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.
Hi, Perry
Your arguments are well thought out. I agree with you on almost every turn. I would just offer that your sarcasm with our atheist friends is beneath you. Peace.
Hi Perry,
I noticed that you referenced the Kulmann Book but perhaps have missed “Nothing Short of A Miracle” by Patricia Treece. I challenge any skeptic to read this book and if they are intellectually honest, not leave the door open for the “miraculous”–no matter what its origins.
A secular book well worth browsing is stacked with “spontaneous remissions–hundreds of them. How are we to isolate the cause of them from mystical causation? It is now a free download here?
http://www.noetic.org/research/sr/biblio.html
Finally, you may or may not have ever read Leslie Weatherhead’s “The Christian Agnostic”. Weatherhead was the Bishop of the Anglican church and a brilliant theologian. He addresses many of the same questions you do in an attempt to allow agnostics or skeptics to still test the waters of Christianity without having to buy everything. I think all three books will be page-turners for you.
Finally, a quote from Wittgenstein that you might want to put in your collection:
“We feel that when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely unanswered.”
P.s. Your man Godel also proved any mathematical system–and mathematics are the matrix of science–is both inconsistent and incomplete. He did this by constructing a mathematical proposition that basically said, “This statement cannot be proved”. If it could be proved and the assertion was true, the system contained contradiction. If it couldn’t be proved because it was true, than the system was incomplete because it lacked a rule or rules that could prove all valid mathematical assertions. Therefore all mathematical systems–and by extension, all science–is both incomplete and inconsistent.
I know, it sounds like Abbot and Costello but there it is.
Glenn. The question of miracles is always controversial and I am reminded of Hume’s brilliant discourse which to my mind is reasoning par excellence. Not necessarily true of course but worth a read for its pure critical analysis. I started on this because a couple of years ago Richard Dawkins had a few documentaries on TV about beliefs in general and touched upon religion, the paranormal, homeopathy etc. On one occasion he went to Lourds to witness the alleged miracles. He discussed the percentage of proved or accepted miracles among all those who attended and franky the percentage was no more than that of cures which would have statistically taken place naturally in any event. His conclusion was that consequently the cures were not miracles.
I like the Abbot and Costello theory !!! I grew up laughing at them, now I only wish I still thought they were that funny…it was fun laughing ’til I cried.
I agree with that theory, by the way. Only God knows all the answers and He will continue to laugh at those who, through their own knowledge or “science” seek to disprove Him. He will have the continually in derision, as He says in His Word (Psalm 2).
Godel was a truly “big mind”, but this particular example sounds a lot like the liar’s paradox. Earliest example is probably Epimides of Crete who said: “All Cretans are liars.”
Others include: “Everything I say is a lie”, “This sentence is false.” or simply “I lie.”.
Our brains start to spin when we think through statements like these. Why? I have a personal theory about why these paradoxes exist, but don’t think it proves anything about all science being incomplete or inconsistent.
Ignore this post.
Ron: As a former pilot for the Air Force flying tactical aircraft (F-16C)my experiences have lead me to take it as an a priori that ANY enterprise predicated on human observation must be flawed. Our greatest challenge–at least mine–was trying to minimize perceptual deficits which included the failure to perceive things that were present in the environment, things that weren’t which I perceived to be, the ever-present problem of “relevance”…it went on and on and on. Consider a common example from everyday life: viewing a stick that was partly submerged in water: it appears to be bent. There are so many such examples, if it’s as if nature is playing a game with us–blurring, masking, and providing conflicting sensory information…and this is just on the macroscopic level. For me, personally, It just seems intuitively obvious that science and math are riddled with problems–as is faith. Fortunately, I have become very comfortable with ambiguity.
Martin: I don’t doubt that a statistical study of Lourdes would do little in the way of proving the Grottos haver any special healing powers. I’m not inclined to go down the road Perry does about miracles, insofar as they are considered theologically. If they do occur they, for me, cause more problems than they solve: I do not like the idea of
God “cherrypicking” those who will receive miracles and letting the less-fortunate sweat it out. I do believe, however, that there be many–for more many than we imagine–variations of pathologies, and we currently do not have the instruments to look deep enough to discover them, just as we lacked the tools not long ago to look into deep space. So, an individual may have what appears to be an incurable melanoma but in actuality may have one that is almost identical but which will remit
spontaneously. I think this possibility is theologically and scientifically reconcilable: the pathologist and the theologian are both correct when they say “judge not by the appearance.”
Glenda: Did you know Seinfeld was based on “The Abbot and Costello” show? The idea was to do the show in a small neighborhood, with people dropping in and out of Seinfeld’s apartment just like they did in the A & C show. I’m not sure who said it but didn’t someone say that when science arrived at the summit of truth it would find the theologian sitting there waiting for it?
Yes, I have heard that saying. And my dad used to say, “If you get to heaven before I do, cut a little hole and pull me through…”. I used to think that was funny, too, until I learned what God says about getting to heaven.
It won’t be on our terms or by our own strength, or by our good works. But I am very glad of that. I thank God for His mercies, and for His Grace and for His plan of salvation. I found out I was a sinner before anyone ever told me (as a matter of fact, no one ever did). I knew, as a child, something profound was wrong with me, and I also knew there was Somone I could not define Who was watching over me, and Who loved me. Now if a little child can know these things, what in the world is wrong with people of high intelligence and knowledge that they cannot know these things?
If I had known that Sienfeld was based on A & C, I might have watched it. But I just did not connect with that generation’s take on their humor, not quite as naive as A&C.
And as a pilot, I’m sure you appreciate the simplest and most surefire cure for the inconsistency of human functioning: the checklist.
It also seems to me that reaching the summit of truth is an upward spiral. Round and round we go. Science is going clockwise and religion is going counterclockwise. Every so often they flip each other the bird as they go by each other in opposite directions. But they will meet at the top and realize the same truths.
I like this site. I like reading difficult questions like these ones and I wonder how they will be answered. I also like contributing answers to some of the questions myself. May the moderator just correct some of my spellings and grammars if there errors if there are any. thank you.
Hi, Perry, firstly, I am an orphan who recently accepted Christ faith only after long years of sceptisims unsimilar to yours and always a slow learner, having no college education due provety nor studied theology. But I have asked for and SEEN HUMBLE miracles, so far, and MOST OF ALL 2 VISIONS.
My reply is, simply if you have not seen any vision, it does not mean to only believe Christ if you had met him 2000 years ago. How could you explain to ONLY believe science on UNSEEN bacteria when doctors who just studied ALL science books bulls can not CURE us, Not even common flu till now, saying gems mutations is difficult. BUT you are even CURED of recent H1N1 swine flu and a whole of illness, including cancer, naturally. Miracles or what, right? Please also explain why earth can balance itself even when there are more buildings on one side or why it turns.
Billions of HUMBLE BELIVERS who knows science, excluding the PROUD BELIEVERRS can not be stupidly wrong.
Friend, I am a simple, HUMBLE and a poor person to reply you, sir, as you faced ETERNAL SIN for blasphemes GOD.
Dear Thomas, just keep listening to the still small voice of the Holy Spirit in you heart and soul. He will guide you into all truth, and He will help you in ways the agnostics and unbelievers can never understand. For our faith will grow stronger and stronger as we read and study the Word of God, the Holy Bible, as it is not just another book, but it is the inspired Word of God.
Also, scripture teaches us that “…not many mighty, not many noble…” will believe, but the poor and uneducated, not the proud and self sufficient, will hear God speak. Scripture declares, “…the natural man cannot understand the things of the Holy Spirit for they are spiritually discerned…”; not found out by simply inquiring or curious minds; they must be truly seeking Him…at that, He will find them in profound ways.
