The Unbelievable and the Inconceivable

As I reflect upon a lengthening career refuting implausible religious claims, it occurs to me that it is valuable, for both evangelists and their nemeses, to draw a distinction between two types of claims, both of which leave unbelievers unpersuaded, but for entirely different reasons. Actually, I guess I am saying this for the benefit of religion promoters rather than for my own advantage. At least it might bring a bit more clarity to the debates.

First, evangelists and apologists make claims that might be true, but for which there is no evidence, or nowhere near enough. The existence of God and the resurrection of Jesus would fall into this category. It is by no means impossible that these tenets may be factually correct, but where is any serious reason to think so? Obviously (even if they are true!), most people who hold these doctrines do so because of early instruction and continued peer pressure. The beliefs in question may well be true even though people believe them for inadequate reasons. They would just be lucky, as opposed, say, to Buddhists or Shintos who believe what they believe for the same lame reasons but (if Christians are right) happen to have stumbled into the wrong thing. But once one presses the claims of one's faith onto outsiders, or once one begins to question the adequacy of one's own too-easily accepted creed, things begin to look different. I believed in the resurrection of Jesus because I was told it was true and assumed those authority figures, older than me, knew what they were talking about. Then I learned all about apologetics, with its sophisticated arguments. The next stage was seeing through those arguments, discovering with bitter chagrin how very shoddy they were. They are not even strong enough to put the unbeliever on the defensive. He has no problem, as if there were no viable naturalistic alternative to the resurrection. I will not repeat here what I have said and written so many times before.

The existence of a powerful, never-aging divinity invisible to mortal eyes is another of the same kind. It is not a foolish notion, but what reason can there be to accept it? It is like belief in space aliens or Atlantis. Not laughable, not at all. But why on earth credit it? There would still, regrettably, be room for doubt even if the Martians or the Venusians were to pop in and say hello, with all requisite special effects. Because of the special effects. It is easy to be gulled. Even in the Hellenistic period of the New Testament, there were plenty of conjurers and charlatans bilking the credulous into new religions. But there were also careful individuals who refused to be won over (taken in) by signs and wonders. These feats seemed "too good to be true." Even the gospels condemn "lying wonders."

Why do miracle-mongers try to short-circuit the natural means of convincement, namely, rational argument and persuasion? "I, too, brothers, when I came to you, I did not come armed with excellent rhetoric or wisdom as I announced to you the witness to God. I had decided that while among you I should offer no other answer to any question, but Jesus-Christ, and him crucified. And it was in weakness and fear and much trembling that I was with you, I freely admit, and my speaking and my proclamation were not marked by sophistical rhetoric, but by a definitive display of spirit and power. Otherwise you should have placed your faith in human wisdom, not in divine power" (1 Corinthians 2:1-5). They say faith in divine revelation is the only way to rise above the deafening clash of merely human guesses and speculations. But faith does not trump argumentation; it only cheats, tearing up the rules and claiming victory, like Buck Strickland playing golf on King of the Hill. That is what they are saying, albeit with euphemisms. That is the sin of faith. You're just deciding to believe something because you want to, without sufficient reason, and then you pretend you know. It is what Francis A. Schaeffer used to call an "upper-story leap" when he thought he saw other people doing it.

But there is worse. There are the claims of religion that are inconceivable, unacceptable on their face. Notions so unreasonable that no evidence brought forth could help. As Voltaire (I think it was) observed: if I tell you I will now prove two plus two equal three by making a ball disappear from my outstretched palm, and I do in fact make it disappear, guess what? Two plus two does not suddenly start making three. The one has nothing to do with the other. The thing Voltaire's charlatan seeks to prove is absurd on the face of it, and nothing will change that. "Even if we or some angel from heaven should proclaim to you some message of salvation besides the one we proclaimed to you, let him be excommunicated" (Galatians 1:5). It won't start looking truer just because there's an angel endorsing the nonsense. I am thinking of claims of divine Providence amid the seeming chaos of the world, of the inspiration of the Bible, an eternal Hell of torment, and (of course!) the Trinity. It's not that these claims are known not to be true. Rather, it is that they could not be true, they make no sense.

