T. Tennent

This post was an attempt to get believers thinking about the consequences of what they profess. Similar challenges were what set me on the course of examining my religious beliefs, in accordance with the mandate of 1 Peter 3:15, and of course, I realized that I could no longer hold them. I wish someone had challenged me much, much earlier. Naturally, I don’t dislike any of my Christian friends, but I want them to think. I apologize for the repetition if you read through the comments above, but the fact that you don’t think it will make much difference to talk with me about hell is exactly the problem I’m trying to highlight.

Consider: why do you think it wouldn’t do much good to discuss those matters? The only reason I can imagine (though I’m not trying to put words in your mouth) is that you are unable to support what you believe by providing evidence and reasons. And if that’s the case, why do you believe it? especially on such an important matter that proclaims such dire consequences? Believing in a place like hell, and agreeing with the Christian god that non-believers deserve to go there, is a serious accusation. Holding things like this to be true (or good!) is a belief that demands serious attention, not blissful ambivalence or fearful silence. Abandon the belief or back it up — that’s my challenge.

If you’re a Christian and you’re not able to provide any reasons or justification for why you think there is a hell, but you still think it exists and that non-believers deserve it, then you are the boy who cried “wolf.” When people show up and ask you where the wolf is, your response seems to be, “It’s here and it’s dangerous. I won’t bother trying to tell you about it, however, because it’s invisible, and you can’t see it. But believe me, it’s here. And when it attacks you, you’ll deserve it.” My question is: what can you see that I can’t? If I made up a different story right now with a different kind of hell, would we be able to distinguish between the two? You’d have a story and I’d have a story, and we’d have no basis for saying which one was real other than that we each believed in our own. And that’s the importance of having evidence and reasons to back up your beliefs.

I’m more than willing to change my mind! (If you have been a Christian for your entire life, than of the two of us, I’m the only one who has yet demonstrated that I am willing to do so.) But when I change my mind again on anything, I’ll change it because of logical discussion, reason, and evidence, not because of the fear of any religion’s imaginary torture cell.

On an individual note, if you can’t provide any evidence or reasons for why you believe what you do, then all your theology boils down to a personal opinion that you hold. It’s not communicable. In this case, that personal opinion is that non-believers deserve hell, and that it is just and good for them to end up there–and that includes me. This doesn’t bother me, but it does make me wonder why you would ever call yourself a friend. If I think you’re a horrible person who deserves the greatest imaginable (infinite) punishment, I should be damn well prepared to back up that accusation with something better than, “I just think it’s true, but I can’t give you any reason for that.” Such a claim is indistinguishable from me making something up, right here, right now. But I would probably make up something a lot more pleasant.

The point of this post is to get you to wake up to the reality of what you believe, not offend you or make you think that I don’t like you. In fact, I’m sure I do. What’s more, I’m sure you like me, too. If so, you probably don’t want a place like hell to exist for your friends. If that’s the case, congratulations–you are automatically more moral than the Christian god. Moving past emotion, the next step is to realize that only justified beliefs are worth holding if you value truth. Again, if there is no way to distinguish a belief from random fantasy, let it go. If you can distinguish it, you have a moral responsibility to tell me (and everyone else!) about it–especially people you love.

By the way, it’s very hard to read these after having personal conversations with you about these things. I know we’re all hypocrites in our own ways, but face to face conversations about these things have been loving and civil. The attitude in these writings are quite hostile and not the “Mikhailovich” I thought I knew. It’s hard for me to put the two personalities together. If this is the new you, I can accept that, but do you really want to be the time of person who anonymously swears at their “friends” behind their backs? If that is the real you, say these things to our faces and be who you really are. You claim that Christians are fake and hypocritical, why are you acting the same way? I’m interested to hear your thoughts.

Thanks for your comment. The question of the historical Jesus is not an easy one, but it should be approached in the same way that we examine the evidence for other figures in history. Would you agree that it is inconsistent to ignore the testimonies of miracles performed by Mohammad or Joseph Smith while *not* ignoring the miracles of Jesus? Everyone has different standards for what they will accept as “evidence.” Some people will believe almost anything you tell them. Others are more skeptical and require more evidence before they will believe a claim. Where do you draw the line? How do you know what to believe and what not to believe?

