Bill Nye, Ken Ham, and Starting Points

Initially I had no intention of watching last night's creation versus evolution debate between Ken Ham and Bill Nye. I have listened to more than a fair share of other such debates, read numerous books on both sides of the argument, and - perhaps most importantly - I am very familiar with Ken Ham's position. I used to frequent Answers in Genesis when I was a believer, and I've watched scores of videos deconstructing Ken's claims. I knew Mr. Ham-fisted would basically hit the same five or six notes he always does, with precious little deviation:

• There are gaps in the fossil record.
• Evolution cannot explain the origin of life.
• Evolution cannot explain the origin of the universe.
• Evolution cannot explain the laws of logic.
• 'You weren't there, were you?'
• The Bible has all the answers.

 

After finding myself with some free time, and seeing friends commenting on the debate online, I decided to fire up the stream and check it out. I only caught things from the rebuttals and on, but the first words I heard out of Ken Ham's mouth told me I hadn't missed anything. "I would like Bill to explain where the laws of logic come from." Yes, Ken, we know you would. You're at the wrong place for that, though.

Evolutionary theory is not a theory about the fundamental foundations of reality. It's not a theory about the nature of logic, even. It's also not a theory about the origin of life from non-living matter, the origin of the universe, or the origin and meaning of morality. As everyone who stayed awake in Biology class knows, the theory of evolution is a theory about the diversity of life. It explains why there are so many different lifeforms, including us. It tells us that random mutations in our genetic material are 'selected' by mother nature in ways that favor our survival. Those organisms that miss out on mutations that allow others to endure a hostile environment, or to stand a better chance of finding a mate, do not reproduce and eventually die out. Different species emerge when one group of organisms evolves to the point that they can no longer produce viable offspring with the other group(s).

Now, of course that's a very cursory and simplified explanation of evolutionary theory, but there it is. The theory doesn't purport to answer how the first cell came about, how the cosmos began, or anything of the sort. There are other scientific theories attempting to resolve those questions, but evolution by natural selection is not one of them. In making such demands of evolution, Mr. Ham-bone only showed that he doesn't actually understand the theory he's pretending to refute.

But consider what Ken is proposing in place of evolution. His "theory" (which is not a theory in any scientific sense, as Bill Nye adequately demonstrated in the debate) is not simply a competing explanation for the diversity of life. Creationism does purport to answer questions about the origin of life, the origin of the universe, the origin of morality, the nature of logic, the fundamental foundations of reality, and lots more. The creationist claim isn't just that god made humans, or that god made all living matter. There is no room for alternate possibilities in creationism; it can't be that god made life, but we don't know where matter came from, or that god created the cosmos, but logical absolutes just are brute facts. If you permit any alternative explanations, you leave space for the puzzling question of why one and not the other. Why can't other things be brute facts, too? Why it isn't acceptable to say we don't know where the universe came from and leave it at that?

However, creationists are not so concerned with how god created any particular thing as much as they seem concerned with that he created it. Creationism is the bizarre "theory" of everything that offers no explanatory mechanisms for what it pretends to explain - indeed, it even seems incapable of providing them! The Bible might say that god spoke and the world came into being, but this bald assertion could hardly be called a mechanism for explaining the actual process of divine creation. For one reason, it makes no sense of the fact that we find layers upon layers upon layers of working parts inside everything in the universe, down to nearly inconceivable subatomic scales. If a watchmaker could construct a watch simply by speaking it into existence, it seems absurd to think he would still bother to do it in such a way as to assemble gears, springs, glass, and all the individual parts into the whole. Why not just create a magic, irreducible watch?

Any answer to the question can only be speculation, no less conjectural than entertaining an answer to how many angels can fit on the head of a pin. And here is where the real trouble begins, because with no mechanism to make predictions with, or to test and experiment with, creationism is dead on arrival. It's not science, nor is it a theory. In fact, I don't see how it qualifies as any good kind of explanation at all, even to the "who" question. When archaeologists ask themselves who built Stonehenge, they don't just consider identities of different ancient peoples, they consider the resources that were available to them, the knowledge they would have possessed, and, most importantly, how they might have used their resources and knowledge to construct the monument. Unfortunately, the construction methods used at Stonehenge are still a matter of widespread debate, and so too, as we would expect, is the identity of the builders. Even though there are many old legends attributing the site to different sources, the question of who built Stonehenge remains as speculative as how they built it.

This is what amused me about Ken Ham's frequent appeal to "starting points" during the debate. His starting point he proudly declared to be the Bible - a collection of old documents that have been given countless interpretations over the centuries, which are known to have been redacted and borrowed from earlier stories, [Origins of the Old Testament] which show evidence of anachronism, [Finkelstein, The Bible Unearthed; Cline, From Eden to Exile] and which have all the hallmarks of a pre-scientific worldview. [Paul Tobin, The Physical Sciences] On this foundation, Ham wants to build his case for his "theory" of everything that is incapable of providing explanatory mechanisms for its claims. It's not hard to see why this is an inadequate starting point... unless you're wearing Ken's "biblical glasses", or dogma blinders as I call them.

Ham-ster man's other two notes, about the gaps in the fossil record and indirect observation, go to show that in addition to having no clue about what evolutionary theory posits, he also has no clue about what is important in a sufficiently explanatory theory. I would like to see him ask a homicide detective if he was present for the murder he's solved on indirect observations. Ken seems to have this crazy idea that eyewitness testimony is the strongest kind of evidence one can have for anything, and while I can't help but suspect it has something to do with his faith in the orthodox view of the gospels, I can say there are tons of studies by Elizabeth Loftus and others showing that eyewitness memory is, in fact, quite easily fooled. Likewise, the gaps in the fossil record as not as significant a challenge to evolution as Ken would like us to believe. [Kathleen Hunt, Transitional Vertebrate Fossils FAQ] Even generally speaking, the fact that a theory cannot account for absolutely everything it describes, or that it relies on indirect observations, is not going to undermine that theory as badly as it will if there is no working mechanism. Mechanisms allow us to make predictions and test claims in ways that can resolve apparent gaps and strengthen our confidence in a theory.

