Faith-killing questions from the trenches, and answers
Top 10 Reasons to Not Be a Christian
Q & A Session Audio
- “There is no scientific evidence whatsoever of any miracles ever actually occurring.”
- “The Jesus story just is an accumulation of myths of legendary people, all rolled into one über nice guy.”
- “Science and faith are incompatible ways of thinking. Separate realms that should be kept separate.”
- “The history of science is the story of one religious superstition after another being eradicated by reason and logic.”
- “The Bible is a translation of a translation of tales cobbled together by Constantine in 300AD.”
- “St. Paul invented Christianity by making a nice rabbi named Jesus into a god.”
- “Evolution disproves God.”
- “In their arrogant superiority, Christians think everybody else is going to burn in hell for all eternity.”
- “The Bible is riddled with contradictions and therefore cannot be the perfect word of God.”
- “More people have been killed in the name of religion than any other cause in the history of the world.”
This story starts with my brother Bryan, a tough-questions seminary student. He got a Masters degree in theology at a very conservative seminary where they work them real good, and he toed the line and he learned all the stuff that he’s supposed to learn, and he moved to China.
He’s in China for a couple of years and he basically turned into an agnostic and came within spitting distance of becoming an atheist, which really shook me up.
Bryan is a very smart guy, and one of the questions that he asked was this.
He goes, “Okay, Perry, I’ve been to seminary. I know Greek, I know Hebrew, I know Aramaic, and when I read the New Testament I do not see any reason whatsoever from the text why we should not have miracles today. So where are they?
1. “There is no scientific evidence whatsoever of any miracles ever actually occurring.”
And I’m like, “Uh…let me ask my sales manager and get back to you.” I hate it when people ask ‘elephant in the room’ questions.
Now, if you’ve been in any strand of Christianity for any length of time, you will encounter miracle stories. For example, “We prayed for my sister Debbie and she had cancer, and all of a sudden she didn’t have cancer anymore.”
Every now and then, I don’t care where you are in Christianity, you will hear those. I’ve heard a few of them, but I was in very short supply of such stories and I hadn’t thought about it much. I had always been taught that those miracles went away and they either don’t exist anymore, or at least never happen “on command.”
And Bryan’s cutting to the chase; he’s like, “Well, I don’t see any reason why they shouldn’t.” And I knew he was right. So what’s the deal? Let’s start in on this.
I went looking and I’ll teII you that one interesting book that I found along the way was by Richard Casdorph, who is a medical doctor. He wrote a book in the 1970s called Real Miracles. This is an older version of the book. It’s called, The Miracles – A Medical Doctor Says Yes to Miracles.
What this guy did was there was this lady back in the 1970s named Catherine Kuhlman and she would do these healing services. He followed her around and he documented what happened to these people. He documented the “before” and the “after” and he did so with X-rays, medical reports, letters from doctors, all of that kind of stuff. This book is 10 case studies. I’ll tell you what some of the chapter names are:
- Malignant Brain Tumor
- Multiple Sclerosis
- Atherosclerotic Heart Disease
- Carcinoma of the Kidney
- Mixed Rheumatoid Arthritis and Osteoarthritis
And he goes through, one by one, with X-rays, doctor’s reports and everything and says, “This guy had this before and it’s gone now. Here’s the X-ray, here’s the letter from the doctor, and there it is.” This is not by any means the only such book, but they exist.
Another example of this is God and The Sun at Fatima. Catholics will know what Fatima is (probably most Protestants won’t) but I think back somewhere around 1913, just before World War I, some children were playing and they had a vision of the Virgin Mary. She said that something really amazing is going to happen here at this certain date and they told everybody. Everybody showed up and they all saw it.
This book is by Stanley Jaki, who is a physicist and a Catholic priest and a science historian. He goes into 360 pages of interviewing people and documenting all this. This is as close as you can get to a scientific investigation of a miracle.
Another book that I ran across that I found real interesting that isn’t really about miracles but is about the metaphysical world is called Margins of Reality, by Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne.
They worked at the Princeton University Engineering Anomalies Research Lab. The lab was closed in 2007, but for almost 30 years there was a lab at Princeton and they would investigate paranormal phenomena. And they proved to five 9’s of statistical confidence (that’s almost six Sigma) that people could deflect falling objects by concentrating. They proved that they could send and receive telepathic messages.
Now, most of the scientific community does not know what to do with this stuff. It freaks them out, but it’s there. This is a fascinating book. So I started investigating this, and I also started looking for personal experiences.
A couple of years ago I was in India with my friend, Jeremy. He has spent a lot of time doing healing and practicing Biblical healing. We were at a little church service and Jeremy goes up to the pastor and says, “Tell these people that if they want healing prayer at the end of the service, I’ll pray for them.” So the pastor tells all the people and everyone was like, “Well, okay, I’ll go over there!”
Jeremy was like, “Perry, Perry, come over here and help me!” I’d never done this before. There was a woman whose whole left arm was paralyzed. She had had brain surgery a year and a half before. She had an indentation in her head from the surgery. She had been having seizures ever since the surgery and she had no feeling in her left arm. She wanted us to pray for her.
So Jeremy’s like, “Okay, Perry, start praising God, start praying for this lady!”
I’m like, “Okay, me Robin, you Batman, I’ll do whatever you tell me to do,” and we started praying. He would poke her on the hand – “Can you feel that?”
“No, can’t feel that.”
He’d pray some more and ask, “Can you feel that?”
“I’m starting to feel something!” So he would pray some more and at the end of 20 minutes, all the feeling was back in her left arm. She was so excited, she didn’t know what to do with herself.
A guy came in with a broken wrist, holding it like that; by the end, he was jumping up and down, he was so excited.
There was another lady who had a severe shoulder injury and she couldn’t move her shoulder past about here. I put my arm on her shoulder and I could feel this crunching going on in her shoulder and we prayed for her for about 30 minutes. The crunching was all gone and she was moving her shoulder and she was all excited.
Then I go home and I’m like, “I wonder if this actually stuck. I wonder if it did.” So I emailed this guy and I asked him, “How are these people doing, anyway?”
He said, “In the glorious name of the Lord Jesus Christ, Mr. Perry Marshall, I am so excited to tell you, they are telling everybody they can’t wait for you to come back!”
I said, “Wow, this is great!”
Now, I’ve got to cover 10 of these things in 50 minutes, which is kind of insane, so I don’t have time to go any more. The church that I attend, a Vineyard Church, we practice this.
I of all people know what it’s like to sit here and pray for someone and go, “I feel really stupid! What if this doesn’t work?” You know, sometimes there’s no obvious result, but sometimes there is. You know what? It’s less risky than going to the emergency room.
I have a few friends who actually go to the emergency room every Tuesday night and they pray for people, and trippy stuff happens sometimes. If you want to read some more of these stories, go here. You can read the whole India story in more detail.
This brings up another thing. You know a lot of the people talk about Christians living by faith. Well, I totally understand and agree with that, but I also think that as you mature as a Christian, you live more and more by experience. That faith leads to results which gives you experience, and there’s kind of an upwards spiral and it’s not just like, “Well, you know, life is miserable, but by and by in the sky, someday God’s going to make the world a better place.”
No, it can be now. I think the Kingdom of God is now. I think a lot of Christians kind of have this, “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to the higher gifts, and I guess the question that I’d like to raise for people that want to take that approach is, well, if we took the New Testament and took all of the miracle stories out, what would we have left?
I think my brother was right. I don’t see any place in this book that says these miracles are supposed to stop. There’s a little challenge for you on that.
Note: For more information on documented healing events, see my extensive article on miracles which includes videos of live healings taking place, links to mainstream media coverage and recent reports in scientific journals. Read and watch here.
2. “The Jesus story is just an accumulation of myths of a legendary people, all rolled into one über-nice guy.
Let me expand on that a little bit. People say, “The God and the Jesus that Christians worship today are actually amalgams formed out of ancient pagan gods. The idea of a virgin birth, a burial in a rock tomb, a resurrection after three days, eating a body, drinking blood, had nothing to do with Jesus.
“All those things were already in other myths and legends before that, so they just took them all and they kind of rolled them into these Jesus stories. So Christianity is a snowball that rolled over a dozen pagan religions and as the snowball grew, it freely attached pagan rituals in order to be more palatable to converts.”
By the way, I got this verbatim from an email that a guy sent me, so I just went and fished one up, and there you go. This is a very common thing. Well, I would like to reduce this to a question, so let’s look at the logical question behind the question.
I think the question is this:
“If a myth precedes a fact, does that make the fact a myth? Does it logically follow?”
Well, let’s take 9/11 as an example. On 9/11/01, as we all know, two planes flew into the Twin Towers. The Last Jihad by Joel Rosenberg, on the first page puts readers into the cockpit of a hijacked jet, on a kamikaze mission into an American city, but it was written nine months before 9/11.
Does that make 9/11 a myth? Or how about Debt of Honor by Tom Clancy. 1996 – a Japanese 747 crashes into the Capitol, killing most of the top functionaries in the U.S. government.
Or here’s a good one – The Lone Gunman TV series. The pilot episode was about an attempt to crash an airliner into the World Trade Center. It was a government conspiracy to increase defense spending by making it look like a terrorist attack. It aired in March 2001.
So the next time someone tells you that Jesus was a myth, ask them this question: “Name one other resurrection story that stuck. Just one.” I don’t know of any. I think there’s a reason for that.
3. “Science and faith are incompatible ways of thinking. They are separate realms that should be kept separate.”
I’ll tell you a little story. Back in the early 20th century there was a great deal of optimism in the mathematical profession that we were closing in on a theory of everything. What mathematicians were looking for was a set of constructions that made all of the propositions of mathematics form a nice, tidy, complete circle.
Let me explain what I mean by this. How many of you took high school geometry and it was stuff like, “This triangle has three equal sides; therefore, it is an Equilateral triangle.” And then you do all these proofs and you work all this logic from it.
Well, if you take that high school geometry book, there are always four or five things that the book starts with as premises that everybody knows are true but no mathematician has ever been able to prove are true.
For example, “We know this is true, no one has ever been able to prove it. We know it’s true because it works and it’s all consistent, but we can’t prove it.” And they were like, “Someday we’re gonna prove it!”
Well, in 1931 a guy named Kurt Gödel proved that it would never happen. And actually, I think that Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem is just as important as Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Most people have never heard of it, but let me explain what his Incompleteness Theorem says.
This is the kindergarten version. It says, “Anything you can draw a circle around requires something on the outside to explain it, which you cannot prove.” This applies to everything. It applies to a bicycle; if you build a bicycle, the fact that it’s there relies on something outside of the bicycle.
It’s true of a geometry book, a software program, the English language, or the universe. Gödel’s Theorem was a crushing blow to mathematicians. It was as if they realized, “You mean, we’re never going to make everything flow into a perfect circle?” No. Can’t be done.
Actually, the universe is like an MC Escher painting where you climb up the steps and all of a sudden you’re at the bottom again. There’s a book called Gödel Escher Bach, which takes Gödel’s Theorem, Escher’s paintings, and Bach’s music and shows how they’re all basically the same.
For instance, in Bach’s music the notes escalate and they go up and up and somehow all of a sudden it starts with bass notes again and you didn’t even notice. What does this have to do with the question, “Science and faith are incompatible ways of thinking”?
Gödel’s Theorem says that you cannot do science without faith; it’s impossible. You start with a fact – “I know this because of this, and I know this because of this,” you always go back to some fact that you can’t prove.
Now, what does science do? Science says, “If I drop this cup from my hand onto the ground, it’s going to fall every time. Only past experience shows that to be true. I cannot prove that it’s going to fall again. I always have to rely on some assumption that I can’t prove in science.”
One little extra thing I want to throw in here; the statement that, “Science and faith are incompatible ways of thinking, separate ways of thinking that should be kept separate,” is that a scientific statement?
No, it’s a philosophical statement.
Even a statement about keeping science and philosophy separate requires philosophy. And the statement itself presumes that philosophy gets to say something about science.
That’s exactly what Gödel was talking about.
I’ve written a much more thorough treatment of Gödel’s Incompleteness theorem here: http://www.cosmicfingerprints.com/blog/incompleteness/
4. “The history of science is the story of one religious superstition after another being eradicated by reason and logic.”
I want you to think about something:
Where did science come from?
If you study the history of science, you’ll find out that it got started in Greece and didn’t go anywhere. It got started in Rome and it fizzled out and didn’t go anywhere. It got started in ancient Egypt and in China – didn’t really go anywhere there either. It got started in Islam, and every time in those places, it stalled.