A good starting point is this quote from Carl Sagan: “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” I’ll provide an example to illustrate the importance of this statement. Let’s say that I tell you right now I have a candy bar sitting on my desk. You’d probably just take me at my word. It’s not a very extravagant claim. You have no reason to doubt it, and you’ll probably immediately accept it as true. If, on the other hand, I told you that right now I have the corpse of a *real* dragon sitting in the trunk of my car, you almost certainly would *not* believe it. Why? because it’s a much, much more extraordinary claim. It’s not usual at all. You probably would demand a DNA test and some extensive research to be done before you’d believe me. Am I right?

So let me apply this to the story of Jesus and his death. What we have is a VERY extraordinary claim (somebody rising from the dead), and the *only* evidence we have of it is writings by believers, two thousand years ago, written with an agenda, written decades after the events (the earliest gospel, Mark, is dated around the time of the Temple destruction, ~70 CE, and the earliest [original] manuscripts of this gospel don’t even include the last 12 verses of chapter 16 we currently have about the risen Jesus–look for a note explaining this in your NIV study Bible; the latest canonical gospel, John, is dated near the turn of the century, ~95 CE), none of it written by eyewitnesses, composed as part of an oral tradition, and with *zero* external corroborating accounts of *anything* about Jesus’ life whatsoever. The earliest reference to Jesus that we have from the world outside the Christian community is from Tacitus and Suetonius, both of whom were writing in the second century and merely referred to the existence of Christians. That’s it. (If you bring up Josephus, I’ll take the time to explain why most historians acknowledge his reference to be a 4th century interpolation.) Detailed, observant Roman historians who were quite willing to discuss minute astrological phenomena mention nothing about a very unusual, sudden darkness at the time of Christ’s death. They mention nothing about Herod killing all the babies in the area surrounding Bethlehem. They mention nothing about all the dead zombies walking out of their tombs when Jesus died and talking to people (see Matthew 27:52-53). In fact, nobody mentions anything about Jesus *at all* until the presence of Christians is discussed in the late second century.

If you don’t believe that extreme rumors can grow up quickly in an oral community, just google miracle healers in first century Palestine. They’re a dime a dozen, *and* many any of them claimed to have come back from the dead. A modern example of this is the Sai Baba cult in Sri Lanka. This guy has thousands of followers who give testimonies and sworn statements saying that he has performed crazy miracles, including raising people from the dead. He’s still alive. There hasn’t been a whole lot of time for the rumors to grow and spread, and yet they’re already really tall tales. Nobody outside his community really takes his claims seriously, however, despite all the great stories and eyewitness accounts. Why? Because he’s making extravagant claims, and we know they’re exaggerated. In fact, one way that historians determine fact from fantasy is by *excluding* stories of supernatural events. How do we learn what really happened when researching stories about historical figures such as…Alexander the Great? The miracles and supernatural stories attributed to Alexander’s life (e.g., being conceived by a god) are automatically excluded from what we take to be the real facts about his life. This is because we have no good reason to think that anything outside the ordinary happened. No miracles took place. It is far, far more likely that stories about him developed.

This is what you’re missing by accepting Lewis’ Trilemma. Someone proposed a while back (I forget who) that a fourth option be added: Liar, Lunatic, Lord, or *Legend*. I’d personally lean more toward lunatic, but the “legend” option is far more viable than “Lord.” The TinyFrog blog recently suggested, purely for the sake of argument, that the Romans moved Jesus’ body to prevent his tomb from being a rallying point for Jews against the Roman occupation. This was done in modern times when the communists killed the Russian royal family and told no one where they were buried to prevent the site from becoming a rallying point for anti-communists (see http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/11/25/europe/25czar.php). Or maybe the Romans just didn’t want to keep men stationed indefinitely at a tomb where Jesus’ followers kept showing up. As I mentioned before, the gospel of Mark just reports an empty tomb and scared disciples at the end; no resurrection story Matthew was written. I’m not remotely saying that I believe either of these two possibilities to be the truth; I don’t have evidence for them. All I’m saying is that there are *much* more likely explanations for what happened than just gullibly believing the whole story!