I should say I do think we all bring our own unique perspectives to the table of discussion and debate, but whether it's accurate to call these "starting points" is another question. Have we come to these points by a priori or a posteriori means? Frankly, I'm less interested in that argument than I am in how you think you can demonstrate the truth of your claims. Even if you want to start with an assumption and try to show how much sense everything makes if we grant it, you still need to state your case and expect that assumption to be questioned. When Ken Ham calls the Bible his "axiom", I think he abuses the concept of an axiom. The Bible is not self-authenticating in any sensible way, and there are, as I've already noted, quite a few problems with it.

On the other hand, it seems to me that there can be axioms that are far more defensible. Ken ironically asked Bill to account for the laws of logic, but the law of noncontradiction and the law of identity can be taken as self-evident axioms in a way that the Bible cannot. If one were to try and show the law of noncontradiction to be false, for example, she would only wind up affirming it. To meaningfully undermine the law of noncontradiction, you would have to assume that the law could not be both true and false simultaneously. But this assumption is what the law of noncontradiction states. There is no analogous manner in which refuting the Bible would be to affirm the Bible, and if the laws of logic are conceivably self-evident in this way, there is actually no need to account for them - they account for themselves.

What all could be built on these sorts of axioms is a subject for another time, and it's important to remember that the creation/evolution debate is a different ballgame. While I was at first slightly perturbed by Nye's refusal to even acknowledge Ham's red herrings, perhaps it was a good move to not let things descend into a deeply philosophical quibble that would've been ultimately irrelevant. Evolution in no way conflicts with, or establishes, the laws of logic, for reasons already given.

Nye did do an excellent job of showing that he really knows science and the scientific method, however, and Ken couldn't help but preach to the converted, since it's all he knows how to do. In a debate where science is meant to play so eminent a role, Ken only hurt himself by appealing to scriptural authority and to vague individual authorities, rather than keeping the discussion centered on facts and evidence. But then again, after all we've seen that Mr. Ham doesn't know, it shouldn't be surprising for me to say that I don't think he knows what makes facts reliable facts, and what makes evidence good evidence. To quote mine a passage from a very old book, if one were to write down all that Ken Ham doesn't know, "I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written."

King David's Palace Found? - Two Different Reports

This morning I read an article posted to Yahoo News by Live Science journalist Megan Gannon, reporting how Israeli archaeologists believe they have found "two royal buildings from Israel's biblical past, including a palace suspected to have belonged to King David." The findings come from a site called Khirbet Qeiyafa, where archaeologists Yossi Garfinkel of Hebrew University and Saar Ganor of the Israeli Antiquities Authority have been excavating. According to the article, radiocarbon analysis at the site has placed it around the time of 1020-980 BCE, "before being violently destroyed, likely in a battle against the Philistines." As someone who has read compelling arguments challenging the biblical narrative around King David, this made me sit up and take notice.

Biblical minimalism is a paradigm in archaeology that posits a low chronology for many biblical events, and also proposes mythicism or heavy redaction to biblical stories in a number of cases. Minimalists would include archaeologists like Philip Davies, Thomas L. Thompson, and Niels Peter Lemche. On the other end, there are so-called biblical maximalists like William Dever, Kenneth Kitchen, and Amihai Mazar. The major area of disagreement between maximalists and minimalists seems to revolve around the united monarchy, or the kingdom of Israel during the reigns of Saul and David, as told in the Bible. Minimalists go so far as to deny that there is any evidence of the united monarchy, while maximalists more or less hold to the portrait of it presented in scripture. 

The important work of Israel Finkelstein - particularly in The Bible Unearthed, with Neil Asher Silberman - has helped to establish somewhat of a middle ground between the two perspectives. Finkelstein assents to the historicity of David (on the basis of such evidence as the Mesha Stele and the Tel Dan inscription), but argues that the biblical portrait exaggerates the extent and influence of his kingdom. David was more like a chieftain than a king, as there is no evidence of a united monarchy in the region at the time. Although there have been some critics of Finkelstein's work, it has been largely praised within the archaeological and scholarly community.

So, what to say about the news article on Garfinkel's discovery? First of all, make note of the fact that Garfinkel is a maximalist - and a stalwart one at that - indicated by his publication of "The Birth and Death of Biblical Minimalism" in the May/June 2011 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, as well as his subsequent heated exchanges with Philip Davies. One of the evidences Garfinkel proposes to signal the demise of minimalism is, of course, his findings at Khirbet Qeiyafa. Gannon quotes Garfinkel as saying, "This is unequivocal evidence of a kingdom's existence, which knew to establish administrative centers at strategic points". Unequivocal evidence? I can't help but wonder if perhaps the professor has an ideological axe of his own to grind.

However, what really struck me was the difference between the Live Science report and another report written up by Associated Press journalist Max J. Rosenthal. Rosenthal also quotes Garfinkel as suggesting that his findings constitute "unequivocal evidence", and yet we are actually given examples, such as "cultic objects typically used by Judeans" and the absence of pig remains. A sort of disclaimer then promptly follows:

Critics said the site could have belonged to other kingdoms of the area. The consensus among most scholars is that no definitive physical proof of the existence of King David has been found.

Biblical archaeology itself is contentious. Israelis often use archaeological findings to back up their historic claims to sites that are also claimed by the Palestinians, like the Old City of Jerusalem. Despite extensive archaeological evidence, for example, Palestinians deny that the biblical Jewish Temples dominated the hilltop where the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, Islam's third-holiest site, stands today.

In general, researchers are divided over whether biblical stories can be validated by physical remains.