Why did it succeed in Europe after failing everywhere else? We all know it launched there and took off like a rocket.
Here’s why I think it happened. In the Apocrypha, the part of the Bible that the Catholics read and the Protestants don’t, Wisdom of Solomon 11:21 says:
“Thou hast ordered all things in weight and number and measure.”
I submit to you that this verse is where science started. That all things are weigh-able, measurable and countable. That there’s a systematic explanation for what goes on in the universe. So far as I know, no one else in the ancient world made a more definite statement about science than Solomon did right here.
Western Christianity believed that the universe was governed by fixed, discoverable laws, and that’s what gave birth to science. The reason that science succeeded in the West and failed in all those other places was that in all those other places, there was no theological basis to believe this.
If you believe that it rained today because Zeus is in a snit with Apollo, how are you going to come up with a systematic explanation that doesn’t invoke some kind of arbitrary, whimsical source?
Christian theology believed that God could create the world and then on the seventh day that He could rest and the universe would continue to do what He told it to do. Therefore, the great scientists viewed the study of science as a way of studying the mind of God.
I would rewrite the question to say this: “The history of science is a story of faith in a harmonious universe being rewarded in weight, number, and measure.”
1,000 years ago you couldn’t take that for granted. Now we all take it for granted, because we figured it out.
5. “The Bible is a translation of a translation of tales cobbled together by Constantine in 300 AD.”
People make a lot out of this. Constantine got everybody together and they hammered out what they agreed was going to be the Bible. “You know, we just don’t buy these books, we’re going to keep them.” A lot of people have this idea that this is when the Bible that we have today came to exist.
I want to show you a book that will correct that notion. This is called Faith of the Early Fathers by Jurgens. I have to mention here that this is another Catholic book. I was raised Protestant. I was a preacher’s kid. We were uber-studious Protestants. We took ourselves real seriously. Some of you know what I’m talking about – “Oh, that kind…starchy!”
We thought that Catholics were bad people. You know, “Go tell them how bad they are!” Well, then I grew up and my brother-in-law, Alan, studies church history. He gets a Ph.D. in church history at Iowa State, not some conservative place.
He went to Iowa State because they had the biggest and best library he could find on church history.
It turned out that most of his professors were atheists. To get a dissertation pushed through these guys was a Herculean task. But he and I would talk about theological stuff, and it was kind of funny because every time I would raise some theological question, he would always say something like, “Well, yeah, the first people to probe that question in detail were the monks in Western Italy in 800 AD and what they said was…” and he’d go off on something.
Anything you could come up with, someone had already thought about it and written about 1,200 books on it. I thought Christianity started all over again with Martin Luther after this burned-out period…oh, come on! Heavens, no.
So this is a Catholic book. I have great respect for Catholics and Catholic theologians and all that. I know somebody will probably want to get in a fist fight about that with me at the end, but I’m telling you anyway.
This book is a collection of all of the earliest writings, and actually there’s three of them. I just brought the first one. It starts at about 80 AD and it’s letters from all these guys that ran churches. Letters from pastors to their congregations, and letters to disciples from their mentors, and it ends somewhere around St. Hilaire of Poitier and St. Cyril of Jerusalem. I don’t know what year this was, probably about 400-500 AD, and it starts at 80.
It goes in order, so you can read 80 AD and then you can read 110 AD and then you can read 125 AD and 300 AD and so forth. In every chapter there are footnotes of the Bible verses they’re quoting. It’s exactly the same.
Pastor Bill Hybels at Willow Creek could use this to preach a sermon out of any page in this book and it would be just fine. It would be scriptural and it would be original Christianity, no different than we have today. Most of these early letters sound an awful lot like the New Testament letters that Paul wrote.
Anyone that tells you that Christianity started in 300 AD is just as ridiculous as saying it started in 1517 when Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door.
6. “St. Paul invented Christianity by making a rabbi named Jesus into God. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were just later fabrications.”
Obviously, the book that I just talked to you about does speak to that, because you can go all the way back to 80 AD and you have a whole body of literature that’s already telling a consistent story.
What’s usually said is that Paul wrote his letters in 40-50 AD and the Gospels were written in 60 – 90 AD and that’s too long. All of these myths would have accrued, so yes, Jesus was probably just this radical guy and he had these radical teachings and then they wanted him to be God and so they made the story about Him being God, and the people were so desperate and oppressed by the Romans that they found it believable – well, let’s do a comparison.
Paul Tibbetts was the pilot of the Enola Gay, which was the plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima in 1945. He wrote a book in 1998, shortly before he died, called Return of the Enola Gay. How many years after 1945 is that? Fifty-three years after the bomb was dropped.
I found this book at my father-in-law’s house because he’s into World War II. You go over there and he always has The History Channel on. I started thumbing through this book, and the reason Tibbetts wrote the book was to correct revisionist history.
Revisionist history said, “If we had just been a little nicer to the Japanese, we should have just gone over there and talked to them, and they would’ve…”
Tibbetts is saying, “No! Let’s get this straight.” He goes into extensive detail about the political situation and all this stuff that was going on behind the scenes. He tells what it was like to get in that plane, what it was like to let the bomb loose and go into a 135 degree angle and feel the shock wave from the bomb and the brilliant flash of light and think, “Oh my word, what did I just do?” and all that.
Now, does anybody doubt that his autobiography tells you more or less accurately what happened? Is anybody going to reasonably doubt that he doesn’t remember what happened, 53 years later? I don’t think so!
So if Jesus died in 33, what’s 53 years out from 33 – isn’t that 86? That’s like getting to the outside limit of when they said the Gospels were written.
Is there any reason to think that the Gospels were any less reliable?
Considering there are four of them and considering they don’t all perfectly line up or quote everybody verbatim the same way, they don’t all tell stories the same way – four independent accounts – can anyone reasonably think that the Gospels are any less reliable than his story? I don’t think so.
And if you compare it to other things in history, a lot of those things were written even further after the fact than that. I would like to point to the consistency of early teachings about Jesus and raise the question: Why do substantially different teachings about Jesus only appear after 150-200 years? Isn’t that kind of what you would expect?
I rest my case.
7. “Evolution disproves God.”
That’s a good one. I like that one. I have a question for you. Who knows what that is? DOS – how many of you have used DOS somewhere in your early childhood? This is a screenshot of DOS 3.0, 3.3, which is about 1985. You all remember DOS:
C:> dir
C:> dir /w
C:> format c:
When you tried to format the hard drive, did it say “Are you sure?” I don’t remember. Early versions did.
Now here we have Windows XP with Internet Explorer, which is about 2005. Let me ask you a question: let’s say that DOS never got modified by the guys in Redmond, Washington and it evolved into Windows XP all by itself.
Imagine that DOS adapted, that it had a capability built in to where it would sense that it needed an Internet connection and it needed a web browser and it needed Outlook, and that it needed a mouse and updates and antivirus software. And let’s say that it would rearrange its code and then test different versions with some version of natural selection until the pieces started to work.
Did that happen? No. If DOS had actually evolved all by itself, off without any exterior tampering, tinkering or code writing from any software engineers, and it had just done that, would you be more or less impressed with the person who wrote the first DOS program?
You would go, “How did you do that?” You could go to China and for $2 you can buy a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of Windows. All those versions, especially the ones in China, they don’t have the little 3D thing on them. It’s grey and it has Magic Marker on it ‘Windows XP’.
Now, the copies of copies of copies of copies, they all had mutations, didn’t they? And the marketplace had a chance to select them. Does anyone know of copies of Windows that were better because of the mutations?
No.
Now, I just tried to apply the usual theory of evolution to DOS and everybody got a chuckle out of it. First of all, everything that evolves that we have any experience with, evolves because of some ability to do so or some kind of design or something acting upon it.
At the very least, if we’re going to even imagine that DOS could have evolved into Windows XP, we have to imagine that it has some kind of special program inside that’s ready and willing to rearrange all the pieces.
You know what? I am totally open to the possibility that God planted a cell in the ocean and that cell had some kind of magnificent program that could eventually evolve into everything that’s on Planet Earth. I am open to that.
And if that happened, then God is even more impressive than the version of God that says, “Well, OK, now we need apes, so let’s put an ape there, and now we need people, so let’s put a person there..”
I’m not trying to get into some debate about Genesis 1; this is simply an engineering argument. If evolution is true, then God is even more impressive than they thought God was before anyone thought of evolution!
8. “In their arrogant superiority, Christians think everybody else is going to burn in hell for all eternity.”
Let’s get the most riling questions out on the table. I want to point some scriptures out to you. Little things are kind of tucked in there that are easy to miss.
John 15:22 – Jesus says, “If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not be guilty of sin. Now, however, they have no excuse for their sin.” Hmm, that’s interesting.
Luke 11:30 – Jesus said, “The Queen of the South will rise at the judgment with the men of this generation and condemn them, for she came from the ends of the earth to listen to Solomon’s wisdom and now one greater than Solomon is here.”
Let’s look at this again. “The Queen of the South will rise at the judgment with the men of this generation and condemn them” – so what does this tell you about judgment? This isn’t like some cowering guy staring at God, getting pounded; this is anybody who has anything to say about what he knew, didn’t know, did and what he did not do, and what they did perhaps in a comparable situation.
Let’s look at this one. Matthew 11:21 – “Woe to you, Korazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! If the miracles that were performed in you had been performed in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes.”
Well? That’s a statement about two people, now, isn’t it? “Tyre and Sidon would have believed if they had Me.” Do you think that gets taken into consideration? I think so.
Acts 17:29 – Paul refers to idol worship and he says, “In the past, God overlooked such ignorance, but now He commands all people everywhere to repent.”
Now, this always comes up, somebody always says, “Well, what about the guy in Africa that never heard about Jesus?” They’re like, “I have to get this guy figured out before I decide if I’m going to go for this Jesus thing. I’m not sure if this is fair. I think this is all a setup. What about all these people?”
Here’s my concern: If you’re that guy, I’m not real worried about him. Not that the missionaries shouldn’t go talk to him and all that. In the Great Commission – “Go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature” – God told us to do that for a reason.
This is just my opinion, but I suspect that guy in Africa, he has no missionary, Bible, or anything, I think if he looks up in the sky and goes, “Somebody made all this, whoever You are, I’d like to know you,” I think God can respect that prayer.
What I’m concerned about is that guy will rise up in the judgment and testify against the guy who used him as an excuse. If you look at all of these verses, the theme is, “Hey, guys, you knew an awful lot. What did you do with it?”
“If Tyre and Sidon had seen what you have seen, they would have repented in sackcloth and ashes.” The people he was talking to saw a lot. They saw the dead raised, they saw the blind see.
9. “The Bible is riddled with contradictions and therefore cannot be the perfect word of God.”
I’m going to take an interesting approach with this. I brought with me three different versions of the Bible. I’ve got a King James New Testament, a New Living Translation Bible and a New American Standard. I could have brought an NIV, but all you guys probably have one, because that’s kind of the popular Bible translation.
Do they all read the same? No.
I had to sign this thing before I came that I understood that Willow Creek has a doctrinal statement. One of the things in the thing that I had to sign was that I understand that Willow Creek says that the scriptures are inerrant in their original writings. That’s a very common thing that you’ll find in the Protestant church, that scriptures are inerrant in their original writings.
Do we have the originals? No. What we have are thousands of Greek manuscripts and there are slight differences with some of them. You could make a whole little tree of this copying error and that. You could put it all together and we could open all three of these Bibles up to John 5 or Ezekiel 34 or Revelation 12 or any book and we could read them side by side.
And rather than getting 12 decimal places of precision, I think what we get is more like there’s an outer edge on one side or the other on how you can interpret something, and then there’s something sort of in the middle.
Maybe the King James seems to be here and maybe the NIV seems to be here, and maybe the Catholic Bible seems to be here. But they’re all kind of within this range of variation. So there’s some wiggle room, not like 12 decimals of precision, but more like maybe two.
No matter what Bible you read, did Jesus rise from the dead in all of them? Is adultery a sin in all of them? Is it not all right to lie, cheat, and steal in all of them? Is there a debate between predestination and free will in all of them? Yes.
I had this realization one day; “Hey, wait a minute! I don’t have to sit here and nitpick every last verse that some skeptic wants to pick a fight with me about and make me explain everything that doesn’t quite seem to fit together, because you know what? This is like a puzzle that you’re trying to put together and some of the edges are fuzzy and I can’t put it perfectly together. And that’s all right.”