Is your standard of evidence is so low that all it takes to convince you of the truth of an account is that some people who were not eyewitness and part of a notoriously unreliable oral culture made some extravagant claims, like almost every other cult and sect was making during that time? I hope not. My point is that there’s no good reason to believe that anything supernatural occurred during Jesus’ life, including a resurrection. If you do believe this, based on the available evidence, than you should probably be a member of nearly every cult in the world–from ancient Egyptian religion to modern Mormonism. You have just chosen one improbable belief system and dismissed others out of hand.

Really, the evidence for Christ’s divinity is compelling. I am aware that it is false to assume that an “abnormal” man must be a God or of God, but let’s face it, C.S. Lewis’ argument (for all the logical flaws you would say it possesses) is compelling by any reasonable standard. A man that calls himself God can be said to be a maniac, a liar, or God. This one lives without flaw or vice, performs countless miracles, willingly faces death and is resurrected by his own prediction, and despite the followers he had, denies earthly power and ascends into the clouds (an event also witnessed by a multitude). Liar or maniac? I think not. Wise teacher who just told a lie a few times to get a crowd’s reaction? I think not.

The evidence suggests Christ was God or of God, and therefore God must exist.

It sounds to me like the issue isn’t skepticism for want of proof, it’s a question of the Bible’s legitimacy. If this is the case, it leaves us in a rather unfortunate place as far as the search for truth is concerned.

Read back over what I said about proof in the comment above. The only difference between the Christian god and Tiamat is that today, one is more popular than the other. It used to be the other way around. Old gods are not disproved, they’re forgotten.

Your Shakespeare example is a kind of conflation, or at least a false analogy. Beside the fact that there is rigorous scholarly debate about who Shakespeare actually was (perhaps even multiple authors), we approach the question of his identity in the same way that we approach any historical question — by examining the evidence. We can’t be “sure” that George Washington existed, for example, but we have very, very good reason to believe so (e.g., documents written in his own hand, thousands of contemporary eyewitness accounts, etc.).

In the end, it doesn’t matter at all who Shakespeare was. What we value are the things he wrote, and they maintain their value apart from his identity. If we found out today that Shakespeare was actually a Viking immigrant to Stratford-upon-Avon, it woulnd’t change the importance of his writings a bit. Nothing of the sort can be said about religious claims. If Christians suddenly found out that the devil wrote the Bible in one, great, final act of massive deception, it would change everything for them. The irony is that the suggestion I just made has no more evidence for or against it than the suggestion that God wrote the Bible. And that’s the importance of holding justified beliefs.

You also seem to be making Paley’s Watchmaker Argument with a touch of Pascal’s Wager, but I feel like those have been beaten to death on this blog already.

T. Tennent

I dispensed with the idea of absolute certainty a while ago, and I don’t think very many things outside the realm of mathematics can be “proven.” What we must learn to live with and deal with in life is the reality of incredibly high probabilities and the preponderance of evidence, not certainty or proof. Choosing the most likely explanation for a given question, based on the available evidence, to reach a justified conclusion, is something we should all be more intentional about. Combine this with the necessary humility of always admitting that you might be wrong (always being open to new evidence), and that’s the best, most reliable path toward truth that I know of. Part of the process is never knowing with certainty, but this doesn’t mean you can’t know things with confidence and refer to them as true to the best of our knowledge (a good example of this would be the theory of universal gravitation).

The reason I don’t see a justification for concluding that God exists is not that you can’t explain things through this lens, but that A) there is no positive evidence to support those conclusions or distinguish them from alternative made-up answers, and B) explanations of that sort can be sliced away from the list by an application of logic, reason, examination of evidence, and Occam’s razor. For example, the “problem of evil” can be explained by a demonic rebellion in heaven and subsequent temptation of humans on earth. It can also be explained in numerous other fictitious ways. But the most reasonable explanation, the one supported by the available evidence, is that humans have evolved with a mix of altruistic and incredibly selfish tenancies required for survival.

