The End of Christianity (10 page)

Elsewhere I've put this in more visceral terms:

If God Himself were really appearing to people, and really was on a compassionate mission to reform and save the world, there is hardly any credible reason he would appear to only one persecutor rather than to all of them. But if [the persecutor] Paul's experience was entirely natural, and not at all divine, then we should expect such an event to be rare, possibly even unique—and, lo and behold, that appears to be the case. Paul's conversion thus supports the conclusion that Christianity originated from natural phenomena, and not from any encounter with a walking corpse. A walking corpse—indeed a flying corpse (Luke 24:51 and Acts 1:9–11) or a teleporting corpse (Luke 24:31–37 and John 20:19–26)—could have visited Pilate, Herod, the Sanhedrin, the masses of Jerusalem, the Roman legions, even the emperor and senate of Rome. He could even have flown to America (as the Mormons actually believe he did), and even China, preaching in all the temples and courts of Asia. In fact, being God, he could have appeared to everyone on earth. He could visit me right now. Or you! And yet, instead, besides his already-fanatical followers, just one odd fellow ever saw him.

If Jesus was a God and really wanted to save the world, he would have appeared and delivered his Gospel personally to the whole world. He would not appear only to one small group of believers and one lone outsider, in one tiny place, just one time, two thousand years ago, and then give up. But if Christianity originated as a natural movement inspired by ordinary hallucinations (real or pretended), then we would expect it to arise in only one small group, in one small place and time, and especially where, as in antiquity, regular hallucinators were often respected as holy and their hallucinations believed to be divine communications. And that's exactly when and where it began. The ordinary explanation thus predicts all we see, whereas the extraordinary explanation predicts things we don't see at all.
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We should also expect that a compassionate god who wanted us to know his message of salvation would not allow any errors or alterations to be made to the book containing that message (we would be supernaturally incapable of making such changes, and thus all Bibles ever made from antiquity to the present would be identicalthey are not), which would verify that his message was the true message (whereas otherwise it looks exactly like just one more human-made message purporting to be from God, such as every other religion produces); or faithful Christians (then and still) could have miraculous powers that
aren't
natural phenomena, such as the ability to regenerate destroyed limbs and organs or verifiably resurrect the genuinely dead.
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Of course that such things didn't happen is 100 percent expected if Christianity is false. But that none of them, not even anything else like them, would happen is certainly not 100 percent expected if Christianity is true. Surely the odds are
something
less than that. Thus, C < D. Any such evidence, or anything else instead that was at all like them (in being very unexpected unless Christianity were true), would also have generated a rate of growth for the movement far greater than natural phenomena are already known to produce. Instead, Christianity grew at the same rate as every other aggressively evangelistic religion in history—despite those religions being, one must suppose, false. Hence we expect that rate if it's false; we don't expect it if it's true. Thus, again, C < D. Even Christianity itself predicted that, if it were true, Jesus would have stuck around or very soon returned and remained on earth to judge and rule all peoples by now. This is explicitly predicted by Jesus. His prediction didn't come true.
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We surely can't say that his prediction not coming true by now was 100 percent certain. To the contrary, it must necessarily have been less likely than that. Yet that it wouldn't come true is 100 percent certain if Christianity is
false.
Thus, again, C < D.

We can extend this observation all the way back in human time: given its importance and (we're to suppose) fitness and elegance, the Gospel should have been revealed, preached, and known to every shaman and tribe of the human race from the dawn of history to now, not
never
heard of, by anyone, anywhere, ever before, until ten thousand years of civilization had gone by, and then heard of in only one place and time and thereafter spread merely by humankind and solely by word of mouth. That Jesus revealed “the true Gospel” only once and only to Palestinians (and only after thousands of years of religious soul-searching there) is exactly what we expect if this was just a human-made religion. The odds of this being the case are then 100 percent. But the odds of this being the case if Jesus was God and cared about all humankind are surely not 100 percent, as if we could predict with absolute certainty from that premise (“Jesus is God and cares about all humankind”) that Jesus would never reveal himself at the same time to Asians and Indians and Celts and Australians and Persians and Native Americans and all other peoples (in other words, all humankind). No, the odds of
none
of the latter happening cannot possibly be 100 percent. It must be
something
less than that. Which entails, again, C < D.

Finally, we have all the bizarre facts of Christianity, which make little sense if it's true but perfect sense if it was just a natural product of its time and place like every other religion. For example, why does God bother bearing a son? He could send an angel, the holy spirit, or reveal himself directly or through any other means. Why does he need to actually impregnate a woman and wait decades while the resulting child grows up and then wanders around preaching with all the illogical limitations of a mere mortal? We can explain this
culturally.
Because that was then the fashionable thing: gods were routinely believed to impregnate women and their sons to walk the earth telling tales and founding kingdoms and suffering until ascending to their celestial glory. That's a weird thing to believe
now.
It's no longer a peculiarity of our culture. But back then, it was. That Christianity would begin with such an idea is 100 percent exactly the sort of thing we expect if it's merely a product of its culture. But as an idea of a universal god who is not bound by any fleeting fashions and cultural expectations like that—a god to whom such ideas should surely seem as quaintly silly as they now do to us—it's certainly
not
100 percent exactly what we expect. Thus, again, C < D.