Your sister in Christ,
Hi, Sister Glenda in Christ- Thank GOD it’s you whose childhood experience with the Holy Spirit (in reply to Greg Richard) which I, as a child, also, experienced. I adored my dying Grand Uncle so much that I panickly prayed to wish him lived 2 more weeks. Immediately, he got well but died EXACTLY 2 weeks later. It was my 1st prayer to GOD. But my Anglican School Church was dormant on Conversion even though I excelled in scriptures. I grew up, till now, as an orphan living from hand to mouth without anything else in mind, totally neglecting other thoughts and GOD. But I NEVER FORGETS any favors and, ‘regrettably’ (fortunately, Jesus said, “..the last will be the FIRST to ENTER…) only RECENTLY, I started searching for a FINAL answer on GOD, which was leadless till The Bible. So, I prayed my 2nd prayer to HIM in 40 years to guide me to know HIM as I need hard convincing (incidently, much later I knew that Christ’s disciple, Thomas asked for proof of His Resurrection, right? Why I had chosen Thomas as my name, was a chilling thought). 3yrs later, on Christmas, I got a Bible and it was a Holy Blessing indeed to my search (what do you think of my Bible knowledge, so far, sister?). The following yr just before Easter, I seen my 1ST VISION of Christ and, also, dreamt (I can agree to ignore dreams as brain tricks, even though I did enter a Catholic Church and could have ‘implanted’ His Cross image in my good memory). of Him on a Cross in a Chapel, few times. Last yr, I seen my 2nd VISION of Christ. So till do me apart, my belief of GOD Almighty is Eternal, no matter what others say, for they may not know what they are saying…said, (…,.). It was such a long time coming to convince a tough and stubborn person like me as are the scientists, who never admits small planet earth is just one of trillions. trillions. trillions planets in the glaxays or universe to study.
However, I like your very inspiring advices very much. I feel you are an exceptionally good and GOD fearing person. So am I. Hope my e-mail address: thomas116688@yahoo.co.uk is allowed here by the moderator. Glenda, you are most welcome as sister in Christ to drop a line, however, due to financial constraint, I shall only able to reply, say, once a mönth.
I wish to say thank you, thank you. Thanks a millions as I need advices as I am poorly educated though I know English.
Religious wars are not stated by Christians —They are started with Religious people, not Christians–Big difference….
I would not go that far. What I would say is that nowhere in Jesus’ teachings do you find any justification for starting a religious war. Jesus said to Pilate, “My kingdom is not of this world.”
Religious wars are just human greed, prejudice and hatred looking for a place to land. They have nothing to do with Religion.
good idea,
what if everyone thinks like you?
regards,
sickpeacer.tk
If everyone understood this, most of the arguments against religion become moot. The crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, and whatever other “evils” of religion are called up lose their sting.
That is exactly what Pope Urban II said in 1095.
Perry,
It is admirable that you spend so much time answering people’s questions, and that you post comments, which are counter to your website’s general thrust. For that I commend you.
Having said that, I must say that Christian apologists have never been able to see the forest for the trees, clearly because their minds are limited by strict adherence to a set of ancient myths. If the first question you have to ask yourself when presented with new facts is: “Does this fit into my evangelical world-view? If not, then I’ll twist and turn reality to make it fit,” then your reality model is in need of some revision. Your argument regarding science is, unfortunately, very one-sided and does not reflect the truth. Science and democracy go hand in hand, and neither of these could’ve made their appearance when they did in history if it hadn’t been for the rejection of religious dogma during the Enlightenment (via Voltaire, et. al.). Luckily, the US was founded during a time when everything about the “old ways” was questioned (i.e. domination of the majority by a church-infested aristocracy). Read Jefferson, Paine, Franklin, Washington – almost any of the Founding Fathers – and you will see that strictly following dogma was well out of fashion among the “thinking classes” by the time the United States came into being. The divinity of Christ and his miracles were not considered very plausible by any of them (see Thomas Jefferson’s bible). If you also read books, which do not support your position, then pick up “The Science of Liberty” by Timothy Ferris. It is enlightening ;-)
Regarding the Sumerians, Egyptians, Greeks, Persians, Romans, etc., they all accomplished amazing feats of science and engineering given their level of knowledge and technological achievement. Their technology may seem limited to us now, but you must remember that “we are standing on the shoulders of giants”. Their discoveries and the technology built on them are enriching our lives today. Technology requires a branching, linear progression over time, and societies in which its development can flourish, i.e. where there’s no dogma to crush it, e.g. in medieval Europe, 17th century Spain, Stalinist Russia, etc., etc. Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire was not a place where rational inquiry could be carried out, most of the time. Its inhabitants were no less brilliant, but their coalescence into functioning societies did not occur until much later – in part due to religious fervor. One of many examples: Christians destroyed a lot of the documents the Greeks left behind, which would’ve enlightened them in the ways of science and the arts, because in their view (warped by religion) the world was coming to an end (since ultimately the root of Jesus’ preaching was apocalyptic) and any knowledge gained before Jesus’ appearance was essentially nonsense. Luckily, the Arabs kept and copied most of what would’ve been lost forever. They also made further progress in mathematics, etc. We can thank them for the concepts of zero and the methods of algebra (both are in fact Arabic words).
In my view the worst trespasses against progress and common sense that Christian apologists commit are arguments from ignorance (“I just can’t see how that could be true…”) and that they assume that if there’s one tiny fact out of place, then the default position goes back to “My Version of Christian Dogma”. As mentioned before, science is built on the shoulders of giants, who’ve provided the world with evidence gained from observation over a long time and from this massive body of evidence come theories, which not only fit the evidence very well, but can make predictions very accurately (quantum field theory, evolutionary theory, germ theory, atomic theory, gravitational theory, etc., etc.). You owe your continued existence to them. Religion is built on improvable belief and can make no predictions about the natural world – just look at the millions of apocalypticists (including Jesus) who’ve predicted the end of the world over the last two thousand years. As Bart Ehrman, whose books you should also read, said, “The only thing all of the apocalypticists over all the centuries since Christ have in common is that they’ve all been wrong.” One of your respondents wrote that scientists always lose debates against creationists. I don’t know where that came from, since creationists generally make themselves look stupid enough on their own without debate, but if you want to see the best and most important “debate” of them all watch “Judgement Day: Intelligent Design on Trial” and read Judge Jones’ very readable decision on the dangers of teaching pseudo-science in our classrooms (see http://www.pamd.uscourts.gov/kitzmiller/kitzmiller_342.pdf).
Regards,
Christopher
Christopher,
If you wish to critique specific statement I have made rather than generalizing about other apologists, feel free.
As for religion making testable predictions, Genesis 1 got Big Bang cosmology and the fossil record exactly right 3500 years ago. See http://www.cosmicfingerprints.com/audio/newevidence.htm – read the entire piece very carefully before adding further comments, please, including the FAQ. No other ancient scripture matches modern science, but with a few very simple assumptions the Genesis account does – tit for tat.
I agree, Young Earth Creationists butcher science pretty badly. But YEC is not the only view. Try the one I espouse at http://www.cosmicfingerprints.com. Also see “If you can read this, I can prove God exists” – http://www.cosmicfingerprints.com/ifyoucanreadthis.htm.
Perry,
No one knew anything about fossils until they were actually found and carefully studied. A lot of work has gone into making sense of them. Over time, a lot of work by geologists, paleontologists, etc. has made sense of the strata and the fossils found in them, providing evidence for the ancientness of the Earth and the universe. Before that they were probably considered evidence for the existence of dragons and other mythical monsters. Evidence has cleared that up and shown us how magnificent “creation” actually is – much grander and more awe-inspiring than the bible has told us.
The Big Bang was initially proposed by a Catholic priest who was also a physicist, but in both cases, evidence is what was required to back up any claims about what fossils and the Big Bang are all about, not bible verses. Bible verses only serve as evidence for an extremely small number of people on this planet, i.e. fundamentalist Christian literalists, and no one takes them seriously except themselves.
