Does Christianity Contradict Evidence?
Recently, I was having a conversation with a commenter named Alrenous on Cl’s blog “The Warfare is Mental”. The conversation takes place specifically hin his essay “The Evidential Problem of Evil”, but the exact conversation is unimportant because I want to respond to a stand alone part of the conversation that I think deserves a lengthy point.
Specifically, I want to make that lengthy point on my blog, because I think the point is very important to both how I personally think about Christianity and how I think everyone should think about Christianity. Thus if you want to know more about where I’m coming from on this blog and why I reject Christianity, this essay is for you.
Here’s the comment in question:
Even if you do choose ‘reason,’ Jesus is specifically designed to be ambiguous on the evidence – on purpose, by Jesus. The Christian explanation for this itself doesn’t, in fact, contradict any evidence. This means literally the only counter-argument is Ockham’s razor, unless you can find a logical contradiction everyone else has missed. Ockham’s razor is a heuristic, not a proof.
The Order of Creation and a Direct Contradiction of Evidence
First I’ll look specifically at the claim “The Christian explanation for this itself doesn’t, in fact, contradict any evidence.” Does Christianity truly not contradict any evidence? I think not, because Christianity does contradict some evidence. For my first demonstration, I refer everyone to the first chapter of Genesis.
If we look at Genesis, we find the following for the creation of everything:
- Day 1: Heaven, Earth, Light, Darkness
- Day 2: Sky (firmament), Water
- Day 3: Water, Land, Plants
- Day 4: Sun, Moon, stars
- Day 5: Birds and sea creatures
- Day 6: Nonhuman land creatures, humans
- Day 7: Rest
This has nothing to do with the apparent contradiction with Genesis 2, which does seem to suggest a different story — animals being created from ground instead of water and humans coming before plants and other animals. This also has nothing to do with literal 24 hour periods and billion year periods, though I do think the Bible most likely used literal 24 hour days (see also here).
Much has already been written on these two topics, and though I have not yet seen an adequate resolution, I’d like to talk about something else; something more obvious. Instead of Genesis 2 or a Young-Earth vs. Old-Earth debate, this has to do with the order of the creation and the very real contradiction this has with what the sciences say about how everything came about.
The sciences tell us that the Sun (Day 4) must have come before the Earth (Day 1) and before plants (Day 3). The sciences also tell us that there cannot be light (Day 1) without the sun (Day 4), and that the moon is not a “second great light” but rather a reflection of sunlight.
Science also says that other stars (Day 4) could not have come after our solar system (Day 1). Also, the heavens (Day 1) came billions of years before the Earth specifically (Day 1). If you believe that science has even the most basic parts of astronomy down, this part of Genesis is flat out wrong.
It gets worse if you accept evolution. According to evolution, Birds (Day 5) came after land creatures (Day 6) and some sea creatures (Day 5) evolved from land creatures (Day 6).
Basically, if you think scientists have the even the tiniest clue, the order of Genesis is contradicted by the evidence. Meaning that the Bible is contradicted by the evidence and therefore Christianity is contradicted by the evidence.
The Resurrection of Saints and No Evidence
While some events of the Bible don’t directly and boldly contradict evidence, some events of the Bible contradict evidence indirectly — mainly, we would expect there to be lots and lots of indication that the event took place if the event took place, but instead we find no indication whatsoever.
Good examples of these events for which no substantiating evidence exists are the alleged Global Flood and the alleged Exodus, both of which have no archaeological evidence backing them up. But these events aren’t quite as unequivocal as Matthew 27:45 and Matthew 27:51-54.
Here we have a mass group of saints being resurrected from the dead, coupled with an earthquake and an eclipse. But now we have to wonder, what happened to these saints? They’re never mentioned in the Bible again; apparently Rome just deals with the problem somehow and goes on its merry way. Why did no one outside the Bible record these events?
There were many historians who could have covered the time period who failed to mention the resurrection of the saints, earthquake, or eclipse. There were even some historians who specifically did cover that time and place and mention the Crucifixion, but don’t mention the resurrection of the saints, earthquake, or eclipse. And even if they weren’t any historians available, events of this magnitude often make historians out of people who want to record what they saw.