Likewise, a son of god who has to be killed, then rise from the dead, then ascend to heaven. That was, as we saw, a fashionable idea in that culture at that very time. There were lots of gods like that. Then, it seemed natural; now, it seems ridiculous. As Captain Kirk said in
Star Trek V
, “What need does God have of a starship?” we, too, must ask, “What need does God have of a dying-and-rising demigod?” It's not as if this is in any way what we would expect a universal god needs to forgive our sins. Quite the contrary. Except for that bizarrely peculiar and entirely parochial cultural fad for dying-and-rising divine sons, it's not even remotely what we would ever expect at all. Thus, again, C < D.

The same goes for the notions of blood sacrifice and vicarious atonement—which were commonplace then and very much in the mindset of the time, but which are now seen for what they are: silly. That someone can accept the punishment for someone else is hardly believed to be just or appropriate anymore (if it were, we'd allow criminals to walk free if they can find anyone to volunteer to do their time for them).
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That God “likes” the smell of burning flesh (Ephesians 5:2, referencing Exodus 29:25) or “needs blood” to effect atonement, or that God blood has “more magical power” than animal blood (Hebrews 9:13–14 and 9:22), is all primitive superstitious hokum no one takes seriously anymore. Back then, it was taken very seriously indeed. But God is not a primitive slave of ancient culture. Only men were. Thus that Christianity would be founded on a primitive superstition of atonement magic is 100 percent exactly the sort of thing we should expect if Christianity is false (as then it will have as its core ideas just what was culturally assumed it should then have), but certainly not 100 percent what we'd expect if it's true, as if a cosmic God who made the universe fourteen billion years ago is still hung up on blood magic. Thus, again, C < D.

It doesn't matter what excuses you try to make for why the evidence looks
exactly
like it would look if Christianity is false. Either you must concede there is no evidence that Christianity is true—because only then would all the evidence we have be exactly the same as it would be if it were false (which is all you end up with if you make excuses for every single thing)—or you must concede
something
about the evidence we have is unexpected on the hypothesis that Christianity is true. In other words, either you must concede D = C (and, therefore, there is no evidence for Christianity, and Christianity is no more likely than its own prior probability), or you must concede C < D (and therefore Christianity is probably false). You must pick one or the other. Even the first option (conceding there is no evidence for Christianity) falls against the horns of every argument there is that the
prior
probability that Christianity is true is certainly not as high as 50 percent. And if it's less, then Christianity is still false
even if you insist
D = C.

CONCLUSION

All attempts to argue that Christianity's origin and success were supernaturally special only end up exposing how not special it is and how not supernatural its origins and growth were. Because a close look at the actual facts fully undermines the claim that Christianity ever had the backing of God. Such backing entails we should see a very different set of historical facts than we do. That Christians need to believe Christianity was supernaturally remarkable when it really isn't is a sign that they don't really believe in Christianity because it's true; they desperately need to massage or even doctor the facts to convince themselves it's true. Anyone who analyzes this argument for Christianity rationally will discover both facts: that the evidence actually disconfirms the supernatural claims of Christianity, and that Christians can only deny this by ignoring or altering those facts. Once we
all
realize this, Christianity will come to an end.

by John W. Loftus

I now regard “the case for theism” as a fraud, and I can no longer take it seriously enough to present it to a class as a respectable philosophical position—no more than I could present intelligent design as a legitimate biological theory.…I just cannot take their arguments seriously anymore, and if you cannot take something seriously, you should not try to devote serious academic attention to it. I've turned the philosophy of religion courses over to a colleague.…So, with the exception of things I am finishing now, I am calling it quits with the philosophy of religion.
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        —
PROFESSOR KEITH PARSONS
.

T
here are many religions in the world we don't take seriously enough to pay attention to them. There are also many dead religions of the past that we ignore in today's world, including several dead Christianities. They do not merit our thought or discussion. They are dead. They have no relevance for our lives. Unless we're interested in the history of these religions, we simply ignore them. We ignore their scriptures, their prophets, their religious duties, their rituals, and their threats of punishment in the afterlife. They no longer matter to us.

