Randal Rauser's Blog, page 112

What is the most difficult Christian doctrine to defend?

In my 2008 book Faith Lacking Understanding I identify three types of objection to Christianity:

Logical objections
Plausibility objections
Moral objections

Next, as I work through the Apostles’ Creed I identify examples of each type of objection. For example, the doctrine of the Trinity is subject to logical objections.  Meanwhile, the doctrine of particular divine action within creation is subject to plausibility objections.

But of the different types of objection to Christianity, I suspect the moral objections are the most powerful. This intuition is borne out on the following survey that I recently ran on Twitter:

Which of these Christian doctrines is the most difficult to defend?

— Randal Rauser (@RandalRauser) November 5, 2017

As you can see, the clear “winner” for being the most difficult doctrine to defend — at least among those selected — is the doctrine of hell. And by “hell” one can assume most survey respondents are envisioning the traditional understanding of hell as eternal conscious torment.

Unfortunately, my survey was only limited to four doctrines. But this blog has no such limitations. So which Christian doctrine do you believe is most difficult to defend and why?

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99. How do you hear the voice of God?

Randal Rauser (that’s me!)

There are few questions as basic and important as this: how do you hear the voice of God? How do you discern God’s will for your life? How does one seek divine guidance in the day to day?

Is divine guidance a matter of hearing a literal voice from heaven? Or is it simply a matter of baptizing our own decisions with a nod to the divine? Or something else?

In this episode of The Tentative Apologist Podcast I share my perspective on this topic which I delivered at a recent youth conference. Inspired by the admirable concision of TED Talks, the conference stipulated that speakers should limit their topic to a 15 or 16 minute time slot. So no words are wasted!

And now, without further ado, let’s turn to the matter of hearing the voice of God.

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Does Christianity need a resurrected Jesus?

The other day I posted the following survey on Twitter:

If the physical bones of Jesus were disinterred in Jerusalem, would it follow that Christianity is false?

— Randal Rauser (@RandalRauser) November 2, 2017

The results were not surprising. A full 75% of those surveyed — both Christians and non-Christians — believe that Christianity requires a resurrected Jesus. This is an important datum because, as should be obvious, all my Twitter surveys are fully scientific and provide accurate representations of public opinion within 3 percentage points 19 times out of 20 (or thereabouts).

Still, that’s 25% of people who think the resurrection of Jesus isn’t required. To those who think this miracle is required to sustain Christianity, this minority position can be perplexing indeed. Heck, Paul himself issued the following declaration in 1 Corinthians 15:

14 And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. 15 More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised.

So what explains the logic of that minority?

While we can hardly get into the head of every person with a particular opinion, we can seek to understand how many might be arguing. That brings me to my book You’re not as Crazy as I Think: Dialogue in a World of Loud Voices and Hardened Opinions (Biblica, 2011). In this book I seek to provide a bridge to understanding several groups that are commonly not understood by the conservative Christian (my primary audience target for that book). Included in the discussion are atheists, animal rights activists, and liberal Christians.

In the chapter on liberal Christians, I consider those who profess to be Christian while doubting or even denying the historical bodily resurrection of Jesus. In the following excerpt from the book (drawn from pages 124-132) I seek to provide a sympathetic reading of the liberal Christian who denies the resurrected Jesus whilst insisting they nonetheless maintain a Christian faith. This is in keeping with the long and noble tradition of attempting to steel man one’s interlocutor.

One more thing: I’ve included a couple additional reader’s notes in brackets with dark red font.

And now, without further ado…

* * *

I Believe on the Third Day He Rose Again . . . but Must I?

Marcus Borg

Although I do not know Marcus Borg [d. 2015] personally, I have two good reasons to think he is the genuine article. The first is the quality and integrity that comes through his writings. The second is the testimony of that towering intellectual pillar of Anglican orthodoxy, N. T. Wright. While Wright is widely lauded as one of the premiere New Testament scholars in the world, he is also good friends with Borg.