Thanks for the links. I will get back to you after looking them over. I may seem somewhat reactionary to a guy like you, but, as a former biology teacher, now an engineer, I’m sick of the America I love taking the path of ignorance over knowledge. I think religious fundamentalism has had and continues to have a big hand in this. I also think, if a person wants to be religious that’s fine – in America freedom of and from religion is guaranteed in the Bill of Rights. However, pushing religion on the general public in the form of pseudo-science and outright lies about the Bill of Rights and the Constitution is just plain underhanded and dishonest – the latest example of that being the “wedge strategy” by the Discovery Institute.
Thanks for your reply,
Christopher
Hi, Christopher
In my opinion, and I must say in my experience, ignorance is opposite of faith. The more you are eager to study the word of God, the more eager you are to study of universe in general.
As for Jesus’ apocalypticism, don’t forget that Bible teaches that to God 1 day is like 1000 years and vice versa. The time since Jesus walked on Earth is really not much, considering the time the humans exist on the Earth (according to science).
I agree with you that ‘Church times’ (medieval and so on) were choking most rational ideas, progress, technology etc. But one have to wonder about that ‘Church’ of that time, as well as many ‘Churches’ of today. This is another issue and a long one.
Genesis goes hand-in-hand with science theory of the chronology of the Earth phases. Analyze Genesis 1.
Check out these 2 guys (PHD in science and Christian apologetics):
http://www.evidenceforchristianity.org/
http://www.douglasjacoby.com/
Sorry for my bad English.
Wish you all the best in your search for truth.
Dalibor,
I would encourage you to subject the following to a little more scrutiny:
“I agree with you that ‘Church times’ (medieval and so on) were choking most rational ideas, progress, technology etc. But one have to wonder about that ‘Church’ of that time, as well as many ‘Churches’ of today. This is another issue and a long one.”
There are some well publicized incidents like Galileo etc. I don’t think they were generally any worse than what happens today when a biologist questions Darwinism for example.
And the “Dark Ages” never happened. There is a widespread notion that the middle ages were full of ignorance and superstition. That really doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Good author on this topic: Rodney Stark.
Christopher. Read my post in answer to Bill. I think it is also an appropriate answer to yours.
Hello, Perry:
I’ve read you very interesting mail.
It is so full in references, ideas, explanations and themes I haven’t yet read it completely.
By the way, your mail is to me an opportunity for asking you something I am thinking about for a long time, as follows :
When God created Adam and Eve in the Garden, did God know they were going to sin (or: they were going to use their free will to sin)?
Because God is omniscient and beyond the time, he knows our past and our future.
But, if it is so, God is no benevolent because he, God, started a process whose future God knew that implied Adam and Eve sin and punishment.
Or, God is benevolent because he didn’t knew what was going to happen. Then God is not omniscient.
In order to be clear and exactly understood, I want say this: I am seriously and exclusively talking and asking about God, in no way about Adam, Eve, the serpent or another.
So I expect a serious answer and exclusively centered on God, only.
Greetings for you.
Carlos
Most theologians for thousands of years have tended to agree that God knew what Adam and Eve would do. God had a plan of salvation in mind before they did it and as the New Testament said, God foreknew those who would be saved before the foundation of the world.
Carlos,
Your confusion stems from the way you are trying to understand God. You state that “God is omniscient and beyond the time”, but then limit Him/Her to human understanding and motives. God can’t be God if He’s human. He is not “beyond the time” or even outside of time. For God there is no such thing as time. If you wish to trust Moses, when asked, God said (says) “I AM”; present tense. Time is a very limiting concept. There is even a growing body of ‘current thinking’ (as scientist like to call it – and I do consider myself a scientist) that believes that time cannot be separated from the space where it is perceived, hence the term space/time. So you cannot say that God ‘knew’; He knows. But don’t try to conceive of no past, no future, no beginning or no end. It will give you a headache.
You are also defining His “benevolence” or the lack thereof, in human terms, using words like punishment and sin. Whether you wish to go with a literal or metaphoric interpretation of Adam and Eve as the genesis of humanity, God’s purposes are beyond humans’ ability to comprehend. In fact, the Original Sin had nothing to do with a light snack. It was the desire to KNOW, to partake of “the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil” and be “as gods” with only a human mind (talk about standing on the shoulders of giants!) My personal interpretation is that knowledge without wisdom and understanding is a bad thing, something that history seems to support. However, as a human, I cannot claim to understand precisely what God had (has) in mind.
Hello, Lisa Parker.
This I what you say:
“You state that “God is omniscient and beyond the time”, but then limit Him/Her to human understanding and motives”. Then, when you say “God loves me”, just for only saying that, in human words, you are “limiting” him. OK?
“He is not “beyond the time” or even outside of time”.
Well. Then, if not beyond neither outside, is he in the time?
“God can’t be God if He’s human..”
Then, what was Jesus?
“If you wish to trust Moses, when asked, God said (says) “I AM”; present tense.”
Yes, but you are talking about god in past tense, “limiting” him with your tenses. How can you solve this?
“Time is a very limiting concept.”
I don’t believe that. Time, the “time arrow” is the way energy flows (Stephen Hawking). Or else: don’t you use a clock?
“There is even a growing body of ‘current thinking…”
Those are old news. That “current thinking” is almost 100 years old.
“…(as scientist like to call it – and I do consider myself a scientist) that believes that time cannot be separated from the space where it is perceived, hence the term space/time. So you cannot say that God ‘knew’; He knows. But don’t try to conceive of no past, no future, no beginning or no end. It will give you a headache.”
Lots of scientists works daily with the spacetime without a headhache. It is matter of manage 4 or more dimensions.
“You are also defining His “benevolence” or the lack thereof, in human terms”
If not in human terms, then what kind of terms?
“…using words like punishment and sin”.
Words that Bible is plenty of.
“Whether you wish to go with a literal or metaphoric interpretation”
Aha! Who and how decides whether literal or metaphoric?
Besides, how do you know it is metaphoric? I wonder if many Bible issues were not metaphoric when wrote, thousand years ago, but they were wrote and understood as real and true facts. It is today, when science shows wrong Bible parts, that you say “metaphoric”. So, “metaphor” is the magic way to get 2+3=17, for instance.
“God’s purposes are beyond humans’ ability to comprehend. In fact, the Original Sin had nothing to do with a light snack. It was the desire to KNOW .”
Wow!! Who says that? How do you know that was the cause of expulsion from Eden? Did God say it to you, or are you merely guessing God’s motives?
Or perhaps you are reasoning about God from facts, as I do.
“It was the desire to KNOW, to partake of “the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil””
Well. What if there were no trees? It seem to me that Adam and Eve wished because there were the desirable trees, as a temptation. Or else, if forbidden, what for were the trees in the garden?
It looks this way to me: I send you a dinner as a gift, with all kind of delicious and exquisite foods and beverages, with a box of chocolates with a note: “You are forbidden to eat this chocolates “
I find it a bit crazy, don’t you?
“My personal interpretation is that knowledge without wisdom and understanding is a bad thing, something that history seems to support”
Oh, yes. Like to arrange a gigantic genocide by sending a universal flood and then became repented. I agree 100% with you.
Finally, Lisa, here is Perry Marshall’s answer to my asking:
“Author: perrymarshall
Comment:
Most theologians for thousands of years have tended to agree that God knew what Adam and Eve would do. God had a plan of salvation in mind before they did it and as the New Testament said, God foreknew those who would be saved before the foundation of the world.”
My reasoning is:
If God foreknew those who would be saved, then foreknew those who wouldn’t , too.
This is “God created people not to be saved, it is to be condemned”
Then, God is omniscient but no benevolent.
Greetings
Carlos
Carlos,
The way I understand this is as follows: While God is omniscient, He also chose to limit Himself with respect to His omniscience precisely to allow us *true* free will. He is after all, God, and can choose to limit is omniescence and omnipotnence if He chooses. There are, to me, telling hints about this in the Genesis account, where for example God “brought them [the animals] to the man to see what he would call them.” (Gen 2:19) Clearly God must’ve deliberately limited His own omniscience in respect of his dealings with mankind just enough, in order to make a meaningful relationship with man possible (as shown in thie verse), or else in the above piece would’ve been pointless He would already know what the animals would be called!