The current excavators are not the first to claim they found a King David palace. In 2005, Israeli archaeologist Eilat Mazar said she found the remains of King David's palace in Jerusalem dating to the 10th century B.C., when King David would have ruled. Her claim also attracted skepticism, including from Garfinkel himself.

This is a prime example of good journalism. Rosenthal even manages to get commentary from Dr. Finkelstein as a skeptical take on Garfinkel's findings. Ms. Gannon includes no such counter-points in her article. In fact, she features no dissenting opinion at all, only what seems like credulous acceptance of Garfinkel's claims. Anyone reading her news report and not taking the time to read others might get the mistaken impression that this "discovery" is really more established than it is. 

 

This is why it pays to do additional research, whether you're a journalist or just a reader. I have no ideological bias driving me to deny Garfinkel's findings, but I do want to see a multiplicity of interpretations, because there always is more than one. If further excavation turns up more compelling evidence that this is indeed the site of David's palace, I won't have any qualms about accepting that. The historicity of a united monarchy would not validate the supernatural claims of scripture. Ironically, in a particularly terrible reader review of The Bible Unearthed at the Tekton apologetics site, the author speculates that Finkelstein and Silberman not only deny the existence of David (quite the opposite, if you actually read the book) to deny the divinity of Christ, but that the authors "prefer" it because they "hate Him" so much they want to "destroy faith in Jesus". I don't know whether to mock the author or mock the site's admin, J.P. Holding, for publishing such unscholarly shlock.

Really, how would it work, that denying David would deny the divinity of Christ? Because if there is no line of David from which the messiah comes, there must be no messiah? I'm sure clever Christians would find a way to reinterpret those passages, just like modern apologists reinterpret the genealogy passages in light of their belief that Joseph wasn't Jesus' biological father. Through whom do those genealogies trace Jesus' history? Why, if it wasn't Joseph, it must have been Mary, despite the instruction in Numbers 1:18 that ancestry was to be recorded "by their fathers' households" (NAS; once again, the NIV has omitted words from the text that are present in the original, for a seemingly apologetic reason - the Hebrew word avotam means "of their fathers", and is translated as such in all other 83 occurrences as noted in Englishman's Concordance).

More importantly, though, there are much better reasons to reject the divinity of Christ than to suppose that a historical David never existed. But, as thrice stated now, Finkelstein and Silberman do not deny that David existed ("...the house of David was known throughout the region; this clearly validates the biblical description of a figure named David becoming the founder of the dynasty of Judahite kings in Jerusalem", Bible Unearthed, p. 129). All this author's speculation shows, all that Ms. Gannon's sloppy journalism shows, and all that Dr. Garfinkel's insistence on his conclusion shows, is that the longstanding and long-engrained paradigm of biblical maximalism dies hard indeed, despite lack of evidence for its claims, and despite evidence against its claims.

What's the Probability of Resurrection?

Once a week I tune in to the UK Christian radio podcast Unbelievable to hear debates and discussions between believers and non-believers (sometimes between two or more believers). Generally speaking, it has quite a fair format and covers current trends in religion and atheism, from the release of popular new books to the publication of scholarly materials to subjects brought up in the news. The latest episode features Calum Miller and Chris Hallquist in dialogue on an issue that's particularly interesting to me: the probability of the resurrection.

Christian philosopher and apologist Richard Swinburne has attached a 97% probability to the resurrection. How did he arrive at such a high number? Though I have not read Swinburne's book where he makes this claim, the guests and host on Unbelievable dive into some discussion of it. Swinburne uses a mathematical formula from probability theory known as Bayes' theorem. The theorem is a way of calculating the likelihood of something given certain prior conditions. To use an example from a Scientific American article, suppose that 99% of sick people who take a medical test will test positive, and 99% of healthy people who take it will test negative. The doctor has informed you that only 1% of people in the country are sick. You take the test and receive a positive result, and you want to know what the chances are that you are actually sick. Bayes' theorem will give you the answer.

For the sake of space, I won't work out the problem here, but the important thing to understand is that Bayes' theorem depends on knowing certain prior conditions or probabilities. It's simple to ascertain and easy to verify the chances of getting a specific test result, finding out whether someone is sick or healthy, and determining how much of the population is afflicted with an illness. In many cases, these sorts of statistics and data are kept on record by physicians and health organizations, for example. If one miscalculates the odds of being sick after testing positive, it's not that difficult to weed out the mistake from the information provided. But what about when we're trying to determine the probability of something that isn't well known or documented, like a miracle?

One of the most frequent criticisms leveled at Swinburne is that he plays fast and loose with the prior probability of the resurrection. If there is a god, he argues, it's reasonable to assume that it would become incarnate to pass on its teachings to humanity. To validate the incarnation's authority, he continues, god would use a "super-miracle". [link] Someone like Jesus, Swinburne believes, is a prime candidate for god's stamp of approval in the form of resurrection.

On the podcast, Hallquist raises an excellent point that Miller never does address, to my recollection. The mere existence of a god should not lend much credibility to any miracle story, because in addition to competing miracle claims - like the miracles of Mormonism, Islam, Hinduism, etc. - which many Christians reject, there are Deists and many other stripes of believers who do not think their god works in the world to perform miracles. Even if a god exists, why think it acts in nature? Why single out the resurrection as being particularly likely out of all the miracles it could conceivably perform? With all the unnecessary suffering and evil in the world, perhaps the god that exists is an evil god and would have no motivation to raise Jesus from the dead. Why not take the theology of Muslims and Jews into account, who consider doctrines like the trinity and the incarnation to be blasphemous? There's a good argument to be made that, in many ways, Jesus does not resemble the Jewish messiah described in the Tanakh. If the Hebrew god exists, perhaps it sees the Jesus of the gospels as a false prophet rather than its son, and would be against resurrecting him. 