The claim “The Christian explanation for this itself doesn’t, in fact, contradict any evidence” is then rendered definitively false.
How to Wave Away Any Challenge
Now I’d like to focus on another claim: “unless you can find a logical contradiction everyone else has missed”. This must mean that all logical contradictions to Christianity have been reviewed and found to fail completely. However, I think this is less likely to be so. Instead there appears to be contradictions within Christianity that have been brought up but not actually resolved at all.
A great website Errancy.org surveys some of these contradictions, finding twenty serious contradictions in the Bible, some of which occur in key parts of the Bible, such as massive conflicts in describing how his resurrected body was found to massive conflicts in describing Jesus’s birth, even with the date of Jesus’s birth being very problematic. Ebonmusings finds some additional contradictions that also appear problematic for the Bible.
We Don’t Need No Acknowledgement of Contradictions
But why are these contradictions not seen as a death knell of Christianity? Simply because they can be waved away easily. Even when we have a very stark and direct contradiction like “Jesus healed the blind as he was leaving Jericho” (Mark 10:46) and Jesus healed the blind “[a]s he drew near to Jericho” (Luke 18:35), is dismissed by saying “Oh, there were two Jerichos”.
Something like Simon carried Jesus’s cross for him (Luke 23:26) vs. Jesus carried his own cross (John 19:17) is dismissed by saying “Oh, they both took turns carrying the cross”, despite no passages saying this.
Something like a Centurion physically coming up to Jesus and talking to him (Matthew 5:5-13) vs. not talking to him and instead dealing with Jesus completely indirectly and through intermediaries (Luke 7:2-10) is discussed by suggesting that the centurion only used intermediaries some of the time, denying a lot of the reading of Luke.
Lastly, Mark 8:12 says “There shall no sign be given unto this generation” yet John 20:30 says “And many other signs truly did Jesus in the presence of his disciples”, dealt with by inventing a distinction between signs from Jesus and signs from Heaven.
With Skill, Contradictions Don’t Exist
But these resolutions all appear very weak and lacking, because we could easily use them to resolve any contradiction. Imagine we were watching two different accounts of the Wizard of Oz, suggesting that the Wizard of Oz is a documentary (the events all really happened in a spiritual realm which you can’t disprove).
Now imagine someone points out the dispute between the novel which says Dorothy wore silver shoes and the movie which says Dorothy wore ruby slippers. Instant resolution: she wore shoes, also called slippers, which were silver but had rubies in them. It doesn’t matter that both stories only had half the truth.
If you’re on trial, and the first witness says that they were driving when the left tire popped and the second witness says they were driving when the right tire popped, would you say they were contradicting each other, or would you just assume that both tires popped?
It’s no wonder why Christianity doesn’t appear to have any logical contradictions — any contradiction can be dismissed or waved away with relative ease. All you have to do is reason from “there can’t possibly be a contradiction” to “oh, this situation has to be the real one”, where that’s sharing the carrying of a cross, or a distinction between types of signs that the Bible totally meant, or two flat tires and silver slippers with rubies.
The Contradiction Test vs. The Demonstration Test
But the tale of proving that the Wizard of Oz happened tells us another point. The Wizard of Oz as a story contradicts no facts that you can astutely prove; or at least a sufficiently stubborn believer could always counter anything you said about the Wizard of Oz being false.
And this is pretty damning. If the Wizard of Oz is a true story based on the standard “it doesn’t contradict any evidence”, then perhaps this is a terrible standard for proving things.
Perhaps the question shouldn’t be “Why shouldn’t I believe the Wizard of Oz?” or “Please provide evidence against the Wizard of Oz and show it never happened”. Perhaps the question should be “Why should I believe the Wizard of Oz in the first place?” or “Please provide evidence for the Wizard of Oz and show it did happen”.
So I suggest a different test for theories: instead of using the contradiction test (Does this theory produce a contradiction?), use what I am going to call the Demonstration Test (Can this theory be demonstrated to be likely?). Do we have any reasons to think the predictions made by Christianity are actually true? What are those reasons?
I’m genuinely interested in the answer to this question, because past answers I’ve seen haven’t been too satisfactory.
Could Christianity and Naturalism Be the Same?