In the eye of many evangelicals the problem arises not with the friendship per se but rather with the fact that Wright believes his resurrection-denying friend is also a Christian. This is how he put it in a 2006 interview:  “Marcus Borg really does not believe Jesus Christ was bodily raised from the dead. But I know Marcus well: he loves Jesus and believes in him passionately.” So then why does Borg not believe? Wright suggested that “the philosophical and cultural world he has lived in has made it very, very difficult for him to believe in the bodily resurrection.” Is it possible as Wright said, that a person could be a Christian and yet reject the resurrection of Christ?

Let’s begin to address this question by turning to the Easter season. Just like clockwork, every Easter popular magazines like Time and Newsweek find a way to squeeze Jesus onto the cover, typically with a heading that carries a whiff of scandal like “How the Jesus of History Became the Christ of Faith” or “Did Jesus Really Rise?” Without fail, these articles are weighted more to hype than substance. But what if a story broke in the media about Jesus that actually had some substance to it? What if some real evidence arose questioning the resurrection of Jesus?

That scenario is addressed in Paul Maier’s novel A Skeleton in God’s Closet. In the story well-respected archaeologist and devout Christian Jonathan Weber is working on a dig for the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea when the remains of Jesus Christ are discovered. As you might guess, with this discovery Weber finds his faith coming under severe testing. After all, if Jesus’ bones remained in the tomb then Jesus did not in fact rise from the dead, and this means that a doctrine that has stood at the center of Christian faith for two thousand years is false. As news of the discovery sweeps the globe, it leaves in its wake a sea of deeply confused Christians.

However, Weber observes that not all Christians find their faith upended by the discovery: “A Methodist professor said he’d have to do a lot of rethinking. But an Episcopal rector said that finding Christ’s remains ‘would not affect me in the slightest.’ I recall being totally disgusted at that response. The one I easily agreed with was a Catholic New Testament professor at St. Louis University who said that he ‘would totally despair.’ Now, that was honest!”

The scenario leaves each reader to ask the same question for himself or herself. Would I be left to do a lot of rethinking like the Methodist professor? Or would I despair like the Catholic professor? And what about the Episcopalian rector whose faith never depended on the resurrection? What sort of faith is that anyway?

Let’s think about this question more carefully. If Jesus’ body were discovered we would suddenly find ourselves in Borg’s shoes (or a pair much like them), needing to decide whether to leave the faith or reinterpret it. There would be good grounds for the first move, given Paul’s declaration that “if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith” (1 Corinthians 15:14). So if Christian faith without Christ’s resurrection is useless, we might as well find something else to believe in. But what? Islam? Deism? Atheism? Amway? (Or perhaps a combination thereof?)

The more I think about the radically, sweeping implications of walking away from faith altogether, of rejecting everything in Christianity lock, stock, and barrel, the more game I am to consider the second option. The point can be made by considering G. K. Chesterton’s commentary on the complex reasons why people hold Christian belief:

[I]f one asked an ordinary intelligent man, on the spur of the moment, “Why do you prefer civilization to savagery?” he would look wildly round at object after object, and would only be able to answer vaguely, “Why, there is that bookcase . . . and the coals in the coal-scuttle . . . and pianos . . . and policemen.” The whole case for civilization is that the case for it is complex. It has done so many things. But that very multiplicity of proof which ought to make reply overwhelming makes reply impossible.

According to Chesterton, in much the same way that our commitment to civilization depends on a multiplicity of factors rather than a single point, so Christian faith also rests on a multiplicity of factors. A person is typically not a Christian for one single reason but because of a whole variety of factors. For instance, they have experienced God’s providential hand guiding their life, they have found inspiration and guidance in the Scriptures, they have had great Christian mentors and models, their nephew was healed of cancer after an all night prayer meeting, and God saved their marriage.

In short, they are a Christian because it provides the most complete, satisfying and plausible understanding of the human condition, where we came from and where we are going. For these reasons and many others, they could indeed resist the attempt to throw all this away on the condition that one doctrine should come up false, even if it is a doctrine as central as the bodily resurrection of Christ.

And so, when the alternative of rejecting faith is considered, it might seem preferable to retain our Christian faith, even given the discovery of Jesus’ body. But is this really a serious possibility? Or would keeping faith under these conditions be like keeping the marriage going after you discover your spouse is a bigamist? That is, as great as all these other things may be, without a resurrection of Christ is there really anything left to save?