For the person concerned with truth (no matter what the implications of truth might be), it is incredibly important to differentiate between true and false explanations for a given phenomenon, or of the nature of reality itself. It seems to me that the search for truth must begin with the desire to distinguish truth from its counterfeit. Only by so doing can we rightly be said to love or pursue truth. Developing this heuristic and fine-tuning it rigorously to distinguish as accurately and reliably as possible between fact and fantasy should be the goal of everyone who wants to know what is and admit to be false that which is not.

If we are willing to say that truth can be defined by preference, a religious tradition, or anything that speaks to us personally in a way that we feel is superior to other beliefs, then we have given up the only meaningful aspect of the definition and have retreated into the worst form of postmodern relativism: the realm where a surgeon or historian has no more place in society than a maniac. Much of the time, truth will probably be uncomfortable. It’s that result you don’t want to get, or that conclusion you don’t want to come to, that the search for truth itself has demanded of you.

We are not approaching this issue from two different but equal starting points. If we really wanted to break down our epistemological bases, we could move all the way back to Descartes’s “Cogito ergo sum,” but I don’t think we need to back up that far to recognize that the three fundamental laws of logic (identity, non contradiction, and excluded middle) establish the nature of our shared reality and dictate a difference between things that exist and things that do not (A cannot be A and not A at the same time). The goal of anyone interested in truth and the nature of reality is to distinguish between things that are and are not.

My starting point is simply that everything that exists (physical or metaphysical) has to make its case for existing. I.e., it has to manifest. If something does not manifest, in what way can it be said to exist? Pretend I tell you that I have two boxes: one is empty, and the other contains a transcendent, metaphysical spirit. Would you be able to tell which one is which? Outside of dumb luck, no. And the reason is that even if something metaphysical does exist, we have absolutely no way of knowing about it if it doesn’t interact with the physical, i.e., revelation.

Revelation, too, has to make its case. It has to demonstrate that it is something other than a story like Ovid’s Metamorphoses or Homer’s Iliad. And that’s what I meant by pointing out that Occam’s Razor demolishes the special status of books dubbed “revelation.” You are forced to take them on faith and incorporate their teaching into your existing experience, observation, education, and understanding of the world. Religion’s track record over the course of the past few centuries gives me very little reason to assume that their unsupported, faith-based claims are going to hold up when we do find out what’s going on. Slowly but surely, believers have been forced to take less and less of their “revelation” seriously (or literally) because it doesn’t square with what we know to be the nature of reality, forcing God into smaller and smaller gaps.

To be taken seriously, ideas have to hold up to scrutiny. Things have to be shown to exist before we accept them as real (e.g., we don’t yet have evidence for unicorns, so I’m not going to believe in them, even though they are very nice). I’m not going to tack a dubious revelatory lens onto my perception of reality, because I care about truth. To the theist, I would like to ask the following question: Would you view it as equally justified for me to adopt a different religion’s understanding of reality? Why or why not? If yes, then A equals not A (mutually exclusive claims cannot both be true). If no, on what basis can you possibly distinguish between the claims of your religion and the claims of another? All such claims are in the realm of fantastic, made-up answers that are not testable, rendering them useless and indistinguishable from lunacy.

My argument is based on what we know, not on what we don’t know. In other words, it’s not an argument from ignorance or incredulity. Many Christians simply say that they don’t understand how the world exists, and therefore, we automatically must have been put here by an incredibly complex super-being in the metaphysical realm. As comforting as it might seem to have that “answer,” I would content that ultimately, a made-up answer (like God, fairies, or a giant serpent like Tiamat) should not be satisfying at all. Perhaps we will someday find evidence of a supernatural realm, or a single reason to believe that the prayers of any religion have efficacy. But until that day, the search for truth demands justified beliefs.