Both Christianity and Naturalism are, if properly defined, theories about how the world works made up of many truth-apt statements. In order to demonstrate the truth of one hypothesis, each and every truth-apt statement made by the hypothesis would have to be individually verified and demonstrated.
So one question here is, when it comes to making a testable prediction, what does Christianity predict that Naturalism doesn’t? If there is no differences in testable predictions, then it could be said that, surprisingly enough, Christianity and Naturalism are not the same.
This can also be seen in the statement “This means literally the only counter-argument is Ockham’s razor”. Ockham’s razor is the idea we should believe the simpler hypothesis, all else being equal. That means that if all we have left is appealing to Ockham’s razor, then all else must be equal, and we must be looking at theories that make identical predictions on everything — in a sense, the same theory.
What could Christianity and Naturalism differ on? And when they differ, who wins?
For one example, a potential testable difference is that of prayer. Christianity is committed to prayer being sensical and moderately effective, but when we look at it, it fails in a contradictory way, both philosophically and scientifically. Naturalism is committed to prayer not working, so this seems to be a win for naturalism.
Why Be Christian?
So when it comes down to it, why be Christian? Christianity does seem to contradict the external evidence both directly (in the order of creation) and indirectly (in the Resurrection of Saints). Christianity also seems to have a surprising amount of internal contradictions in the Bible as well.
Don’t get me wrong — the Contradiction Test is stunning horrible, because even the Wizard of Oz can pass it. Thus it is utterly stunning that Christianity fails the Contradiction Test. But more to the point, Christianity fails the Demonstration Test, as I write about both here and in other essays.
Naturalism-Humanism is a livable worldview, it’s not bleak and hopeless, is compatible with all the purpose we need, and allows us to be happy, even when resolutely facing death.
If none of the evidence is on the side of Christianity, the rest is just emotion. But Naturalism-Humanism is completely compatible with emotion in clear and fulfilling ways.
So why be Christian?
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I now blog at EverydayUtilitarian.com. I hope you'll join me at my new blog! This page has been left as an archive.
On 3 Oct 2011 in All, Atheism, Responses. 24 Comments.
3 Oct 2011, 9:09 pm
That certainly attacks certain versions of Christianity. It does not attack the essence of Christianity, namely Christ.
Biblical inerrancy is indeed well and truly hosed. Assume a more reasonable epistemology and individual errors in the Bible aren’t a problem. Even if the Bible was originally inerrant and inspired directly by Jesus, huge numbers of copying errors have made their way into the manuscript. Some of them are bound to be serious.
Evangelicals, among others, are pleading specially for the Bible. You’re turning around and pleading specially against it. You disprove Evangelism but you don’t prove that the Bible is useless as a source of spiritual knowledge.
Your statements about prayer are what are self-contradictory. Indeed the Christian wins no matter what – almost. Again, it’s an empirical question, and far beyond anything we have evidence for. You don’t have anywhere near enough information to safely conclude that prayers are answered at chance rates or not – and neither does the Christian.
This discussion interests me much more, but I will get to it later. I want to see if you can understand my objections to the other arguments, first.
3 Oct 2011, 11:47 pm
“The sciences also tell us that there cannot be light (Day 1) without the sun (Day 4)”
This seems to be wrong. If light means any electromagnetic radiation then there must surely have been some (and some within the visible spectrum) during the big bang as the early universe is said to have been at an incredibly high temperature.
If you take it to mean a sustained, source of visible light, enough for photosynthesis, then the sun is indeed a requirement. Though of course if God just created everything supernaturally then he could have just acted as a supernatural light source (argumentum ab rectum).
Days vs. Billions of years
The bible gets so metaphorically loose with concepts like …everything really….that it is very easy to explain away as a metaphor.
Like the point over at CSA that William Lane Craig, after seeing the Neutrino result from CERN proclaimed it added weight to the A theory of time and the Kalam Argument, but is not willing to say things like “the A theory of time would predict Neutrinos travelling at faster than light speed and thus can be falsified” before the result was in.
4 Oct 2011, 1:05 am
This discussion is the bulk of my point; the ultimate point I wanted to make for this essay. The rest of the stuff is silly and secondary, and I agree with you on all of it: you can do whatever backflips you want to make it so I haven’t conclusively disproven Christianity.