While I appreciate the reservation here, I think we need to understand the real force of the civilization parallel. To push things further, consider a specific example. I know a missionary who was home on furlough raising ministry support and had come up short $300 a month. Just when he was about to give up, having exhausted every possible avenue of support, he received a call from somebody who felt God laying on his heart the need to support him . . . at $300 a month. (At this time nobody except the missionary’s wife knew of their specific financial need.) I refer to an event like this as a “LAMP” which is an acronym for “little amazing moments of providence.” Many Christians have experienced LAMPs like this in their life. Is it so obvious that the discovery of the body of Jesus would persuade people to dismiss all these LAMPs as mere happenstance? Would they really be forced to reject Christianity, kit and kaboodle, as plain false?

As A Skeleton in God’s Closet unfolds, Jonathan Weber wrestles with this question: should he surrender his Christian faith altogether, or could he instead adopt a faith like that of the Episcopalian rector?

[M]aybe Mark Twain was right, Jon finally had to admit to himself. And not only Twain, but all of liberal theology, which had been denying a physical resurrection of Jesus ever since David Strauss and Ernst Renan did so in nineteenth-century Germany and France. Yes, maybe all the higher critics, particularly Rudolf Bultmann, were right all along. The Resurrection never happened, but it was the faith and belief that it did that was important. And all his conservative, Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod Sunday school and Bible classes, and all the endless sermons . . . wrong!

As unsettling as the thought is, we ought to reflect on Weber’s questions. So I ask myself, if Jesus’ body were discovered would I leave the Christian faith altogether, or would I instead adopt a more liberal interpretation of that faith?

Try as I might I cannot be sure which of these options I would follow. The dilemma recalls the crisis that lies at the center of William Styron’s novel Sophie’s Choice where we meet sweet and brooding young Sophie, a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps. As the novel unfolds we discover that Sophie was forced by a cruel Nazi to choose which one of her two children would live and which would die. How could any parent be asked to make such an unthinkable choice? The popularity of the book and subsequent film (starring Meryl Streep) led to the popularization of the term “Sophie’s choice” as a way to refer to any impossible or unthinkable decision.

It seems to me that where the Christian faith is concerned, the discovery of Jesus’ remains would pose just such a crisis of decision. Do I reject the faith altogether or do I set aside the centrality of the historic resurrection? It strikes me that this is by no means a straightforward or easy choice. And if it seems presumptuous to judge Sophie for making such a forced decision, it seems also presumptuous to judge a liberal Christian for having made a theological judgment under equally impossible circumstances.

This brings us back to the Episcopalian rector in Maier’s novel and the suspect bishop for the diocese of St. Joseph’s church. In the passage cited above where Jonathan Weber contrasts the Methodist professor, Episcopal rector, and Catholic professor, he finds the ease with which the rector accepts the news “disgusting” but considers the Catholic’s growing despair “honest.” The Catholic professor may indeed be honest, but does that mean that the rector is disgusting? Some liberals may be inexcusably flippant about, and even hostile toward, the doctrines of faith, but does that mean that all are?

Perhaps that rector had already passed through his own dark night of the soul some years before and emerged with an integral liberal faith that can handle a non-resurrected Christ. The question of how anybody could call himself a Christian while doubting Christ’s resurrection is transformed if we think of these “liberals” as people who have wrestled with a Sophie’s choice. If we do not judge Sophie for choosing one child over another in an impossible decision, can we necessarily judge others who have weathered their own Sophie’s choice?

There is one significant problem with the argument so far, and I know that were Ted with us he would point it out. Astute amateur apologist that he is, Ted would reject the assumption that, where the resurrection of Christ is concerned, Christians (liberal or otherwise) face anything like a Sophie’s choice. Ted has read Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ and he is quite familiar with the excellent historical grounds for the resurrection. So even if A Skeleton in God’s Closet suggests a possible scenario in which faith would be challenged, that scenario cannot be invoked in defense of liberals like Marcus Borg.

I would agree that the available historical evidence strongly favors the resurrection. But the central point at issue here concerns not what the best objective assessment of the data is but rather whether certain individuals who are neither stupid nor wicked perceive there to be a real crisis with the church’s conception of resurrection. And Marcus Borg seems to constitute just such an example (due perhaps, as Wright believes, to the “philosophical and cultural world” that he accepts). Whatever the genesis of their doubt, these individuals find themselves in much the same place as Jonathan Weber in A Skeleton in God’s Closet with a genuine crisis of faith.