When it comes to Christianity, two thousand years are enough. It's time this ancient myth was put to rest. This book calls for the same end of Christianity as the other religions we reject as dead to us. Just as we ignore other faiths, our hope is that someday we can ignore the Christian faith because its future adherents will live in cultural backwaters—like the Amish people, who pose no threat to the peace of the world. Bob Price makes such a case for Evangelicalism in the afterword of this book. The decision of Keith Parsons quoted above probably shows we're making some progress, for one of the reasons he tells us he's calling it quits with the philosophy of religion is because several atheists have “produced works of enormous sophistication that devastate the theistic arguments in their classical and most recent formulations” and as such, “presented powerful, and, in my view, unanswerable atheological arguments.” The case is therefore closed. There's nothing much more to add. Christianity is living on borrowed time. In the end, science ends Christianity.

THE CHRISTIAN FAITH IS PREPOSTEROUS

In this chapter I'll use a smorgasbord of arguments to show that Christianity, especially Protestant Evangelicalism, is wildly improbable. Evangelical Christian beliefs are so wildly improbable to me that they are ridiculous, preposterous, absurd, and bizarre. I'll show this by first placing evangelical beliefs out on the periphery of the Christian faith and then in turn by placing the Christian faith as a whole out on the periphery of religion itself. I'll also show this in its many bizarre derivative beliefs. Next I'll show that the contortionist ways Christian apologists defend their faith make otherwise intelligent people look stupid. Then I'll close with a reality check, a wakeup call, for Christians to consider. Christianity is just way too improbable to be believed or defended by any thoughtful, scientifically minded person in today's world.

First, consider the following ten creedal affirmations:
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1) There exists an eternal, all-powerful, all-knowing creator God, who, though of one essence, exists as three distinct, but not separate, persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

2) There exists a devil, Satan, and numerous other demonic beings as well as angels, archangels, cherubim, seraphim, and other types of supernatural beings.

3) The earth is not billions of years in age, but created by God six to ten thousand years ago.

4) There was an actual Adam and Eve in a literal Garden of Eden who sinned and brought upon this world the horrible suffering it contains; as such, organic evolution is false.

5) God has a morally sufficient reason for permitting all the evil that ever has or ever will occur.

6) A first-century Galilean Jew, Jesus of Nazareth, was born of a virgin as an incarnate God in the flesh and performed numerous miracles during his life, including walking on water, turning water into wine, and feeding thousands with a small serving of bread and fish.

7) This Jesus was crucified by the Roman authorities according to specific prophecies in the Old Testament as a divine sacrifice to atone for the past, present, and future sins of the world.

8) This same Jesus bodily arose from the dead on the third day, and after forty days of additional earthly presence, during which he performed more miracles, he bodily ascended off the earth into the sky to go to heaven.

9) A collection of sixty-six ancient texts, composed by numerous persons, nearly all unknown, over a period of over a thousand years, in their original versions, contained no inconsistencies, absurdities, or errors of fact or morality.

10) There is life after death, and only people who have accepted a legitimate form of Christian belief will go to eternal bliss in heaven, while all others, with a few rare exceptions, will suffer an eternity of torment in hell.

The Christianities that embrace fewer of these creedal affirmations are less improbable than those that embrace more of them. Any professing Christian who interprets all these creeds mythically is a religionist who simply believes in a higher power of some kind, or a cultural Christian, who likes studying the Bible as literature in the social grouping of the church, something that I find completely unnecessary.
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Any professing Christian who goes beyond that and literally believes only one of these affirmations has an improbable faith, since each one of them alone is highly disputable with respect to its truth or intelligibility. Any professing Christian who literally believes more than five of them has a wildly improbable faith (and that's being very generous). And any professing Christian who literally believes them all has an incredibly bizarre faith.
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Christians who accept these ten creedal affirmations must show that the biblically described events actually happened. This task is fatally hamstrung by virtue of the fact that such efforts are based upon the poor quality of historical evidence that survives from the ancient superstitious past.
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Usually, the farther we go back in the past the harder it is to reconstruct exactly what happened. Sometimes the evidence leading to a different conclusion has been lost or destroyed. Other times it was hidden away only to be discovered much later. In most circumstances historians can at best say only what did not happen as they falsify one historical supposition after another. When we factor in claims of miracles, it gets even worse, for extraordinary claims of miracles demand a greater deal of solid evidence for them (e.g., if a person tells us he levitated, we would need more than just his testimony to believe him).
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So, expecting this kind of solid evidence for miracles in the past is asking more of history than it's possible to show from historical study (e.g., unlike a person who personally tells us he levitated, we cannot interrogate an ancient text that says a certain person levitated). But we're not done yet. Christians must also show that the doctrines they derive from the supposed biblical events are true. However, this task is fatally hamstrung by virtue of the fact that their interpretations of the biblical texts are historically situated and culturally conditioned, as is evident from the number of Christianities that have existed and exist today.
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If this isn't enough of an impossible barrier to belief, Christians have the additional task of trying to show, if they can, how the doctrines they arrive at are supported by the evidence from the sciences (i.e., creationism, the Exodus, the virgin birth, the ascension of Jesus, the efficacy of petitionary prayer, etc.). Lastly, Christians have the task of showing how philosophy can make coherent sense of their doctrines (like Trinitarianism, the incarnation, atonement, personal identity after death, and the goodness of an omnipotent God in the presence of massive and ubiquitous human and animal suffering). Accomplishing all these Herculean tasks is needed to defend what they believe. It cannot be done.