So, exactly to what extent and how God limited his general omniscience we obviously do not know and are not told, but clearly, it was just enough to allow us free will and the ability to have a relationship with Him.
And consequently, this to me also resolves the contradiction you see between omniscience and God’s benevolence.
Hope that helps. :)
Hello, Walter
As I understand it, theology says God necessarily is “3O”: omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent, infinitely. Teology says he is that way by his own nature. So he cant stop or avoid being that. To me, limiting (diminishing) his omniscience to less than infinite is limiting his nature, an impossible. But, worst even, you add he (supposedly) did (does) it in order to make room for our free will to work, so you implying his omniscience and our free will are opposites each other, as simple logic implies. To me, it is his (infinite) omniscience or our fre will. So I remain as before. He knew, (or even foreknew) Adam and Eve, (with or without free will) were going to sin and to be condemned. Then. God is no omnibenevolent.
Greetings.
Carlos
Hello Carlos,
I see what you’re saying, but I don’t agree. It is a (to me erroneous) assumption that God is incapable of limiting or distancing him partially, maybe you might say, temporarily, from his omniscienct nature. If this was true, it would, I would argue, by itself be a contradiction of his omnipotence.
I would further submit that, in the form of Jesus Christ, God the Son did just this, when he became fully human and (temporarily) seperated Himself from his divine nature, eventually to serve as a sacrifice for humanity’s unrighteousness. (See f.ex Phil 2:6)
For the record and to be clear: I’m not claiming God altered his fundamental nature, I am suggesting that possibly he voluntarily *limited* it to some limited degree, only sufficiently for (our) free-will to exist.
I submit the contradiction you insist exists is like the one people point to when they ask the question about what would happen when an immovable object is struck by an unstoppable force. This apparent conundrum exists only because it is itself founded on a contradiction, and so is inherently nonsensical, fundamentally flawed and basically just wrong. You cannot reason based on flawed or contradictory premises and expect to get reasonable results. E.g. you cannot claim a paradox exists when it itself relies on a contradiction being true, that’s just bad/wrong logic/thinking, nothing more.
(Aside in case this is not clear: The issue with the immovable object/unstoppable force question is that the moment you involve an immovable object as a premise, that implicitly precludes an unstoppable force from existing. Hence, that makes it nonsensical to then introduce that as a premise in a logical argument. If you do, then what results is simply bad logic, nothing more.
I would further submit, at the end of the day, there’s a lot of things that we probably will never understand but that are nonetheless true. As one small example, how is it possible for example, for a photon to be in 2 physical places at once for example? We have our theories that basically describe and label this reality, but fundamentally we don’t really know. It seems paradoxical, and yet, the reality demonstrate that being true.
Regards,
Walter
Hello, Walter Prins:
First of all, I apologize. I couldn’t answer you before.
Based on theology, I guess that God is -even omnipotent- unable to do certain things: he can’t cease existing, he can’t commit suicide, and he can’t be simultaneously good and evil. And so on.
It is against its nature to be no-omniscient or “partially” omniscient. If he “limits” -as you suggest- his omniscience, he remains being that nevertheless: absolutely “omni”.
The same as the question of an immovable object and an unstoppable force, the issue of God’s omniscience and human free will IS positively a nonsense. Theology admits it is a contradiction and there is no way to get God “no guilty” of omniscience. All the issue of scientia media is a mere try but it fails: in no time God stops being omniscient, and then RESPONSIBLE.
Theology says that God knows before the Creation who will be saved and who won’t. Thus all what happened in the garden was in God’s knowledge. Then, I have to repeat the same as before: God is no-omnibenevolent. Do you agree?
Greetings.
Carlos
I am sorry, but I don’t understand; where did you get the idea that pre-knowledge always implies responsibility?
As I understand it, in giving people free will, God has chosen to let us take responsibility for our actions so that we can learn. God, knowing we would sin, could stop us, but that would remove the consequences for our actions and make Him a bad father.
But perhaps you have an answer for this too?
Hello, Andrew Lobb.
Regarding free will, I want to add this:
From First Cause argument, it is said everything exists or happens has a cause. Then, nothing exists or happens without a cause. So, our will has a cause, and then is not free. Then, free will doesn’t exist.
Greetings.
Carlos
Carlos,
>It is against its nature to be no-omniscient or >“partially” omniscient. If he “limits” -as you suggest- >his omniscience, he remains being that nevertheless: >absolutely “omni”.
I don’t agree. Let me clarify.
Having an attribute or ability does not mean you have to use it, and also does not mean you cannot decide to limit it. Not using it or limiting it equally does not you’ve altered your fundamental nature.
For example consider the inherent ability we all have to see in colour. Normally you would see everything in their normal colours, it is **part of your nature** to be able to **discern the colours** of things. But this does not mean you must/will always see everything in colour! If you (for example) put on monochromatic glasses (which thus limits your ability to see colour) then you obviously will only see the world in black and white and shades of grey.
But has this changed *your* nature? No! This limiting happened without altering your nature, which is still very much that you’re inherently capable to see in colour. But, by putting on the monochromatic glasses, you’ve voluntarily **limited** your ability to see colour, **without** altering your nature. Do you see?
So, like I’ve said before, my position is *NOT* that God alters his very nature by deciding to limit the application of His attributes.
And like I’ve also said before: There are many things which we don’t understand and probably never will. There are many apparent contradictions in what we know and understand of the world, and yet, here we are and for the most part our models of the world work reasonably well, despite such problems.
>The same as the question of an immovable object and an >unstoppable force, the issue of God’s omniscience and >human free will IS positively a nonsense. Theology >admits it is a contradiction and there is no way to get >God “no guilty” of omniscience. All the issue of >scientia media is a mere try but it fails: in no time >God stops being omniscient, and then RESPONSIBLE.
Firstly, to note, you’ve referenced “Theology” a few times now. Please note that I am not here acting as some apologist for what (some undefined notion of) “theology” says. As you should well know there is not just one opinion in theology on every subject you might raise. What I have been trying to do however is give you alternate/additional explanation(s) relating to the apparent conundrum/contradiction you raised in your original post.
You can choose to accept/consider it or reject it as you’ve been doing. But given that I’ve demonstrated at least one more plausible alternative, I put it to you that your conundrum/contradiction now only exists due to your insistence on effectively committing a “fallacy of false choice”. You’re refusing to allow legitimate hypotheses into the conversation, thereby causing, as far as I’m concerned, a false dilemma.
>Theology says that God knows before the Creation who >will be saved and who won’t. Thus all what happened in >the garden was in God’s knowledge. Then, I have to >repeat the same as before: God is no-omnibenevolent. Do >you agree?
No I don’t. As I say, all of this hinges as far as I’m concerned on your choice/insistence that the only possible explanations are the ones you list, which you then conclude implies a contradiction. I see things differently.
Respectfully,
Walter
Walter:
“>It is against its nature to be no-omniscient or >“partially” omniscient. If he “limits” -as you suggest- >his omniscience, he remains being that nevertheless: >absolutely “omni”.
I don’t agree. Let me clarify.
Having an attribute or ability does not mean you have to use it, and also does not mean you cannot decide to limit it. Not using it or limiting it equally does not you’ve altered your fundamental nature.
For example consider the inherent ability we all have to see in colour. Normally you would see everything in their normal colours, it is **part of your nature** to be able to **discern the colours** of things. But this does not mean you must/will always see everything in colour! If you (for example) put on monochromatic glasses (which thus limits your ability to see colour) then you obviously will only see the world in black and white and shades of grey.
But has this changed *your* nature? No! This limiting happened without altering your nature, which is still very much that you’re inherently capable to see in colour. But, by putting on the monochromatic glasses, you’ve voluntarily **limited** your ability to see colour, **without** altering your nature. Do you see?”
