The End of Christianity (58 page)

35
. Yes, Baal worship! That was the brainchild of the Wildean emperor Heliogabalus; it had already been popular in Roman Syria.

36
. Rodney Stark,
The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).

37
. Richard Carrier,
Not the Impossible Faith: Why Christianity Didn't Need a Miracle to Succeed
(Raleigh, NC: Lulu, 2009). See Carrier's
chapter 2
in the present volume.

38
. Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter,
When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group that Predicted the Destruction of the World
(New York: Harper and Row Torchbooks, 1964).

39
. Cognitive dissonance theory is well-established in psychology and has been applied to the origins of Christianity by Adela Collins and others: see Carrier, “Burial of Jesus,” 387–88 (with note 55, 392); and Carrier, “Plausibility of Theft,” 356–57, for several other examples in the history of religion.

40
. Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter,
When Prophecy Fails
, 12.

41
. Eric Hoffer,
The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements
(New York: Harper and Row, 1951).

CHAPTER 10

1
. Quoted in David Quammen,
The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution
(New York: Atlas Books/Norton, 2006), 245–46.

2
. Tertullian,
De Spectaculis
30,
http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0303.htm
, accessed April 19, 2011.

3
. Paul Johnson,
A History of Christianity
(New York: Atheneum, 1976), 342.

4
. Ibid., 341.

5
. James Joyce,
A Portrait of the Artist as a YoungMan
(New York: Viking, 1972).

6
. Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God,”
http://www.apuritansmind.com/jonathanedwards/JonathanEdwards-Sermons.htm
.

7
. Johnson,
History of Christianity
, 341.

8
. Peter Kreeft and R. K. Tacelli,
Handbook of Christian Apologetics
(Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1994), 290.

9
. Ibid.

10
. Rational Christianity, “Hell,”
http://www.rationalchristianity.net/hell.html
, accessed April 19, 2011.

11
.
The Catholic Encyclopedia
, “Hell,”
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/
, accessed April 19, 2011.

12
. Various points in this paragraph were inspired by the following remarks from Richard Carrier (personal communication, October 15, 2010), whom I would like to thank for reading a draft of this chapter and making some excellent editorial and substantive suggestions:

Of course, “infinite authority” is nonsensical. It confuses the word “total” with the word “infinite.” God's authority is not “infinite” in any degree, it's just final and complete (and thus by definition
finite
, per the phrase “the buck stops here”). Indeed, the severity of a crime is measured by the amount of harm it does, and surely being infinite and omnipotent God can't be harmed, even in principle, so it doesn't even make sense to say that sinning “against” him causes any harm deserving of any punishment, much less of infinite degree. And God is supposed to be supremely forgiving anyway (otherwise we are superior to him in being more merciful than he), so this idea that he would infinitely punish every crime makes no sense on that account either.

Thanks also to John Beversluis for reading the material on C. S. Lewis and making valuable suggestions.

13
. John Beversluis,
C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007).

14
. All quoted material and cited arguments in this rebuttal of C. S. Lewis come from C. S. Lewis,
The Problem of Pain
(New York: Macmillan, 1961), 109–15.

15
. Conversely, heaven has many people who did very bad things yet who repented before death. As Eddie Tabash often notes in his debates with religious apologists and theistic philosophers, had Hitler earnestly repented, even he would have made it to heaven. Eddie's mother, on the other hand, an Auschwitz survivor who remained a faithful Jew throughout her life, is presumably in hell.

16
. Emma Darwin, Charles's beloved and traditionally pious wife, wrote him an anguished letter about her fears that his loss of faith would mean that they would be separated in the next life. So far as I can tell, traditional Christianity has no answer to Emma Darwin's concern.

17
. Dante Alighieri,
The Inferno
, trans. John Ciardi (New York: Signet, 1982), 42.

18
. The Athanasian Creed,
http://www.ccel.org/creeds/athanasian.creed.html
, accessed April 19, 2011.

19
. All quoted material and cited arguments in this rebuttal of Jerry Walls come from Jerry L. Walls,
Heaven: The Logic of Eternal Joy
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 66, 82, 87.