Is God in hands-on control of the world? The believer says he is, despite appearances. He even admits he cannot imagine an atrocity so hideous as to debunk that claim. "So your loving God did not lift a finger to save Jews from the Holocaust, but he's still loving and provident? Suppose the whole population was wiped out by AIDS or nuclear weapons; would that convince you no loving God is in control of things? No? Then I'm afraid I no longer have any idea of what we are arguing here! What can be meant by the 'love' of such a being?"

Can the righteous Father-Creator of the human race possibly be pictured as assigning individuals, in fact most who have ever lived, to a never-ending ordeal of suffering in Hell? Not even the loathsome Hitler, Stalin, Genghis Khan, or Pol Pot could deserve that. To believe otherwise is to redefine God's "righteousness" as compatible with an avenging sadism worthy of the very devils he would be tormenting.  C.S. Lewis once wrote: "But there is a difficulty about disagreeing with God. He is the source from which all your reasoning power comes: you could not be right and He wrong any more than a stream can rise higher than its own source. When you are arguing against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all; it is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on." (Mere Christianity, pp. 52-53). Uh, you think this is an argument for your view, "Jack?" Turn it around the other way: if your own moral sensitivity is higher than that of your supposed Source, the odds are good that He is not your Source.

Look, if he's going to impose a sentence on the damned souls against their will, why not sentence them to sanctification? That way, everybody winds up, forgiving and forgiven, in heaven. And the minute you begin back-pedaling to argue that the damned choose Hell, you are admitting the outrageously nonsensical character of the whole silly business.

Biblical inspiration is another ultimately meaningless claim, based as it is on the postulate that scripture is infallible only in its plain sense as derived from a straightforward, exoteric reading. It becomes meaningless as soon as, in order to sidestep a difficulty, the apologist for inerrancy begins arguing that the dubious text must be taken in some less than literal way, that it is but an "apparent" contradiction. Those are the worst kind, since they in the very same moment vitiate the fundamental axiom of "apparent sense" infallibility. Look elsewhere for a consistent theory. This one is gibberish from the word go.

And the Trinity! Need one say more? It is fine to fall silent in reverent contemplation of a sublime mystery transcending human ken, as when physicists admit that light behaves sometimes like a wave, sometimes like a particle, so we cannot really hope to describe it. But when it comes to the Trinity, I am going to need quite a bit of evidence to convince me we have a real paradox on our hands, and not just a bad theory resulting from the ancients trying to cobble together a theological compromise enabling all parties in the debate to agree with their favorite parts of it.

Add the so-called "doctrine" of the atonement. It confuses torts with crimes and imagines that an innocent man can pay with his life's blood for the wicked deeds of wicked men. This is the beginning and revelation of the righteousness of God? I know of ten or a dozen models for explaining the atonement, and I will confess not one makes any real sense of it to me. Can you make any sense of it? Come on!

You can ask me to accept the "fact" that Jesus rose from the dead, and I must shake my head, unable to oblige. I cannot pretend the case is a good one when I know better. I agree, it might have happened, but if so, the information is beyond recovery, short of somebody inventing a time machine. But if you ask me to believe in the saving death of Christ, the superintending love of God, a Hell compatible with his ostensible mercy, etc., heck, you might as well be speaking in tongues. There is just nothing to see there.

I say there are these two distinct categories of unacceptable arguments, but in fact they fade off into one another as follows. If you step back to look at the big picture, you see that on the one hand God is said to hold us responsible for accepting the one true, saving belief. On the other he has not allowed us sufficient evidence for such belief—or even defined it adequately enough that we can grasp what it is (the Trinity?). It is grossly unfair. And that cannot be predicated of the sort of deity Christianity claims to represent. Again, the claim is torn apart by a jagged fault of self-contradiction.

Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to believe!

So says Zarathustra.