supernatural miracle, it is necessary to establish the claimed attributes listed above. Cavin considers what kind of evidence would be necessary to establish such claims. He point out two methods whereby claims are established by evidence.

The first method Cavin dubs “from above”. By favorable comparative reference to an already established general conception whereby obvious axiomatic similarity of the claimed phenomena to the known concept, the phenomena in question can be identified. This works for processes and things because of the nature of conceptual knowledge. Ayn Rand defined concepts as: “A concept is a mental integration of two or more units possessing the same distinguishing characteristic(s), with their particular measurements omitted.” [7]. Ms Rand further noted what concepts do for people: “A concept is a mental integration of two or more units which are isolated by a process of abstraction and united by a specific definition. By organizing his perceptual material into concepts, and his concepts into wider and still wider concepts, man is able to grasp and retain, to identify and integrate an unlimited amount of knowledge, a knowledge extending beyond the immediate concretes of any given, immediate moment.” [8] Cavin's argument is that the claims of the Christian apologists regarding the resurrection cannot be established “from above” because humanity has no experience of any human being possessing super powers like those asserted for the risen Jesus. Without a broad scope of prior experience of humans with super powers, human beings cannot form concepts with which to compare the asserted attributes of the resurrected Jesus. Thus the resurrection cannot be established “from above” using comparative similarity to human super power concepts.

Cavin's names his second method “from below”. He notes that: “...in order to establish universal generalizations of the form of (Object S is able/unable to C after time T.) “from below” it is necessary (and indeed sufficient) to have as evidence a large number of independent instances acquired over a relatively long period of time in which object S is exposed to a wide variety of conditions that cause C-ing and yet does/does not C.” [9] He argues that the small number (11 reported incidents) of encounters with the alleged risen Jesus are insufficient to establish the proposed resurrection attributes claimed by Christian apologists. Even if it is granted that the New Testament Gospel accounts of the risen Jesus are historical, they are not enough to establish the resurrection of Jesus because they do nothing to specifically test the properties of the alleged Jesus. The disciples do not attempt to burn Jesus at the stake, or to stab him, or to feed him poison, or to smash him with a large object. There is no testing to determine if Jesus aged or was susceptible to disease in the forty days prior to the alleged ascension depicted in the Acts account. But a lengthy and methodological program of such testing would have been required to ascertain if Jesus was actually supernaturally resurrected. Thus the resurrection cannot be established “from below” because the disciples did not use scientific testing of the properties of the alleged resurrected Jesus.

The assertion that “supernatural” is a valid concept is presupposed by Christianity. Ayn Rand's definition of concept renders the notion of “supernatural” specious. How can human beings mentally integrate “...two or more (supernatural) units possessing the same distinguishing characteristic(s)...” [10] when all human perceptual and instrumentation faculties are limited to sensing natural phenomena. By definition “supernatural” implies the negation of all that is natural. Thus no natural effect can have a “supernatural” cause, nor can any natural system interact with anything that is “supernatural”. It is unclear how a miracle of resurrection could occur.

Taken at face value, all should be deeply suspicious of miracle claims because the Uniformity of Nature arises from material existence. David Hume, 19th century atheist [29] philosopher noted this when he wrote:

“A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined. Why is it more than probable, that all men must die; that lead cannot, of itself, remain suspended in the air; that fire consumes wood, and is extinguished by water; unless it be, that these events are found agreeable to the laws of nature, and there is required a violation of these laws, or in other words, a miracle to prevent them? Nothing is esteemed a miracle, if it ever happen in the common course of nature… There must, therefore, be a uniform experience against every miraculous event, otherwise the event would not merit that appellation…

The plain consequence is (and it is a general maxim worthy of our attention), ‘That no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavors to establish….’ When anyone tells me, that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself, whether it be more probable, that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should really have happened. I weigh the one miracle against the other; and according to the superiority, which I discover, I pronounce my decision, and always reject the greater miracle. If the falsehood of his testimony would be more miraculous, than the event which he relates; then, and not till then, can he pretend to command my belief or opinion.” - David Hume, [11]