I was emailing back and forth with an atheist and he’s quibbling about the different tomb stories of the Resurrection. I don’t think they contradict each other, but in order to make them fit, you have to make a couple of assumptions before they fit.
He’s trying to duke it out and I said, “I don’t feel like defending the idea that the Bible is infallible. I’ll just say for today that I have four stories that were pretty close! So what do you think?”
He didn’t know what to do.
I said, “Well, Jesus died on the cross, you are a sinner, God created the world, 12 disciples went out and preached. The story’s pretty clear. How many of these little nit picky things from the New Testament that you brought up because you found them on some website do you have to get all straight before you get the big picture here?”
Try this on for size; the Bible is the word of God with a lower case w. But if we’re going to use a capital W, what is the Word of God? Jesus! Jesus is the Word of God. The Bible is the written testimony, inspired by the Holy Spirit, testifying to the Word of God. There’s a verse that says, “No one can confess Jesus Christ is Lord apart from the Holy Spirit.”
Let’s not put the Bible above the Holy Spirit.
You realize if you want to sort out all those puzzle pieces, you need the Holy Spirit to help you do it. And a person who does not have the Holy Spirit is not even going to be willing to do that. That’s why they’re arguing with you.
So when I get in these debates, I say, “Let’s just assume that this is like any other piece of history. Someone wrote it down as best they could, and here we have it. Let’s make a judgment from what’s in front of us. So what do you think?”
Did they just make all this up? Like perhaps, Jesus didn’t really die; they pried him off the cross and he was almost dead and then he was in the tomb, and people in the Middle East had these clever ways of reviving almost dead people and then he popped out. He looked so good, he looked like Superman, and everybody said, “Wow! You’re the Son of God!” Yeah, that’s what happened! Sure, that’s what happened!
Guys that are pulled off crosses when they’re almost dead always inspire people three days later to like change the world! That’s what happened!
Sorry, I’m getting a little sidetracked… here’s a fun one:
10. “More people have been killed in the name of religion than any other cause in the history of the world.”
Let me show you a book, called The Black Book of Communism. How many of you think this is cheery? Oh, yeah, if you’re feeling a little too good today, just read this one. This book documents the genocide of 160 million people in the 20th century alone – mostly by atheist governments.
Remember the Cultural Revolution under Chairman Mao? Well, that was a great period in China’s history, wasn’t it? How about Stalin? Oh boy, Stalin loved children. Yep, that guy just loved puppy dogs and children. He was such a nice man. 160 million people! Do you realize that’s more people than all the religious wars of the whole history of the world put together?
Some people say, “Well, it was just a coincidence that they were atheists.” All right, well, you can believe whatever you want to believe, but there does seem to be a correlation. Let’s recognize the question behind the question.
First of all, I don’t think you can overstate just how dangerous a worldview atheism actually is. I’m sure there are atheists here, and I’m glad that you’re here and you’re welcome.
When my brother slid into his faith crisis, I wanted to argue with him and he wouldn’t; and I’m not sure that would have been the healthiest thing if we had argued. I think it was probably a good idea that he declined, but I was ready to go. In truth, he was dragging me with him. I was scared because he was raising all kinds of questions.
I started going to Willow Creek 15 years ago and I started leading Seeker Small Groups. Those groups are where people who do not necessarily believe the Bible or Christianity get together at a table, and so every other Sunday for a couple of years I got seekers in there pummeling me with questions, and I thought I’d heard everything. Well, when Bryan and the Internet came along, I had no longer seen everything!
It was intense. Bryan was asking all kinds of penetrating questions and I was going to all these websites and it was like walking into machine gun fire. One of the things that I did was decide that I had to duke this out. So I started this website, www.CoffeehouseTheology.com, and it has emails that you can sign up for and see what it’s all about, if you like. If people replied to the emails, the emails came back to me.
The reason I did that was that I wanted to know if enough people came through the website and sent me emails, if Christianity cannot stand up to the test, I was going to find out! I decided that I was going to take everyone on and I was going to see if someone can punch a hole in this thing. And there were some scary moments. I was like, “Oh my goodness, these are big questions!”
I probably answered 10,000 emails during the last 6 years. There have been a LOT of people and a lot of conversations. The first thing I’ll tell you is that nobody’s punched a hole in Christianity. I think it stands up very well. If you have a question, there’s a book or website or something that has a good answer to it.
Here’s the other thing; nobody comes out swinging like the new breed of atheist like followers of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and all of those guys. These guys are furious! People talk about Muslims being extreme? Well, I get emails from a lot of Muslims and none of them come out swinging like the atheists do. They’re angry. And Richard Dawkins says things like, “Teaching your children that there is a God who would reward or punish you, people that do that are worse than child molesters.” That’s what he says.
It’s a war. What’s the track record? 160 million dead people. Now, this is not a battle of guns, because the pen is mightier than the sword. This is a battle of the pen. This is a battle of truth and belief systems. I think Christians have a moral obligation to know what’s going on, because if you don’t know what’s going on, you’ll get picked off by a skeptic.
The reason we have science today is because Christianity said there is a logical rational universe that was designed by an intelligent Creator. And the reason we have democracy is because Paul said, “There is neither male nor female, Jew nor Greek, slave nor free; all are equal in Christ Jesus.”
The most cherished Western values come from Christianity. Don’t surrender them to someone who has an axe to grind.
Very good ..you know , the best person in one of our Bible studies was an atheist because he had all of us thinking and evaluating why we believe what we do …..i found the excercise very profitable indeed and yes it did stregnthen my faith a lot
Hi Andrew Lobb,
Good to hear from you. Now if you agree that logic must prevail in order to have a discussion of any kind you will be obliged to think about this.
If you give me something which you know is liable to be harmful to me (God would have known what we would do, since He is all knowing)and tell me do as I wish with it (Free will) well, you can’t turn around and punish me when I use it as I see fit!
If God didn’t want man to eat of the forbidden fruit why make it in the first instance and why put it in a place wher God knoew man would eat it.
Leave God out for now. Reality. Buy a toy for a child. Put that toy in front of the child and tell him don’t touch it or if you prefer you tell him: “Johnny you may touch that toy if you want. If you are being honest with yourself you MUST know that Johnny will definitely touch that toy. Now tell me then, how can you turn around and punish little Johnny for playing with the toy?
Let’s look at the God & Free Will theory from a philosophically different angle. To give man Free will and then hold him in contempt when he chooses to exercise that free will is illogical. I am hard pressed to understand how senseless murder and killing of his people by and for his people can qualify god as being merciful, just and forgiving. A man chops up another and places his body parts in a garbage bag which he promptly dumps over a cliff. He then goes to confession and God forgives him for his sin. Now multiply this or similar act by millions and tell me how on earth any sane person can believe in such a God and say he loves us! It;s seems to me he is using us for his own pleasure and I would be the first to agree that it’s in a way we could never hope to comprehend. But then the good Christian is not supposed to question God. Ours is not to ask; it’s just to do or die. His will be done so that would make all the evil committed in our world logically the Will of God!
Is that how you want people to see your God?
Hi
Yes, I do agree we must argue logically. So, tell me logically, if someone has a choice they can not exercise, do they actually have a choice? Ask a lawyer about that one.
As for punishment, that has nothing to do with the issue at hand. All choices must have consequences(or they are meaningless and not really choices), and knowing the consequences, you must choose. Adam knew full well the consequences of his choice. As, in a way do you. The law(of most countries anyway) grants you freedom, but if, while free, you break it and kill someone, you will be jailed. In some places hung. Would you then blame the people who made the law and granted you freedom in the first place? Logically, you’re not making any sense here. When you have freedom, your argument would hold water if and only if, all choices were equal. They are, sadly not. You would also have to show that the consequences do not exist. When quite clearly, they do.
The “tree” (whether literal or allegorical) is no toy. Adam did not eat the apple not knowing the consequences of what he did. He walked with God long enough to understand. Adam was no child. But Adam desired to “be like God” more than he feared those consequences.
I’m afraid I don’t follow you here. Your train of thought seems to shift randomly, perhaps you could clarify? What is the significance of someone getting chopped up and thrown of a cliff?
God does not condone the murder and killing of his own people. He may allow it, but he does not condone it. Forgiveness is conditional on repentance. A man who continues to sin has not repented. God may forgive those who murder, but that does not remove the consequences of their actions. And you will find, a lot of people are unrepentant. So they are not forgiven. If I wrong you and don’t even apologize, why on earth would you forgive me? But if I came to you to make things right, you have a reason to now. The only difference is, God came to the ones who wronged Him to make it right, all He asks is that you accept his forgiveness and turn from the wrong.
If the “good christian” is not supposed to question God, then I am no “good christian”. My God wants me to know Him. My God said “Come, let us reason together.” My God wants me to trust Him. I don’t claim to have all the answers, but neither do I assert I can’t have them.
The evil committed in this world is logically the will of man. God only gave the choice. Man chose, knowing what he chose. Then God provided a way out.
You may not like what I have to say, and you may not agree, but I think to say I am not arguing logically, you will need to attack what I am saying in slightly more formal language. It helps keep the argument clear and not personal. We are arguing logically, not emotionally here.
Regards
Andrew
Hello Caleb,
You say inter alia, ” these things are mysteries, because there is no good reason for them to exist”.
I would suggest that mysteries are simply things that we do not yet understand. I agree that life ought to be the only thing here, but it isn’t. However, I don’t feel that we should endow events realized or as yet unrealized with beliefs in illogical myths. Wouldn’t such an approach complicate matters and set human development back instead of pushing it forward?
You can say that mysteries are things we don’t `understand`, this is also a good idea of what they are. The problem is that there is no reason for consciousness in an evolutionary world view, because there is no reason for our observations to ever be reliable. Is it not more logical to conclude that something that can account for these things does exist, than to just say ‘we will find the answer later’ (which is a fallacy, by the way)? If God doesn’t exist, we run into those various pitfalls which make human progress impossible. So my views are the ones that are progressing humanity, not your’s.
Caleb,
It is yet to be determined why God made us? Or for that matter why God made the world or is it the universe?
If you make something and you see it is not good. You discard it and based on what you learnt you try to make something better. Since your God is god why did he not follow that simple logic.
The next question one needs to answer is which god are we talking about? After all, there were many gods before Rome in its wisdom decided for political and practical reasons to bestow upon an innocent world Emperor Constantine idea of a Single god. So with the stroke of a pen we went some 2,000 years ago from polytheism to monotheism. And the Church murdered, plundered and stole all in the name of this god!
Comme gauche, mon ami!
Why should God have made us, or the universe? It is understood that God rejoices when people choose to follow Him. The point is that people will make such a choice. The saddest part is that few will make the choice, and many will have claimed to make the choice, but not truly mean it.
Why should God decide to keep this universe? That sounds like a fundie’s question (theodicy is resolved in a non-fundie view). Remember Liebniz’s quote? The point is that the world `is` perfect, but not for our purposes, for God’s. That the world is falling apart is supposed to be a sign that the plan is finally coming to a close.
Yes, the Church has done many things in the name of God. Does that mean that they are doing His will? Not necessarily; consider the parable of the Wheat-And-The-Tares, which is about how there are going to be many false Christians running around. So far, this confirms yet another claim, and I really wish this claim wasn’t made.
Caleb/Andrew:
“Further, you are only considering the world as it is now, rather than what it is intended to lead to (consider Leiniz’s statement about the best of all possible worlds).
You seem to be suggesting that there is some divine (for want of a better word)concerning the future of this world as we know it. Such a statement on;y acquires logical import if we believe there is a divine god that manages and controls everything. Unfortunately there is no evidence to support this!
[God did know that Adam would eat the forbidden fruit, and planned all that He did based on what He knows will happen, and what He wants to happen. The future world will be what you want right now, but don’t get to have].
Exactly what do you base the above statement. From what we can see the god of whom you speak is totally impartial. In his realm there is no such thing as good or evil, right or wrong, just or unjust. I would say we are allowed to do whatsoever we want and reap the rewards or pay the price. Swiss numbered bank accounts hold the wealth of some of the most evil people in the world but the country and tits people are prosperous. Our world is riddled with dictatorships and human oppression, but life goes on. the mafia supposedly came out of the seat of Christianity and infested the entire world and the evildoers continue to prosper. Somalian pirates plunder and kill because they can. Is this what we are to understand by the exercise of Free Will” and “Thu Will be Done”?