Mmmm….Are you doing aerobatics? OK. Let us suppose you are right. Then, we have a god that voluntarily limits –or ignore- his omniscience. Then he is responsible for that limitation and its consequences: to be unaware of what was happening in the Eden. Because he was voluntarily unaware, he couldn’t stop the events before “the red line” and “limit the damages”. When he decided to know again, he enrages and punish. From the beginning, he is a conscious and responsible actor of every instance of facts, either having decided to know or having decided not to know.
Even more: 1) I start an avalanche of snow.2) I cause a massive “stampede” of panic of conscious people with “free will”. Even if I don’t know the trajectory of any snowflake in particular or the way each person runs, I am responsible for damages, wounds or deaths happened because I am the origin of events. The same, for god’s ‘lacking of knowledge” of what Adam and Eve were doing.
“So, like I’ve said before, my position is *NOT* that God alters his very nature by deciding to limit the application of His attributes.
And like I’ve also said before: There are many things which we don’t understand and probably never will. There are many apparent contradictions in what we know and understand of the world, and yet, here we are and for the most part our models of the world work reasonably well, despite such problems.”
In this case everyone can choose to follow a religion or myth or creed or faith or science, as he likes, each of them with its complexities and or absurdities.
“>The same as the question of an immovable object and an >unstoppable force, the issue of God’s omniscience and >human free will IS positively a nonsense. Theology >admits it is a contradiction and there is no way to get >God “no guilty” of omniscience. All the issue of >scientia media is a mere try but it fails: in no time >God stops being omniscient, and then RESPONSIBLE.
Firstly, to note, you’ve referenced “Theology” a few times now. Please note that I am not here acting as some apologist for what (some undefined notion of) “theology” says. As you should well know there is not just one opinion in theology on every subject you might raise. What I have been trying to do however is give you alternate/additional explanation(s) relating to the apparent conundrum/contradiction you raised in your original post.”
OK. I have read certain issues mainly from Catholic theology.
“You can choose to accept/consider it or reject it as you’ve been doing. But given that I’ve demonstrated at least one more plausible alternative, I put it to you that your conundrum/contradiction now only exists due to your insistence on effectively committing a “fallacy of false choice”. You’re refusing to allow legitimate hypotheses into the conversation, thereby causing, as far as I’m concerned, a false dilemma.”
I am grateful for your efforts to propose alternate explanations. But they don’t satisfy me, they look as logically capricious, strongly biased and contorted. I see them as trying to save the image of a being of dubious existence. Regarding omniscience-free will (supposing it exists) it looks as if you were trying to get 2=5.
“>Theology says that God knows before the Creation who >will be saved and who won’t. Thus all what happened in >the garden was in God’s knowledge. Then, I have to >repeat the same as before: God is no-omnibenevolent. Do >you agree?
No I don’t. As I say, all of this hinges as far as I’m concerned on your choice/insistence that the only possible explanations are the ones you list, which you then conclude implies a contradiction. I see things differently.”
OK. It is your right
Finally, it is obvious from this story that god wants us lacking of knowledge.
Greetings,
Carlos
Perry, I’m sorry, but your facts are fiction, and fiction you espouse we generate are facts. Atheists do not have group thinks, churches, organizations,or temples. Atheist are exactly what the word implies no more no less. Its the likes you and your sheeple that twist the English language to fit your mythical agenda. Your retort so so fall of misinformation that I will not take the time to argue. Lets just say it was laughable. Ignorance can only be tolerated if it is based on no knowledge. You are obviously attracting those who have no knowledge of the truth. So, I tolerate your comments but will not reply. Thank you. Ps. I’m an Atheist and was responsible for collecting the most in Sarasota for the Katrina aftermath $57k in one night. And that my dear friend is the tip of the iceberg.
Robert,
In point of fact, atheists do have group thinks and organizations. If you want a list, ‘Google’ it.
And I think it is wonderful that you cared enough and took the effort to help those who needed it, and (not trying to sound condescending in the least!) I am proud of you for doing it. But I don’t think it is a good idea to start any argument, implied or otherwise, about which group (religion, nationality, ethnicity, et al) is the nicest or kindest or most generous bunch. Generalizing leads to misunderstanding and breeds ignorance.
I simply don’t understand why athiests get so much attention. I’m an a-Nessie-ist (I don’t believe in the loch Ness Monster), I’m also an a-EasterBunniest, an a-Communist and an a-Crop Circlist.
So what?
Who cares what you or Richard Dawkins or Bertrand Russell don’t believe? Just go off into your panel discussion and not talk about anything you don’t believe in. It’s absurd.
The real question is: OK, what DO you believe? And what are you doing because of these beliefs.
A wise man once said that we argue the hardest about only those things that we are the least sure of.
RE: Q.10 “More people have been killed in the name of religion than any other cause in the history of the world.”
You stole my argument out from under me, sort of. BUT, is not Communism, like humanism, a religion unto itself? Where humanism reveres itself, Communism revels in the “infinite wisdom” of government. Both Evangelize endlessly, extolling their virtues. Both damn opposition, and in the case of Communism, apply the penalty of death.
Dear Sir, Why is there such a need among human beings to prove that there is a God or that there isn’t?
( Thank you for presenting this very stimulating website, it is wonderful to be able to be in touch with many different convictions and approaches. As for the above question: I’ve studied some very convincing evidence supporting both scenario’s. It seems that when it comes to spiritual matters, we grope like moles in the dark earth, trying to prove the absence or the presence of light which we cannot see. I could prove two opposing ‘truths’, the strength of my arguments defined by the amount and quality of information and the manner in which I choose to arrange and present that information. For a person who does not believe, no prove will suffice. For a person who does believe, no prove is necessary. Each has made his CHOICE. Does that make one of them more ‘wrong’ or ‘right’ than the other one? )
If there is a God, what can be more important than connecting with that being? Those that have made that connection, for example Christians, realise how you are only living half a life when you don’t have that relationship. It then becomes natural (an imperative if you follow the teachings of Jesus) to share this wonderful knowledge with others. That, in my opinion, is why proving, or at least showing the evidence available supports his existance, is so important.
I would like to ask a whole lot orf related questions. As you will realise, I was a comitted christian, and now… I don’t know. I used to give because I just loved to give and the word says ‘give’. Give and it shall be given…? When my husband lost his job, NOT ONE CHRISTIAN HELPED US. When my daughter wanted to get married inour church, the minister had a meeting with her and her husband, and refused to marry him bacause he did not say he was going to heaven! That classed him as not being a christian. He helped us!
I God gives everyone free will and will not interfere in lives, why bother to pray? Nothing changes. It all stays the same!
There is no Holy Spirit that I know of. Sometimes people help when you are staight out up front, but if left to the Holy Spirit – nothing happens!
How do we actually know if God, or more particularly, Jesus, existed? Maybe things got lost is translation?
There seem to be laws of cause and effect whether you are a believer or not.
I hope you don’t mind these questions, but I cannot ask them in my community as I genuinely want to know and discuss these issues, but it would be taken as sacralige, and not as wanting answers.
Thanks,
Linda
Free will is not the same as believing that God will not act in the world. God wants to do things WITH us, and for us to join him in the labor. He wants neither for us to labor alone or for him to labor alone. It’s kind of like a spouse. You want your spouse to work with you willingly not under force.
I am sorry that some Christians have not been helpful to you. I believe you can look and find Christians who feed the poor, visit the sick.
Linda
I share your questions and lost my faith.
Your current church does not reflect your beliefs or your values.
If you value your faith, (and I suspect that you do) you NEED to find a church where you can ask your questions freely and without feeling condemned.
I share Carlos’ view on the original sin, but would like to take it even one step further. The concept of the Original Sin is perhaps the greatest reason for my atheism. I could swallow/accept/believe most other things within Christian Dogma. However, my point of contention with this concept is just too great.
