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May 31, 2014 - July 11, 2020
If only that so many dead lie round
28
The Wandering Jew and the Second Coming
MARTIN GARDNER
Hundreds of adventist sects since the time of Jesus, starting with the Montanists of the second century, have all interpreted Christ’s prophetic statements about his return to refer to their generation.
For the past two thousand years individuals and sects have been setting dates for the Second Coming. When the Lord fails to show, there is often no recognition of total failure. Instead, errors are found in the calculations and new dates set.
Someone not mentioned in the gospels, alive in Jesus’s day, was somehow cursed to remain alive for centuries until judgment day, wandering over the earth and longing for death.
29
The Demon-Haunted World
CARL SAGAN
In Book VIII of The City of God (begun in 413), Augustine assimilates this ancient tradition, replaces gods by God, and demonizes the demons—arguing that they are, without exception, malign. They have no redeeming virtues. They are the fount of all spiritual and material evil. He calls them “aerial animals . . . most eager to inflict harm, utterly alien from righteousness, swollen with pride, pale with envy, subtle in deceit.”
One Richalmus, abbot of Schönthal, around 1270 penned an entire treatise on demons, rich in first-hand experience: He sees (but only when his eyes are shut) countless malevolent demons, like motes of dust, buzzing around his head—and everyone else’s.
Demons, the “powers of the air,” come down from the skies and have unlawful sexual congress with women. Augustine believed that witches were the offspring of these forbidden unions.
As they seduced, the incubi and succubi were perceived as a weight bearing down on the chest of the dreamer. Mare, despite its Latin meaning, is the Old English word for incubus, and nightmare meant originally the demon that sits on the chests of sleepers, tormenting them with dreams.
With this Bull, Innocent initiated the systematic accusation, torture, and execution of countless “witches” all over Europe. They were guilty of what Augustine had described as “a criminal tampering with the unseen world.”
The pope appointed Kramer and Sprenger to write a comprehensive analysis, using the full academic armory of the late fifteenth century. With exhaustive citations of Scripture and of ancient and modern scholars, they produced the Malleus Maleficarum, the “Hammer of Witches”—aptly described as one of the most terrifying documents in human history.
What the Malleus comes down to, pretty much, is that if you’re accused of witchcraft, you’re a witch. Torture is an unfailing means to demonstrate the validity of the accusation. There are no rights of the defendant. There is no opportunity to confront the accusers. Little attention is given to the possibility that accusations might be made for impious purposes—jealousy, say, or revenge, or the greed of the inquisitors who routinely confiscated for their own private benefit the property of the accused.
It quickly became an expense account scam. All costs of investigation, trial, and execution were borne by the accused or her relatives—down to per diems for the private detectives hired to spy on her, wine for her guards, banquets for her judges, the travel expenses of a messenger sent to fetch a more experienced torturer from another city, and the faggots, tar and hangman’s rope. Then there was a bonus to the members of the tribunal for each witch burned. The convicted witch’s remaining property, if any, was divided between Church and State.
In the last judicial execution of witches in England a woman and her nine-year-old daughter were hanged. Their crime was raising a rainstorm by taking their stockings off.
The God Hypothesis
CARL SAGAN
If we are to discuss the idea of God and be restricted to rational arguments, then it is probably useful to know what we are talking about when we say “God.” This turns out not to be easy. The Romans called the Christians atheists. Why? Well, the Christians had a god of sorts, but it wasn’t a real god. They didn’t believe in the divinity of apotheosized emperors or Olympian gods. They had a peculiar, different kind of god. So it was very easy to call people who believed in a different kind of god atheists. And that general sense that an atheist is anybody who doesn’t believe exactly as I do
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Now, there is a constellation of properties that we generally think of when we in the West, or more generally in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, think of God. The fundamental differences among Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are trivial compared to their similarities. We think of some being who is omnipotent, omniscient, compassionate, who created the universe, is responsive to prayer, intervenes in human affairs, and so on. But suppose there were definitive proof of some being who had some but not all of these properties. Suppose somehow it were demonstrated that there was a being who
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And there is a wide range of other sorts of gods. And in every case we have to ask, “What kind of god are you talking about, and what is the evidence that this god exists?”
So they can’t all be right. And in fact they all may be wrong. It is certainly true that many different religions are mutually inconsistent. It’s not that they just aren’t perfect simulacrums of each other but rather that they grossly contradict each other.
Different religions believe different things. There’s a grab bag of religious alternatives. And there are clearly more combinations of alternatives than there are religions, even though there are something like a few thousand religions on the planet today.
Put another way, any preexisting predisposition to religious belief can be powerfully influenced by the indigenous culture, wherever you happen to grow up. And especially if the children are exposed early to a particular set of doctrine and music and art and ritual, then it is as natural as breathing, which is why religions make such a large effort to attract the very young.
There are lots of charismatic people who have all sorts of mutually exclusive conversion experiences. They can’t all be right. Some of them have to be wrong. Many of them have to be wrong. It’s even possible that all of them are wrong. We cannot depend entirely on what people say. We have to look at what the evidence is.
So if I then run through these arguments—the cosmological argument, the argument from design, the moral argument, the ontological argument, the argument from consciousness, and the argument from experience—I must say that the net result is not very impressive. It is very much as if we are seeking a rational justification for something that we otherwise hope will be true.
Grant for a moment that evil exists in the world and that unjust actions sometimes go unpunished. And grant also that there is a God that is benevolent toward human beings, omniscient, and omnipotent. This God loves justice, this God observes all human actions, and this God is capable of intervening decisively in human affairs. Well, it was understood by the pre-Socratic philosophers that all four of these propositions cannot simultaneously be true. At least one has to be false.
It is argued that some pain is necessary for a greater good. But why, exactly? If God is omnipotent, why can’t He arrange it so there is no pain? It seems to me a very telling point.
Now, I don’t claim to know which of these four possibilities is right, but it’s clear that there is a fundamental contradiction at the heart of the Western theological view produced by the problem of evil.
Why is there such a long list of things that God tells people to do? Why didn’t God do it right in the first place? You start out the universe, you can do anything. You can see all future consequences of your present action. You want a certain desired end. Why don’t you arrange it in the beginning? The intervention of God in human affairs speaks of incompetence. I don’t say incompetence on a human scale. Clearly all of the views of God are much more competent than the most competent human. But it does not speak of omnicompetence. It says there are limitations.
And yet it is perfectly possible to imagine that God, not an omnipotent or an omniscient god, just a reasonably competent god, could have made absolutely clear-cut evidence of His existence.
God could have engraved the Ten Commandments on the Moon.
Or why not a hundred-kilometer crucifix in Earth orbit? God could certainly do that. Right? Certainly, create the universe? A simple thing like putting a crucifix in Earth orbit? Perfectly possible. Why didn’t God do things of that sort?
Or, put another way, why should God be so clear in the Bible and so obscure in the world?
About the gods I have no means of knowing either that they exist or that they do not exist or what they are to look at. Many things prevent my knowing. Among others, the fact that they are never seen.
30
From Roger’s Version
JOHN UPDIKE
“How do you know there’s only one universe? There might be zillions. There’s no logical reason to say the universe we can observe is the only one.”
God? Forget the old bluffer.”
31
Conclusions and Implications
From The Miracle of Theism: Arguments for and Against th...
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J. L. MACKIE
The Challenge of Nihilism
We are responsible for our morality”
To say that God is introduced by definition as that which explains itself, that which terminates the regress of explanation, is again empty and useless; but any attempt to explain and justify the claim that he has such a special status leads us, as we have seen, to the concept which underlies the ontological proof. . . .
