I’m reading the book shown below (click on the link to go to its Amazon page), a useful summary of nonbelievers’ responses to religionists’ arguments for God. The book has done quite well since it came out a year ago; its author is an ex-Muslim who now heads The Atheist Republic, a support group and resource center for heathens.
Navabi’s argument #2 is “God’s Existence is Proven by Scripture.” That’s a common claim, most obvious in the arguments that Jesus really existed and that his deeds were real—simply because the Bible tells us so. Navabi’s refutation occupies five pages of the book, but is more economically expressed in this cartoon sent me by reader Paul D:
Q.E.D.
And, of course, Potted Harrier is proof positive that you can catch the train to Warthog’s in the Charring Cross Tube station on platform 19 37/54. Plan your supernatural pub craw vacation today!
b&
I hope you’ve misquoted that (not that I’ve ever read Harry Potter). I assume ‘Warthog’s’ is a destination somewhere outside the London urban area. However, no main line trains run from Charing Cross Underground station and never could, since the two lines (Northern and Bakerloo) serving it are deep-level (i.e. genuinely ‘tube’) lines and no main-line stock would fit. And no ‘tube’ stock could run beyond the limits of the fourth-rail electrification.
Main-line trains could of course run from Charing Cross station itself (i.e. the main-line surface station).
Yours
Prof. Pedant
Yes; you’re absolutely correct. Not possible from Charing Cross. Which is why you catch the train at CharRing Cross.
Details are important. Pay attention!
b&
I noticed that but considered it a typo. There is no station in London and certainly no Underground (“Tube”) station called CharRing Cross.
Or is that a reference to the Harry Potter books which I haven’t read?
cr
Ah, but that’s just what the warlocks want you to think! If only you knew the truth, it’d set you free….
b&
But I *do* know…
(That is apparently a B*blical quotation.
I don’t mind confessing ignorance of the B*ble or Harry Potter. I’d be deeply embarrassed if I was worng about anything to do with British railways 🙂
cr
The Harry Potter movies are quite well made. Hogwarts is the name of the school and the station to catch that train that goes to it is in a nearby dimension.
As every non-muggle knows, it is King’s Cross Station platform 9 3/4. This is clearly a blasphemous attempt to mislead and make the Truth look ridiculous!
I think I’d heard that somewhere. That is Kings Cross mainline station (which makes more sense than Kings Cross Underground), though there is of course no ‘Platform 9 3/4’, Platforms 9 and 10 are in the suburban extension on the west side. And as I recall, in the movies the ‘Hogwarts Express’ has variously been hauled by a Great Western Hall and a Southern West Country (both naturally green locos and both repainted LMS red); neither the locos nor the red livery of which would ever have been seen at Kings Cross station.
If J K Rowling/movie producers were trying to be counterfactual they couldn’t have done better.
cr
Yes the “9¾” is the fictional part that only those who know where to find it can and slip through to a near by dimension to ride that particular train. It was in the books of course.
I have a Chinese friend who, when planning a trip to the UK asked me if Hogwarts would be open to the public. I explained that ‘Hogwarts’ in the films was made up from a number of different buildings plus studio sets but he obviously found it very convincing. In fact I suspect that was the main reason he was coming . . .
@nightgaunt
OK, I’ll accept the ‘alternate dimension’ explanation.
It’s a quite well-established sci-fi convention that alternate dimensions are ‘just like ours’ except for one odd detail – such as the sky is green, or 2+2=5, or Midland Red Great Western and Southern engines departing from Kings Cross…
😉
If the bible proves the existence of god then comic books prove the existence of superman.
And here lies the joke:
Question:If Superman and Mighty Mouse got into a fight, who’d win?
Answer: Superman, of course. Mighty Mouse is just a cartoon character.
I am afraid you need more than those surface analogies. Nice and glib, but against a religious or Bible scholar just may not work.
They would point out that others in the same period of time supposedly acknowledged such-na-such person including Joshuah also known as “Jesus” though that was a common name like Richard is today.
Wish I had a copy to read. Have very limited resources. However it sounds interesting. Best for the layman to use against the common Bible thumper.