Even if we accept Swinburne's prior condition of  a god existing - for the sake of argument - there are many problems that seem to stop his argument dead in its tracks before ever getting to the resurrection. Remember, all of this must be taken into account to constitute a fair treatment of the prior probability of resurrection. Along with assessing what might count in favor of resurrection, we have to consider all that would count against it, and this is where things become mired in speculation, in my opinion. How do you derive statistical probabilities from things like religious doctrines and facts of the universe that have varying interpretations? If the prior probability of resurrection rests on theistic assumptions, then the entire argument seems to be an exercise in self-justification for Christians, and will be persuasive to no one else.

Like many believers, Calum Miller says he finds naturalistic explanations of the resurrection to be more incredible and outlandish than the idea that god raised Jesus from the dead. Yet some of these are attested in the historical record, like the accusation against the disciples of stealing the body of Jesus. It may be widely dismissed by biblical scholars today because of the guards at the tomb mentioned in one measly gospel, or because the theory doesn't explain the postmortem appearances (whoever decided there had to be one neat, over-arching thematic explanation for everything?), but there are objections to the resurrection hypothesis, too, of a far more devastating nature, in my view.

Several times throughout the podcast, Brierly and Miller bring up what apologists often call a 'naturalistic bias'. They ask Hallquist if he is ruling out miracles altogether from the git-go, on some atheistic commitment to the impossibility of divine intervention. What amuses me about this is how much the Christian explanation is emptied of what little thrust it might have when the assumption of a god is removed. Miller claims that, in his mind, the case for resurrection is strong enough to stand apart from assuming the existence of god, but I have to ask what in particular would compel one to conclude that Jesus was raised from the dead.

The postmortem appearances? Despite Paul mentioning 500 witnesses, we have testimony from exactly none of them, nor do we have their names or any way of verifying their integrity and their story. The gospels mention Jesus appearing to all of his disciples at various times after his death (John 20:26-28, Luke 24:13-16, Matthew 28:16-17), but again we have no written testimony from any of these figures. The only individual to personally report witnessing Jesus after his death is the apostle Paul, though his experience is depicted as a vision (Acts 9:1-9), not quite what the gospels depict for figures like Peter, John, and Mary. Hallucinations are not uncommon among human beings, and with the Book of Acts portraying Peter and Paul as being visited by Jesus upon falling into a trance (10:9-16, 22:17-21), there are alternate explanations to the extraordinary one of actually seeing a man risen from the dead.

The empty tomb narrative? According to the Two-Source Hypothesis, there may actually be just one empty tomb story, in the Gospel of Mark, which was used as source material by the authors of Matthew and Luke. However, the last few verses of Mark are widely recognized by biblical scholars as a late interpolation. [link] The original text of the gospel seems to end at 16:8, when the women flee from the tomb after being told that Jesus has risen, and they "said nothing to anyone." Mark's gospel has been dated to ~70 CE, approximately 37-40 years after the alleged death of Jesus. An empty tomb would also beg of many natural explanations, generally, such as relocation of the body, theft, or even a misidentification of the tomb - all arguably more plausible than resurrection, since history has no short supply of such experiences.

What about the disciples' willingness to die for their faith? Hallquist rightly remarks that the stories of martyrdom are on even shakier ground than the gospel accounts, and brings up Candida Moss' book The Myth of Persecution. The biggest counter-point to this argument all too often goes unstated, though. In short, there is no reason for the skeptic to presume that the disciples knew what they were dying for was false. Many devout religious believers have gone to the gallows for their faith before, including a lot of non-Christians. It could have been, for example, that Jesus' body was relocated or stolen by someone who didn't die a martyr's death, and perhaps wasn't even a disciple. The early martyrs (assuming they were in fact martyred at all) could have remained blissfully unaware of the trickery, going to their deaths no less sincere.

The probability of the resurrection, a priori or a posteriori, is quite low when one seriously considers all the objections to be made. But that's a generous way of putting it. I'm not about to be so bold as to attach any specific number to how unlikely it is, though, partly because I wouldn't know where to begin. There are certainly ways the evidence could be more convincing, like more independent corroboration, dates closer to the purported event, personal written/reported testimonies, a surviving empty tomb with a long history of veneration, and so on. Yet this isn't what we have, nor would it do much to offset the force of the naturalistic explanations, which still far outweigh resurrection in terms of real world experience.

What is a Divinely Inspired Text, Anyway?

As some of you may know, I'm in the process of writing a book, and one of the issues I want to tackle in it is the question of divinely inspired texts. We often hear people assert their beliefs in the divine inspiration of a text like the bible or Qur'an, and we also hear many apologists defending these beliefs by appealing to things like scientific and historical accuracy, as well as prophetic fulfillment. Consequently, a great number of atheists (myself included) have critiqued these 'holy' books on very similar terms. However, this all seems to me like putting the cart way ahead of the horse. Perhaps we ought to reach a conclusion on what it means for a document to be divinely inspired before we go defending or criticizing anything. What are the criteria a text must meet in order to be considered as a product of divine inspiration?

With this question in mind, I listened today to an episode of the wonderful podcast Conversations from the Pale Blue Dot, where this very subject was discussed by the atheist host Luke Muehlhauser and his guest, Christian philosopher Thomas Crisp. Professor Crisp has published an article in Analytic Theology, "On Believing that the Bible is Divinely Inspired." In the podcast, Luke interviews Crisp about his article, wherein he argues that it is rationally justifiable to believe in the divine inspiration of the bible. What is his argument? You are justified in believing the bible is divinely inspired - or in believing any text is, for that matter - because the experts say it is.

Yes, you read that right, and no, it's not a misrepresentation of Crisp's view. As he states numerous times in the interview, he believes that because we cannot research every nuance of a claim in our lifetimes, and because we take the word of scientists and historians on matters involving their disciplines, we are justified to believe that the bible is the word of god because the theologians and scholars tell us it is. Well, not all theologians and scholars. There are more than a few experts on Christianity who don't accept the bible as a holy book. How does Crisp navigate this objection?