“Just be patient”, you say. How much longer must we wait, bearing in mind that part of the Church prayer ends with “world without end”?
Once again, sorry for showing up in this conversation.
Burt:
“Such a statement on;y acquires logical import if we believe there is a divine god that manages and controls everything. Unfortunately there is no evidence to support this!”
And there can be no *naturalistic evidence* of this. What you miss is when you ask for evidence, you are requesting naturalistic evidence of something beyond the natural. If you think otherwise, be my guest and design a scientific test for God. Then we may examine it.
“the mafia supposedly came out of the seat of Christianity”
And Pol Pot was an atheist. Whats your point?
“How much longer must we wait, bearing in mind that part of the Church prayer ends with “world without end”?”
No man knows the day nor the hour, but while we wait, there is opportunity to improve. While we wait, more can come to know God. While we wait good can be done. A christian passively waiting is doing it wrong.
If you want to talk about dictators and suffering, let me tell you, I doubt you have any idea. I came from Zimbabwe. Look it up. While I was there I saw God do amazing things. And I saw people suffer and die. Yet, still having seen this I trust God. I see no contradiction – the hate and the evil came from the people and their actions, the peace, love, forgiveness and joy came from God. For those who died in Christ their suffering is at an end. Their joy begins in the “world without end.” For those who did not, I can not say. I am not their judge.
As I maintain, there is evidence to support this. Consider the pitfalls of knowledge and atheism: if atheism is true, then there is no way to know that it is true, because we would most likely (a chance of one in infinity against the contrary) be trapped in our own imaginations. If deism is true, then there is no reason for god to have created the universe, because he doesn’t care for us anyway (so like the above).
I base this on a belief in the Bible, which I base on the impossibility of knowledge if the contrary is correct. If God is omniscient (which makes sense, since He is beyond the universe’s limits), then because foreknowlegde does not demand causation, freewill exists, or at least can.
Again, theodicy is not what I am here to debate about. I am merely pointing out that God is required for knowledge to have an explanation (freewill too, is necessary). You can ask anybody, but one answer that helps is based on how it is already predicted that the world will start to fall apart near the end times, so I’d be worried.
To the best that I have, it is the Roman Catholic Church that ends its prayer with ‘world without end’. They don’t believe in the rapture, and think that the book of Revelations was describing the reign of Nero in Rome. I, believing otherwise, don’t need to worry about what definitely is a pitfall.
These discussions seem have deteriorated into a an argument between Caleb and Martin Lagerwey on the authenticity of the contents of the Bible to some extent and the purity of science.
As pointed out by other contributors to these discussions, there is no solution to the questions posed here.
First of all, the Christian Holy Bible was written by man and I am yet to understand how it came about that it contains “the word of God”.
Second, the Book of Genesis is a stretch for anyone. Think of it: the Tree of Knowledge and the intervention of the evil Serpent.
Next, there is the question of Adam and Eve. Now Adam and Eve had two sons – Cain and Abel but Cain killed Abel (and that would had to have been with the approval of God). So who did Abel marry to start the promulgation of the human race?
Now we get to the question of Hell and Satan, Lucifer or whatever name God’s adversary is known as. Where did Satan come from? Who was his father. You see we cannot accept that God is all powerful and all knowing and yet allows another godlike being to set up a rival kingdom in direct competition with him from the very beginning wherein this Satan was able to appear in the form of a snake to deceive Eve.
To continue then since man had no power of his own, the creation of sin had to be the work of God. But why?
Why give us a sin and then become so frustrated that it was necessary to send his on;y begotten son to die for these sins?
The question of “only begotten son” is most troubling as it would logically suggest that there was another son – one who was not “begotten”. Would that have been Satan or Lucifer who rebelled and was kicked out of the Heaven;y home and who had enough power to set up his own rival kingdom?
Moving on: if Jesus died for our sins why do we still have these sins. This would indicate Jesus’s death was ineffective or useless. Of course there is yet no conclusive evidence that Jesus even existed. And surely such drastic action as killing His only begotten son should not have been necessary for an all powerful God?
Here I stray into the confusing concept of a Holy Trinity wherein one God is the father, the Son and the Holy Ghost at the same time. No one can explain this and all I get is that it is too complex for anyone but God to know. Unacceptable.
Why the need for a human mother for Jesus and a Virgin at that? In the novels the heroes are made to take a wife even for show except the wife never gets pregnant!
Of course I have often wondered why in a world that is over 4 billion years old, God on;y sprung into action just over two thousand years ago!
Conclusion: the fact that there are many things we do not understand about the world we inhabit is not sufficient reason to revert to myth instead of seeking answers. As much as some of us would like to believe, history alone makes it difficult to come to terms with what the creationists would have us believe. It must be agreed that Faith is stronger than Truth. However even the most faithful deist – never mind monotheist – must admit that there are too many unanswered question to succumb to the one god or the Christian god concept.
Sorry that this reply to you, Ben, is not attached to your post, I can’t find it.
God placed the tree there. Why? Contrary to AiG’s position (“There was no reason!”), this was part of a plan. As stated prior, forced love is a contradiction of terms. Thus, God had to give them the choice to rebel against Him, the tree itself appearently being the best test: trees live darned-near forever, so all people would be able to have the test, if not Adam and Eve. In fact, it is a good thing in this model that Adam and Eve ate from the tree first, because otherwise, God would have needed to send a saviour for every single person! Lesser of two evils, or what? If you want to complain more, go ahead, this is the best I have, and a reason for human theodicy won’t convince those who don’t want to accept it (no matter how good, and mine likely isn’t!).
Sorry for this response to your questions not being attached to your’s, Ben, finding comments becomes difficult as the number of comments grows!
You assert that the Bible was man’s doing, I assert the opposite. We come to our conclusions based on what we think makes the most sense. I won’t worry about that, and I won’t try to convince you, I’ve already seen that you don’t want that, and I consider it best to respect your wishes.
Yes, the Genesis `Original Sin` Story does seem like a stetch… …Using the modern hermeneutic (AiG, I’m lookin’ at you!). The original model can be roughly summarized, by Leibniz’s idea that this world is the best of all possible worlds, with a `twist`. This world is the best of all possible worlds for God’s purpose (rather than for ours). Remember, `Forced Love` is a contradiction of terms. Hence, the Tree of Knowledge. What form Lucifer/Satan/Serpent takes on, is unimportant, and arbitrary.
Next idea, Adam and Eve actually had more than two sons, they had three sons that are recorded, but they had many children in total. If you’re worried about Cain and marrying one of his siblings, the problem would only arise after the next several (dozen?) generations, which is why incest laws are introduced later on. It is more a question of `how far did we read?`, because when you look at the (proven to be telescoped) geneaology from Adam to Noah, you see that Adam is recorded to have “Other sons and daughters, and then he died.”
Actually, God can be all good and all loving, while allowing a being that He created to attempt to rival Him in power. The pitfall only arises when we’re forced to accept the modern ideas of what Eden was like, and then make a logical extrapolation of these ideas, which have been shown to be wrong.
Man does actually have power of his own, in a sense. God doesn’t interfere with what we choose to do, that would be to violate the purpose of this world. In fact, sin is not a creation, but a manifestation. It is the logical conclusion of freewill in a world intended to let people choose how they will spend eternity (Heaven, or Annihilation?).
Sending His Son to die for us, because He gave us sin, “Why?” We follow this from the point of planning. Since forced love is a contradiction of terms, He allowed sin in this world. Because He knew that men would eventually fall, He needed to provide a means of salvation, because He wanted us to freely choose to be His friends. See, it is understood that God’s Nature has two aspects: one of mercy, one of justice. In order to satisfy both, He needed someone who could cover all the sins of those who accept the gift.
You pose one of the most interesting questions I’ve ever read, when you ask of God’s `Only Begotten Son`. First, I think that it’s already been established that Jesus is God the Son, the second person in the Trinity (let me know if we haven’t established that). Jesus was begotten when the Holy Spirit overshadowed Mary, producing the body He would inhabit. Following logically from this, we are sons/daughters (either term seems acceptabe) of God, and we are the ones who were not begotten by His power (that is a different topic).
We still remain in sin, because we are still in this world, where sin is allowed to manifest. We are liberated from it in a promise; Next world over. Keep this in mind as well, as long as sin is allowed to manifest, as intended (God’s purposes, not ours’), theodicy will still be there to complain about.
Here’s an explaination for the Holy Trinity concept:
Imagine we live on a two-sheet, as two-dimensional beings. God is a three-cube. God the Father exposes Himself to Moses, and he sees a square. God the Son exposes Himself to the world, and we see a line. God the Holy Spirit exposes Himself, but we cannot see Him, because points are non-dimensional. They are all different aspects of the same object, but still part of the same object. We are observing different `appendiges`–to put it crudely–of God.
Why have a virgin mother? Why not? Being born had a purpose: “I can’t follow Him! He just popped out of the sky one day! He doesn’t know what it’s like!” Nobody can object like that now!
Being born of a virgin has at least two differing hypotheses behind itself: 1- The sin nature is inhereted through the male. Don’t ask me how this one works, I don’t believe in this model in any case! 2- It proves Him to be miraculous.
Why intervene sooner, or later? If ~2000 years ago is the most opprotune time, that makes hash of this rhetoric! Consider, His plan is not workable without humans, who understand the consequences of sin. That restricts His operation of `Plan Aleph-Vav` to within ~60000 years time. He also set several prophecies in motion, so what should we make of these? It depends on how willing you are to believe that these were written after the fact, and on how much faith you have in chance.
If God does exist then It/He/She does not exist in the form that we believe in.
The world is in a confused and corrupted state. Any new person coming into the world cannot be expectd to choose Christianity as the proof is in no way definitive, and arguments can be made for all of the major religions. If it was definitive then we would all be Christians.
This can easily be solved by “God” giving personal and definitive proof to each human being. It/He/She won’t because It/He/She does not exist.
This is the 21st Century. Lets start looking for real answers.
Actually, Justin (or do you prefer me to call you Mr. Hart?), this is not necessarily the case: if revealed religion can be trusted (and that is another topic, so we might worry about it later), then at least one of our beliefs about what God is like can be trusted.
I perfectly agree that the world is in a corrupted state, but I can’t see how it is ‘confused’. It seems pretty rationally driven from my point of view. Yes, arguments can be made for all the other major religions. How does this prove anything about the existence of God? If anything, one could only use it as proof of Pluralism, and nothing more.
You seem not to realize that the Argument From Unbelief has been answered from every possible angle. Maybe God wants fideism? I highly doubt that, but Søren Kierkegaard argued something like this (Namely, only unprovable beliefs are important in life); in this case, the only evidence we need would be the witness of the Holy Spirit, which God has given to everybody. Or, God already _has_ given enough evidence to reasonably condemn those who reject that evidence? Another answer is that there is no such thing as a possible world where everybody is freely saved, regardless of the evidence given? Yet another possibility is that God has given people enough evidence that only people who actively _look_ for God will find Him? Blaise Pascal argued this way in his work “Pensees” All of these answers are empirically identical, because what you define as ‘enough’ or ‘no’ evidence would differ from what I consider ‘overwhelming’ evidence.
Who says we haven’t already found our ultimate answers? I’d think you’re just searching for the crumbs that landed on top of the cake’s frosting (that is, smaller-scale answers to questions like “_How_ did God do that?” over larger-scale answers like “_Why_ did God do that?”). I’d say something like that about a lot of atheism, agnosticism, and other views of course; don’t get me wrong, the smaller-scale answers are still interesting and worth discovering, but we shouldn’t let them distract us from the more important things (which you likely agree with, but thinking I’m on the other side).
Am I sounding like an anti-knowledge rant?
Thanks Caleb,
I appreciate you taking the time to reply.
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Actually, Justin (or do you prefer me to call you Mr. Hart?), this is not necessarily the case: if revealed religion can be trusted (and that is another topic, so we might worry about it later), then at least one of our beliefs about what God is like can be trusted.
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The first problem is that religion cannot be trusted just on the basis that there are so many of them and they conflict with each other. Which one do we trust? The fact that there are so many of them proves that there is no definitive proof of their validity. If one religion had definitive proof then people would flock to it.
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I perfectly agree that the world is in a corrupted state, but I can’t see how it is ‘confused’. It seems pretty rationally driven from my point of view. Yes, arguments can be made for all the other major religions. How does this prove anything about the existence of God? If anything, one could only use it as proof of Pluralism, and nothing more.