Let me suggest a way to explore and expand our sympathy for the liberal. It has been said you ought not judge a man till you’ve walked a mile in his shoes. (Or, if you prefer, you ought not judge a fashionista until you’ve walked a mile in her four-inch stiletto-heeled pumps.) With that in mind, a little role-playing is always helpful in thinking through these types of issues. And so let’s put Ted in the place of Jonathan Weber. [Note to reader: in You’re not as Crazy as I Think the character of “Ted” is a fictional character that I refer to throughout the book to embody some standard evangelical traits.]

Now it is Ted who has been left to agonize over the apparent discovery of Jesus’ body in an archaeological dig. Many of Ted’s evangelical friends do not yet appear particularly disturbed by the discovery. Some are too busy to worry, occupied as they are with the more mundane matters of shifting mortgage rates and car payments coming due. Meanwhile others are content to put it all back to faith, without giving a second glance to whatever evidence may arise. But Ted has looked at the evidence of the discovery and he is deeply disconcerted. Ted knows that his friends are chalking up his doubt to a faith weaker than their own. But even so, he cannot shake the sense that this is a genuine crisis of faith and he has a real obligation to respond. As time drags on Ted becomes more desperate for a resolution, and so he reads all that he can get on the topic from archaeologists, apologists, and historians. Finally, after several months of agonizing over the discovery, Ted painfully and tentatively concludes that Jesus was not bodily resurrected.

But even in this difficult hour, Ted finds himself unwilling (or unable) to walk away from the faith altogether. He simply has too much invested in Christianity; it makes too much sense in so many ways. For one thing, Ted has his own LAMPs that speak of the fundamental truth of the faith. It all began that chilly winter night when that Campus Crusade for Christ worker came out of nowhere and interrupted Ted’s suicidal thoughts with the shattering message that Jesus loved him. And then there was the time when Ted came up $876 short on making the payroll at his business, only to find an envelope with that exact amount sitting in his church mailbox. Could he really throw out these LAMPs, and many others, by calling Christianity a big mistake? What if instead Ted found himself ending up one Sunday morning at St. Joseph’s with a new humility and an openness to a church that offers a warm pew to doctrinally stumbling disciples like himself. What do you suppose that Ted would then think of his award-winning “Sunday at St. Joe’s” skit?

This brings us to the core debate: is the evidence for the great truths of Christianity such that an honest person cannot consider them carefully and still find him or herself in doubt? Or is it indeed possible to find ourselves honestly doubting some of these doctrines? If we conclude the latter, then it would seem that we simply cannot adopt the sweeping cognitive or moral judgment of the liberal.

Here it needs to be noted that any judgment is complicated by the fact that there is no single threshold of evidence that would convince everybody of a given truth. Some Christians, like the Episcopalian bishop, give up key doctrines like the bodily resurrection of Christ in response to comparatively low thresholds of evidence. Others would require much greater evidence: perhaps bodily remains that clearly evince the marks of crucifixion being discovered in Joseph of Arimathea’s tomb. (Evidentially speaking, this is about where Jonathan Weber finds himself.) Still others would retain faith unless further evidence was added to the body, such as additional first century documentary evidence that revealed a malicious plot among the apostles. (Perhaps this is where Ted would find his threshold.) And finally, a few others (some of Ted’s friends included) would never abandon their faith no matter how strong the evidence against it. (Nor is that unwillingness necessarily admirable.)

Here then is our question: which of these evidential thresholds is the proper point at which faith should be abandoned? The fact is that there is no simple answer to this question. But as we wrestle with it, we will begin to see the tension with the very notion of “liberal” and “conservative.”

To read more, check out You’re not as Crazy as I Think: Dialogue in a World of Loud Voices and Hardened Opinions.

Endnotes

Borg and Wright explored their differences in The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions, 2nd ed. (New York: HarperOne, 2007).

See the interview with Jill Rowbotham: “Resurrecting Faith,” The Australian (April 13, 2006), available at http://www.virtueonline.org/portal/mo....

Paul Maier, A Skeleton in God’s Closet (Nashville, TN: Westbow, 1994), 258.

Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1908; Reprint: London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1996), 119.

Maier, A Skeleton in God’s Closet, 200.

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If God wants us to be saved, why is grace so confusing?

It’s a daunting question. If God wants all human beings to be saved — and surely he does — then why aren’t the requirements of that salvation clearer? This is a central theme woven through my book What’s So Confusing About Grace?,  a theological memoir spanning a forty year journey trying to understand the nature of God’s grace.

I started off that journey assuming that salvation was simply a matter of right belief. But over time I began to face a growing list of nagging questions that challenged that paradigm. In this article I briefly consider three of them.

What must you believe if you are to be saved?

In my conservative upbringing, conversion and faith were first of all about belief. You needed to believe particular doctrines about God and his Son, Jesus. But which statements of doctrine do you need to believe in order to be saved? The disturbing fact, as I soon discovered, is that Christians don’t agree on how to answer this question.

It is hard to convey just how disturbing this fact of disagreement was, but consider this analogy. Imagine that a deadly plague is spreading across the landscape. Fortunately, medical personnel have identified a vaccine to protect people from this terrible plague. Great news, right?

So you think. But then you discover that there is extensive disagreement among those health professionals on how the vaccine should be administered in order to make it effective. Some say it should only be taken on an empty stomach while others insist it should only be taken with food. Some people insist that a booster shot is required while others warn that the booster could actually undermine the vaccine’s effect.

What good is a vaccine if there is no agreement on how to administer it? And what good is the Gospel of saving belief if there is no agreement on what you need to believe to be saved?

At some point in junior high school I appeared to find a biblical answer to my question and it came in Romans 10:9:

“If you declare with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”

There it was in black and white, straight from Paul himself: Believe Jesus is Lord and believe that God raised him from the dead. At last, that is what is required. Problem solved, right?

What must you not believe if you are to be saved?

Then again, maybe not. Around the same time I discovered Romans 10:9 I also began hearing about Mormons, a group that wasn’t saved because they hold false doctrines. Intrigued, I read a book that was popular at the time, The God Makers, which solidified my concerns. According to that book, Mormons held a range of errant doctrines — like the idea that human beings can become gods — and those beliefs placed them outside of salvation.

Think of salvation as being like the fabled Scales of Justice. On the salvation side, you could put the beliefs that Jesus is Lord and God raised him from the dead. So far so good. But then on the damnation side rested distinctly Mormon beliefs, like the idea that human beings become gods. Those beliefs are so in error that they outweigh the correct beliefs on the salvation side of the scale. Consequently, it turns out that even Romans 10:9 offers no guarantee of salvation.

You might think, so much the worse for Mormons! However, it didn’t take a lot of reflection to realize I could flip that disturbing dilemma back on myself. I too believed that Jesus is Lord and God raised him from the dead.

Okay, but then did I have any errant beliefs on the damnation side of the scale? Beliefs that were sufficiently in error so they could outweigh the salvific benefit of the correct beliefs on the salvation side?

The bottom line is, I simply didn’t know.

And while we’re on the topic, if it is just as important to avoid believing the wrong things as it was to believe the right things, then why didn’t Paul say that? Why didn’t he include a footnote to that effect along with Romans 10:9? That definitely would have helped me!

When are you responsible for believing?

As I contemplated the prospect of believing the right doctrines and disbelieving the wrong doctrines, I soon faced another equally disturbing question: what’s the deadline for getting all this sorted out?

Ever since I was a kid I heard Christians talk about a so-called age of accountability. The idea went like this: before that mysterious age you weren’t accountable for your beliefs: God would benevolently save you regardless of what you believed. But after that age everything suddenly changed: now you were accountable and you could go to hell forever for believing the wrong doctrines … or failing to believe the right ones.

The mysterious age of accountability certainly had its appeal: after all, it doesn’t seem like God would damn babies and toddlers for getting doctrine wrong. Ergo, so it seemed, there must be a period where you are counted innocent.

That said, the doctrine also had a lot of problems. Here’s the first one: where does the Bible teach this so-called age of accountability? The short answer, as I soon discovered, is that it doesn’t. The best anybody could come up with in terms of a biblical precedent appeared to be David’s statement that he would one day join his deceased infant son (2 Samuel 12:23). But of course, that passage doesn’t teach or even imply an age of accountability. All it says is that David will one day join his son in death: a thin reed indeed on which to base such an existentially critical doctrine.