Yet many Christians talk as if they are certain Christianity is true. When I first converted to the Christian faith, I attended a youth group of a Pentecostal church where John Lloyd was my first youth pastor. Not that long before this book went to press I met with him, and he said to me, “John, I know that I know that I know that what I believe is true.” And when he said this he closed his eyes as if he was experiencing God. He means what he says. But what he says cannot be true. Many other people in different religions would all say the same thing. Neurologist Robert Burton describes this “delusion of certainty” in his book
On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not
: “Despite how certainty feels, it is neither a conscious choice nor even a thought process. Certainty and similar states of ‘knowing what we know’ arise out of involuntary brain mechanisms that, like love or anger, function independently of reason.”
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There is simply no way anyone can claim what my friend Lloyd does. How can he? His faith is based on a historical claim, a much disputed extraordinary one about a man who came back to life in the ancient superstitious world. Many ordinary historical reconstructions are weakly justified because that's the best historians can do with the paucity of evidence for them, so how much the worse for an extraordinary one? Why won't evangelicals admit this?

When it comes to extraordinary miraculous claims, yesterday's evidence has lost all its power to convince. In order to see yesterday's evidence as convincing evidence for a miracle, we must already believe in an interpretive framework that allows us to see it as such. In the case of Christianity, the raw uninterpreted data of the past will not be enough for us to believe a miracle took place without first having a Christian interpretive framework for that raw data. This is a circular catch-22 for faith.

Where does the Christian interpretive framework come from, then? It doesn't come from philosophical analysis, or from any “background knowledge” or any “priors,” for there are no relevant “priors” prior to establishing the Christian interpretive framework. Christians must first independently establish that the miraculous resurrection of Jesus took place from the uninterpreted raw historical data. Not until then can they place such a miraculous belief into their bag of “priors” in the first place! This problem is fatal for anyone who wishes to believe Jesus bodily arose from the dead.

In my world, miracles do not happen. What world are
you
living in? The odds of a resurrection, from my experience, are at 0 percent. No Bayesian analysis can multiply a virtual zero probability with any other likely number and get very much higher than zero. That's what the probabilities are. I am skeptical of the extraordinary claim that Jesus resurrected because I cannot dismiss my present experience. I must judge the past from my present. I cannot do otherwise. Christians cannot believe based on the raw uninterpreted historical evidence, and yet they must approach said evidence from our present-day perspective where miracles, like virgin births and resurrections, do not happen. The only way they can reach their faithful conclusions is by assuming what needs to be shown based on their upbringing in a Christian culture, and that's it. If in our world miracles do not happen, then they did not happen in first-century Palestine, either. And that should be the end of it.

We can even grant the existence of Yahweh, or a creator god, along with the possibility of miracles, and it changes very little. What needs to be shown is that Yahweh did such a miracle here in this particular case. After all, overwhelming numbers of Jews in the days of Jesus did not believe Jesus arose from the dead even though they believed in Yahweh and the Old Testament. And they were there! They didn't think there was sufficient evidence to believe, and yet two thousand years later I'm supposed to? If they didn't, why should I? In fact, even if God exists and raised Jesus from the dead, there is simply no way
we
can know that he did this with the historical tools available to us. And these tools are all we've got.

All we have is hearsay testimonial evidence coming from the ancient past, containing inconsistencies and improbabilities, on behalf of the resurrection of Jesus. We do not know who wrote the Gospels. We do know they were written decades or more after the alleged facts supposedly occurred. How reliable of a testimony can that be? We also know there were many forgeries written by Christians, some of them accepted into the canonical New Testament. Can we really say all four canonical Gospels are genuine? Can we say they represent four separate testimonies when later Gospels borrowed from and expanded on the Gospel of Mark, a Gospel where the resurrected Jesus does not appear to the disciples at all? We don't even know whether all the characters in them are real people. Much less can we claim to know what they actually said and did. We cannot interview them or the Gospel writers themselves. Even if we were to grant that the Gospel writers reported some things correctly, there are things in them we simply cannot believe. After all, we're told that at the death of Jesus the tombs of the dead saints opened, and they walked around Jerusalem (Matthew 27:52–53). Why should we believe anything they said at that point? There is a reason why hearsay evidence is not admissible in court: it cannot be substantiated or cross-examined. This problem is even more exacerbated when it comes to the ancient superstitious past.
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