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If you read my email I begin with
~If God does exist then It/He/She does not exist in the form that we believe in~
I am perfectly open to something greater than us. I just think that it is laughable that we try to define it and give it the same characteristics as ourselves i.e. we have historically shaped it to suit our needs e.g. The King James Bible (this text is copied from another source)…The King James Bible was completed in 1611 by 8 members of the church of England. There were (and still are) no original texts to translate. The oldest manuscripts we have were written down hundreds of years after the last apostle died. There are over 8,000 of these manuscripts, with no 2 alike. The King James translators used none of these, anyway. Instead, they edited previous translations to create a version their king and parliament would approve. So, 21st Century Christians believe the “Word of God” is a booked edited in the 17th Century from 16th Century translations of 8,000 contradictory copies of 4th century scrolls that claim to be copies of lost letters in the 1st century???
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You seem not to realize that the Argument From Unbelief has been answered from every possible angle. Maybe God wants fideism? I highly doubt that, but Søren Kierkegaard
argued something like this (Namely, only unprovable beliefs are important in life); in this case, the only evidence we need would be the witness of the Holy Spirit, which God has given to everybody. Or, God already _has_ given enough evidence to reasonably condemn those who reject that evidence? Another answer is that there is no such thing as a possible world where everybody is freely saved, regardless of the evidence given? Yet another possibility is that God has given people enough evidence that only people who actively _look_ for God will find Him? Blaise Pascal argued this way in his work “Pensees” All of these answers are empirically identical, because what you define as ‘enough’ or ‘no’ evidence would differ from what I consider ‘overwhelming’ evidence.
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I am a bit confused about what point you are trying to make. First of All you are continuously referring to your Christian God. We unfortunately need to clear up point 1 before you can make the very arrogant assumption that the Christian God is the correct God.60-70% of the world does NOT believe in Christianity.
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Who says we haven’t already found our ultimate answers? I’d think you’re just searching for the crumbs that landed on top of the cake’s frosting (that is, smaller-scale answers to questions like “_How_ did God do that?” over larger-scale answers like “_Why_ did God do that?”). I’d say something like that about a lot of atheism, agnosticism, and other views of course; don’t get me wrong, the smaller-scale answers are still interesting and worth discovering, but we shouldn’t let them distract us from the more important things (which you likely agree with, but thinking I’m on the other side).
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Smaller scale answers? Do you call is there life on other planets a small scale answer?
I have two things I would love to see in my lifetime. 1) Mankind (and I mean mankind and not just China, America or Russia) landing on Mars. 2) Discovery of life on other planets. If it is intelligent life then it will be really interesting to see what religious beliefs they have (if any – the more advanced (or intelligent) they are the less likely they are to have any). Poor uneducated masses – usually very religious…top scientists almost all are atheist (some agnostic). Politicians…whatever religion gets the votes ;-P
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Am I sounding like an anti-knowledge rant?
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You are perfectly entitled to your opinion.
The universe is amazing. How did it get here? I don’t know. How, why do I/We exist? I don’t know for sure. Will I keep thinking about it and looking for real answers? Of course. Do I believe in something because I have just been told about it(born into it, indoctrinated by my community,parents, friends) without any real evidence whatsoever. Of courses not.
I just want to share any input that may be helpful.
I think I have answers for what you take at issue:
1. I don’t think we should answer ‘which is it?’ just yet for the exact reason you give to be skeptical of all revealed religion. We might work on that later. However, we can start with what all revealed religions agree on (some form of higher power, etc.) and work our way up from there.
I merely left it as a given, but I think that what all revealed religion agrees on is a good start.
No, people would not flock to a religion that had definitive proof. We’ve given definitive proof that the Earth is round, but people still believe that the Earth is flat. “More people would believe it,” isn’t true either. Even if we say that you’re right, consider the ancient Israelites who repeatedly turned away from God, despite constant exposure to miracles. At the judgement, people will complain that they didn’t have definitive proof, but God will tell them “No you wouldn’t have,” or, “You may have believed as Satan did, but you would still lack faith in my grace.” This relates to the answers I gave you for the apparent “Hiddenness of God” that your argument rests on. I will get to those as you did.
2. It seems that a double-standard is in our midst. Do you accept Plato as historical? The gap between his extant writings and his life-time is much larger than what you’re complaining about in the Bible (it extends to three _thousand_ years, last I checked). So it isn’t as laughable as you say, since the same is true for others.
Your issue with anthropomorphism is mildly striking to me. If man is made in the Imago Dei, then it follows that we can know at least something about what God is like simply by examining ourselves. Of course, you will rightly point out that I need to give a reason to believe this key premise. It is not something that all revealed religion agrees on, so we cannot use it at this point.
We didn’t alter God to suit our needs, mind you; God could surely have been made less judgemental, less demanding, and capable of accepting things that are contrary to His nature! The closest thing I can find to evidence for what you said as happening is the odd switch from killing people who burnt their children as sacrifices to commanding forgiveness (and even that has a simple explanation).
3. The answers I gave are not exclusive to Christian theism, so the complaint is simply misconstrued. Odds are that at least one answer that I have given is applicable to the other revealed religions. For example, it seems that Muslims can make testimony to the witness of God Himself as Christians can.
What’s so bad about referring to the God I understand best?
You seem to be bent toward pluralism when you complain about this ‘arrogant statement’. Why is this important, considering what I’ve already said?
4. Yes, life on other planets is a smaller scale answer. It does not tell us the meaning of life (which includes whether there is one or not), or what is right or wrong, etc. Although it gives us something to marvel at, we should focus on the ultimate answers, because they not only allow us to live better (same as many smaller scale answers), but also because they will allow us to find the smaller scale answers.
The current leaders of science are ignorant of philosophy, if we accept what you asserted (and what I’ve found implies that you have it backwards); they still seem to believe in Empiricism, which is self-defeating. Metaphysical naturalism is untenable in my mind, but that’s just an opinion that I’m devising a justification of. So we have people accepting what is not necessarily the only acceptable view of reality, and is possibly an _un_-acceptable view; your argument therefore proves nothing, even if we grant your first premise. That the assumptions that allow science to function at all have no good reason for being true in atheism leads me to believe that they are being inconsistent for reasons unknown.
Intelligence has nothing to do with religious belief. America is one example of this, since we are technological leaders in most fields of science. Japan is another example, since they lead in computer science, but are religious (Shinto, Buddhism, etc.).
Education has nothing to do with religious belief; have you noticed that atheism has began to rise since American education has started _loosing_ rigor? Have you noticed how philosophical education for the most part is completely ignored, and that our schools are obviously mired in philosophical naturalism, rather than merely methodological naturalism? Quite a puzzle!
5. Actually, you _do_ believe things without evidence (this is only fine if what is believed is properly basic), since the key objection that you have given is one that theologians have refuted centuries ago. If you have read the counter arguments offered by the professionals, we probably wouldn’t be holding this conversation.
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1. I don’t think we should answer ‘which is it?’ just yet for the exact reason you give to be skeptical of all revealed religion. We might work on that later. However, we can start with what all revealed religions agree on (some form of higher power, etc.) and work our way up from there.I merely left it as a given, but I think that what all revealed religion agrees on is a good start.
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My Response:
Don’t be ridiculous. I say that Islam and Christianity are enemies. Your argument would have us believe that they are allies. Tell a Muslim that his god is exactly the same as the Christian god and see what his response is? Scientists also believe in a higher power. It is called logic and reason. The only difference is that they don’t personify it and give it a throne with ridiculous rituals.
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No, people would not flock to a religion that had definitive proof. We’ve given definitive proof that the Earth is round, but people still believe that the Earth is flat.
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My Response:
??? Really, who? If you do manage to find someone then all you have to do is ask them to start walking/swimming in a straight line and they will end up back were they began. Alternatively you could launch that person into space and allow them to orbit AROUND the earth. ALL COMPLETELY PROVABLE!!!
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“More people would believe it,” isn’t true either. Even if we say that you’re right, consider the ancient Israelites who repeatedly turned away from God, despite constant exposure to miracles. At the judgement, people will complain that they didn’t have definitive proof, but God will tell them “No you wouldn’t have,” or, “You may have believed as Satan did, but you would still lack faith in my grace.” This relates to the answers I gave you for the apparent “Hiddenness of God” that your argument rests on. I will get to those as you did.
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My Repsonse:
???Really the ancient Israelites turned away from God!!! Oh dear, where are you getting this completely factual information from…the Bible??? The very book that I am saying cannot be verified… FORGET THE BIBLE AND THE ANCIENT ISRAELITES…WHERE IS GOD NOW??? DO YOU WATCH THE NEWS?
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2. It seems that a double-standard is in our midst. Do you accept Plato as historical? The gap between his extant writings and his life-time is much larger than what you’re complaining about in the Bible (it extends to three _thousand_ years, last I checked). So it isn’t as laughable as you say, since the same is true for others.Your issue with anthropomorphism is mildly striking to me. If man is made in the Imago Dei, then it follows that we can know at least something about what God is like simply by examining ourselves. Of course, you will rightly point out that I need to give a reason to believe this key premise. It is not something that all revealed religion agrees on, so we cannot use it at this point.We didn’t alter God to suit our needs, mind you; God could surely have been made less judgemental, less demanding, and capable of accepting things that are contrary to His nature! The closest thing I can find to evidence for what you said as happening is the odd switch from killing people who burnt their children as sacrifices to commanding forgiveness (and even that has a simple explanation).
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My Response:
I am not sure where this has been derived from but let’s look at the Plato argument. If Plato existed or did not exist is not really that much of a life defining issue for me. He is responsible for the creation of philosophical writings that I can choose to read and interpret. If it suddenly emerged that Plato never existed and that they were written by someone in 850 AD called Bob, it really would make very little difference to me. The words that Plato/Bob had written contain the power not Plato (or Bob) himself. Furthermore at no point is Plato saying things like here is my son if you don’t believe in him you are going to spend the rest of eternity in hell.
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3. The answers I gave are not exclusive to Christian theism, so the complaint is simply misconstrued. Odds are that at least one answer that I have given is applicable to the other revealed religions. For example, it seems that Muslims can make testimony to the witness of God Himself as Christians can.What’s so bad about referring to the God I understand best?You seem to be bent toward pluralism when you complain about this ‘arrogant statement’. Why is this important, considering what I’ve already said?
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My Response:
Okay, so your whole argument is that there is a higher power because that is the basis of all religions. With regards to a “higher power”… WAIT FOR IT…I COMPLETELY AGREE. The problem is definition. I say that we do not have the means to do so. That our understanding is severely limited (and I do not mean this in the same way an Agnostic would mean it). Are you saying that Christianity is definitely and completely correct. Therefore Islam et al are incorrect. Just the fact that you both have different definitions of god renders your argument void. Which is right, you are, they are, you are both partially right??? Which is it? This is not politics, this is my “soul” you are talking about. So I ask again, which one is right?
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4. Yes, life on other planets is a smaller scale answer.
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My Reposnse:
Really…small scale…LOL…why don’t we see who their god is. Do they have exactly the same religions we have or have they EVOLVED different religions? Maybe they already know the ultimate answer and can prove it!!! I think that is a pretty big question!
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It does not tell us the meaning of life (which includes whether there is one or not), or what is right or wrong, etc. Although it gives us something to marvel at, we should focus on the ultimate answers, because they not only allow us to live better (same as many smaller scale answers), but also because they will allow us to find the smaller scale answers. The current leaders of science are ignorant of philosophy, if we accept what you asserted (and what I’ve found implies that you have it backwards); they still seem to believe in Empiricism, which is self-defeating. Metaphysical naturalism is untenable in my mind, but that’s just an opinion that I’m devising a justification of. So we have people accepting what is not necessarily the only acceptable view of reality, and is possibly an _un_-acceptable view; your argument therefore proves nothing, even if we grant your first premise. That the assumptions that allow science to function at all have no good reason for being true in atheism leads me to believe that they are being inconsistent for reasons unknown.
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My Repsonse:
You’re Babbling…
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Intelligence has nothing to do with religious belief. America is one example of this, since we are technological leaders in most fields of science. Japan is another example, since they lead in computer science, but are religious (Shinto, Buddhism, etc.).Education has nothing to do with religious belief; have you noticed that atheism has began to rise since American education has started _loosing_ rigor? Have you noticed how philosophical education for the most part is completely ignored, and that our schools are obviously mired in philosophical naturalism, rather than merely methodological naturalism? Quite a puzzle!