Counter-claims do not change one's justification for believing in a divinely inspired text, he says. It's all about the authority you consult. Crisp even disagrees with Luke on the value of majority consensus. In other words, if you're raised in an Evangelical Christian environment and the 'experts' around you tell you that the bible is the literal and inerrant word of god, you are justified in believing it, according to Tom. On the other hand, if you're raised in an environment where authorities recognize the Qur'an, or some other text, as divinely inspired, then you are justified to believe that. You're even justified to accept the word of experts about the bible being nothing special.

I could hardly believe my ears when I heard Professor Crisp offer this as a serious justification for faith in the bible. His contrast of religious authority with scientific or historical authority is also extremely dubious. An appeal to authority is not fallacious in all cases, but it always depends on the claim, the expert, and other factors like probability. We are justified in believing the earth is round even if we don't verify it for ourselves, because scientists have verified it for us. In disciplines like science and history, there is actual content that can be verified and examined, and which takes many years of intense study to acquire. Appealing to people with demonstrable expertise is what is important to make an appeal to authority non-fallacious.

In the case of religious authority, only certain subjects can boast of having experts with demonstrable expertise. Biblical archaeologists, textual critics, and religious historians have a lot of factual knowledge that can be relied upon, to a good extent. Yet the idea that a counter-claim would not undermine their authority is sheer nonsense. When you cast serious doubt on the expertise of the expert on a given subject, then they can no longer be accepted as an expert - at least not in the area concerned. If a biochemist like Michael Behe asserts that evolution cannot happen, and the vast majority of his colleagues contradict him to show that it can and does happen, then his credibility as an expert is undermined until he is able to rationally defend his position and refute the arguments of his detractors.

And that's really what rational justification should be about: arguments, based on reason and evidence. In fact, an appeal to authority, when correctly used, is an argument based on reason, and perhaps evidence, too. Suppose you find statistical evidence saying that 99% of plumbers know how to fix a leaky toilet. Your friend Joe is a plumber. You infer that Joe, being a plumber, is highly likely to know how to fix your leaky toilet. Thus, we see there's an underlying, unstated premise missing from Professor Crisp's reliance on expert testimony. His argument would only justify our belief to the extent that our inference about the skills and knowledge of the expert is reliable. So who has the demonstrable expertise to responsibly declare that the bible is the inspired word of god?

Sure, thousands of apologists and theologians have made arguments for the bible's inspiration, but are they actually capable of proving what they assert? Liberal and moderate Christians see no problem with accepting historical inaccuracies and scientific errors in their bible, and there really doesn't seem to be any logical inconsistency with the notion of a divine being inspiring a text that has some mistakes in it. The idea of a perfect being is not quite the same as a divine being, but even then one might appeal to metaphor as explanation for mistakes. Was only the original text divinely inspired, and then it was corrupted by humans? Did the divine being only inspire the central message? How to identify divinely inspired documents without starting on an assumption is, in my view, one of the most troubling problems that faces believers in any textual revelation.

Crisp comes close to touching on this significant flaw in his argument when he brings up epistemology. Religious claims are not on the same epistemological footing as scientific or historical claims. Many religious believers recognize this, and most scientists and historians do. There is a point at which faith comes into the equation, and this is vigorously discouraged by the methods employed in science and history. We don't accept "because I said so" or "because they said so" in either of those disciplines. Even in the case of a historical source like Josephus, scholars still dispute some of Josephus' reports, finding them lacking in evidence or contradicted by evidence.

Theologians, ministers, and apologists are not experts on determining divine inspiration. Neither are biblical archaeologists, textual critics, or religious historians, for that matter. And let me state, unequivocally: atheists cannot be experts on it, either. No one is, because we still lack a conclusive definition of divine inspiration and do not have useful criteria for identifying a divinely inspired document. The knowledge has to exist and has to be demonstrable before anyone can be claimed as an expert. I say this not to downplay the knowledge of any of these educated scholars, who often can serve as very helpful sources on a number of issues. They just can't be considered experts on the question Crisp is addressing.

The Eagerness to Believe

In the last four or five years of being an atheist and engaging Christians in discussion and debate, one thing has become startlingly clear to me. Among many believers, there is a very real and potent eagerness for affirming things of faith. I'm not just talking about a hope or desire for affirmation in the sense of, "Oh, wouldn't that be nice...", but a willingness to believe that is seemingly defiant of facts known even to the believer.

The easiest way to notice this eagerness is to look at the Shroud of Turin or the claims of prophecy in the Book of Daniel. What troubles me about these two things is that they are often touted as examples of the truth of Christianity. The shroud is called a miracle because of the impression on the cloth, which believers say was caused by radiation that emanated from Jesus' body during the resurrection. [1] The seventy weeks prophecy in Daniel 9:22-27 predicted the birth and death of Jesus, according to a number of Christians. There are many people who accept one or both of these claims, and great effort has been spent on trying to prove them.

However, without even getting into the plethora of details for either one, there is an initial big problem that is rarely considered. We don't know the actual date of Jesus' death. Numerous scholars have estimated it to somewhere between 30 and 36 CE. Six years may not seem all that significant, but consider what this means for the shroud and Daniel's prophecy. Even if we could pinpoint the shroud to a specific year, and even if the Christian interpretation of Daniel were to point to a specific year - say 32 CE - it's still extremely inconsequential. Devout believers will assume the date is correct only because they want it to be, but in a range of six years, there is too much uncertainty to be so careless. If Jesus were actually crucified a year later or a year earlier, then your shroud and prophecy are moot.