The making of the extreme claim that Jesus of Nazareth rose from dead via means of supernatural miracle resurrection requires extreme evidence in order that legitimate warrant for belief may obtain. The canonical Gospels of the New Testament do not provide such evidence, nor do the writings of Paul or the other epistolary authors. Without warrant a belief cannot be justified. Without justification a belief cannot be considered probably true. It is far more likely that the Gospel stories are the product of early Hellenistic/Jewish Religious and Gnostic cults who created allegorical metaphor stories via midrashic analysis and story making of Septuagint scriptures combined with pagan mysteries to assert doctrinal positions relevant to their mystery faith communities.

Dr. Robert M. Price wrote about Hume in an essay [12] that: “...Hume simply pointed out that, faced with a report of a miracle, the responsible person would have to reject it, not because he has a time machine in the garage and can go prove it didn't happen, but because he knows the propensity of people to exaggerate, to prevaricate, to misunderstand, to be tricked, etc. Balance against the possible truth of this report of a miracle all the evidence of contemporary experience against violations, suspensions, whatever, of the regular occurrence of events, and where will you come out? You do not know for a fact that the miracle report is mistaken because you can never absolutely know the past. But you have to make your call whether the thing is plausible of not.”

A miracle must be extremely unlikely or else then no one would take notice of them and say “The gods are with us.” However, if we accept all reports of the miraculous without evidence, then we would be up to our eye balls in such claims. It is special pleading that one should believe the purported miracles of Christianity and reject those of the other religions when there is no good evidence for any miracle claim. What does this mean? How are we to judge what is plausible? Christianity as a mystery religion is plausible as Joseph Campbell [13] shows how universal mythemes of dying/rising saviours across the world's many cultures underlay the great religions. This prescient fact vivifies Hume's contention. It is far more likely that reports of miraculous occurrences from antiquity are the product of expression of the dying/rising savior mythemes. These myths in turn developed in the northern and southern latitudes where people depended on seasonal agriculture. The death of vegetation in the Autumn and renewal in the Spring in conjunction with the solar cycles of nature are the driving force behind the human tendency to create savior hero myths.

Richard Carrier in his superb essay , "The Spiritual Body of Christ and the Legend of the Empty Tomb" [14] demonstrates that it was very probable that earliest Paulian Christians thought of Jesus's resurrection as a spiritual event wherein the rotting corpse remained in the grave. Paul's assertions that “It (the resurrection of the dead) is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body.” [15] and “...flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.” [16] are used by Carrier to make help make his case that Paul believed the Resurrection of Jesus was a spiritual event. Since "supernatural" is not positively defined with any vivifying potentialities, it is therefore simply the negation of the natural. To demonstrate a miracle, the theist must prove the absolute impossibility of any natural causation for the event in question to be held as a justified belief. Carrier and many others have demonstrated that there is a very good probability of naturalistic causation for the alleged resurrection.

It could be, as Dr. Michael Martin points out, that “ ... it might be the case that what we thought were strictly deterministic laws are I fact statistical laws. These are compatible with rare occurrences of uncaused events. Thus, the events designated as miracles may be wrongly designated; they may be uncaused in the sense of being neither naturally nor supernaturally determined.” [17]

What of the New Testament’s own witness? There were no eye witnesses to the resurrection itself. The four accounts of post resurrection Jesus sightings cannot be harmonized. The long ending of Mark from 16:9-20 is an acknowledged interpolated appending. Thus there are no post resurrection appearances in Mark. Paul’s list of post resurrection appearances contradicts the Gospels and Acts which in turn contradict each other. The clear progression of legendary development apparent with the chronological order of writing of the Gospels indicates that the original writers had no concern with historical fact. They instead were very much interested in asserting doctrinal and theological points of significance to their faith communities.

Randal Helms, In a great book, “Gospel Fictions” notes many examples of how the Matthew, Luke, and John Gospel evangelists engaged in literary midrash by deliberately and self-consciously changing by elaborative additions to Mark's Gospel. In the second chapter Helms points out that in three of the four canonical Gospels that the alleged final dying words of Jesus are recorded differently, and Matthew spins the words for his own purposes. I will cite the text at length as Helms is an excellent writer.