Yes…and no.
It perfectly serves the point of demonstrating that “The Bible says so” is utterly inadequate justification for believing the claims within its pages.
The next step is to examine the actual claims of the Bible…which turn out to be that human history began in an enchanted garden with talking animals and an angry wizard; that a key turning point occurred when the reluctant hero took magic wand lessons from a talking plant (on fire!); and reached its pinnacle when the King of the Undead (who had a penchant for getting his intestines fondled through a gaping chest wound) led a zombie uprising in Jerusalem.
At that point, there’s really not much need to delve any further into the matter, is there?
But, if you feel you really must, Richard Carrier has a peer-reviewed tome On the Historicity of Jesus that makes plain that even the most minimal hyped-up Jesus imaginable couldn’t possibly have existed.
Cheers,
b&
My favorite is that, unless the mass of texts are random compilations and allegoric, the first two chapters are inconsistent. [ http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/contra/accounts.html ]
So the Bible says the Bible is false. QED
Apologists have millennia of writings “reconciling” the “apparent contradictions” in the Bible. They even cite the conflicts as strengthening the validity of the text, claiming that it’s expected that eyewitnesses wouldn’t agree on all the details.
b&
A follow-up to ‘Is Yahweh Gay’ is coming to mind using the first creation story – ‘Is Yahweh Transgender.’
Omnisexual, perhaps? To go with all the other omnis?
b&
Well, Yahweh does have a knack for fookin’ any and everything…
Got that from Zeus, he did.
b&
Maybe. I was thinking along the lines that Yahweh is XXXY and he divided himself into XX and XY to make man and woman. Transgender maybe isn’t the appropriate term here, but the idea is still mulling.
I do like the parody “God-Man” whose nemesis is Darwin-Man as seen at Gocomics.
Your counter-argument might address the Mr. Tickle part, but it doesn’t address the Koran part. There are many stories of historical figures doing magic things. We can reasonably believe the historical figure existed but nobody outside the faith believes the magic parts of those stories simply based on the story.
Actually, we know that Jesus is every bit as fictional a character as all the other ancient demigods that St. Justin Martyr equated him with in the second century — Perseus, Aesculapius, Bellerophon, Hercules, Mithras, and all the rest. It was blindingly obvious even at the time. See Richard Carrier for a modern scholarly analysis, but even that’s overkill; inventing heroic terrestrial biographies for gods dated back famously to Euhemerus, who himself lived a century after the earliest (Old Testament) mentions of Jesus and centuries before Mark took up the mantle.
Muhammad, too, was very obviously a fictional character. Real people don’t shuffle off this mortal coil by riding a flying horse into the sunset.
b&
There are quite a few arguments for Muhammad being as fictional as Jesus, but no one knows about them because Islam has made it an all but impossible subject to debate openly.
Yes, to an extent. I’m not aware that there’s been the depth of academic investigation put into the question of Muhammad’s historicity as there has been into Jesus’s. But, at the same time, there aren’t any valid arguments for Muhammad’s historicity, plus he fits the mythical archetype to a “T.” He was the greatest military general of his day, yet no contemporary records of him exist, including amongst those he conquered. His history was recorded entirely orally for generations until it was canonized by committee. His primary function was as the same Messenger / Word / Logos as Jesus, Mercury, Moses, and a great many other obviously fictional gods and demigods. The most significant portions of his biography are devoted to him speaking with another even-more-obviously-fictional character, Gabriel…and the rest is punctuated by obvious fictional stories such as riding off into the sunset on the back of a flying horse.
The chances of him even being an Haile Selassie type of figure are basically nonexistent…and, even then, the Muhammad of the Q’ran still remains an entirely fictional construct grafted onto a figure who, quite literally, lent nothing but a name to the legend. Even in such a case, calling Muhammad an historical figure makes as much sense as calling John Henry an historical figure.
Cheers,
b&
Yeah. Also things like there’s absolutely no archaeological evidence that Mecca existed when he was supposed to be around, and it’s not at a location that would be a trade hub. The idea within Islam too is that because of him Islam took over completely immediately, but there’s quite a lot of archaeological evidence that Islam and Christianity existed side by side for some time. There’s other stuff too. I need to read up on it again and do a post myself some time. (Yet another draft post!!!)