Of course, they likely wouldn't see it that way. If we found some incontrovertible evidence for Jesus' date of death, the "evidence" from the shroud and Daniel would be reinterpreted to make it fit. But it's a lot more than just the date of death that exposes the blind eagerness to believe. Were we to find out that the shroud does in fact come from ancient Judea, circa 32 CE, and were we to discover that the stains on it are blood from a crucified man, this would still not narrow it down enough. Even the gospels report that Jesus was crucified along two others. Imagine if the Shroud of Turin that believers have been worshiping for centuries was actually the shroud of the robber who mocked Jesus!

In the case of Daniel 9, Christians have invented a whole other portion of the prophecy that is nowhere in scripture. The passage mentions that an anointed one will be cut off or put to death, after which war and destruction will break out, culminating in the "abomination of desolation" in the temple. Historians and many biblical scholars connect this last reference to Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who erected a statue of Zeus in the Jewish temple around 167 BCE. Obviously this is far removed from 30-36 CE, so Christians who favor a "Christocentric" interpretation do a little creative renovation of the passage. If Jesus is the anointed one who is cut off, then the events following afterwards in the narrative must be yet to come. Thus, instead of Antiochus Epiphanes, the abomination of desolation is imagined to be a future action of the Antichrist. This means that the 70th week in the prophecy is detached from the preceding weeks by an unknown length of time (currently at nearly 2,000 years), something for which there is absolutely zero support in the Daniel passage.

What boggles my mind about these sorts of things is that they're not necessary at all to being a Christian. There are many believers who regard the shroud as a fake and Daniel 9 as having nothing to do with Jesus. So why do some of these other ones fight tooth and nail to defend such lofty claims? Part of it is probably due to the weight they give these things as justification for their faith. But again, plenty of Christians get by without the shroud or the seventy weeks prophecy. Perhaps these willing believers aren't really seeing them as justification then, but as a little bit of magic.

I can remember the temptation I felt when I was a Christian to believe in fantastic claims that would affirm my faith. In addition to conversion stories, there are many miracle stories among the faithful, many stories of "that-couldn't-have-been-coincidence", and so forth. I think stuff like the shroud and Christocentric interpretations of prophecy can be classed among these faith-affirming things, because they all express a desire for something magical to believe in. In the day to day life of the average person, there is nothing on par with the memorable elements of the bible. I've often wondered if this desire for a little bit of magic may be most prevalent among those with a more literalist view of the bible. If you believe things like the parting of the Red Sea, the visitation of Mary by an angel, and other fantastic bible stories actually happened, your own life will seem quite dull by comparison, and it will be only natural to ponder why you don't seem to be in that same world of miracles and wonders.

Certainly, magic is an exciting idea. If it were real, it would open up a new dimension of untold possibilities. With Christianity and other religions, there is a pre-existing framework that already confirms the reality of some magic - though few believers would be fond of calling it that. However, we start to notice disparities in our experiences and our beliefs, when the two differ too much. Perhaps some of us latch on to these "moments of magic" in a more subconscious way of affirming our beliefs. When something occurs that we don't understand, we look for an explanation. At first, it starts as simple superstition, growing over time into a more nuanced perspective. Once the groundwork is laid, occasional reinforcement may be needed, and so moments of magic fill the need.

We might find this even with belief in the paranormal. I have known a few people who almost certainly concocted their own "experiences" with ghosts. The eagerness to believe can be there even without religion, but it does seem to require a foundation of extraordinary beliefs. Someone who has been brought up to believe in a spirit world and who feels a deep longing for a deceased friend or relative will probably have a lot more of a willingness to believe than someone who has no such experiences. Of course, it's not easy to say what a total absence of these influences would be like, because the majority of world cultures are mired in supernatural claims of some sort or another.

I don't believe Christians or other eager believers are aware that they embrace those little bits of magic to affirm their faith. Consciously, they are not racked with doubt, as it might be unfairly presumed. I think that as the rational mind seeks confirmation of its beliefs in reason and evidence, the mind that relies on faith seeks confirmation of its beliefs in further articles of faith. Maybe this is because faith is what the believer's mind prioritizes. Or maybe it's because some believers are fooled into thinking that faith is rational in itself. Either way, the mind operates according to how it's trained, and if belief is made the focal point, reason and evidence will take a back seat.

Thinking of how I was raised, there was a great emphasis on belief when I was young. My parents told me of their belief in Jesus, and any questions I had were answered with further statements of belief. Although they did later teach me some critical thinking, my childhood revolved around belief, and because this probably seems the easiest route to take for most parents (who need their children to believe them, after all, so that they will listen), I'd bet that I'm not alone in this. In our world, most people use belief synonymously with faith, and when there are certain beliefs that are almost universal to us - like the belief in love - faith becomes as high a priority as belief. Thus, we develop a sort of "belief in belief", as it's been called before.

For a mind that relies on faith or belief, reason and evidence likely will not be persuasive. Then a strange cloth of dubious origins and an inexplicably suspended 70th week in a prophecy from an ancient book may actually be more appealing. This in turn is difficult for a rational mind to understand, because while we may be putting the truth right in front of another person's face, it will not often seem to make a difference. But the wonderful thing about being an atheist now is that I don't have to invest my hope in magic to get through to the other person. Reason and evidence are far more effective than faith and blind belief, and there are so many ways to show it.

The Dennis Nedry Defense

One of the especially irritating apologetic excuses I've seen offered by believers in books and in my conversations with them is what I call the 'Dennis Nedry Defense.' Any fan of the film Jurassic Park will remember that Nedry was the computer programmer who shut down the park to try and steal the dinosaur embryos, only to meet his end in the jaws of a Dilophosaurus. When the park administrators attempted to override Nedry's actions that shut down park security, they found themselves locked out by a password-protected defense that repeated, "Uh uh uh, you didn't say the magic word!" The Dennis Nedry Defense (DND for short) is when Christians argue that inconsistencies in the bible can be harmonized because 'it doesn't say the magic word.'