"For example, according to Matthew and Mark, the dying words of Jesus were, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" According to Luke, Jesus' dying words were, "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit." But according to John they were , "It is accomplished." To put it another way, we cannot know what the dying words of Jesus were, or even whether he uttered any; it is not that we have too little information, but that we have too much. Each narrative implicitly argues that the others are fictional. In this case at least, it is inappropriate to ask of the Gospels what "actually" happened; they may pretend to be telling us, but the effort remains a pretense, a fiction.

The matter becomes even more complex when we add to it the virtual certainty that Luke knew perfectly well what Mark had written as the dying words, and the likelihood that John also knew what Mark and perhaps Luke had wrote, but that both Luke and John chose to tell the story differently."

The interesting thing here is that both the Lukian and Johnine writers were working from Mark and other source documents, but they choose to tell the story in very different ways for doctrinal and theological reasons related to the needs of their faith communities. Helms continues.

"The Gospels are Hellenistic religious narratives in the tradition of th Greek Septuagint version of the Old Testament, which constituted the "Scriptures" to those Greek-speaking Christians who wrote the four canonical Gospels and who appealed to it, explicitly or implicitly, in nearly every paragraph the wrote.

A simple example is the case of the las words of Christ. Mark presents these words in self-consciously realistic fashion, shifting from his usual Greek into the Aramaic of Jesus, transliterated into Greek letters: "'Eloi eloi lama sabachthanei (My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? - Mark 15:34). Mark gives us no hint that Jesus is "quoting" Psalm 22:1; we are clearly to believe that we are hearing the grieving outcry of a dying man. But the author of Matthew, who used Mark as one of his major written sources is self-consciously "Literary" in both this and yet another way: though using Mark as his major source for the passion story, Matthew if fully aware that Mark's crucifixion narrative is based largely on the 22 nd Psalm, fully aware, that is, that Mark's Gospel is part of a literary tradition (this description would not be Matthew's vocabulary, but his method is nonetheless literary). Aware of the tradition, Matthew knew that no Aramaic speaker present at the Cross would mistake a cry to God (Eloi) for one to Elijah - the words are too dissimilar. So Matthew self-consciously evoked yet another literary tradition in the service both of verisimilitude and of greater faithfulness to the Scriptures: not the Aramaic of Psalm 22:1 but the Hebrew, which he too transliterated into Greek - "Eli Eli" (Matt. 27:46) - a cry which could more realistically be confused for "Eleian". Matthew self-consciously appeals both to literary tradition -a "purer" text of the Psalms-and to verisimilitude as he reshapes Mark, his literary source. ..... Matthew certainly knew that he was creating a linguistic fiction in his case (Jesus spoke Aramaic, not Hebrew.) though just as clearly he felt justified in doing so, given his conviction that since Psalm 22 had "predicted" events in the crucifixion, it could be appealed to even in the literary sense of one vocabulary rather that another, as a more "valid description of the Passion.

Luke is even more self-consciously literary and fictive than Matthew in his crucifixion scene. Though, as I have said, he knew perfectly well what Mark had written as the dying words of Jesus, he created new ones more suitable to his understanding of what the death of Jesus meant - and act with at least two critical implications: First, that he has thus implicitly declared Mark's account a fiction; second, that he self-consciously presents his own as a fictions. For like Matthew, Luke in 23:46 deliberately placed his own work in the literary tradition by quoting Psalm 30 (31):5 in the Septuagint as the dying speech of Jesus: "Into your hands I will commit my spirit" ("eis cheiras sou parathesomai to pneuma mou"), changing the verb from future to present (paratithemai) to suit the circumstances and leaving the rest of the quotation exact. This is self-conscious creation of literary fiction, creation of part of a narrative scene for religious and moral rather than historical purposes. Luke knew perfectly well, I would venture to assert, that he was creating an ideal model of Christian death, authorized both by doctrine and by literary precedent." [18]

Helms illuminates purposeful editorial revisionism throughout "Gospel Fictions". There are many examples of this sort of redaction to assert midrashic theological-doctrinaire teachings. The last words of Jesus were and are of utmost importance to Christians as is indicated by many Christian citations of John 19:30. Yet each of the canonical Gospels tells it differently or spins it differently in the case of Matthew. This shows that the Gospel authors were self-consciously aware they were not dealing with history but rather with pious fiction. Taken together almost all content of the Gospels can be shown to be based on earlier Moses, Elijah, Elisha, David stories or from bits of liturgical text form the Jewish apocrypha.