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My Response:
I can’t believe you actually put this as an argument. So you are saying that the whole of America and Japan are intelligent. They are technological leaders because of a few very bright people. Billy Bob in Hicksville Alabama who believes in the Lord on Sunday and then fires up his particle collider Monday through Saturday. Amen. Congratulations, you have just classed over 300 million individual people as being intellectually identical. Oh say can you see, by the dawn’s early ligh……
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5. Actually, you _do_ believe things without evidence (this is only fine if what is believed is properly basic), since the key objection that you have given is one that theologians have refuted centuries ago. If you have read the counter arguments offered by the professionals, we probably wouldn’t be holding this conversation.
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My Response:
If you hadn’t been brainwashed as a child and could take complete responsibility for your thoughts you wouldn’t have written a reply.
I shouldn’t be replying now. You don’t deserve a respectful reply for acting like that, but I digress. Call this a mis-judgement, but that doesn’t phase me.
1: I am NOT being ridiculous. What do Muslims and Christians agree on? A higher power? DINGDINGDING! Logic and reason are not a higher power, they are not capable of doing anything by themselves. That is the difference.
If you really _must_ ask who believes the Earth is still flat, then it seems odd. Have you ever heard of the Flat Earth Society? Telling them to walk in a straight line will not convince them, the fact that they still believe that the Earth is flat is evidence enough. Launching them into space will not convince them either. “COMPLETELY PROVABLE!” You just missed the point, you know that? You are the one who’s going on a rant, and I feel like your responses are obviously half-baked.
It wouldn’t matter whether this story from the Bible is historically true, so I really don’t need to take your complaint seriously at all. Where did you learn to make valid criticisms?
2: It seems you missed my point: your argument was more or less “The Bible was corrupted”, and all I did was give a refutation of that. If you want to believe the author was somebody who wasn’t God, that can wait for someone who is more skilled in making an argument in that arena.
3: I was not arguing over which religion was right. I have already said that I _believe_ that Christian theism is true. I am not making a full-scale argument. Your response is simply inappropriate. It all started as a rebuttal to the Argument from Unbelief, why are you ballooning it to something so much bigger?
4: I would be perfectly fine with them evolving different religions! But, even if they already know the answer to the larger-scale questions, I doubt that we would be able to contact them, but that isn’t what I’m arguing. It is only a really big question if the creatures we contacted could give us the answer.
How am I babbling? You said that the leaders of science were disbelievers, I was giving my response to that. Where did I stray off the problem? I clarified a few statements on the assumptions I started with, and came to my conclusion.
First, your argument does the exact same thing, when you correlated education with atheism (“Poor uneducated masses – usually very religious…” [Ellipsis in original]). You’ll notice that there are graphs designed to make similar correlations to what you just said. Furthermore, I _don’t_ make this assumption. I assume that the intelligence is distributed between camps of believers and non-believers alike, as a _given_ of _education_. Your analysis of my “counter-argument” is simply improperly construed.
5. I shouldn’t be replying…. I shouldn’t be replying…. I shouldn’t be… Aw, forget it! The fact is that the Argument from Unbelief has been refuted. What you have said, it seems to me, is not justification to strengthen the premises.
I really shouldn’t be replying…so I won’t, other than to say I feel like I am having a “discussion” with a 10 year old who really hasn’t got a clue what he is talking about. To be honest you are winning most of my arguments for me. I apologise if I you think I have been offensive but to be quite frank, apart from paedophiles, its people like you I don’t want anywhere near my children.
Actually, what I just said was very nasty. But don’t worry, I have asked the Christian God for forgiveness and he said it was not a problem and I am totally forgiven. Awesome…All I have to do now is ask all the other gods for forgiveness and I should be okay. I think it makes sense to cover myself fully…Dear Allah…
I dont personally like Dawkins but sometimes The things he says make sense…
“Everybody is an atheist in saying that there is a god – from Ra to Shiva – in which he does not believe. All that the serious and objective atheist does is to take the next step and to say that there is just one more god to disbelieve in.”
You probably dont understand what he means but maybe you could ask your mommy and daddy for help.
Actually, I have decided that it is probably best not to come on here anymore. It really is like flogging a dead horse. You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it think (that’s a play on words before I get pulled up for that).
It seems that Christians can be presented with tons of reasonable logic that any reasonable person would say yes you have a point, there is no real proof, there are contradictions, and also many unanswered questions, but still they carry on defending Christianity (and religion).
You are the victim of one of the world’s longest running marketing campaigns, run for centuries by imperfect human beings who in the majority of cases put their own motives and requirements before the masses.
Hopefully one day you will realise the logic and stop believing for the simple reason that there is abundantly more reason to doubt than to believe.
In 2,000 years time (provided humanity still exists) they will look back at religion and go “How did they believe in such nonsense”, in the same way we today look at older tribes and their beliefs.
I really don’t know what else to say to you other than keep acquiring all types of knowledge (not just the bible), keep trying to see things from different viewpoints, and keep trying to see situations as a progression of events and not just the current view. Most importantly, QUESTION EVERYTHING. I am very sad for you because you are devoting energy to a pursuit that is divisive and has very little chance of being the truth.
I wish you luck with your futures but I take part in something that is so logically and fundamentally incorrect.
It seems the moderator removed my lasts two posts. Probably because they were childish and nasty. Caleb, I am sorry for what I said and I hope that you can forgive me. If I said anything nasty it was purely for the shock effect, and none of it had any basis in reality.
You are probably a very nice guy and I was just being mean because you dont agree with my point of view. My sincerest apologies.
I try to forgive, and I forgive you.
I question many things, but I think we can agree that there are some things that we need to assume are true before hand in order to know certain other things. The difference is what we assume, and like a good scientist you assumed your senses are generally reliable. I tried to find an assumption to base this from, because of Descartes’ Radical Doubt (how I got there is a different story). This is my end result so far. It may change again.
[…] vs. Fé na CoffeehouseTheology.com (em […]
The Danger When You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know”scienceblog.com”
May 03 2010 Published by MarkCC under Bad Logic
A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing.
There’s no shortage of stupidity in the world. And, alas, it comes in many, many different kinds. Among the ones that bug me, pretty much the worst is the stupidity that comes from believing that you know something that you don’t.
This is particularly dangerous for people like me, who write blogs like this one where we try to explain math and science to non-mathemicians/non-scientists. Part of what we do, when we’re writing our blogs, is try to take complicated ideas, and explain them in ways that make them at least somewhat comprehensible to non-experts.
There are, arising from this, two dangers that face a math or science blogger.
1. There is the danger of screwing up ourselves. I’ve demonstrated this plenty of times. I’m not an expert in all of the things that I’ve tried to write about, and I’ve made some pretty glaring errors. I do my best to acknowledge and correct those errors, but it’s all too easy to deceive myself into thinking that I understand something better than I actually do. I’m embarrassed every time that I do that.
2. There is the danger of doing a good enough job that our readers believe that they really understand something on the basis of our incomplete explanation. When you’re writing for a popular audience, you don’t generally get into every detail of the subject. You do your best to just find a way of explaining it in a way that gives people some intuitive handle on the idea. It’s not perfect, but that’s life. I’ve read a couple of books on relativity, and I don’t pretend to really fully understand it. I can’t quite wrap my head around all of the math. That’s after reading several entire books aimed at a popular audience. Even at that length, you can’t explain all of the details if you’re writing for non-experts. And if you can’t do it in a three-hundred page book, then you certainly can’t do it in a single blog post! But sometimes, a reader will see a simplified popular explanation, and believe that because they understand that, that they’ve gotten the whole thing. In my experience, relativity is one of the most common examples of this phenomenon.
Todays post is an example of how terribly wrong you can go by taking an intuitive explanation of something, believing that you understand the whole thing from that intuitive explanation, and running with it, headfirst, right into a brick wall.
As any long-time reader of this blog knows, I’m absolutely fascinated by Kurt Gödel, and his incompleteness theorem. Incompleteness is, without a doubt, one of the most important, most profound, most surprising, and most world-changing discoveries in the history of mathematics. It’s also one of the most misunderstood.
The problem is exactly what I described up above. It’s a really complicated idea. You can’t fully grasp it without having a really good understanding of logic and proof, and spending time going through the whole proof, in all of its gory details. But you can get across the gist of it with a simple explanation – and therein lies the problem. The gist that you can grasp with a simple explanation isn’t the real meaning of the incompleteness theorem. It’s an approximation – something close enough to what the theorem says to help you understand it – but it’s not the real meaning of the theorem. And if you don’t realize that you don’t understand all of the details, you can wind up making some really serious errors.
One of the common ways that Gödel’s incompleteness theorem is explained is by a metaphor. Incompleteness shows how, when you’re working inside of a formal mathematical system, you can find statements that can’t be proven true or false from within the system. So as an approximation of that, people sometimes say something like “If you’ve got all of the true statements you can prove inside of a circle, then Gödel shows that there’s something outside of that circle.” That’s a nice metaphor, which is certainly clearer, on an intuitive level than the earlier, but more correct, statement.
People often try to make it even a bit clearer, by extending that metaphor: If you’ve got a set of tools for drawing geometric systems, and you use them to draw a circle, part of the field that you use to draw on must be outside your circle. No matter how careful you are, you’ll can’t draw a line around an area of the field without leaving part of the field outside of it. Gödel’s theorem describes a mathematical form of the same sort of problem: if you have a good enough set of mathematical tools for showing what’s true and what’s false, there will be things that fall outside of the range of those mathematical tools.
The problem is, that’s just an intuitive explanation. It misses the depth of incompleteness. It both makes incompleteness seem like something more than it really is, and also like something less than it really is.
You can try to make the statement of the theorem closer to accurate. That’s what I just did two paragraphs ago: I restated it in terms of a mathematical toolkit. That’s closer. But it still stinks.
I can get even closer, by saying something like “In any valid, consistent, formal mathematical system that’s capable of expressing Peano arithmetic, there will be true statements that cannot be proved within the system.” That’s considerably closer, but it still misses some of the essential points. After all, what does “true” mean in a formal system? And it misses one of the big facets of incompleteness, which is that no matter how careful you are to create a careful model that’s constrained to prevent self-referential statements, you can always create an alternative and equally valid model that does include problematic statement. Grasping that fact, that there’s more than one model that can be fit to any consistent system, and what that really means, is absolutely crucial to fully understanding incompleteness.
The point, however, is that just because you’ve understood some intuitive explanation of something doesn’t mean that you really understand it. And using your incomplete understanding as the basis for building a proof of something else is, pretty much inevitably, going to be a total disaster.
Our target in this post is the author of an argument that tries to use Gödel’s incompleteness theorem as a proof of the existence of God. It’s a perfect example of what I’ve just gone on at great length explaining. The author takes the “no circle without something outside of it” explanation of Gödel, and abuses it horribly. He really believes that he gets it, and that he’s doing valid reasoning on the basis of incompleteness. But because he doesn’t know that he doesn’t really understand it, he makes a mess.
Here’s his explanation of Gödel:
Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem says:
“Anything you can draw a circle around cannot explain itself without referring to something outside the circle – something you have to assume but cannot prove.”
You can draw a circle around all of the concepts in your high school geometry book. But they’re all built on Euclid’s 5 postulates which we know are true but cannot be proven. Those 5 postulates are outside the book, outside the circle.
You can draw a circle around a bicycle. But the existence of that bicycle relies on a factory that is outside that circle. The bicycle cannot explain itself.
You can draw the circle around a bicycle factory. But that factory likewise relies on other things outside the factory.
Gödel proved that there are ALWAYS more things that are true than you can prove. Any system of logic or numbers that mathematicians ever came up with will always rest on at least a few unprovable assumptions.
Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem applies not just to math, but to everything that is subject to the laws of logic. Everything that you can count or calculate. Incompleteness is true in math; it’s equally true in science or language and philosophy.
Anyone who knows math can tell you that most of that has nothing to do with Gödel. It’s mostly confused babble. Gödel didn’t prove that you need to start any proof with a set of unproven axioms. That was part of math and logic long before Gödel ever came along. But our author believes that that’s what Gödel actually talked about.