You should tip off Jerry when you do so….
b&
You can add Krishna too who has many similarities with the Jesus of the Bible to the point that some of the more esoteric thinkers tell that Krishna is Jesus gone to visit ancient India at one point!
It really says more about mythology, psychology with syncretism and carry over mingling among the various peoples and synthesizing new versions of the old stories than one fictional person being a different one in another country.
Isn’t it obvious that Krishna is also fictional?
b&
Why do you even repeat it? Wasn’t I clear? To us yes, of course. And you? (You started it.)
There’s a mummified body in a glass case somewhere in India that’s supposedly Jesus. The story is he went there in his 20s and learned about Buddhism, then returned to the Holy Land, then because he faked his death on the cross he had to get out of Dodge and returned to India. He lived to a ripe old age and was respected and revered.
As nightgaunt mentions above, the Argument From the Bible is usually a lot more sophisticated than a simple “the Bible is true because it says it’s true.” In fact,it contains a whole slew of arguments, ranging from history, prophesy, and what I’d call applicability, which is when people exclaim in astonishment over how the Bible still manages to be such an amazingly helpful guide on some level or other, what with its insight into human nature and character and modern situations and all. Just approach it with that assumption and watch it come alive for you.
None of these arguments work, but getting into how and why they don’t work usually takes a lot more work than it takes to make the original claim– which is one of the tried and true virtues of most apologetics.
There’s a perfect response to such people: Numbers 31.
b&
Oh, but since that’s not the part they’re thinking about, that’s not where God directed their attention. Once they start thinking of selective validation as a sort of miracle (look what God is blinding from me!) it’s hard to make them consider the work as a whole without allowing their overriding theme to remain in place.
But yes, that’s one of the reasons why it doesn’t work.
…which is why this particular example is so effective. It’s insanely over-the-top in terms of just how horrific YHWH and Moses are as they conspire to rape prepubescent girls by the tens of thousands after killing their parents and enslaving their brothers. You can’t read it and maintain any pretense that these are the good guys whose moral virtue represents the ideal standard. Even cultural relativism, “God gave the Israelites a moral code suited for their time and culture,” doesn’t cut the mustard with this one.
If you can still call the Bible “The Good Book” after reading Numbers 31 — actually reading it, not just skimming the Cliff’s Notes summary as quickly as you can to get past it to the Ten Commandments — you have no right to look yourself in the mirror.
b&
Good point about Numbers 31.
I had tried to post about Numbers 31 on a Christian site a few months back. I pointed out that:
1) the action was specifically commanded by God as revenge;
2) the target people were not part of the Promised land;
3) the Israelites were reprimanded for initially leaving some of the women and children (apart from the virgin girls who were destined to be sex slaves) alive.
My observation was that this was worse than any known atrocity of ISIS.
My comment never made it out of moderation.
As an aside it is interesting to note that the Israelite army killed many thousands of Midianites in this encounter yet did not suffer a single casualty themselves. All the more confusing when we find in Judges 1:19 that even though God was with them they could not displace the people from the plain because those people had iron chariots.
I think it’s worth mentioning that Numbers 31, along with basically the entire rest of the Bible (within rounding), has absolutely not the slightest grounding in reality. Moses is a fictional character and the ancient ancestors of the Jews were never a military power, let alone a dominating one.
b&
“In fact,it contains a whole slew of arguments, ranging from history, ”
No doubt, but most people don’t know them.
Christians who argue about religion usually know them. Coming up with rebuttals meant for people who don’t like to get into arguments or even discussions is a pretty low bar.
I don’t seem to run into those.
Most Christians, even the “non-argumentative” ones, will offer one argument if you criticize one of their tenets, even if it’s only “but the Bible says…” or “Are you smarter than everyone else in the world?”
You could counter with this: “Albert Einstein did not believe in God. Are you smarter than Albert Einstein?”