Dr. Robert M. Price's does a masterful job of illustrating the midrashic nature of the Gospels. Price informs the reader of the evolution of literary criticism applied to study of the Gospels. “Scholars including Erhardt Guttgemanns, Robert M. Fowler, Frasn Neirynck, and Werner Kelber began to show that, despite their brief episodic character, the gospel stories bear extensive traces of authorial creation, original de novo storytelling. Earlier tradition may have played a role, but there is less and less reason to think so, the more 'Markan', 'Matthean', 'Lukan', or 'Johannine' a story appears. This is measured by the extent to which each gospel story employs the familiar themes and vocabulary of each writer as established by studying his redactional treatment of prior gospels. The resultant theory would see Mark as writing much or even most of his work (as the radical critic Bruno Bauer had said already in the nineteenth century) out of his imagination, with Matthew and Luke freely redacting Mark's work and adding much new material of their own invention.” [19]

There is an interesting puzzle within the Gospel of Mark itself that bears upon the question its reliability regarding historical happenings. We read in Mark 16:5 “...they saw a young man sitting on the right side...”(RSV) and in 16:8 that “And they went out and fled from the tomb; for trembling and astonishment had come upon them; and they said nothing to any one, for they were afraid. (RSV).[20] Who was the young man? The original ending is an obvious literary device to account for why people had not head this story previously. That the women ran away and told nobody is a good reason why the story had not been previously known. Verse 16:8 also functions to explain why it is that the author knows what happened, for implicit is the notion that the young man sitting on the right in verse 16:5 is the author. Mark, or whoever originally penned Mark, wrote himself into the story so that he could authoritatively claim to know what happened. Use of a literary device to feign history would be suspicious. Employed to create pious fiction for the Kingdom of God, use of the literary device would be praise worthy within the faith community that spawned Mark.

What about the Tomb itself? Jerusalem is surrounded by a vast necropolis with many thousands of rock cut tombs. The hole in the wall in question, as it turns out, was selected as a site of veneration by Helen, Emperor Constantine's devote mother, in 325 CE shortly before she commissioned the construction of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. No person living in Jerusalem in 325 could possibly have any factual knowledge regarding the location of the tomb as two major wars and almost three centuries had transpired between the legendary events and Helen's choice. Local Christian traditions articulated by Saint Macarius, Bishop of Jerusalem, probably influenced Helen's choice. The controversy as to whether the site is actually Golgatha assumes the Gospel stories are true. Such presumption is question begging and special pleading. Mark was knowingly written as an inspirational but fictional liturgy. Since the other Gospels are based on Mark, the Tomb cannot be evidence of any truth.

When the earliest Christian documents, the genuine Pauline epistles, are examined, there is no trace of the life and ministry of Jesus, the Passion, the Trial, details of the Crucifixion, details of the Burial, details of the Resurrection or Empty Tomb. Paul's silence is puzzling. Why would “the Apostle to the Gentiles” not be keen on telling the story of his Master to the Converts? All Christians that have ever lived have at least one thing in common, they are intensely interested in all things Jesus. Would it have been any less so in Paul's day? Of course not.

Peter Kirby in "The Historicity of the Empty Tomb Evaluated: Argument from Silence" points to the silence in early Christian first century writings regarding the Empty Tomb tradition as the reason why the Christian has a burden of proof.