20
. Kreeft and Tacelli,
Christian Apologetics
, 285.

PART 4

CHAPTER 11

1
. Francis S. Collins,
The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidencefor Belief
(New York: Simon&Schuster, 2006).

2
. See, for example, John C. Polkinghorne,
The Faith of a Physicist
(Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996);
One World: The Interaction of Science and Theology
(West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton, 2007);
Exploring Reality: The Intertwining of Science and Religion
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007);
Quantum Physics and Theology: An Unexpected Kinship
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008).

3
. Elaine Howard Ecklund,
Science vs. Religion: What Scientists Really Think
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

4
. Richard Dawkins,
The God Delusion
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006).

5
. Stephen Jay Gould,
Rock of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life
(New York: Ballantine, 1999).

6
. Pascal Boyer,
Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought
(New York: Basic, 2001), 94.

7
. Emile Durkheim,
The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life
(New York: Free Press, 1965 [1915]), 62.

8
. Clifford Geertz,
The Interpretation of Cultures
(New York: Basic, 1973), 90.

9
. Mark Pendergrast,
For God, Country, and Coca-Cola: The Unauthorized History of the World's Most Popular Soft Drink
(New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1993).

10
. E. B. Tylor,
Primitive Culture, Volume I: The Origins of Culture
(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1958 [1871]), 23.

11
. Anthony F. C. Wallace,
Religion: An Anthropological View
(New York: Random House, 1966), 52. [Editor's Note: see Dr. Eller's supporting discussion of this definition of religion (and similar difficulties in defining “morality”) in David Eller, “Christianity Does Not Provide the Basis for Morality,” in
The Christian Delusion
, ed. John Loftus (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2010), 347–67 (348–50 on defining religion).]

12
. Boyer,
Religion Explained.

13
. Scott Atran,
In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

14
. Stewart Guthrie,
Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

15
. Graham Harvey,
Animism: Respecting the Living World
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), xvii.

16
. Martin Buber,
I and Thou
, 2nd ed., trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958).

17
. Robin Horton, “A Definition of Religion, and Its Uses,”
The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland
90 (1960): 211.

18
. Michael Shermer,
How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science.
(New York: W. H. Freeman and Company, 2000), 129–35.

19
. Ian G. Barbour,
Religion and Science: Historical and Contemporary Issues
(New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997).

20
. Ibid., 98.

21
. Massimo Pigliucci, “Science and Religion,”
The Skeptic Encyclopedia of Pseudoscience
, ed. Michael Shermer (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2002), 443–54.

22
. The Discovery Institute can be found at
http://www.discovery.org
.

23
. Hugh Ross and Reasons to Believe can be found at
http://www.reasons.org
.

24
.
Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language Unabridged
, ed. Philip Babcock Gove (Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, 1986), s.v. “compatible.”

25
. Todd Pitock, “Science and Islam,”
Discover
, July 2007, 40–41 (see
http://discovermagazine.com/2007/jul/science-and-islam/
, accessed April 19, 2011).

26
. Arun Bala,
The Dialogue of Civilizations in the Birth of Modern Science
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 99.

27
. Ibid.

28
. Ibid.

29
. Thomas Kuhn,
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975).

30
. Quoted in Ed L. Miller, ed.,
Classical Statements on Faith and Reason
(New York: Random House, 1970), 5.

31
. Quoted in Walter Kaufmann,
The Faith of a Heretic
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961), 75.

CHAPTER 12

1
.On Bayes’ theorem, see discussion and references in: Richard Carrier, “Bayes’ Theorem for Beginners: Formal Logic and Its Relevance to Historical Method,” in
Sources of the Jesus Tradition: Separating History from Myth
, ed. R. Joseph Hoffmann (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2010); and Richard Carrier,
Bayes’ Theorem and Historical Method
(tentative title, Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2011).

2
. P(h|e.b) = [P(h|b) x P(e|h.b)] / [P(e|b)], where P(e|b) = [P(h|b) x P(e|h.b)] + [P(~h|b) x P(e|~h.b)].