And my problem with it goes thus:
In order for morals to exist, there HAS to be free choice. Morality invokes the capability of choosing that one is moral or amoral. That is the reason why the concept of morality only works with humans (though one could argue that several species of animals could be sentient enough to develop morality). If there is no choice in the matter, then something cannot be amoral. An example of this would be a father stealing food from a market to feed his children. Now whether the father is moral or not depends on the values of the society in which this happens, namely whether life or the rights of individuals are of higher value. But one CANNOT blame the children of being amoral because the father stole for them. The father chose to steal for them, they did not choose to have the father steal for them.
How does this tie in with the concept of Original Sin? I would argue, that it is impossible for anyone but Adam and Eve to be “carriers” of this sin. Sin indicates that a code of laws, to uphold morals set by someone, was broken. Now, unless I am mistaken, I think no one who is reading this website was around when the fruit of knowledge of good and evil was eaten. Therefore it is impossible for us to carry this sin if we did not choose to commit the action that incurred the punishment. If the latter case is true, then it is not a sin that is the burden of all humanity, but a curse (much different in nature I assure you), much like that incurred by Tantalus for attempting to trick the gods into cannibalism. But I would argue that in that case, being dealt those lemons, Oedipus should have made himself a glass of lemonade to take on his trip to find new gods.
I have heard the argument that the Original Sin is a moral choice, since we can choose to accept Jesus Christ, be good Christians, and may even still end up in heaven. But this argument does not hold water. There is a large difference between having the choice to get rid of punishment and having a choice in incurring the punishment in the first place. If this were not the case, then there would be no difference between someone getting into your vehicle while you are waiting at a red light, pointing a gun to your head and telling you to “Drive, or the last thing going through your mind will be a .45” and leaving after you brought that person to where he/she wanted to go, and never having had that unpleasant experience in the first place. But they are not, to say the least.
Another very convincing argument, on a more theological basis, against the concept of Original Sin, is that, According to Scripture, God gave us reason and free will. Reason to determine what is best for us, and free will in order to do something with that knowledge. He did not only give these to us, he made it clear that they are key to our survival. Just as a bird will surely die if it intentionally breaks it’s wings, we perish if we choose to not think, and don’t make choices based on our thinking. After all, Existence was granted to us, survival was not. Anyone who does not agree with this ought to take a week-long vacation in a wilderness area, such as the Rockies, without supplies. If you choose to not think during this time, I have a hard time believing that fire will magically appear in front of you, that a shelter will assemble itself, and that food will fly/crawl into your mouth.
That is the basis for our morality as well, however. For again, if we cannot choose, morality is not involved. I would therefore argue that choosing to survive, since existence was already granted to us, would be the best way to honour that existence. It would also follow that any action done against our survival would be amoral, whether committed by us or someone else. Now, survival has different implications for different people, so this might even make suicide more palatable, since for some reason, survival may not be the mere carrying on, but may also involve striving, and attaining, happiness. But that is going off on a tangent.
The basic logic would be that, we have to choose to sin in order for us to actually sin. If this is not the case, then it would be judgment against His creations, the way the He created them. And surely, that is a sin.
“I would therefore argue that choosing to survive, since existence was already granted to us, would be the best way to honour that existence.”
And a poor argument that would make.. It is based on two assumptions, namely:
1. Survival of self is of highest priority
2. Survival is only a physical thing..
Firstly, I could also ask you why you did not argue that to honour that existence, we should attempt to help as many people survive as possible.. After all, would that not better honour the one who made everyone?
Secondly, if as an atheist, you speculate upon the Christian God, I’m afraid, you must do so by the rules set out within the Bible. Much of Jesus’ message was about the heaven. Though the benefit of Christianity is here and now as well as in heaven, death is not an issue as the immortal soul survives. Therefore the survival of the soul is paramount. There are actions you could take to ensure your physical survival which would cause your soul to be separated from God (who is life) and hence die and by your argument, dishonour God. Perhaps the soul ceases to exist or remains(who knows?), but definitely it can die the “second death” from which there is no resurrection.
Have fun!
I do not believe that it would honour the one who made everyone if we attempted to help as many people survive as possible. As I stated, my opinion is that choosing to survive is the best way to honour that we exist. If you will, this could be interpreted at that close, personal connection with God that most people seek. Now, I would almost think it disrespectful to go against that very tenet. It would be stating the same as “Well, we do know that you bestowed existence and the capability to survive amongst most of these people, but we don’t really trust you there. So, I shall sacrifice my own life, or at least portions thereof, because I don’t really trust your judgment.”
This does not mean that I reject game theory, however. Quite the opposite in fact, I very much embrace it. But game theory states that everyone has to be able to “bring something to the table”, and then multiplies the output, that being the reason to practice it. It follows the same idea as economies of scale. Perhaps the best example is the “hunt explanation” (with the deer and the four spear men). But the important thing to remember is that team work is not equal to helping as many people as possible to survive. I provide CPR to someone in the street in the hope that if I ever require it, someone will perform the same deed for me. I am gaining something out of that effort, something that I think would at one time help my survival. It is therefore not a sacrifice.
Ahh, but what you said in regards to “the survival of the soul being paramount” disregards the fact that God did bestow on us this plane of existence. Would it therefore not be logical to speculate that God would prefer us to excel not just in the coming plane of existence (Heaven), but also in this?
Hmmm… did not see your response before; hence the delay.
Certainly we must excel in this plane of existence. Christianity is very clear on this. However, the question is what does it mean to excel. In your limited and materialistic view, it means survive. In the Christian view, it means something spiritual. To “store up treasure in heaven.” To develop our relationship with God and others around us. To present an undamaged soul to God. These are more important than physical survival, since we are only here for a short time, but must deal with the consequences of our actions forever.
People often say this life is “training” or a “rehearsal” for the next. I suspect the bulk of your argument revolves around an assumption that there is no next. If you did, your perspective would be radically different.
Cheers
We do not really “choose” to accept Jesus Christ…it is all a work of God in that God MUST draw us to Himself. He is not arbitrary in this, but only God knows a person’s heart. I was seeking God, I was in church and listening to the sermon…BUT I was not seeking or looking for what God actually DID in my heart at a given moment during church service that day…just as Paul was not looking for what Christ was going to do in his heart that day on the way to arrest Christians…breathing hatred along the way scripture says.
God appeals to each one of us on a personal level…He MUST reveal Himself to us…we cannot find Him…He finds us.
Now a days, people have hear so much about God, and about the Way of salvation, they can turn towards God through confession, of sin and for His forgiveness and for His restoration…but God must do it all. He is not willing that any should perish…so it is a very fine line between God’s Soverignty and our choice. The thing about our choices is “none are good, no not one…”; we are not inclined to seek God, unless He is ALREADY working in our hearts…perhaps it is in our zealous and misguided anger, or our doubt or fear or any other human condition…but God MUST act first.
So taking your question by question method:
Do a lot of people following a myth make the myth true?
You said that it’s true because the Jesus story stuck, damn thats a stupid statement and you know it.
By the way, just because a book afirms that 160 million people were killed because of communism, doesn’t make it true.
There has benn a lot of religious conflicts, just to name a few:
Albigensian Crusade, 1208-49
Algeria, 1992-
Baha’is, 1848-54
Bosnia, 1992-95
Boxer Rebellion, 1899-1901
Christian Romans, 30-313 CE
Croatia, 1991-92
Early Christian doctrinal disputes
English Civil War, 1642-46
Holocaust, 1938-45
Huguenot Wars, 1562-1598
India, 1992-2002
India: Suttee & Thugs
Indo-Pakistani Partition, 1947
Iran, Islamic Republic, 1979-
Iraq, Shiites, 1991-92
Jews, 1348
Jonestown, 1978
Lebanon
1860
1975-92
Martyrs, generally
Molucca Is., 1999-
Mongolia, 1937-39
Northern Ireland, 1974-98
Responsibility generally (Is religion responsible for more deaths than …?)