“It should be noted that, outside of the four gospels, all Christian documents that may come the first century mention neither tomb burial by Joseph of Arimathea nor the subsequent discovery of such a tomb as empty. Although there may have been no particular reason for any one of these writers to mention the story, it could be argued that, if they all accepted the story, perhaps one of them would have entered a discussion that would mention the empty tomb story. For example, if there were a polemic going around that the disciples had stolen the body, one of these early writers may have written to refute such accusations. In any case, it is necessary to mention these documents if only to note that there is no conflicting evidence that would show that the empty tomb story was an early or widespread tradition since the argument from silence would be shown false if there were. Here is a list of these early documents:

1. 1 Thessalonians, 2. Philippians, 3. Galatians, 4. 1 Corinthians, 5. 2 Corinthians, 6. Romans, 7. Philemon, 8. Hebrews, 9. James, 10. Colossians, 11. 1 Peter, 12. Ephesians, 13. 2 Thessalonians, 14. Jude, 15. The Apocalypse of John, 16. 1 John, 17. 2 John, 18. 3 John, 19. Didache, 20. 1 Clement, 21. 1 Timothy, 22. 2 Timothy, 23. Titus, 24. The Epistle of Barnabas,

Indeed, outside of the four canonical gospels, the Gospel of Peter is the only document before Justin Martyr that mentions the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea or the discovery of the empty tomb. If the Gospel of Peter as it stands is considered to be dependent on the canonical gospels, then there is no independent witness to the empty tomb story told in the four gospels.” [21]

Christian apologists widely acknowledge there was not a tradition within early Christianity of veneration of Jesus’ tomb. By this they commit error by predicating on that basis argument for an empty tomb. Rather the lack of Christian worship at a tomb site indicates the lack of knowledge of any tomb of Jesus, full or empty. Modern Christian of whatever stripe are intensely interested in visiting the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and the empty tomb. It is quite likely that first century Christians would have felt likewise and hence would have wanted to visit and worship at a tomb site. The fact that they did not is evidence against a tomb.

Dr. Michael Martin argues that “Its is difficult to take seriously the alleged fact of the empty tomb given: the inconsistencies in the stories, the lack of contemporary eyewitnesses, the unclarity of who exactly the eyewitnesses were, the lack of knowledge of the reliability of th eyewitnesses,the failure of early Christian writers to mention the empty tomb, the failure of the empty tomb story to be confirmed in Jewish or pagan sources, It is significant that Habermas does not even consider the problem of the failure to confirm the empty tomb story by independent sources.” [22]

Michael Martin cites a goodly number of scholars who are skeptical of various aspects to the resurrection story to rebut Gary Habermas’ claim that “… events that are listed as agreed to be virtually all critical scholars…” regarding the main points of the Jesus story. Dr. Martin continued: “But is there the degree of agreement among scholars that Habermas claims? That he has at least exaggerated this agreement can be inferred from the following. W.Trilling argues that “not a single date of Jesus’ life” can be established with certainty, and J.Kahl maintains that the only thing that is known about him is that he existed at a date and place which can be established approximately”. Other scholars argue that the quest for the historical Jesus is hopeless. Ian Wilson argues that, concerning the Resurrection, “Ultimately, we must concede that on the basis of the available evidence, knowledge of exactly what happened is beyond us.” H. Conzelman finds that the Passion narratives are shaped by the evangelists’ own theological convictions, that they are the results of “intensive theological interpretation”, and that they establish only the bare fact that Jesus was crucified: “Everything else about the sequence of events is contestable.” C.F. Evans argues that “almost all the main factors” in the Passion story “have become problematic.” Dieter Georgi maintains that since Paul’s writing omits any mention of an empty tomb this raises the possibility that Jesus’ body was still inside. He also suggests that the empty tomb stories may have been added to the Gospels after the sack of Jerusalem in A.D.70 at which time the tomb may have been empty. We have already seen that scholars such as Marxsen, Fuller, Kummel, and Anderson disagree over whether the empty tomb stories entered the Christian tradition early or late.” Martin makes it clear that the claims of Christian apologetics regarding any consensus on the soundness of the Gospel traditions is exaggeration. [23]