I find a simple “yes” works nicely. 🙂
I don’t think they will believe you. I know, the people gullible enough to believe in glorified fairy tales will disbelieve you. 🙂
“Are you smarter than everyone else in the world?”
‘”Everyone”? – you mean, including the 77% of the world’s population who _don’t_ believe the Bible?’
cr
(I guessed the 77% but it’s probably near enough).
I think the Christians who come to you are more likely to have done their research (poor though it may be) than Christians whom you stumble across and challenge when they casually make a claim. That’s probably a general rule of thumb for most issues.
As for the “do you think you’re smarter than everyone else?” challenge I usually respond that it’s not about being smart because they know that intelligent people make mistakes all the time; it’s more about being cautious and careful in our conclusions because we know that intelligent people make mistakes all the time.
Take a look at Rebecca Goldstein’s “36 Arguments for the Existence of God” for some real heavy lifting.
Most of it is a novel centered on a fictional philosopher, but the Appendix is her rebuttal to actual arguments. She’s only interested in philosophy not history, so no arguments from the Bible.
Yes, that’s a wonderful book.
Iirc Ted Drange over at Secular Web did a great analysis and takedown of the Argument From the Bible.
So far as applicability goes, I’m inclined to run a Mr. Tickle argument. You can get moral inspiration and guidance from The Lord of the Rings or the collected works of Agatha Christie. I chose those examples arbitrarily, out of personal fondness rather than any moral reason – but seriously, they are much more morally inspiring works, and I’d feel safer around someone whose idol was Gandalf or Hercule Poirot than someone who picked any biblical figure.
Most fairy tales have moral messages (though outdated morality)
Which ones are out dated?
going with strangers
Going into the woods alone
I guess making deals with suspicious entities does seem dated.
Well the first two aren’t actually moral messages, though they may be good advice. The first one probably more valid than the second – going into the woods alone is probably fairly safe these days in most Western countries, since there aren’t many wild predators left. Venturing round some parts of town alone is probably more dangerous for kiddies.
“how the Bible still manages to be such an amazingly helpful guide on some level or other”
Not that I’ve ever read any of them, but I’m sure Mao’s Little Red Book, Das Kapital, and Mein Kampf also have many thoughtful insights in them. Aesop’s Fables (which I did read long ago) certainly qualifies, as does Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Doesn’t mean the rest of the contents is verifiably and eternally true though.
I notice the book cover uses the same font as The God Delusion. I wonder if that’s on purpose.
Also Armstrong’s “A History of God” and Jack Miles’ “God, A Biography”. I think there is a whole tradition of God books that use this font and lots of white background.
I find the argument that 30,000+ sects of Christianity have managed to distinguish their own peculiar take on that source material pretty convincing that it lacks authority
“I find the argument that 30,000+ sects of Christianity have managed to distinguish their own peculiar take on that source material pretty convincing that it lacks authority”
For an updated reference that 30,000+ should be 45,000+ as of 2015. The growth rate is approximately 2.2 new Christian sects per day!
http://www.gordonconwell.edu/resources/csgc-resources.cfm
I usually tell proselytizers to get their own religion straight as in one version and one version only before bothering me.
Someone else commented that it is fact of so many sects and versions and so on that keeps them from being even more aggressive against us. That might even be true.
Still I would think a true mystical “holy” book would be easy to read regardless of who you are and what language you know. But it is really just a book compilation created by humans for humans. So we get the wonderful contradictions of the Bible. Which some of them have put their minds to argue around. And if they can know more than to whom they are arguing-/educating those they wish to absorb, they can usually win. Even among believers few of them have really read that book much less analyzed it to any great extent.
Blimey Charlie! They’re like rabbits
And I failed to mention that there are more than 100 differing English translations of the bible. Believers can’t even agree on which books to include in the bible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_Bible_translations
You do have to have them tell you whether god has a physical body or not. Do not accept that god can choose to have one or the other — what is the default? How do they know that?
I am kind of creeped out by Mr. Tickle, and I am glad I am too old to have been a kid when ‘it’ was spawned from the disturbed mind of Roger Hargreaves. **shudder**.
LOL!