Christian culpabiltiy
Russian pogroms:
1905-06
1917-22
St. Bartholemew Massacre, 1572
Shang China, ca. 1300-1050 BCE
Shimabara Revolt, Japan 1637-38
Sikh uprising, India, 1984-91
Spanish Inquisition, 1478-1834
Taiping Rebellion, 1850-64
Thirty Years War, 1618-48
Tudor England
Vietnam, 1800s
Witch Hunts, 1400-1800
Xhosa, 1857
In addition, here are a few noteworthy conflicts where dissimilar
ethnic groups fought for primarily religious reasons:
Arab Outbreak, 7th Century CE
Arab-Israeli Wars, 1948-
Al Qaeda, 1993-
Crusades, 1095-1291
Dutch Revolt, 1566-1609
Nigeria, 1990s, 2000s
only inside those conflicts with the RECORDED casualties they put the figures in approximately 809,215,732, thats a lot more than what your bold statement says about atheist governments. Of course these are just a fraction of all the religious conflicts there has been throughout history, if you dont believe the figures, look all of it yourself.
And of course this includes only direct death by the use of violence, the black book of communism refers to deaths caused by deportation, starvation etcetera, so i’m gonna give you a vote of confidence and i’m gonna think you didn’ know any of this so please look it up, hope i helped to change a little bit of your opinion.
Please substantiate your number 809,215,732.
To Perry Marshall;
OK. Then, lets say, “only” 100,000,000 (or 10,000,000 or even best 1,000,000) killed by followers of the God of Love is an acceptable number?
Carlos
I do not think that ANY killings in the name of God are acceptable.
Mr: Robert Edwards,
The world would no doubt be a far better place if we all possessed your profound humility and self-professed limitless charity.
You however are either misinformed or purposely disingenuous when you suggest atheists do not have organizations. Two immediately come to mind: American Atheists and Atheists Alliance International. Then there are those, two numerous to number, that employ the terms “naturalism” or “secular humanism” to advance assertions that there are no dieties or entities apart and/or transcendent to the natural world.
Much of the rest that follows this misstatement of fact is “dicta”–opinion nothing more.
Your suggestion that acts of compassion, generosity, and good citizenship committed by an atheist somehow substantiates the basic premise of atheism is as logically flawed as suggesting acts of violence and evil perpetuated by “believers” says something essential about the devil.
One question: you suggest believers believe as they do because they are either ignorant, misinformed, or mistaken about the the ultimate nature of existence. May I ask what compelling proofs–not syllogisms or tautologies–but evidence that would at least rise to the level necessary to prevail in a civil suit: preponderance of the evidence. What facts do you have at your disposal that the world as we experience it precludes the existence of diety?
Nobody has yet sufficiently provided such proof to me that would hold up in a court of law–at least as I know the law to be, while the relatively new field of Astrobiology has successfully provided at least some hard science to suggest that previous theories which suggest the universe was the result of chance no longer pass the laugh test.
One more group of Atheists is the group that professes “share the wealth” by force…Communism and Socialism. They may claim some form of faith, but it is in their actions that their true religion come forth…control and stifling indivdual freedoms.
Religion comes in the form of godless governments that have followers who have dogmatic allegiance to their leaders…including our own and present government in the U.S.A.
Um, Glenda, I would appreciate it (mainly for your own benefit, since the destruction of world views is so rarely well perceived by those who’s views are shattered like the stained glass window of a church) if you would not make your deeply Republican views all too known on this site, especially when defacing the best thing to happen to the United States since the 1930s. Just the memories of the Reagan and Bush administrations force shivers down my spine in terms of control, the stifling of freedoms, and let’s not forget the Iron heeled boot of neo-liberalism that continually enjoys the stomping-in of developing world skulls for the benefit of the few.
Gregor,
I would appreciate you not making your deeply (Democratic?) views all too known on this site. Everyone please take your political debates elsewhere.
Mr. McGregor,
You yourself are victim to the same limitations Christians have which lead them to a belief in Christianity.
You present yourself as someone looking from the outside in. The truth, however, is that in
making what superficially seems like an objective criticism of Perry’s beliefs you are being both the advocate of your own belief as well as the judge who rules on the merits of your case. You really wouldn’t want to find yourself in court, would you, where the prosecutor and the judge were the same individual?
Consequently, as you dissect Perry’s view, you do so as one who has been brought up in a culture, whose tools of choice are history, science, and rationality. Were you born in another culture, you would view affirmations of belief through different lenses–i.e., personal experience, revelation, or intuition. There is NOBODY who could impartially look at another’s belief because they have been nurtured on any one of any systems of thought be it pantheism, naturalism, theism, or rationalism–neither of which can claim any inherent, a priori authority.
You mistakenly make the statement that science and democracy thrived only when when religious dogma was surpressed, when in fact two of humanities greatest scientists, Copernicus and Galileo, conceivably considered as the fathers of modern science both believed there was something more than naturalism needed that could explain natural phenomenon–that is, you had to reach for something beyond the universe to explain it.
Copernicus described his quest for the “mechanism of the universe wrought for us by a supremely good and orderly creator–the system the best and most orderly artist of all framed for our sake.”
Copernicus used the analogy of a craftsman creating something supremely beautiful for us; it wasn’t a conclusion of his observations but the assumption that was the engine that drove his inquiry.
So, too, try to rekindle the turf war between Descartes and the church that would determine
who had province over science and who over human nature is an anachronism and half truth: while a papacy hostile to Copernican theory did surpress scientific inquiry for a time and rationalism set that inquiry free again, the science to begin with was greatly invigorated by religious dogma through the belief of Copernicus and Galileo.
Keppler and Newton as well believed the universe was the product of a mind. They were driven by a quest to discover “God’s handiwork” and that there was a hidden subtext to nature that could be understood and man could get a glimpse into how God put the cosmos together.
For reasons that completely escape me, individuals like yourself find it considerably intolerable to acknowledge that the “giant shoulders” upon which science stands were men of Christian faith.
Getting back to the heart of the matter, it doesn’t matter that you cloak your argument in the Robes of Science. You have done the same thing the believer has: bought into the collective opinions of others and it is a tenant of YOUR “religion” that science method is superior to religious experience–and this is not an opinion that you hold because you had a Buddha like moment under a banyon tree. By degree, you accepted the tenants of your faith–scientism– with very little resistance just as the Navaho child accepts his because during his formative years it is the only ocean of “truth” into which he is repeatedly submerged.
Were you born to a hindu family, you would have less disdain for things spiritual, even if you went on to become a biophysicist. In the west, however, we are required to take sides, and long before we choose we have been force fed “facts” which inevitably determine the side we shall choose.
At the end of the day, neither you or the Christian have anything but your own opinion on the resurrection of Christ. Each can cite scripture and verse of their preferred scripture, but in fact, your opinion in the tenants of Christianity is only opinion–just as the Christian’s view of secularism is only opinion, and that is so because you are expressing that opinion, again just as the Christian is, in a language limited by his experience.
You may not believe in a soul, a God, or life after death. “Die” as a friend of mind did after arresting from a cardiac conclusion and experiencing something which you believed to be supernatural and omnipotent while “pronounced” and your opinion might change. Die and be revived as another friend of mine did but who was insensate and experienced nothing remarkable and you might believe this life is all their is.
Both in their own way are right but both have opinion.
You are no closer to truth than Perry–nor any more distant from it–but that’s just my opinion.
Mr Richards: Unfortunately, one point upon which your whole argument rests is false: “Science is a form of religion” – “scientism” as you call it. This is easily disproven.
Plus you wrote a sentence in your reply that I don’t understand: ‘“Die” as a friend of mind did after arresting from a cardiac conclusion and experiencing something which you believed to be supernatural and omnipotent while “pronounced” and your opinion might change.’ What your friend went through sounds very serious from what I can gather, anyway. I hope he survived unscathed.