The second problem is that the age of accountability is a binary concept. It’s as if God flips a switch on (for example) a child’s thirteenth birthday so that suddenly that child moves from being innocent to damnable in an instant. The problem is that accountability doesn’t work like that. Rather than being binary, accountability comes in degrees. To put it simply, the older you get and the more you know, the more accountable you are. Consequently, the notion of a binary choice between innocence and accountability just didn’t make much sense.

Finally, nobody could say when this age of accountability began. I noted a moment ago that it could occur on a child’s thirteenth birthday. That might seem like a reasonable first guess, but a “reasonable first guess” is not enough: surely we shouldn’t need to guess about the moment a perfectly loving and wise God makes you damnable!

To illustrate the problem, just contrast this state of affairs with the age of majority. When you become an adult you become responsible for legal contracts and adult crimes. Consequently, the government is very clear on when the age of majority occurs because it matters!

If there is an age of accountability it marks a shift of unimaginably greater import than the mere age of majority, for here we’re talking about the shift from heavenly innocence to ready-for-hell damnability. Despite the undeniable importance of this date, God was maddeningly silent on when it occurs. And this just made no sense.

Conclusion

The problem is that these questions never went away. Instead of finding answers, I found the questions themselves remaining as they gradually eroded my confidence in this entire way of thinking about salvation. There’s only so long that you can live with this kind of cognitive dissonance before you begin to suspect that the right belief approach to salvation is critically flawed.

I now have a different approach to salvation. To be sure, I don’t discount the importance of right belief. Indeed, as a theologian, I believe that getting theological beliefs right is very important. But at the same time, I no longer locate salvation with checking all the right belief boxes. And I owe that change in perspective to the promptings from these unanswered questions.

For more on my understanding of salvation, including my answer to these conundrums, see What’s So Confusing About Grace?

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98. That All May Be One: An Ecumenical Conversation for Reformation Day

Julien Hammond

One suspects that October 31, 1517 dawned much like any other in the region of Saxony. And when an Augustinian monk named Martin Luther hammered up 95 theses for public debate, he could not have imagined that his action would be the catalyst for a schism within Christendom, one whose repercussions would be felt for centuries. And yet, here we are, five hundred years later, still dealing with the deeply ambiguous legacy of the Reformation.

On the one hand, had there been no Reformation there would be no Baptists, and I rather like being Baptist. Indeed, I believe being Baptist is a vocational call I have to a wider Christendom and the world. So the fact that I have this call and that Baptists exist is a fact for which I have gratitude.

On the other hand, had there been no Reformation, there would have been no schism, no fracture down the heart of the Church. Very likely there would have been no Thirty Years War, no long history of mutual hatred and misunderstanding across emerging denominational divides.

As I said, the legacy is ambiguous, and my response to it is thus rather ambivalent. Is there a way that Protestants and Catholics can recognize and celebrate our differences whilst moving some distance toward healing that schism and recognizing our common faith and identity as the body of Christ?

With that lofty goal in mind, in this episode of The Tentative Apologist Podcast we mark the Reformation by way of a conversation with Dr. Julien Hammond. Dr. Hammond is the Ecumenical and Interreligious Officer for the Catholic Archdiocese of Edmonton and a sessional instructor at St. Joseph’s College, the University of Alberta with a specialty in religious education. His passions include lay education in the Church and ecumenical dialogue across denominational lines in emulation of Christ’s prayer “that all may be one” (John 17:21). And that prayer serves as the theme for this commemoration of Reformation Day.

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Ray Comfort’s Fruity Banana Argument for God’s Existence

The results are in on my survey on the strongest argument for God’s existence. And the cosmological argument has won! Since most folks these days are most familiar with Craig’s version of the Kalaam Argument, my guess is that most folks think Craig’s Kalaam Argument is the strongest argument for God’s existence. I’m sure Craig will be delighted when he receives these results by special courier later today.

In the interim, some readers did ask me what the “Banana Argument” is. The argument can be found in a famous clip where popular apologist Ray Comfort describes his analysis of the banana as the “atheist’s nightmare”.