3
. Including: Victor Stenger,
God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007); and Victor Stenger,
The Comprehensible Cosmos: Where Do the Laws of Physics Come From?
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2006); Michael Ikeda and Bill Jefferys, “The Anthropic Principle Does Not Support Supernaturalism,”
http://www.bayesrules.net/anthropic.html
, an earlier version of which appeared in Michael Martin and Ricki Monnier, eds.,
The Improbability of God
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2006), 150–66; and Elliott Sober, “The Design Argument,”
http://www.philosophy.wisc.edu/sober/design%20argument%2011%202004.pdf
, an earlier version of which appeared in Charles Taliaferro, Paul Draper, and Philip Quinn, eds.,
A Companion to Philosophy of Religion
(Cambridge, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004), 117–48. I'll also rely on my previous work: Richard Carrier, “The Argument from Biogenesis: Probabilities against a Natural Origin of Life,”
Biology and Philosophy
19, no. 5 (November 2004): 739–64; and Richard Carrier, “Statistics and Biogenesis,” May 1, 2009 at
richardcarrier.blogspot.com/2009/05/statistics-biogenesis_01.html
; and
Sense and Goodness without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism
(Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2005), 71–95, 165–76; and “Naturalism vs. Theism: The Carrier-Wanchick Debate,” the Secular Web, 2006, at
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/carrier-wanchick
.

4
. In other words, I will assume P(God|NID) - 1.

5
. So if P(God|NID) = 1, then P(NID|e.b) = P(God|e.b).

6
. In other words, P(NID|b) - 0. In William Dembski,
No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence
(Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002) (much of which is more correct than his critics gave him credit, though not all: see
http://www.talkorigins.org/design/faqs/nfl
) a reasonable case is made for this prior being around 1 in 10
¹⁵⁰
(which is indeed quite near zero), at least for events inside our known universe (see notes 13 and 31).

7
. In other words, it cannot be the case that P(NID|b) > 25 percent.

8
. Note that I have selected this maximum prior of 0.25 for an additional reason: because no higher prior can be developed even by pure logic (i.e., assuming no information exists in
b
other than bare propositions and logic). Given such zero knowledge there would be no more than a 50–50 chance any self-existent god exists, and a 50–50 chance such a god would be an intelligently designing god (as opposed to one who was not), and 0.5 x 0.5 = 0.25, which is therefore the maximum possible probability God can have prior to considering any evidence for or against his existence. This does mean, by the way, that the vast absence of confirmed divine activity that I just surveyed (i.e., the zero frequency of such verified causes in human observation so far) is in this sense evidence “against” God's existence, meaning not contradictory to his existence but lowering its probability. This is precisely because the vast
presence
of divine activity would have been evidence
for
his existence, greatly
increasing
its probability; therefore not having that evidence must necessarily reduce that probability by exactly as much as having that evidence would increase it.

9
. If P(NID|b) = 0.25, then P(~NID|b) = 0.75. Formally, given my prior definitions, no one can rationally deny that P(God|b) < 0.25 and therefore that P(~God|b) > 0.75. That the infrequency of NID entails the same improbability that God even exists follows from my definition of God as a God that entails NID. Accordingly, if God intelligently did only one thing ever (which would entail P(God|b) = 1/EVERY-THING), it would be exceedingly hard to ever know he existed. That “one thing” would have to be less likely (than 1/EVERYTHING) on any other explanation before we could be sure it actually was God who did it. Whereas if God did many intelligent things that we all observed, which were each or together very improbable on any other explanation, then their cumulative improbability could eventually exceed any countermanding prior. Hence, with enough evidence we would be warranted in believing there was a God (I give many examples in Carrier,
Sense and Goodness
, 222–23, 257, 273–82). Of course, the difficulty of distinguishing God from ‘god’ (a not-self-existent being, who thus only looks like a god but isn't really) still intervenes. But solving that problem is the theist's burden, not mine (as here I'm just generously assuming that that obstacle doesn't exist).