You can make it so the errancies don’t matter, so the contradictions don’t matter, you can make Christianity as tiny and as unfalsifiable as you want. It’s just at that point it’s utterly ridiculous to expect me to disprove that, just like it’s utterly ridiculous to expect you to disprove the Wizard of Oz.
If I adopt your methods for the Wizard of Oz, there is no way you could ever demonstrate that it’s not a true story. And that is my key point: a reduction to absurdity of what you’re trying to do.
If you want to respond to this essay here, you need to deal with this, not argue about the individual nitpicks about what hasn’t been disproven.
If you don’t care about the fact that God got the origins of the Earth wrong or decided to lie to us about them, or if you think scribal errors can make that much of a mistake there but still allow the Bible to be completely trustworthy in other places, then so be it.
But I can do the exact same for the Wizard of Oz, and you know it. The Christian religion is no truer than the Wizard of Oz.
4 Oct 2011, 6:00 pm
If you don’t want to give the impression that you find the nitpicks important, you need to not write so much about them.
First I need to know a few things.
Your position is that you should be atheist, yes? What would you consider the falsification of this to constitute? Not necessarily that you should be Christian, but what do you require to convince you that Christianity isn’t unreasonable?
If such a falsification were provided, what significant things would you conclude? What would you find it means?
Why is it that you choose to be forced by reason, anyway?
4 Oct 2011, 7:23 pm
@Alrenous:
The first sections were just to demonstrate that some of Christianity contradicts the evidence. You’ve agreed that the Bible is errant. I didn’t expect that whole section to represent the definitive proof that Christianity is 100% absolutely impossible.
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Yes. My position here is that:
1.) Christianity is no more true than the Wizard of Oz.
2.) Christianity can’t pass The Demonstration Test.
3.) Christianity suffers from significant problems, being rendered false or incoherent in many parts. 4.) Christianity does not explain any part of our world in any useful way.
5.) There is no reason for me, a person who values truth and compassion, to be Christian instead of Humanist.
What would convince me to be Christian? A reversal on all five of those points. For a reversal of three, all I ask is an explanation for why I should believe an errant Bible, why I should believe a contradictory Bible, why I should believe a Bible riddled with scribal errors, how prayer makes sense, why there are so many atrocities in the Bible attributed to God, and how the sacrifice of someone can actually pay for my sins.
What would convince you that Christianity is unreasonable? What would convince you that naturalism-humanism is true?
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I would find Christianity to be true, and start reconciling myself with God. I’ve prayed to God before to no avail, so I would probably conclude he wants nothing to do with me for some reason.
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Reason has enormous instrumental, and some intrinsic, value to my life.
4 Oct 2011, 7:26 pm
@joseph:
I’ve heard that one before, though of course the Bible says nothing about that — it was just made up as a “how it could have been” explanation in order to save the Bible from contradiction. (See my discussion of Biblical contradictions in this essay for more of these.)
Most importantly, even if this were true, it still doesn’t explain the contradiction with how the sciences have concluded Earth and man originated.
5 Oct 2011, 2:21 am
Yes Peter Hurford,
But let me point you to the Bible, Letter to the Apologians:
Chapter 1, Verses 1-4.
1. Sayeth the LORD, if there be an escape to the possible ye must take it.
2. If not, sayeth the LORD, I was probably speaking metaphorically.
3. And lo, if none of these suffice asl William Lane Craig.
4. There’s always Fideism.
8 Oct 2011, 12:55 am
I didn’t ask what you’d do if someone proved Christianity true. I asked what you’d do if I proved it not-unreasonable. I specifically said not necessarily proving you should be Christian.
Of naturalism I’m already convinced. Just, if God exists, it is entirely natural that He does.
Of humanism…well, it’s complicated, but long story short someone needs to find the error in my proof that consciousness isn’t physical.
You don’t seem to have a problem with it for other books. Don’t believe the contradictions. Correct for the errors. We know what copying errors are like and error-correction is a mature field.
Your demonstration test is implicitly circular. Under it, there is no way to learn about spiritual facts of the kind Christians are interested in. It disallows them from existence a priori, then concludes they don’t exist.