After thoroughly examining the case for and the evidence against the resurrection of Jesus, Martin concludes “that the available evidence should lead a rational person to disbelieve the claim that Jesus was resurrected from the dead around A.D.30” [24]

John Loftus in his book “Why I Rejected Christianity: A Former Apologist Explains” cites Uta Ranke-Heineman who argued against the Empty Tomb tradition from the silence of Paul. “The empty tomb on Easter Sunday morning is a legend. This is shown by the simple fact that the apostle Paul, the most crucial preacher of Christ's resurrection, says nothing about it. Thus it also means nothing to him, that is, and empty tomb has no significance for the truth of the resurrection, which he so emphatically proclaims. Since he gathers together and cites all the evidence for Jesus' resurrection that has been handed down to him, He certainly would have found the empty tomb worth mention. That he doesn't proves that it never existed and hence the accounts of it must not have arisen until later.... The belief in the resurrection is older that the belief in the empty tomb; rather the legend of the empty tomb grew out of th faith of Easter.” [25]

If Paul had known of the details of the life, ministry, passion, crucifixion, burial, and resurrection, he would have used that information in his preaching and writing. The principle of final causation dictates that a rational and reasonable person will for a given desired end, employ an appropriate means to achieve that end. Paul would have done just that had the Gospel stories been part of his knowledge base.

Charles B. Waite spent years in the Library of Congress often in inaccessible rooms with the help of friends and insiders researching ancient texts to ascertain a history of Christianity up till the second century. His book is titled “History of the Christian Religion to the Year Two Hundred” and is fully and freely available on Google books. This book is considered one of the most accurate histories of Christianity with much information not found elsewhere. Waite wrote much on lost books, early Church fathers and heresy. His conclusion on page 433 of the downloadable PDF reads:

“…no evidence is found, of the existence in the first century, of either of the following doctrines; the immaculate conception – the miracles of Christ – his material resurrection. No one of these doctrines is to be found in the epistles of the New Testament, nor have we been able to find them in any other writings of the first century.

As to the four gospels, in coming to the conclusion that they were not written in the first century, we have but recorded the convictions of the more advanced scholars of the present day, irrespective of their religious views in other respects; with whom, the question as now presented is, how early in the second century were they composed?

Discarding, as inventions of the second century, having no historical foundation, the three doctrines above named, and much else which must necessarily stand or fall with them, what remains of the Christian Religion?”[26] Waite's conclusion is a powerful evidence against literalistic fundamental Christianity.

Richard Carrier made this strong argument in an podcast discussion of the resurrection. My version of that argument is based on what Dr. Carrier said on the Infidelguy podcast. In ACTS 23:26-31 we find Claudius Lysias' letter to Felix. Claudius was Tribune and Chief of Police in Jerusalem. Claudius Lysias was Greek who had purchased his Roman citizenship and likely an initiate of the Elysian mysteries with no belief in a physical bodily resurrection. Claudius' letter claims he was present in the council of the Jews when the Apostle Paul explained his case. Claudius found Paul to be only in dispute with the Jews over a matter of their law. This letter makes no sense in light of a physical resurrection of Jesus, but Lysias' letter is readily explained if Paul believed Jesus to be a spiritual divinity that performed its salvific action only in the spirit realm or via way of a spiritual resurrection in the spirit realm. If Claudius had heard Paul say something like, "Jesus was recently a living man who the Jews tricked the Romans into condemning and crucifying, but GOD physically raised him from the dead, and we know this because he was seen alive by the disciples", then Claudius, being Tribune and top cop in Jerusalem, would have thought Paul had assisted the criminal Jesus in escaping or that Paul knew who helped Jesus get away. So instead of sending Paul to Felix with a nice letter, Claudius would have tortured Paul to find out were the disciples were and would have sent out the troops to search for Jesus. So it would seem that Paul in the council of the Jews said nothing about Jesus being a man in Jerusalem recently crucified by the Romans and physically raised from the dead. If however he had instead presented Jesus as a spirit world deity similar to an ordinary god or as spiritually resurrected in the spirit world, then Claudius Lysias would have acted as he is recorded as doing in Acts 23. In Rome of the first century, it was a capital crime to deify any person after their death other than the Emperor. If Claudius had heard Paul doing so, he would have had to have arrested Paul on charges of treason. But Claudius sent Paul on to Felix, so Claudius heard Paul and the Jews disputing only about matters of Jewish law. This is very well explained if Paul believed Christ Jesus to be only a spirit world deity. Paul's silence regarding details of the alleged passion, crucifixion, burial and physical resurrection of Jesus is strong evidence against a Resurrection and the Empty Tomb.