As a specific example, take the inconsistencies in the empty tomb appearances. Mark's gospel says Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome were at the tomb. Matthew's says that Mary Magdalene and "the other Mary" were there. Luke's says that Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, Joanna, and "others" were present, and John just mentions Mary Magdalene. The DND of these passages often notes that none of the verses say that ONLY those women were there, so it could be that all of them were there. In this case, the magic word is "only."

Typically, I respond to such claims by commenting on the unique agendas of each gospel author and how harmonizing their stories disregards what they were each trying to say and creates a theoretical fifth gospel that is unlike the other gospels, as Bart Ehrman has remarked. While this is a good criticism, I think there are bigger problems with the DND. For starters, is it really reasonable to expect that the gospel authors would've written "only" even if they knew for a fact that no one else was there? Think about when you tell a story and describe who was present. Think about when an eyewitness gives testimony in court and describes who was present at the scene. Do we usually say, 'Johnny, Jim, and Jack were the only ones there,' or do we just say, 'Johnny, Jim, and Jack were there'?

We may qualify that those were the only people there when we're pressed on the issue by someone, like a lawyer, but I think most of us can recognize that we don't always do this even when we know that only those people were present. We may not initially see a reason to clarify that detail or it may just slip our mind. Yet we also tend to presume that, when describing such things in certain contexts, our audience will rightly assume that we mean 'only,' though we may not actually say it. When someone asks who was in the car with you, most people will simply say, 'Dave and Donna,' presuming that it will be understood that they were the only ones present. What apologists are asking us to believe is that you are omitting another person who Dave might mention, and you both expect the audience to harmonize your testimonies to get to the truth. Is that not a little absurd?

On that same note, a second problem with the DND is that it relies on the silence of the text to speculate about possibility. I've pointed out before that the overwhelming majority of apologetic arguments revolve around possibility rather than probability (Pascal's Wager is the best example). Yet anything is possible to an extent, excluding logical contradictions like square-circles. Postulating arguments for possibility in the case of supernatural claims is worthless, though, like suggesting that Santa Claus is able to visit every house on Christmas because his sled travels at the speed of light; it's possible, but still no more probable than the whole Santa Claus story being a myth. This is why historians concern themselves with what is probable and why scientists conduct experiments to determine the likelihood of an hypothesis. Probability matters far more than possibility.

I already commented on why the silence of the text doesn't have to mean what Christians want it to mean. The absence of the word "only" does not imply that the gospel authors all wanted their separate accounts to be smashed together into one big mess in order for the truth to be understood. What a convoluted way for a supreme being to reveal its message too! I always try to be cautious in building an argument on the silence of a text, but I believe there is ample reason for recognizing inconsistencies as inconsistencies in the bible, and it seems to me that Christians are more likely the ones in error for using the silence of the text to twist variations into a comfortable, non-conflicting 'solution.' Inconsistencies are most often due to mistakes, especially among different authors, and it's only faith that guides a believer to harmonize things.

The Dennis Nedry Defense is something that Christians don't seem to accept from any other religion either. Islam has the doctrine of abrogation, or the supplanting of an earlier revelation by a later one that contradicts it. Muslims believe this is consistent with Sura 6:115 ("And the Word of your Lord has been fulfilled in truth and in justice. None can change His Words."), because it doesn't say verbal revelation, and perhaps abrogation doesn't necessarily mean god's words are changed. Christians see through this nitpicking attempt to maintain the Qur'an's inerrancy and so they reject the DND in this case. Yet the bible's inconsistencies are no less inconsistencies and the DND is still built on no less of a weak foundation. That apologists must resort to word games and deny the same games when played by other religions is another nail in the coffin of the inerrancy doctrine.

You Don't Speak for Christianity, I Do!

What's more annoying than an atheist mistaking one brand of Christianity for the standard beliefs of the entire religion? A Christian that accuses you of said mistake while presuming his own beliefs to be the standard. This was the bizarre interaction I faced in a recent exchange with someone, and of all places to level these accusations against me, this person made them in comments on my deconversion series! As I explained, my story of leaving Christianity is, in part, a story of leaving one particular brand of Christianity. Thus, there are arguments against literalism and inerrancy, which are not doctrines held by all Christian denominations. But what's astounding to me is that I give no indication in the series of presuming that my Evangelical faith was/is the sum total of Christianity. In fact, I mention meeting other Christians who helped challenge some of my fundamentalist views, so I'm not sure where this individual acquired the idea that I was ignoring the other various branches of Christianity. A deconversion story is not intended to be a thorough refutation of a position, either, but simply a telling of the person's progress or journey towards a loss of faith.

However, instead of illustrating the differences between various denominations as a way of making his point, this Christian took a far less successful but much more ironic route. "[T]he problem with most atheists (especially deconverts)," he said, "is that they view/viewed the bible to be something supernatural. You have to understand that christianity does not deny that the bible was written by men of different times."

I have never assumed that Christianity rejects the human authorship of the bible, but many Christians believe those human authors wrote under divine inspiration. Evangelicals believe this, as do Baptists, Lutherans, Methodists, Seventh-Day Adventists, Presbyterians, and many Catholics. There are variations among these groups on how much of the bible is supernatural in origin, but for the most part, they believe it has been handed down to us relatively uncorrupted. It is also important to remember that there are always people who identify as a specific denomination, yet hold views contrary to the majority of the group. But to insinuate that Christians don't believe the bible is at least somewhat supernatural in nature is an assumption just as mistaken as insinuating that they all believe it to be supernatural. There are Christians like John Shelby Spong who reject pretty much every supernatural claim in Christianity, but this view is not the sum total of the Christian religion either. It's not even a majority view, as most denominations accept the resurrection of Christ as a real event.