Further the test itself is just a complicated form of contradiction. You must find a fact about the belief that contradicts the idea it demonstrates anything.
In fact the demonstration test outlaws all philosophy, period, from Socrates to Wittgenstein. And math. Don’t forget math.
There is a right answer to how stubborn you should be. I already know what it is, and it’s puzzling you haven’t discovered it.
In fact, the Wizard of Oz does contradict evidence. An easy one is you go ask Baum and Denslow – they’re dead, but I’m sure they left testimony – about whether it was fiction.
But let’s make it harder for me. Say it’s 5000 AD and Christians in the meantime confused Oz for the Bible. Their saviour now clicks their heels.
Either a fully error-corrected, contradiction-resolved version of the manuscript contradicts physical evidence, or it doesn’t. If it does, we’re done.
If it doesn’t, we’re back into the issue of your impoverished half-moon reason. First, I note you argue circularly here too.
Ahem. “Let’s assume Oz is not truth-apt. Truth aptness is necessary for it to be rational. Therefore, it isn’t rational.”
The purpose of beliefs is to serve the believer. A truth-inapt belief can serve the believer by changing how they feel. No reason to prefer one indistinguishable situation from another?
Hume said, “Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.” I say, “If we wanted, the entire human race could get up, get a cup of coffee, and march off into the ocean.” Passions precede reason and reason is their servant, else it has no purpose.
The goals it is an instrument of accomplishing better have intrinsic value, too.
To find new and interesting ways to make it harder to feel good is the opposite of what reason is for. Instead, you should be hoarding such ‘irrational’ beliefs. Why, if you had enough, you could be happy even in terrific poverty or other dire straights, and since they’re not truth-apt, they won’t imply you should do counter-productive things.
Especially as the new and interesting ways don’t work. In fact, people prefer thinking they’re not BIVs. You can’t argue them out of it. That’s what preceding reason means. It doesn’t make them irrational, it makes believing in not-BIV an extremely cheap source of satisfaction.
Unless you’re the other way around. Then, it makes believing yes-BIV a cheap source of satisfaction.
8 Oct 2011, 5:02 am
“You don’t seem to have a problem with it for other books. Don’t believe the contradictions. Correct for the errors. We know what copying errors are like and error-correction is a mature field.”
Not that I don’t think you make a good point, but very briefly, at a lower level, the bible itself contains a warning to not change it, difficulty as many christian groups will even deny that the KJV Bible should be updated, corrected, changed etc.
8 Oct 2011, 12:30 pm
I’ve read that passage. The self-serving nature is obvious. It gets caught and discarded in the error-correction phase. Moreover, it already has been changed, so it’s too late.
This is what makes Bible inerrancy an almost logic-immune axiom. If you agree it might be errant, then that passage is itself errant. If you don’t, then it isn’t errant and it’s difficult to find anything that should change that person’s mind, and decidedly impossible to find anything that will.
13 Oct 2011, 10:43 pm
I finally found time to get back to this comment, sorry for not replying to it for so long.
Could you elaborate on the difference? It is always unreasonable for me to believe things that I find false. Therefore you must prove Christianity true for me to think it is reasonable for me to hold it.
You might be asking whether I think it is reasonable for *you* to be Christian. I don’t think so, because you say you don’t use reason to come to your answers.
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I don’t think that’s entailed under humanism, but what is your proof that consciousness isn’t physical. And if it isn’t physical, what is it?
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This doesn’t work — other books don’t claim to be the one true word of a divine entity, and don’t give me commandments for how I should live my life. And the ones that do suggest how I live my life often give research and justification for their claims.
The Bible is contradictory — just look at Genesis. If God doesn’t even know how his own universe was created, why should I trust him on anything else? I certainly wouldn’t trust any other book with that bad of an error.
How do we know Genesis was a scribal mistake? We don’t. What’s the correction from the error-correction field? We don’t have one.
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Not quite. All I’m saying is that until you provide some sort of justification, the Bible as a source of spiritual facts is arbitrary. Why should they learn from the Bible, and not the Vedas, or the Koran, or from Dawkin’s The God Delusion?