Why didn't Paul know about the details of Jesus' life, ministry, passion, trial, crucifixion, burial or resurrection? The reason why Paul knew nothing of Jesus' story is that it had not yet been invented. The Q Gospel and the Gospel of Thomas both predate Mark, yet they know nothing of the Story as Mark tells it. The Circular nature of Mark with its abrupt ending at 16:8 depicting the women running away in fear and silence after the young mans tells then Jesus will rejoin his disciples in Galilee prompts the reader to go back to the beginning. In “Deconstructing Jesus”, Robert M. Price notes that Darrell J. Doughty suggest this idea. Price continues: “Mark wants the reader to look next at the only place there is left to look: the beginning. There we find the episode of Jesus' calling the disciples at an the lakeside and the mysteriously immediate response: the disciples drop what they are doing and follow him. Doughty noticed how much sense this scene makes if we assume the disciples know him already. Think of how similar the scene is both to Luke 5:1-11 and to that in John 21:1-11, where it is explicitly a resurrection story! This is the reunion Mark's young man was talking about (Mark 16:7)! So once the Risen Jesus regains his disciples at the sea of Galilee, the post-resurrection teachings begin. They continue throughout the Gospel of Mark.” [27] This sort of religious circularity is characteristic of early Christianity. The presence of such a literary device is yet another piece of evidence betraying Mark's non-historical nature. The other three Gospels depend on Mark, but Matthew, Luke, and John each modify and redact Mark freely. They could only do this if they viewed Mark as Pious fiction to begin with. That their stories differ so profoundly indicates that they were self-consciously crafting liturgical fairy tales for their own faith communities. Thus Christianity is, like all other religions, the result of mythological and legendary accretion.

Nevertheless, even if the Gospels could be shown to be historical and the Empty Tomb established, it would not mean that Jesus had actually Resurrected from the dead by supernatural miracle, Christianity would still be irrational and unreasonable. This finding was reached by Walter Cassels in his great book “Supernatural Religion” after lengthy research and study. Published in 1902, Cassels' magnum opus surveys many of the early Church patriarchs and apologists in detail. (This book is available for free download on Google books.) Its worth quoting at length.

“Orrexamining the alleged miraculous evidence for Christianity as Divine Revelation, we find that, even if the actual occurrence of the supposed miracles could be substantiated, their value as evidence would be destroyed by the necessary admission that miracles are not limited to one source and are not exclusively associated with truth, but are performed by various spiritual Beings, Satanic as well as Divine, and are not always evidential, but are sometimes to be regarded as delusive and for the trial of faith. As the doctrines supposed to be revealed are beyond Reason, and cannot in any sense be intelligently approved by the human intellect, no evidence which is of so doubtful and inconclusive a nature could sufficiently attest them. This alone would disqualify the Christian miracles for the duty which only miracles are capable of performing.

The supposed miraculous evidence for the Divine Revelation, moreover, is not only without any special divine character, being avowedly common also to Satanic agency, but it is not original either in conception or details. Similar miracles are reported long antecedently to the first promulgation of Christianity, and continued to be performed for centuries after it. A stream of miraculous pretension, in fact, has flowed through all human history, deep and broad as it has passed through the darker ages, but dwindling down to a thread as it has entered days of enlightenment. The evidence was too hackneyed and commonplace to make any impression upon those before whom the Christian miracles are said to have been performed, and it altogether failed to convince the people to whom the Revelation was primarily addressed. The selection of such evidence for such a purpose is much more characteristic of human weakness than of divine power.