Amusingly, this Christian then went into debating the inconsistencies in the gospels. If the bible is not at all supernatural, why jump to exonerate its errors? Discussing the different birth dates given for Jesus between Matthew and Luke, as well as the two deaths of Judas, he asserted that they are "exactly rational reasons of explanation." While it may be possible that there was a census taken by a Quirinius in the time of Herod the Great, what is unlikely is the notion that Matthew and Luke each relied on their readers having access to the other text and figuring out the truth by combining them together. This itself seems to require a supernatural basis of sorts. But never to be outdone by his own gross generalizations, the believer then told me that "all scholars believe Luke (who was also a historian/physician) used Matt and Mark as a source" and suggested that I would know these things if I'd really taken theology classes.

First of all, I never said I went to theology classes. I did study up on theology, but it was mostly on my own time, and the theology I learned in church and bible study courses was very basic. Secondly, it doesn't take years of theology classes to know that all scholars don't believe Luke used Matthew as a source. As a matter of fact, that view is a minority theory in biblical scholarship, known as the Farrer hypothesis. As Raymond Brown, Bart Ehrman, Daniel Wallace, and countless others have noted, the theory on gospel origins that is most widely accepted by scholars is the two-source hypothesis, which considers Matthew and Luke to be independent of each other, aside from their common use of Mark and Q. What this means is that Luke would not have presumed his readers to be familiar with Matthew. All this aside, if someone wants to debate these two hypotheses, I'm all ears, but let's refrain from making factually inaccurate statements about what the scholarly position is, especially when evidence means so much more than consensus.

My favorite part of the correspondence, though, was when I asked this person how he or she knows the bible to be divinely-inspired:

now you've just showed your misunderstanding by asking that. We know the bible is divinely inspired because of the subject. The existing God, to us christians. It was their beliefs in God that inspired them to write a book about the existing God. Therefore we christians classify it as divine inspired because we believe the inspiration is of the real divine deity.
My, if this isn't a horribly simplistic concept of divine inspiration. 'It's divinely-inspired because the authors believed in god.' This makes every religious text divinely-inspired, but more importantly, it doesn't draw any real difference between any piece of literature and the bible. As inclined as I am to agree that the bible is hardly different from The Iliad, I don't think most Christians understand divine inspiration in this way. If they did, then Christian apologetics wouldn't exist, since it is an attempt to defend faith in divine inspiration by providing evidence for the bible's claims - even the miraculous, supernatural ones. There's also the problem of how inadequate such a simple definition of divine inspiration is, since it eliminates the ability to differentiate between a claim of divine inspiration and the actuality or falsity of it.

To make one final note, I feel the need to point out that belonging to a group does not give one the automatic authority to speak for every other person in the group. I am an atheist, but I can't speak for all atheists. I'm white, but I can't speak for all white people. I have never felt that my time as a Christian gave me the freedom to speak for all Christians, yet apparently this believer thinks that he has that ability. Of course, he also presumes to speak for all biblical scholars, even though I'm willing to bet he holds no relevant academic credentials. I unfortunately see these types of 'criticisms' of atheist arguments all the time. Dawkins was accused of misunderstanding Christianity because he didn't address the beliefs of theologians like Aquinas and Meister Eckhart. As prominent as they may be in theological history, the views of such men are not universally accepted by all Christians.

For as much criticism as atheists receive over their 'mistaken' ideas about Christianity, believers themselves rarely seem to appreciate the diversity of their own religion. Those professing believers who disagree may be painted as not being 'real Christians,' as some Protestants are known to say of Catholics. But behind all of this is another problem. Who, or what, does speak for Christianity? As the world has changed, Christianity has changed with it in order to survive, and perhaps in another thousand years we won't even recognize the cult of the risen Jesus as Christian anymore.

Tea Party Christians Don't Make Any Sense

Today a rally for the Tea Party was held at the Austin capitol building, where a self-proclaimed "apostle" named Claver T. Kamau-Imani gave a speech on Tea Party values from a biblical standpoint. In his sermon, Claver cites 2 Corinthians 6:14,

"Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness?"
According to this preacher, and the many cheering voices in the background, the bible commands Christians not to compromise with non-believers. However, these non-believers include more than just atheists, as Claver calls out liberals, progressives, moderates, and socialists too. The implication here is that only conservative bible-thumpers are 'true believers'. Why? Perhaps Mr. Kamau-Imani thinks conservatives follow the bible more closely than those other groups do. Yet this brings to mind one of the biggest problems I see in Tea Party Christians.

When it comes to politics, the bible leaves no room for revolution or a non-compromising philosophy. Romans 13:1-2 plainly states,

"Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves."
Take a moment to let that sink in. Not only are all elected authorities put there by God himself, according to the bible, but anyone who rebels against those authorities is, by extent, rebelling against God and inviting judgment on him/herself. In Matthew 22:16-22, when asked about paying taxes, Jesus famously instructs the people to, "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's". The anti-establishment rhetoric of the Tea Party could not be more at odds with the teachings of the bible.

Claver and his ilk cherry-pick passages to support their views that have nothing whatsoever to do with politics. 2 Corinthians 6:14 is about idolatry, how those who worship anything but God can steer believers away from God. If we interpret this in a political sense, anything can be an idol, even the free market system that many Tea Partiers and conservatives seem to place a massive amount of faith in. Yet the real point is that these passages cited by Tea Party members are not a Christian call to revolution. The same (alleged) author makes this very clear in Romans 13.

Tea Party Christians don't make any sense to me, because while many of them claim to accept the bible as the infallible word of God - as Mr. Kamau-Imani stated himself in the speech - they apparently don't consider it important enough to take passages like Romans 13 to heart. Of course, that would disillusion them from their chest-beating radicalism, which I suspect is too enticing for most of them to abandon. The idea of being a 'soldier for God' is probably a lot more exciting than being a doormat for God, however more biblical one may be than the other.