What kind of spiritual facts does the Bible have that are so interesting anyway?
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What do you mean? I didn’t understand what you said here.
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It does not, because we can ask these philosophies why we should believe them to be true. They don’t reply “Because it is a logically coherent belief” or “Because it’s possible”, they reply “Because we explain the world in a way that makes testable predictions about the future, and these predictions have come true”.
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Enlighten me, then.
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Where is that testimony? Do you have it? Are you sure it wasn’t coerced by the Wicked Witch of the West? It’s possible that it was. Etc. etc.
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If this is your standard, why does the Bible pass but the Wizard of Oz doesn’t?
What does a fully error-corrected, contradiction-resolved version of the Bible even look like? How is that problem with Genesis resolved? What about the resurrection of the saints? And how do you go about resolving a contradiction?
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My goal isn’t to feel happy in that manner, though. I’m reminded of the essay I read called “Not For the Sake of Happiness Alone” by Eliezer Yudkowsky.
And even if my goal was to feel happy in that manner, I would have no way of knowing if I was going to accidentally kill myself. Only rationality can tell me what will and will not kill myself.
I’m going to say, sure you can do this. You can say you want to hold unreasonable, possibly false beliefs because they provide “cheap satisfaction”. But if you do, then what’s the point of arguing with me? Why do you need my stamp of approval on your idea?
It sounds like you agree with me that your belief is unlikely to be true, and unjustified from a “reasonable” point of view. So why are we arguing?
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What word do you use for assigning a belief stance to a statement that isn’t truth-apt?
2 Nov 2011, 6:21 pm
Truth is eternal.
And I have email notification so I don’t have to think about it.
Not-unreasonability is first the probability the Christian has some logic or evidence, that you do not, that would show that it is more likely to be true. This is usually due to ambiguous evidence, with multiple reasonable interpretations. You have to interpret it to make a decision, but there’s no way to verify the interpretation.
Not-unreasonability is second the admission that there are reasonable mistakes. That perhaps Christianity is surely and fundamentally false, but that showing so is not easy; which implies first that the consequences of Christianity are close enough to the truth that it doesn’t matter; implies second that it is perhaps beyond the non-specialist to understand why Christianity is false.
I don’t have to know. You can hypothesize whatever you like against present evidence. Which in turn means I shouldn’t pretend to know, because I’m not likely to guess correctly.
Ask a Christian.
2 Nov 2011, 9:16 pm
Peter,
An article I’ve wanted to write lately is something about how God is essentially a shape-shifting chameleon — no matter how wrong something is, it’s right because it’s in the Bible and because God is omniscient and we just have to trust in that due to our limited knowledge of the world (i.e., cognitive dissonance). A lot of the evidence you present here seems to support that, but I worry the same criticism could be leveled at naturalism-humanism.
What do you think?
3 Nov 2011, 7:50 pm
@Alrenous:
I admit that this is a possibility, but it is not very likely, because if they had this logic or evidence, they would provide it. I have yet to be compelled by any logic or evidence provided.
Of course, I also admit the possibility that I am defective or irrational when it comes to considering logic / evidence for Christianity, though again that seems highly unlikely. I’m not sure how I would resolve this.
Regardless, I do have arguments against the existence of God that could be refuted.
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“Ambiguous evidence” a contradiction in terms, because evidence is supposed to make one theory more likely than another — evidence that goes both ways means it is simultaneously making two theories more likely than each other, a contradiction.
If you think you have ambiguous evidence, you cannot use it to say one theory is better than another unless it supports one theory over the other. (Evidence can support two different theories over a third, but that’s a different story.)
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I agree with this to a point. I think there are reasonable mistakes, especially very subtle ones — for instance, where people fail to realize they have inconsistent burdens of proof.
I also think there are reasonable Christians, though I do feel that something like my essay “The Contradictory Failure of Prayer” does indeed present a major problem for Christianity.
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A solid and true response, I was wrong for suggesting that you had to have a counter-answer.
How do you demonstrate that the mind isn’t physical, though?
3 Nov 2011, 8:00 pm
@Thinking Emotions:
I do think this is how some people approach their religious faith, especially groups that advocate mission statements like “Nothing can be true if it contradicts the scriptural record”. (Example: Answers In Genesis.)