It isn’t. Gödel showed that given a formal mathematical system of sufficient power, you can produce a statement in the system which is true, but which is not provable within the system. Like I said before, that’s still a wretched oversimplification, but it’s a whole lot closer to the real meaning. What Gödel did was show how you can use simple arithmetic to encode logical statements into numbers; and then that you could use that encoding to create a number which encodes the statement “This statement cannot be proven true within this system”. It’s true: you can’t prove it within the system. You can use a different system to show that it’s true; but in that system, you can do a similar construction, and show how that system includes statements that are true, but not provable within it.
But he’s convinced that he understands it, and that what it really means is that you need axioms that are outside of the system. He really believes that the “something is outside of the circle” explanation really does express the full meaning of Gödel, and that the things outside of the circle are the basic axioms.
Of course, he’s only just begun. Nothing demonstrates your command of a subject better than your ability to take it and try to apply it to a domain where it makes absolutely no sense at all.
A “theory of everything” – whether in math, or physics, or philosophy – will never be found. Because it is mathematically impossible.
Does Gödel really say that you can’t describe the physics of reality mathematically? No. We’re actually pretty close to nailing down something like a grand unification theory, which would be a physical theory of everything. And Gödel’s theorem has nothing to do with whether or not it’s possible.
OK, so what does this really mean? Why is this super-important, and not just an interesting geek factoid?
Here’s what it means:
• Faith and Reason are not enemies. In fact, the exact opposite is true! One is absolutely necessary for the other to exist. All reasoning ultimately traces back to faith in something that you cannot prove.
Once again, completely wrong. Gödel’s theorem says nothing of the sort. He’s still making the same basic mistake – that what Gödel did was show that logic requires axioms. That’s not what it says, and even if it was, this kind of vague, fuzzy, feel-good statement wouldn’t follow logically from it.
• All closed systems depend on something outside the system.
• You can always draw a bigger circle but there will still be something outside the circle.
You should be starting to see the pattern by now. He really doesn’t understand what incompleteness means. But he’s got one silly metaphor about circles, which he’s misinterpreted, and which he’s absolutely convinced is the whole truth. Gödel’s theorem doesn’t say either of those things. It doesn’t come close to saying anything like those things, and no one who even comes close to understanding what it says could possibly make that mistake.
The problem with all of the statements above is (apart from his confusion about axioms) the fact that Gödel’s incompleteness theorem is a statement about formal logical systems, and statements within those systems. Incompleteness doesn’t talk about religion, faith, god, circles, or open or closed systems. It talks about formal logical inference systems.
Anyway, we’re just finally coming to the point of his argument. But first he needs to take even more of logic and push it into his “circles” rubbish:
Reasoning inward from a larger circle to a smaller circle (from “all things” to “some things”) is deductive reasoning.
Example of a deductive reasoning:
1. All men are mortal
2. Socrates is a man
3. Therefore Socrates is mortal
Reasoning outward from a smaller circle to a larger circle (from “some things” to “all things”) is inductive reasoning.
Examples of inductive reasoning:
•
1. All the men I know are mortal
2. Therefore all men are mortal
•
1. When I let go of objects, they fall
2. Therefore there is a law of gravity that governs all falling objects
Notice than when you move from the smaller circle to the larger circle, you have to make assumptions that you cannot 100% prove.
For example you cannot PROVE gravity will always be consistent at all times. You can only observe that it’s consistently true every time.
Nearly all scientific laws are based on inductive reasoning. All of science rests on an assumption that the universe is orderly, logical and mathematical based on fixed discoverable laws.
You cannot PROVE this. (You can’t prove that the sun will come up tomorrow morning either.) You literally have to take it on faith. In fact most people don’t know that outside the science circle is a philosophy circle. Science is based on philosophical assumptions that you cannot scientifically prove. Actually, the scientific method cannot prove, it can only infer.
(Science originally came from the idea that God made an orderly universe which obeys fixed, discoverable laws – and because of those laws, He would not have to constantly tinker with it in order for it to operate.)
Those are just about the worst definitions of “inductive” and “deductive” that I’ve seen. But worse is that they’re part of a purportedly mathematical argument: in math, “inductive” and “deductive” mean something specific, and it’s not this. In math, inductive reasoning absolutely does produce proofs.
But the worst part of that is: “the scientific method cannot prove, it can only infer”. What does “infer” mean? In mathematical terms – in the terms that we’re using because we’re talking about the implications of a logical proof! – it means prove using mechanical inference rules within a formal mathematical system”. So his statement, in mathematical terms, reduces to a contradiction: “the scientific method cannot prove, it can only prove”.
And now, finally, we get to the point:
Now please consider what happens when we draw the biggest circle possibly can – around the whole universe. (If there are multiple universes, we’re drawing a circle around all of them too):
• There has to be something outside that circle. Something which we have to assume but cannot prove
Nope. Doesn’t say that.
• The universe as we know it is finite – finite matter, finite energy, finite space and 13.8 billion years time
Nope. Doesn’t say anything like that. How can you possibly get from Gödel’s theorem to a statement that the universe can’t be infinite? There’s a reason why he just pretends to “prove” this, but doesn’t actually connect it to anything, even by the most flimsy informal reasoning: because he can’t. The only reason that it’s here is because he wants God to be the only infinite thing, so he just threw it in, even though it doesn’t come close to making any sense.
• The universe (all matter, energy, space and time) cannot explain itself
Again, nope. Gödel’s theorem says nothing remotely like this. Gödel’s incompleteness theorem doesn’t say anything about explanations. It only talks about proofs, in the formal mathematical sense of proof. The whole concept of explanation is completely outside the bounds of Gödel.
• Whatever is outside the biggest circle is boundless. So by definition it is not possible to draw a circle around it.
Once again, this is a total non-sequitur. It simply does not follow from incompleteness.
• If we draw a circle around all matter, energy, space and time and apply Gödel’s theorem, then we know what is outside that circle is not matter, is not energy, is not space and is not time. Because all the matter and energy are inside the circle. It’s immaterial.
And this is just word-games. “If we draw a circle around all of the gribble, then whatever isn’t in the circle can’t be gribble”. It doesn’t mean anything.
• Whatever is outside the biggest circle is not a system – i.e. is not an assemblage of parts. Otherwise we could draw a circle around them. The thing outside the biggest circle is indivisible.
Isn’t this circle rubbish getting tiresome? Actually, it sort of makes sense: all of his arguments are going in circles, so why not express circular arguments in term of a circular metaphor?
• Whatever is outside the biggest circle is an uncaused cause, because you can always draw a circle around an effect.
It’s right back to one of the classic crackpot arguments for god: the uncaused cause. Every effect must have a cause; before the universe was created, there was nothing to cause anything, so there must be something outside of it, therefore god.
It’s a dreadful argument in general. But it’s worse here. He’s just spent all of this time arguing that you can’t prove anything by what he calls inductive reasoning. Just because every event that you’ve ever seen has a cause, by his own argument, that doesn’t mean that you can conclude that every event must have a cause.
And even that isn’t the worst of it: he’s claiming that all of this is “proven” by Gödel’s theorem. It’s not. The universe isn’t a formal mathematical system. And even if it was, by this argument, God wouldn’t be what religious folks think of as God; God wouldn’t be a sentient force that created the universe; God would just be a self-referential statement encoded in arithmetic. Not exactly what most of us religious folks believe.
And then, he needs to repeat that whole stupid argument again, this time using “information” instead of “matter and energy”. It’s like he wants to make my argument for me. You can substitute anything into that, and repeat the argument. Matter, space, information, intelligence, consciousness, colors, shapes. Seriously – just try it. “If we draw a circle around all of the colors in the universe, then anything outside of the circle can’t have a color: it must be colorless! Therefore, by Gödel’s theorem, there must be a colorless thing outside of the circle of color which is the creator of all color!”
A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. It can convince you that an argument this idiotic and this sloppy is actually profound. It can convince you to publicly make a raging jackass out of yourself, by rambling on and on, based on a stupid misunderstanding of a simplified, informal, intuitive description of something complex.
Greetings
Carlos
About misuse-abuse of Godel’s Theorem
“(…)All it would mean is there is something about the mind/brain that we can’t prove, but that is true. For example, maybe we can’t solve a particular kind of math problem because we can’t reason well enough about that sort of math problem. Maybe the thing we can’t prove just is that the mind/brain works like a Turing machine. The fact that we can’t prove that we have free will or a soul doesn’t show that that’s the thing that is true and can’t be shown. It just means that we can’t prove those things. It could be that we can’t prove them because they’re false.”
“(…)there might be other arguments for free will or a soul somewhere else in other branches of philosophy. But Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems lend such negligible support to those conclusions that maybe at best you can say that ‘Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems don’t conclusively prove that there is not a soul or free will.’ If you say that the Incompleteness Theorems imply that there is a soul or free will or God or some other metaphysical entity you are wrong and shut up. They don’t imply anything of the sort and they don’t work with other arguments to imply anything like that.”
Excerpt from “Godel’s Incompleteness Theorems and You – A Helpful Guide.” – Philosophy Bro.com – Tuesday, May 22, 2012
You really only need one reason and this negates the need to produce others. I am responsible for my own thoughts, actions, and deeds, therefore, I place no burden on any human or God for the consequences.
Real fantastic info can be found on website . “The quality of an organization can never exceed the quality of the minds that make it up.” by Harold R. McAlindon.
This site has long since lost its raison d’etre. It is obvious that there is no way that those who believe in a mythical God who sits in Heaven and metes out reward and punishment will change because Faith has always been, and always will be, stronger than Truth or Fact.
There is so much evidence of truly evil people who prosper at the expense of innocent and the Faithful that one is just left to wonder at the cynicism of such a God and how He functions!
Please do not reply to this (at least, not to me). However, I may still occasionally read the blogs as a form of entertainment.
Nice to see you again, Bert. As you request, I will not reply to _you_, I will reply according to my current views, for the sake of better sharpening them.
First, you have, like many people before you, redefined the word “faith”. “Faith” is steadfastness in the original Hebrew, and in the Christian tradition, has both objective and subjective meaning. Objectively, it is the sum of truths revealed by God. Subjectively, it is our assent to those truths. You attack the subjective faith under the guise that we don’t have evidence. You attack the objective faith under the use of steadfastness. You should attack the objective faith for lack of evidence, and the steadfastness for going against truth and fact when they are self-evident.
Second, what are _you_ doing about the evil in the world? Let me guess: Nothing! Let’s assume that you are right about the Best of All Possible Worlds being wrong (though in real life, you misunderstood it); why should God intervene? We were already told we would suffer anyway, and we were already given the privilege to sin. Your complaint is just an outrage that begs the question about theology.
Third is the Best of All Possible Worlds. You assume that when I say that God is working for the good of those who believe Him (and maybe those who don’t know Him), I mean in this world. I never said that, and I think that you should know that I disagree with the idea that a universe could ever be perfect; what is the greatest good of Christian theology? God. Because god transcends the universe so that we cannot directly interact with Him, it follows that there is no such thing as a perfectly good universe.
I know I said I would not come back but I keep getting included in any replies to these threads so I do end up reading them. I read a very obvious saying the other day which aligns itself to what Bert is saying and I thought it summed up the futility of this site.
~ If you could reason with a religious person, there would no longer be any religion. ~
The quote is obviously false, however.
Has anyone noticed that atheists treat the universe as existing inexplicably? Or how about that reason doesn’t make sense in the absence of freewill (which physicalism denies)? I should only need to focus on these two.
With the universe, the atheist says that it exists necessarily, or else lacks an explanation. Considering that the universe began to exist, the first option is false. The second option is impossible; if things could exist inexplicably, then we should see an indication (stuff popping into and out of existence on the macroscopic level [`virtual particles` have an explanation]). If an atheist does give an explanation (multiverse cosmology is the favorite), then it requires an explanation too (anything that cannot exist outside of time has a beginning, and all their proposed models require time).
With reason, one cannot just use compatiblist freewill to side step the argument I’m making. Under physicalism, the mind is reducible to the brain. In order for freewill to be possible, choice must be possible; because the laws of physics dictate how your brain behaves, it follows that you have no choices.
If atheism is true, people are atheists because it is nomologically necessary for them to be atheists; atheists are no more `rational` than my brother’s bunions. The theists aren’t the ones who need to be `reasoned` with, unless it is with deists, rather than atheists.
So God can exist inexplicably, but the universe can’t?
Actually, God has an explanation, though it is one that most (if not all people) have a hard time wrapping their minds around: God contains the sufficient reason for His existence within Himself. This is how Spinoza came to Proposition#7 in his Ethics.