So why is a banana the atheist’s nightmare? Because it is easy to peel, nutritious, and it curves toward the human mouth.

This is, of course, nothing more than a bald instance of selection bias. If the banana is the atheist’s nightmare, there are no shortage of nightmares for theists. Ever tried to peel a pomegranate?

And as for nutrition, several fruits — cherries, apples, peaches — contain cyanogenic glycosides in their seeds/pits which creates cyanide in the body when ingested. Eat enough apple seeds and you could theoretically die from cyanide poisoning. What kind of design is that?

As for shape, for every ergonomic banana there is an intimidating, spiky durian.

For those reasons, Comfort’s Banana Argument has become emblematic of asinine natural theology and just plain bad arguments for God’s existence.

Anyway, nothing beats the original. And so, without further ado, here is Comfort’s analysis with Growing Pains sidekick Mike Seaver Kirk Cameron:

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What is the strongest argument for God’s existence?

It’s time to settle this age old debate. If you’re on Twitter you can vote at my highly scientific

On the claim that believing God exists of necessity is “defining God into existence”

For the second time in as many days an atheist has tweeted me with the charge that asserting God exists of necessity is “defining God into existence.” Here is the most recent example, the amiable Shane McKee:

So the theist merely defines God into existence? This is sloppy.

— Shane McKee (@shanemuk) October 30, 2017

I replied by asking McKee: “Is it also ‘sloppy’ to believe numbers or Platonic universals exist of necessity? Please advise.”

That was merely a tweet response. It’s now time for a more substantial response in which I subject the claim to a reductio ad absurdum.

First, let’s unpack the theist’s beliefs into a set of two propositions. We can call it Theistic Belief Set 1:

(1) God exists

(2) God’s existence is necessary

According to McKee’s charge, TBS1 constitutes “defining God into existence.”

Now consider another theist who accepts Theistic Belief Set 2:

(1) God exists

(3) God’s existence is contingent

Note that both TBS1 and TBS2 include the belief that (1) God exists.

With that in mind, if assent to TBS1 entails defining God into existence, then so does assent to TBS2. The only difference is the modal nature of that existence. To wit, TBS1 would entail defining God into necessary existence while TBS2 would entail defining God into contingent existence.

And if this is true of God — that is, if it is true that belief in God is subject to the charge of defining God into existence — then presumably other existential beliefs likewise entail defining those things into existence.

Consider, for example McKee’s mountain bike. By believing his bike exists, it follows that McKee is defining his bike into (contingent) existence.

Needless to say, this is absurd. And the lesson is that we should abandon the confused claim that belief in entities would entail “defining those things into existence.”

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An Atheist Defining Theism: The Curious Case of Sean Carroll

This week Unbelievable features a dialogue/debate between atheist Sean Carroll and theist Luke Barnes on whether God or naturalism best explains the universe. I was thirty minutes into the program when I found myself needing to press pause and ask, “Did Sean Carroll really say that?” And the answer is, yes, yes he did.

So now I need to write about it.

The set up: theist Luke Barnes has just observed that the naturalist faced the problem that the universe appears to be a brute fact. By contrast, the theist points to God as the explanation of the universe’s existence. In other words, Barnes is pointing out that the atheist must accept a brute fact that the theist does not.

So … advantage theist?

Not so fast. Carroll responds by asserting that the theist also has a brute fact: God’s own existence. This is how he puts it:

“I don’t think that I’m especially bothered by the existence of brute facts in a physicalist or naturalist account of the universe with a beginning. I think that theistic accounts also have brute facts and I know most theists disagree with that because they try to argue that something like God is a necessary part of the universe, not just a brute fact that could have been there or not. And that’s an actual intellectual disagreement. I do not think that God counts as a necessary part of the world.”

It is important that we appreciate what has just happened here. Carroll admits in this excerpt that theists define God in a particular way. He then rejects the very definition that theists accept, instead offers his own definition, and then proceeds to argue against the definition he’s provided.

And yes, that is as outrageous as it sounds.

To begin with, we should first take a moment to distinguish between (1) necessary fact, (2) contingent fact, and (3) brute fact as a type of contingent fact:

(1) Necessary fact: a fact that does not require an additional reason to explain its obtaining as a fact. It just is. (E.g. 2+2=4.)