Science contains no dogma. There are no authorities who dictate what science is or who can practice science. As much as you would like to think so, there are absolutely no canons or creeds dictating what scientists must do or preach. Nothing in science must be taken on faith, especially nothing supernatural. If a scientist’s work is not up to par, it doesn’t matter how much he harangues his colleagues with loud and aggressive speech about how they’ll burn in a lake of fire if they don’t follow him. If he doesn’t provide evidence for his conclusions, then his ideas carry no weight. In fact, even if he does provide evidence but not results other scientist in his field can replicate after repeated attempts, then he is equally left by the wayside. And anyway, religious scientists have no problem finding an amicable balance between the two.
Science and democracy share the core attribute of equality. Mankind suffered to a much greater degree before the Enlightenment than it does now – at least in the “West”, where great progress has been made so that these two realms of rational thought have replaced religion and feudalism as the cornerstones of society.
Mark Twain wrote: During many ages there were witches. The Bible said so. The Bible commanded that they should not be allowed to live. Therefore the Church, after eight hundred years, gathered up its halters, thumb-screws, and firebrands, and set about its holy work in earnest. She worked hard at it night and day during nine centuries and imprisoned, tortured, hanged, and burned whole hordes and armies of witches, and washed the Christian world clean with their foul blood.
Then it was discovered that there was no such thing as witches, and never had been. One does not know whether to laugh or to cry…..There are no witches. The witch text remains; only the practice has changed. Hell fire is gone, but the text remains. Infant damnation is gone, but the text remains. More than two hundred death penalties are gone from the law books, but the texts that authorized them remain.
As you know, the Constitution states: “All men are created equal.” Science is not concerned with your ethnicity or your religion, it is concerned with results. Under a feudalistic monarch who derived his power over his subjects by invoking his divine right, it didn’t matter who you were and what you could do, it mattered what blood-line you came from or whether you had the church behind you. If a true free thinker came along, one who was unencumbered with the dogma preached at the time, and stated that a blue-blood or a church father was mistaken, where did he or she end up? Burnt at the stake or tortured into submission until a confession was extracted. The inquisitors in medieval times, in fact, had a special means for torturing those who were unbelievers, so we know they were around then. Prominent thinkers knew better than to go up against those in power for that reason. For this reason, many – for fear of losing their lives – put up a façade of belief in the local dogma. As brave as he was, Galileo probably fit this mold.
Additionally, since rational thinkers do base their conclusions on evidence, it is no surprise that gifted scientists and thinkers in the past did not consider the idea of a deity out of the question – many still don’t. Thomas Jefferson was a deist (one who believes that a master planner created the universe and left it to its own devices, i.e. this explicitly rules out the idea of a tinkerer or personal god who’s ever-present and always toying with his creation). Newton lived in a time when so little was known about the universe and life on Earth that the idea of a designer and manipulator must have appealed to him, as it would’ve to anyone at that time. By the way, according to his biographer, Descartes had a deep religious faith as a Catholic, which he retained to his dying day, along with a resolute, passionate desire to discover the truth. He has this in common with many scientists, who are both religious and also honest enough with themselves to accept what their results say about the world.
No scientist would ever be so arrogant as to say that there is no god – not even Richard Dawkins. He merely says there is no evidence for him, which – up until now – there hasn’t been. What you may consider evidence, i.e. “the Scriptures” or that you “feel the Holy Spirit”, is not enough to satisfy someone who requires corroborative proof. I repeat Richard Feynmann’s quote here, because it most succinctly summarizes these differences: “Religion is a culture of faith. Science is a culture of doubt.”
If you have a problem with not knowing or not understanding your surroundings and the universe in general, that’s fine. Believe in what you will; it is your right as guaranteed in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. Do not expect those of us, who require evidence to form our world-view and who would rather not know the answer than to fill in the gaps with the supernatural, to do so as well. As I mentioned in a previous comment: Any religion, which has attempted to take on science has failed miserably, because science requires evidence and religion does not, so it’d be best if you kept the two separate.
If I’d grown up elsewhere and been brought up to be Hindu, Muslim or Buddhist, it would not change my desire for rational inquiry in the least. Science is separate and independent from religion, because it is completely different. Once again, so you understand: No faith is required for science. If someone publishes his results, and they’re flawed, they will be found out sooner or later; then these results will be dismissed. Science builds slowly upon previous knowledge (that’s all that can be done, actually), and therefore any sweeping statements – a product of well-developed theories – are the result of a lot of work.
Religion is set and does not change. It doesn’t matter how much information comes to light. If new evidence were to come to light that there was no virgin birth, Christians the world over would not accept it, because it is one of the cornerstones of their belief system. Dogma is monolithic and final – for the most part at least. I just heard about a new book by an evangelical Christian named Brian McLaren, who states: “God revealed in Christ crucified shows us a vision of God that identifies with the victim rather than the perpetrator, identifies with the one suffering rather than the one inflicting suffering.” He went on to state: “We also know that — particularly within the evangelical community — the younger you are, the less likely you are to take the Bible literally, to believe that the Bible is the inerrant ‘word of God,’ as compared to a book of moral precepts.” So there is hope that these younger evangelicals will be less stiff and stubborn regarding science and the great benefits to be gained from being open to it.
Science is competitive, and scientists are curious about mechanisms and outcomes – all of which is driven and proven by evidence. If evidence comes to light, which results in a paradigm shift, then so be it. That’s one step closer to the truth for humanity, which has benefited enormously from scientific progress.
Christopher,
It sounds like have a very idealistic view of science. I am sorry if I’m mistaken and I apologize in advance if I am but it does not sound like you are a person who works in the scientific profession. It sounds like you admire scientists and that you believe that scientists are wise and religious people are fools.
Science is FULL of dogmas. Have you ever read Kuhn’s book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”? It’s all about the never-ending effort to free ourselves from entrenched scientific dogmas. Crick’s Central Dogma comes to mind, which said that information only flows one direction in the genome. That has been proven to be wrong in the last 10 years. Actually, Barbara McClintock proved that wrong 50 years ago but it took several decades for her to overcome the dogma. Finally she won the Nobel Prize for her work in 1983.
There is a dogma in biology that says that evolutionary progress is caused by random mutations filtered by natural selection. It’s in almost every biology book. But in 5+ years I have never encountered a single person who could point to a scientific paper that demonstrates this to be so. It’s absolutely false, I know this as a communication engineer. There is no such thing as a data copying error that leads to better, more useful data.
To the extent science can prove anything, the genetic code proves design in biology. I show this at http://perry.fingerprints.s3.amazonaws.com/index.htm and I’ve defended it successfully for 4 years on the largest atheist discussion forum in the world. see http://www.cosmicfingerprints.com/infidels.
I apologize that many religious people are ignorant hypocrites and murderers. Some scientists are too. That doesn’t make science or religion evil. It just means they’re powerful and they need to be handled with care.
Arjan, I agree….reminds me of the optimist/pessimist glass half empty/half full thing…both are right and both are wrong and no amount of arguing will change the way either feels. It is your CHOICE which view to subscribe to. That said, does it not make sense that if a person feels they have some answers to life/death questions they would want to share it? I (in my ignorance) know of no atheist who has made him or herself or anybody around them a more productive member of society by debating against the existence of God.
God loves us all regardless of our reciprocity.
Perry,
I am in need of a clarification regarding the passage” when the sons of God went with the daughters of men,…….who are called the Nephelim” in Genesis 3. Could you throw some light on this passage.
Thank you,
David.
This is normally understood to mean angels copulated with humans. Jude also refers to this. The lost book of Enoch (NOT in the Bible, but arguably quoted by Jude) talks about this, and Enoch says that the angels who did this were immediately damned.
My argument against angels copulating at all is that Jesus said, “You misunderstand scripture” if you think there will be marriage in heaven because we will be “like angels”…not given to sexual lusts. Even the fallen angels do not have the body parts that humans do according to Jesus’ remarks here.
Sin entered the world after the rebellion of Adam and Eve…Eve listened to Satan’s words and not God’s; therefore, with sin came death and a fallen world and even nature and sinless creatures suffer and groan because of it…awaiting Christ to “make all things new” and a new creation…sinless and without evil.
It is mythology to think angels copulate with human women. It is Greek think.