The universe, as far as modern science seems to imply, is composed entirely of contingent things. Contra David Hume, an infinite regression of explanations doesn’t explain anything, since it follows that we must ask why there is an infinite regression.
Well, like you seem to do with most of your arguments, I could also quote other philosophers who contradict “your” philosophers views. But what’s the point. You are standing on the backs of giants to make your point without having conjured up a logical or rational argument of your own. The concept of religion and God is an insult to intelligence, which is why most academics are atheist or at best agnostic. Let’s be honest with each other, you will never accept a rational or logical argument, and I think you enjoy the conflict whereby your only goal is to find some sliver of contradiction regardless of how tenuous it may be in order to continue this cyclical “argument”. My only consolation is that as science gets stronger, religion is fading away. Hopefully in a few hundred years time there will only be a few religious people left who will be looked upon much the same way that we view people who believe in tasseography today.
If you wish to have a dialogue here, I suggest you actually read the article you are responding to.
After that, I suggest you come forward with rational arguments of your own rather than merely claiming without evidence that most academics believe the way you do.
When you are ready to contribute to a real discussion instead of casting insults, we’re here.
In my defense, Justin, you say that I will never accept a rational argument. Why can’t I say the same for you? Your only argument is not definitive, and begs the question against the people you intend to use it against. How is that rational or logical?
You say that I have never devised my own argument. First, this is false, but my arguments are not for apologetic purposes, so are irrelevant anyway. Second, even if this were true, what would it prove? The ones I’ve put on the table are obviously holding up against their detractors!
You assert that theism is an insult to mankind’s intellect. So tell me, how is saying that your reasoning capacity an accident LESS insulting?? Accepting a self-defeating position is an insult to the intellect, not my position.
In an attempt to reinforce this assertion, you say that this is why most scholars are atheists. Let me clue you in on a little secret: science is not a counter-argument to religion. That anybody believes this is rather telling about our education, not the relationship between science and religion.
Your so-called `rebuttal` hinges entirely on those three rhetorical decorations, all of which are flawed.
It would be better if you actually tried to refute the other position, rather than calling them irrational. I beg of you to practice Mr. Marshall’s advice (I certainly benefited from it!). If not, that’s beyond our control.
Oh why do I keep coming back here??? I really do have a lot better things to be doing.
Apologies for not initially providing proof about my claim that academics are mainly atheist or at best agnostics. I really thought this was a well-known fact. I could ask you to take it all on faith but you probably wouldn’t believe me.
I also realised that the term academic is slightly broad because you would class someone teaching theology as an academic. I should have been more specific and said people in the scientific, biological and mathematics fields. You know the really smart people that have given us useful stuff like computers, advanced medicine, physics, space travel etc.
Here is a website that lists a number of studies from reputable sources that show the correlation between scientists (and intelligence) and religious beliefs. The website itself isn’t too slick but the studies and sources listed are genuine and accurate.
http://kspark.kaist.ac.kr/Jesus/Intelligence%20%26%20religion.htm
On your statement that science is not a counter-argument to religion. Let’s just look at evolution, and the age of the universe I think you may find that your statemnt is not true.
Please stop responding with butchered philosophy. Give me some hard evidence. The problem is that this site is trying to provide a forum where we can discuss the two sides of the argument. In order for that to succeed we need to be able to compare apples with apples. Unfortunately we are failing to even compare apples with pears. In a rational, logical, “scientific”, provable context, religion isn’t even a fruit.
The reason 93% of National Academy of Sciences members are irreligious is that the Academy has a well-known, well-publicized anti-religious agenda. Using them as the basis for your position isn’t much different than me saying “93% of the members of the Catholic Scientists Society DO believe in God.”
A more trustworthy study is the one by Ecklund and Scheitle, “Religion among Academic Scientists: Distinctions, Disciplines, and Demographics” at http://caliber.ucpress.net/doi/abs/10.1525/sp.2007.54.2.289 which indicates religious disbelief hovers around 31% for all academics and 40% for those in physics and biology.
Which means some variety of belief in God is held by the majority of scientists.
In any case, you shouldn’t let your opinion be determined by some kind of “vote” or survey. You should think for yourself.
“On your statement that science is not a counter-argument to religion. Let’s just look at evolution, and the age of the universe I think you may find that your statemnt is not true.”
You’re uninformed about informed Christian beliefs about both evolution and the age of the universe. See http://www.cosmicfingerprints.com, or http://www.biologos.org, or reasons.org, or any one of hundreds of websites and books that discuss these issues from a Christian perspective. You may be pleasantly surprised.
I don’t really come around here much anymore, but I think you’re missing something Justin.
Let us look at what science can prove. In the absolute terms you seem to require:
Nothing.
Thats right science can prove *nothing* absolutely. All we can say is the balance of human experience is shared. In other words science and math are human constructs, and are true if and only human experience matches the real state of affairs. On balance of probability (all our models of the universe rely on “balance of probability”), we can say human experience does match the real state of affairs, but we don’t know for sure. So proof or disproof of religion by science can’t work. The act of a supernatural being might be (to someone not looking for it) indistinguishable from statistical noise. Because your “human experience” does not match mine, we are having this discussion. You can not prove absolutely yours is correct, neither can I prove mine.
Additionally, your arguments against religion rely on a completely literal interpretation of the texts in question, which is a rather silly idea, and the authors of those texts might take exception to it.
To sum it up, don’t confuse the philosophy of science with actual science. And don’t assume that in order to be religious we must take the translation of an ancient book out of context and completely literally on all points.
I hope this clears it up a bit.
Cheers
only one thing that puzzles of the war(confusion) those who always find fault with others. Though perhaps in the range of your advice-you all are not to blame others.
when he was living proof that a person’s nature is to be like him. If he wants to, why the sea is not just that he created overturned beside the sea where he had been running?! …
If TV could talk(hope not): Sir, why else can color tv? while I was only black and white?
the master replied: because you just mean black and white according to the version you have!
TV: I could operate and serve you, that’s because those(you) who provide power (electric)to all of us right can i call you God? so, why you couldn’t trust your own God or whatever you said who gave you air to breathe??
Master: it’s all because of ego, science that I learned and the most important thing is i can show to others that i’m true and i have a lot of money from my ego too, TV: Why n what are you looking for the next? Master: so I was puzzled by them, especially the ego
TV: why do not you just try to pray facing the master from your confusion? because its free and take no charge of your hot money
master: I will ask to the swaying grass …..
Caleb Neff
I cannot find the link to your comment and will post my reply here.
Clearly you interpret my questions as malarkey, and unwelcome.
I find your intolerance discouraging and too common.
Also you repeatedly suppose that those who differ from your opinions have not thought their ideas through and are not welcome on your forum.
(that is if by “we” you speak for anyone other than yourself)
I could ask my question again but you’ve already preempted that a considered reply is unlikely.
(BTW I loved your three barbed non reply to Bert) “As you request, I will not reply to you, I will reply … for the sake of better sharpening [my views]. Did you even read your contradictory comment before you posted it Caleb? Did you listen to Bert’s request before you defied it?
Note to moderator – While I don’t believe in stifling debate, I could make an exception here.
Your argument about the resurrection _is_ malarkey, Martin. And as far as I understand the rules of the board, such arguments should not be welcome.
No Martin, I suppose that what I have to say has some value. When I sound as you say I sounded, it is because I came to the conclusion post actum. Your comment about the resurrection shows, at the very least, a refusal to study relevant theology before you attacked it.
Can you tell me where I failed to understand the ever-patient Ben? He talked about faith being stronger than truth and fact, and I corrected him on what faith is. When he made his comment about the evil in the world, that is where we jump in. I read his comment, did _you_?
Can you explain to me where I contradicted myself? Mind you that referencing the possible world rubric, and then asking Ben what he’s doing about the evil in the world is not a contradiction. Those are two separate answers.
You may want to actually respond to my reply about the resurrection now. That helps stay on topic, doesn’t it?
I agree Science and Evolution disprove Your Gods existence. Why do I except this? No one will convince me otherwise. My daughter was born very disabled. She was so weak when she came home from the hospital she was so weak we had to feed her with a eye dropper, We were told she had degenerative muscular disease, she needed to have a ventilor because she could not breath lying down she never walked a day in her life, she needed a stomach tube to eat, And needed round the clock care for the eight pitiful years of her life, Before she died I asked the nonexistent sky fairy what a disabled child who was baptized ect yadda yadda to please let her live. And if he she it created the universe why couldn’t he spare one little doisabled girl. Well he couldn’t be bothered. No too many fake televangilists to protect, some child rapist to ovsolve of his sons, some politician to get off. So fuck you delusional assholes and most of all FUCK your Teriyaki on a stick god too.
Mr. Williams, I shouldn’t comment on your opening statement; there is simply no logical connection between `evolution is true` and `God doesn’t exist.` Your connection between `science does X (your usage is vague as to what science does)` and `God doesn’t exist` is also faulty. You will need to prove _both_ of these statements before you expect people to consider them worth listening (let alone _replying_) to.
Of course, I’d have to say that your second statement is _obviously_ false; there is no good reason for the universe to be logical or orderly if it exists inexplicably. The existence of science becomes ad hoc under such a rubric.
Then again, you may propose that science is `sealing up the Gaps` so that God is running out of room, but that is also false. First, it fails to realize that God doesn’t _need_ Gaps; anyone who thinks as much should stop reading Wikipedia and find a better resource! Second, no one in their right mind would use this argument to disprove the existence of other intelligent agents (painters, programmers, etc.), so what makes God so special? You’re welcome to fill in that blank, but it’s not miracles (they don’t _have_ to go against nature, and I question that any of them actually do).
You have suffered, you asked for help, you didn’t receive help. Being angry for not getting what you want is not selfish in this case; you wanted the good of your daughter, rather than your own good. Making such a criticism would be unforgivable and callous of me. So where do we go wrong? We should remember that if God exists, He is under no obligation to help us; if God allows us to suffer, we should accept it. The Hebrews saw God in such a way that even if God did nothing, this would be an expression of His sovereignty; whatever evil happened was consistent with God’s will, even if God didn’t command it to happen. The Argument From Evil shows that people are too lazy to study what they are attacking.
Yes, I sound harsh. There is nothing I can do about that, short of being silent, which I can’t do.
Hello, Dee:
If I were cynical, I would say: “But he loves you, Dee”.
Carlos.
Justin, your argument is flawed simply by the fact that the scriptures themselves are opinions and translations of things that are past. If God (whoever that may be) had said these things then you may have a point…..
Robert,I have no idea which argument you are referring to.
I gave up on this a long time ago, so Jesus was without sin, so what? So was the child who got molested by her god fearing daddy. Oops I fucked my three year old! Run to church be absolved. Do it again (which he did!) wtf was Jesus then?’? Waiting for sloppy seconds!!?? And wtf was he when my 8 year old was dying? Helping Pat Robertson count his money? Helping your son not knOck up the prom queen? How can you believe this shit? Well Barum said there was a sucker born every minute! Must be every second on sundays! Fuck Xtains and fuck their Non Existant sky fairy! My daughter died from aids acquired from a blood transfusion. Really sinful I know.
You may want to consider what I have given to Mr. Williams before you continue, Mrs. Williams.
If Jesus is God, then God was simply denying your request.
Question: how can someone be absolved if they are unrepentant?
God didn’t need you to understand, just trust! because you wasting time here.
You’ll never know when your last breath happen. maybe tomorrow or next year. so, why the divine affairs debate, what’s in it for you?
If you do not believe Him, just take care of the other creations that desperately need your help more than them. it is better and most likely you will believe him. Life was simple, it didn’t need to debate.
peace man..
Interesting but have been stated many time in ages past. The most critical factor is what we observe via our satellite telescope system which makes it plain that this creation has a central starting point and is now expanding very dramatically. The issue that comes to the front is WHAT IS THIS EXPANDING INTO AND WHERE DID IT COME FROM??. Vast beyond belief. That that alone is a factor that says there is a God or it could not be a fact as nothing exist that could have caused it to occur. Hell exist as Heaven exist but they are what you might call the East and West of truth. If one is so the other is so. The question that comes out to the front is Jesus Christ. History says that he should have NEVER gained the power that his name holds but HE DID. HOW? Only answer if God. No one can deny the effect this man has brought to this world and if you will notice success follows any Nation that uses his name and practice faith. No other has in the past.
By the Way Jesus was not a Rabbi. He was NOT A LEVITE!! Paul did not invent him. He invented Paul who was originally called SAUL. Think it over.