(2) Contingent fact: a fact that does require an additional reason to explain its obtaining as a fact. (E.g. Ottawa is the capital of Canada.)

(3) Brute fact: a contingent fact that has no additional reason to explain its obtaining as a fact. Thus, though the contingency of the fact requires a reason to explain it, no reason can be provided. Hence, it is “brute”.

Carroll rightly notes that theists understand God’s existence to be a necessary fact (1). So when theists talk about God, they are talking about a necessary being. And when they invoke God as an explanation, they are invoking a necessary being to explain some contingent fact.

However, if Carroll acknowledges the theist’s definition of “God” then he must concede that the theist need not accept a brute fact (though of course they do need to accept a necessary fact).

Apparently, Carroll is unhappy with this outcome. This is where he takes a strange step. Rather than argue that his brute fact is more palatable than the theist’s necessary fact, he instead declines to discuss theism simpliciter further. In its place he opts to discuss a modified version of theism which we can call “Carroll’s Theism”. We can define these contrasting views as follows:

Theism Simpliciter: the view that if God exists then God is a necessary being who explains the existence of all contingent facts.

Carroll’s Theism: the view that if God exists then God is a contingent being who exists as a brute fact.

Obviously, any theist who accepts “Carroll’s Theism” must accept a brute fact no less than the naturalist. The naturalist accepts the universe as a brute fact while the Carroll theist accepts God as a brute fact. Parity has been achieved!

But at what cost? The obvious problem is that theists are almost all theists simpliciter (as defined above). That is, they accept that God has the property of existing necessarily. Carroll’s Theism is noting more than a rhetorical distraction, a strawman position that (virtually) nobody holds.

I’ll give Carroll this much: it takes some chutzpah to decline even to engage the views held by your interlocutor in favor of a creation of your own fashioning. But sadly, this is not the way to spur on a productive conversation. Instead of defining his own strawman version of Carroll theism, Carroll should have committed to engaging the theism simpliciter of actual theistic scientists, philosophers, and theologians.

At that point he could have argued that accepting the universe as a brute fact is preferable to accepting God as a necessary fact to explain the contingent fact of the universe’s existence.

The post An Atheist Defining Theism: The Curious Case of Sean Carroll appeared first on Randal Rauser.

New Atheism as a failed exercise in incivility and anti-intellectualism

One might reasonably identify the advent of the so-called New Atheism with the publication of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion and Bobby Henderson’s The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster in 2006. Or perhaps Sam Harris, The End of Faith in 2004. One thing is clear: the movement — if one might indeed call it a “movement” — has been around for awhile now. Consequently, it would seem a good time for an assessment. What did the New Atheism accomplish?

Above all, I see two results from the New Atheism: incivility and anti-intellectualism. To take a recent analogy, the heart of American conservatism used to be defined by civil and intellectual voices like George Will and Max Boot. But in the age of Trump, anger and ignorance have overwhelmed the calm measured voice.

Something similar happened a decade ago to a large portion of the atheist community. Angry voices like Dawkins and Harris took the microphone in the public square and exhibited a lamentable incivility toward those with whom they disagreed, all the while exhibiting a distressing anti-intellectual ignorance toward the fields of discourse and intellectual communities they were attacking.

This sideshow led to a spike in cultural attention — loud, angry, strident voices tend to sell books and drive ratings. But it did little to swell the ranks of self-avowed atheists. And it most definitely did little to swell the ranks of civil and thoughtful atheists.

As a result, one still regularly hears laughably simplistic maxims like “Religion leads to violence” or “Faith is irrational” traded as a substitute for serious intellectual reflection. And just as Trump supporters safely retreat to their feedback loops in Fox News and conservative talk radio, so many aging new atheists retreat to their feedback loops in blogs and secular groups.

The one bit of good news is that New Atheism isn’t what it once was. For many the novelty has worn off and it is harder every year to fill the big tent of this cultural sideshow. One can hope that with the decline of the New Atheism there will be a commensurate rise in a more civil and intellectually engaging atheism.

I was prompted to write this rumination after reading Tom Gilson’s article “The Death of the ‘New Atheism.'”

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