The End of Christianity (14 page)

Furthermore, if god created us with the propensity for being good and/or if there were some good consequences when we behaved well and some bad consequences if we behaved badly, then we wouldn't need to be told by god what we should do. An ethics based in natural law would be sufficient for us. We wouldn't need a Bible, just logic and the scientific method (yet neither of which are taught to us in the Bible). And if there was no eternal punishment, there would be no need for any divinely revealed warnings about a hell in the afterlife, either. For even if we did disobey this god, then such a deity could simply forgive us without any need for an incarnation or an atonement, which lack any rationally acceptable explanation anyway.
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With no incarnation or need for an atonement, there would be no need of a resurrection either. It's precisely because of these additional and unnecessary extraordinary claims of divine redemptive acts that most nonbelievers don't accept the supposed propositional revelation in the Bible anyway. If this is what God did to redeem us, then he simply did not sufficiently explain why these acts were needed or how they are even possible. Nor did he provide enough evidence to believe that they took place in the historical past. Hence Swinburne's religion simply looks ridiculous on any mature reflection.

In fairness to Swinburne, he'll claim to have defended his view of god and why this particular world exists as we find it, elsewhere in his writings. But whenever I chase that rabbit called “elsewhere” down the apologist's rabbit hole, all I ever find is more ignorance coupled with more special pleading and more question begging. There is no “elsewhere” that accomplishes what he needs to do, even though he is one of the most prolific professional apologists for Christianity in our generation. If that's the best apologists can do, that alone proves Christianity is absurd.

I would think that if the Christian faith is reasonable at all, then Christian apologists like Swinburne would not be required to be so unimaginative about the kind of god that might exist and the kind of world an omnipotent god could have created. But they must be, because they were taught in our Christian culture to believe what some ancient, barbaric, prescientific, superstitious agency-detectors wrote down and claimed was the word of God. Today's apologists have killed their imagination and buried it away because they cannot defend their god against these other god hypotheses and they cannot defend the existence of this present world if their particular god exists. They were raised to believe that their kind of god exists and that therefore this kind of world must be the best one for such a god to create, and that's all there is to it. So ends their quest to understand it, and so begins their attempt to defend it. That's all there is to it. This is what it takes for them to defend their inherited Christian faith, and as such, it makes these otherwise brilliant people look, well, dumb. But then, that's what it takes to be a Christian apologist. Again, no offense, but that's the way it really is. They have to be this way in order to defend what cannot reasonably be defended at all.

A REALITY CHECK FOR BELIEVERS

I'm ending this chapter with a reality check for Christians—especially evangelicals. Following are fifteen additional items they believe and why each one of them involves double standards, non sequiturs, special pleading, begging the question, or just plain ignorance. This is my attempt at throwing a cold cup of water in the face of believers to wake them up from their dogmatic slumbers. Wake up, Christians! Your faith is wildly improbable.

The evidence is simply not there to believe in a three-headed, eternally existing god who became one of us to die on a cross for our sins in one lone part of the ancient world; a god who bodily resurrected from the grave but was only seen by a small number of people, which forces the rest of us to take their word on it or else spend an eternity in hell because we were not there to see it for ourselves. People around the world are raised in different cultures to believe in their particular god(s) and cannot see things any other way, and yet Christians still claim there is only one god who will judge all people based upon what they believe even though what they believe does not pass the Outsider Test for Faith! This divine plan does not look like an intelligent one coming from a perfectly good, all-powerful god. Given the fact that countless contradictory sects of religious faiths believe and defend what they were raised or taught to believe, and that most of them are certain about their faith, I must demand evidence—hard evidence, positive evidence—before I'll accept what any of them believe. Until one of them steps up to the plate and offers something more by way of evidence than the other faiths, I cannot believe in any of them.

Here, then, in summary fashion, is what it takes to believe and defend Christianity:
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1) That there exists a perfectly good, omnipotent God, who created a perfectly good universe even though there is no cogent theodicy that can explain why there is such ubiquitous and massive human and animal suffering in it. How do you think human beings first learned that venomous creatures like certain kinds of spiders, snakes, ants, or scorpions could kill us? People, frequently children, had to die, lots of them. How do you think human beings first learned that polluted water or lead poisoning could kill us? Again, people, frequently children, had to die, lots of them. It was inevitable, since God never told us what to avoid in order to stay alive. We had to learn these kinds of things firsthand. He didn't even tell us how to discover penicillin or a vaccine for polio or tuberculosis.

2) That Christianity is a faith that must dismiss the tragedy of death. It does not matter who dies, or how many, or what the circumstances are when people die. It could be the death of a mother whose baby depends upon her for milk. It could be a pandemic like cholera that decimated parts of the world in 1918, or the more than 23,000 children who die every single day from starvation. These deaths could be by suffocation, drowning, a drive-by shooting, or being burned to death. It doesn't matter. God is good. Death doesn't matter. People die all the time. In order to justify God's goodness, Christianity minimizes the value of human life. Despite all its rhetoric to the contrary, it is actually a pro-death faith, plain and simple. Because all of this horrible death is just God's perfect plan, he can kill or let die whomever he wants, and by letting it all happen can do no wrong. Believers even praise him for it.

3) That the highest created being, known as Satan or the Devil, led an angelic rebellion against an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, omnipresent God…and expected to win. This makes Satan out to be suicidal, inexplicably evil, and dumber than a box of rocks. Yet he still defies God's power by supposedly meddling in the world without God stopping him even though he could.