It’s circular logic. “God is infallible, because the Bible says so, and we know that because the Bible was written by God, and and we know God’s word is true because God is both infallible and would never deceive us, and we know God would never deceive us because the Bible says so, and we know that because the Bible was written by God, …”.
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Why?
5 Nov 2011, 1:30 pm
Yes, the classic “circle of power.” It’s absurd and maddening. However, I truly believe it is really the only way to pursue religious faith if you are a Bible-believing Christian. No matter how much you want to disagree with something, it’s right; that’s the stance the Christian would have to take, no?
I suppose a basic and insufficient rejection would be that atheism (pre-equipped with naturalism and humanism) can’t know everything. More specifically, Christianity has answers that atheism can’t know. Therefore, Christianity is superior to atheism. Of course, with this, we’re assuming those answers are true, which is something I don’t believe. Nonetheless, I was just trying to illustrate that science and Christianity are compatible even if science apparently contradicts Christianity. After all, everything in the Bible could be right, but science just hasn’t found that out yet.
In other words, atheism is right because science has proved certain things which contradict Christianity, making Christianity wrong. These certain things can’t be wrong because we’ve proved them and can prove them again, for they are demonstrable truths. However, as you said in your essay about absolute knowledge, some truths may in some way allow absolute knowledge. Aren’t these truths not demonstrable? How can we demonstrate, unequivocally, that 2+2=4? How can we demonstrate that A=A and other axioms?
6 Nov 2011, 1:03 am
ON THE TALE OF “THE RESURRECTION OF THE SAINTS” IN MATTHEW
Evangelical apologists like Licona in his new book on the resurrection, and even J.P. Holding, are backing away from insisting that the story of the resurrected saints in Matthew must be understood as an historical event. They both admit you can be an Evangelical Christian and not believe such a story is historical. Norman Geisler however, is one Evangelical who does believe that Evangelicals must defend that story has historical. You can probably google up the debate going on if you search under the names above.
6 Nov 2011, 8:45 pm
This would be an interesting debate to follow, because I’m not even sure how the criteria for what makes a Christian is established, let alone what that criteria actually is.
And I’m still not sure how people can acknowledge that the Bible has broad moral, textual, historical, and scientific flaws but yet should be considered the ultimate standard of truth.
6 Nov 2011, 8:55 pm
It also can be based on double standards of evidence (needing a low threshold to believe the Bible, but a normal threshold for everything else). I don’t understand my ally here; I have little to no understanding of how people can still believe in the Bible after being made aware of something like what I write about here.
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I agree with you here — this is a possible objection and one that could potentially be true, but is very unlikely to be so and is definitely unfounded. Sure Christianity could be true, but why think it is?
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Christianity is wrong precisely because it makes a wide degree of predictions about what would be true that do not actually obtain, most notably that which is discussed in this essay and that which is discussed in “The Contradictory Failure of Prayer”.
Atheism, on the other hand, can still be wrong if Christianity is wrong. Atheism is correct just because of the failure of God to be demonstrated to exist, just like unicorns have failed. See “A-Unicornism and the True Definition of Atheism”.
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See my demonstration in “The Origin of Truth”, and some about the idea of definitionally true in “Knowledge: A Priori and Absolute”.
14 Nov 2011, 6:19 am
Errors in rationality are unlikely to align across different methods. Find a second way of evaluating Christian apologetics. If at least one of the methods are erroneous, they will give different answers.
When doing this, it is necessary to be specific. The conclusion isn’t, “Christianity is wrong,” the conclusion is like, “Christianity causes its followers to reject technologically useful scientific conclusions, as demonstrated by [these technologies] which Christians think shouldn’t work.”
You misunderstand my point.
“You have to interpret it to make a decision” The evidence must first be understood before it can be evidence for theories. However, understanding evidence is usually not straightforward. For example, it is common for practically untestable assumptions to solely determine which theory a datum supports. This is ambiguous evidence – picking the assumption amounts to picking the conclusion.
Which means, psychologically, that the preferred conclusion usually determines which assumption is picked.
14 Nov 2011, 3:52 pm
What second way would you suggest?