The true character of miracles is at once betrayed by the fact that their supposed occurrence has thus been confined to ages of ignorance and superstition, and that they are absolutely unknown in any time or place where science has provided witnesses fitted to appreciate and ascertain the nature of such exhibitions of supernatural power. There is not the slightest evidence that any attempt was made to investigate the supposed miraculous occurrences, or to justify the inferences so freely drawn from them, nor is there any reason to believe that the witnesses possessed, in any considerable degree, the fullness of knowledge and sobriety of judgment requisite for the purpose. No miracle has yet established its claim to the rank even of apparent reality, and all such phenomena must remain in the dim region of imagination.” [28]

The story of Jesus' resurrection is probably fictional. However, even if that miracle could be established as happening, there would be no way to determine the actual cause of the miracle. Consequently, there can be no justification for Christian belief. I am justified in deconverting from Christianity in 1981. Nevertheless, the question of the existence of a God of some sort remains, but that is a subject for another time.

[1] Elijah is quite obviously a version of a sun god.

[2] http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/john_schellenberg/hidden.html

[3] See Victor J. Stenger's book “God: The Failed Hypothesis.” and Richard Dawkins' “The God Delusion”.

[4] “Gods Spatial Unlocatedness Prevents Him From Being the Creator of the Universe” http://www.abstractatom.com/gods_spatial_unlocatedness_prevents_him_from_being_the_creator_of_the_universe.htm

[5] Stenger's well researched book yields much of interest, and the above material is loosely quoted and paraphrased from pages 293 and 294 of "Has Science Found God".

[6] “Is There Sufficient Historical Evidence To Establish the Resurrection of Jesus” published in “The Empty Tomb: Jesus Beyond The Grave” p.19

[7] Ayn Rand, “Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology” p.15

[8] Ayn Rand, “The Psycho—Epistemology of Art,” published in “The Romantic Manifesto” p.17

[9] Cavin, p.27

[10] Rand, “Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology” p.15

[11] David Hume, “An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding”, p. 114-16

[12] Dr. Robert M. Price, “William Lane Craig's “Contemporary Scholarship and the Historical Evidence For the Resurrection of Jesus Christ” published in “Jesus is Dead” p. 199

[13] Joseph Campbell, “The Hero With a Thousand Faces”

[14] The Empty Tomb: Jesus Beyond the Grave, p105-233

[15] 1 Corinthians 15:44 (RSV)

[16] 1 Corinthians 15:50 (RSV)

[17] Dr. Michael Martin, “The Case Against Christianity”, p.75

[18] Randel Helms, "Gospel Fictions" p.15-17

[19] Price, "The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man", p.30

[20] It is widely acknowledged that Mark ended at 16:8 and that the long ending from 16:9-20 is an appended interpolation.

[21] Peter Kirby, “The Historicity of the Empty Tomb Evaluated: Argument from Silence"

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/peter_kirby/tomb/silence.html

[22] Martin, ibid, p.89

[23] Ibid, p.88-89

[24] Ibid, p.96

[25] John Loftus, “Why I Rejected Christianity: A Former Apologist Explains”, p.210

[26] Charles B. Waite, “History of the Christian Religion to the Year Two Hundred”, p.433 – (fully available as a complete book on Google Books)

[27] Robert M. Price, “Deconstructing Jesus”, p.34-35

[28] Walter Cassels, “Supernatural Religion”, p.902-903- (fully available as a complete book on Google Books)

[29] "Hume was charged with heresy, but he was defended by his young clerical friends who argued that as an atheist he laid outside the jurisdiction of the Church. Despite his acquittal and possibly due to the opposition of Thomas Reid of Aberdeen, who that year launched a Christian critique of his metaphysics Hume failed to gain the Chair of Philosophy at the University of Glasgow." - http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=David_Hume&oldid=218587342

[*] I apologize for my poor writing.
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Edit History:

1. 6/11/08, 9:41 EST - Corrected bad assertion regarding David Hume having been a Christian Churchman by correctly referencing Hume as the Atheist he actually was and added end note [29].