4) That when it comes to verifiable matters of historical fact (like the Exodus, the extent of David's rule, Luke's reported worldwide census, the darkening of the sun at Christ's death, etc.), the biblical stories are disconfirmed by evidence to the contrary as fairy tales, but when it comes to supernatural claims of miracles that cannot be tested against external facts, like a virgin birth and resurrection from the grave, the Bible reports true historical facts.

5) That although a great number of miracles were claimed to have happened in the different superstitious cultures of the ancient world, only the ones in the Bible actually happened as claimed. Likewise, that although in the ancient world there were false virgin birth claims about famous people (like Plato and Alexander the Great) and mythical heroes (like Perseus and Romulus), Jesus was the only one truly born of a virgin. There are many other similar mythological stories told in ancient Near Eastern literature that predate what we read in the Bible at every step of the way, so why should we think the stories in the
Bible
involve a real God concerning real events and real people?

6) That an omniscient God could not foresee that his revealed will in the Bible would lead believers to commit atrocities against other believers that included the Inquisition, the witch hunts, and the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), in which eight million Christians killed each other over correct doctrine. This leads reasonable people to conclude there is no divine mind behind the Bible. I now call this
The Problem of Divine Miscommunication
.
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      Instead of
suppressing
religious freedom and expression in the Bible (Exod. 20:3; 22:18; Deut. 7; 13:1–16,17:2–5; I Kings 18:40; II Kings 23), God could have permitted the ancient Israelites what the heathen nations had by granting them first amendment–type liberties.
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Then boatloads of people would not have been killed by the Jews or later by the historic church for what they believed or said. It's that simple.
      Christians might try to argue that by granting religious freedom, the Israelites would have strayed completely away from Yahweh, their tribal deity. But this argument presupposes the evidence was not there for them to believe in the first place, for if there was enough evidence to believe, there would be no reason to suppress religious freedom. Either the evidence was there to believe or it wasn't. If it was, then there was no reason to prohibit religious freedom of thought or expression. If it wasn't, then their God should have provided more of it. With a few extra prophets and a little more evidence, the Israelites would freely choose to believe without any command prohibiting people from freely choosing their religion. Consequently, down through the centuries there would be no precedent for the Inquisitional rallying cry of “Convert or Die” that rang in Europe's dungeons for two hundred years, nor for the witch hunts that lasted for three hundred years, nor for the Thirty Years’ War.

7) That Jesus fulfilled Old Testament prophecy even though there is not one passage in the Old Testament that is specifically fulfilled in his life, death, and resurrection that can legitimately be understood as a prophecy and that singularly points to Jesus as the Messiah by any objective method. My friend Dan Lewandowski said it to me this way: the Christian must believe “the Jewish people, who like any ethnic and cultural group know their own language, history, and traditions better than anyone, and who have been studying them with reverential diligence for millennia, have always been completely wrong about the most important meanings of their own most sacred scriptures—even as communicated to them by their own God.”

8) That miracles took place even though believing in them demands a near impossible double burden of proof. What believers must show is that an alleged biblical miracle could not have happened within the natural world because it was impossible (or else it's not considered miraculous). Then they must turn right around and claim such an impossible event probably took place anyway. The probability that an alleged miracle took place is directly proportional to the probability that such an event could take place (i.e., the less probable it is that a miracle could take place, then the less probable it is that it did take place), so the improbability of a miracle claim defeats any attempt to show that it probably happened. That's why miraculous claims in the Bible can never be proof for the existence of that God, for in order to accept such a claim by a writer in the prescientific past, a person must already believe in a miracle-working God who did
these particular kinds of miracles.

9) That their faith is true even though the textual evidence in the New Testament shows that at best the founder of the Jesus cult was a failed apocalyptic prophet who prophesied that the end of the world would take place in
hi
s generation and would involve a total cosmic catastrophe, after which God would inaugurate a literal kingdom on earth with the “Son of Man” reigning from Jerusalem over all the world's nations. This
still
has never happened.
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10) That their faith is true even though, apart from the author of Revelation, the Apostle Paul is the
only
New Testament author to claim he saw the risen Jesus, and Paul reportedly said he merely saw a vision of Jesus on the Damascus Road rather than Jesus himself. Yep, just see Acts 26:9: “So then, King Agrippa, I (Paul) was not disobedient to the vision (i.e.,
) from heaven.” In fact, he himself insists he saw Jesus in no other way (in Gal. 1:11–12,16). The author of Revelation (John of Patmos) likewise clearly states he saw Jesus only in a vision (Rev. 1:1–2, 9–10). Christians must convince themselves that this is to be considered not only evidence but
conclusive
evidence, even though the same kind of evidence would confirm the claims of Joseph Smith, Muhammad, Jim Jones, and almost every other religious leader who claimed to have had personal and private revelations from their God.

11) That even though God's supposed revelation in the canonical Bible is indistinguishable from the musings of an ancient, barbaric, superstitious people, the Bible is the word of God anyway. As my friend George Yorgo Veenhuyzen once put it:

The lord doesn't work in mysterious ways, but in ways that are indistinguishable from his nonexistence. It seems to me that there is nothing in the Christian scriptures, no sentence, paragraph, or idea, that couldn't be anything more than the product of the humans alive at the time the apparently divinely inspired scriptures and ideas were “revealed.” Sure, it's possible for a god to reveal himself in an inspired book, and throughout history, in ways that are indistinguishable from the work of human minds and human minds alone. But how probable does that seem to you? The available evidence shows that the Bible is nothing but the cultural byproduct of human invention. There is no divine mind behind it.
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