There are potentially billions of ways to evaluate Christian apologetics, ranging from “For each argument, flip a coin; if heads, believe it; if tails, do not” to “If William Lane Craig believes it, believe it; if not, do not” to “If this argument does not contradict any other argument, believe it; if not, do not” to…
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Sure. My conclusion: Christianity has no predictive merit and contains several contradictions that can only be resolved by abandoning large parts of the theory.
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No disagreement here. But if you encounter this situation, the argument is then taken back a level: which interpretation is correct? If there truly is no correct interpretation, and you can freely adopt either one, and watch the evidence go both ways, then the evidence is useless.
9 Dec 2011, 9:32 am
I use purpose analysis. Christianity is supposed to make one’s life better. Does it? Well…science thinks so. (Science has no idea why, though scientists probably think they do.)
So if your logic says nobody should be a Christian, you’ve probably missed something important.
I’ma do a third too. Analysis by civilization.
Some of the poorest people in the world, historical people, pre-industrials, not only permitted but encouraged Christianity, and it was them – not, e.g. Buddhists – who eventually managed to scrounge together enough wealth that we could idly have this conversation.
It doesn’t prove it’s good, but it can’t be that bad. Christianity doesn’t kill off its adherents.
Though interestingly, come to think, I don’t know if the apologetics themselves pass these kinds of tests.
And that is one reason it might turn out this way; if you look at apologetics and it turns out that they’re actually parasites, then conclude Christianity is bad, you’ve made a mistake.
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Yeah. So what? Even if true, you establish that Christians sometimes say stupid things, not that, e.g. the Bible is a waste of paper.
Agreed.
I’ll hold off on continuing this line for now.
10 Dec 2011, 3:04 am
Basically I would just have to quote my argument from “But Religion is Useful!” here — everything applies.
I have no doubt that Christianity makes some people’s lives better. But it also makes some people’s lives worse. And naturalism-humanism has just as much potential to make people’s lives better, and probably less potential to make it worse. Therefore, should we become naturalist-humanists?
And even if purpose analysis prefers Christianity, this does not entail that Christianity is factually correct.
And thus we don’t disagree on anything here: Christianity, the set of factual claims, is false — it contradicts the evidence and does not make predictions that come true. Christianity, the self-delusion or the atheist-metaphorical-reconception, does make people happy. I agree to all of this.
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This sounds like the genetic fallacy, but in reverse.
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Well not enough to make a noticeable difference in its own growth rate. But it did, at least once upon a time, kill a lot of people — adherents who weren’t adherent-y enough, and non-adherents.
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Yeah. So what? Even if true, you establish that Christians sometimes say stupid things, not that, e.g. the Bible is a waste of paper.
I wouldn’t say the Bible is a waste of paper. Certain portions of it have poetic merit, and all of it has historical merit. Though this whole line of argument really reminds me of “A Parable on Obsolete Ideologies”.
22 Sep 2012, 10:07 pm
Well, if by “conceded the problem with Genesis order” you mean “admitted that Genesis doesn’t track 100% with modern science,” then, yeah, that’s correct, but I’m not sure what you think you gain.
What you really mean is, a literalist interpretation of Genesis 1 contradicts some scientific evidence, but, since I’ve never denied that, again… what do you gain?
These are both false, but I’ll focus only on the latter for now.
First off, you need to realize that you’re reverting to the same fallacious reasoning you tried to employ in our debate, a.k.a. the same fallacious reasoning you yourself decry elsewhere: “…merely showing that no case against the existence of gods succeeds does not mean that the case for the existence of gods do succeed.” Similarly, merely showing that no archaeological evidence exists for the Exodus does not mean Exodus never happened. However, I don’t need to fall back on that, as I’ve already discussed a bit of the evidence consistent with Exodus (cf. the Stele of Merheptah). So, in short, this is just like your overstated claims on prayer studies: it isn’t the case that “no evidence exists” for Exodus.
…rhetorically persuasive perhaps, but, you’re flat-out wrong, and Jayman already schooled you in this regard:
So there you go: another falsification of another out-of-scope, unscholarly claim. Of course, we can disregard all those, because they’re all hoaxes, or otherwise not countable as evidence, right?