Category: theology

Dawkins’s Darwin Day lecture for Humanists UK: “Taking Courage from Darwin to Fight the Hubris of Faith”

February 18, 2019 • 9:15 am

Reader Michael called my attention to Richard Dawkins’s Darwin Day Lecture to Humanists UK (HUK). Richard is introduced by Humanists UK President and evolutionary biologist Alice Roberts, who was the moderator when I gave this lecture a few years ago. Richard’s lecture was just posted today, and as I write there are only 194 views. I’ll watch it as I write, and give any thoughts I have.

I was glad to see that Richard limned evolution and religion in an antagonistic light, which is what I did when I talked. After all, this is a talk to humanists, so it’s not hubris to do that, much as accommodationists like to argue that people can have their Darwin and Jesus too.

Ten minutes in, I was surprised at how hard Richard went after theology and religion, and especially after Islam and its obsession with “religious control-freakery” such as breast feeding. The audience likes it, of course, as they’re all a bunch of nonbelievers, but I don’t yet see any connection between the criticisms of Islam and Darwin.

The connection came at about 14:15, when Richard contrasts the certainty of theology with the doubt that’s endemic to science. “We don’t know” is his mantra here, and we should use it more often. At 17:30, he suggests a humorous Gendankenexperiment of the kind he’s famous for: he imagines what science would look like if scientists acted like theologians, operating from faith and revelation instead of evidence. (Note the mention of “SJW State University.”)

A quote:

“It isn’t that theologians deliberately tell untruths: it’s as though they just don’t care about truth, aren’t interested in truth, and demote truth to negligible status compared with other considerations such as metaphorical, symbolic, and mythic significance—or simply what feels good.”

Later on, he explains why he’s proud to be a product of evolution—a product with a flexible brain that has vouchsafed to us our ability, unique among animals, to understand our origins—and many other things.

Richard also argues that “the atheistic world view has an unsung virtue of intellectual courage.” To explain that, he introduces the “deep problems” that science might not answer, but that theology can’t, either: these include the “deep problem of consciousness” and the question of “why are the laws of physics as they are?” This leads to his conclusion (40:28) that science (and atheism) help kick ourselves out of the emotional reaction that the “big questions” defy naturalistic explanation—that they defy the scientific assumption that the whole universe arose and evolved through mindless naturalistic processes. As he says,

“However improbable a naturalistic answer to the riddle of existence, a theistic alternative is even more so. But it needs a courageous leap of reason to accept the conclusion.”

He then returns to Darwin as a good fount of courage to seek naturalistic answers to the Big Problems. After all, it was Darwin who, abjuring supernatural explanations, tackled the long-standing problem of life using purely naturalistic methods—and solved it!

In the end, Richard’s lecture is his version of “Faith Versus Fact,” and though it’s independent of my own ideas, I was pleased to see that he’s banging the same drum about the intellectual vacuity of theology as contrasted to the productive wielding of “the empirical attitude” that underlies science.

This lecture is also paean to the virtues of atheism, which won’t please religionists, theologians, and faitheists. Yes, New Atheism makes a brief comeback in this lecture.

If you’re a nonbeliever, you’ll find the last three minutes heartening, bracing, and eloquent. In the last 13 words, he connects atheism with social justice, though that won’t placate the SJWs who are always throwing shade on Dawkins.

At the end, Alice presents Richard with a “Darwin Day medal.”

The blind leading the bland: Nicholas Kristof interviews William Lane Craig

December 22, 2018 • 1:30 pm

When I saw the headline below in the New York Times, I wondered why the deuce Nicholas Kristof wanted to talk to William Lane Craig. But who could NOT read that article after the headline, wanting to see how Craig answered? (Click on screenshot and be prepared to facepalm.)

It turns out that this is part of a series Kristof is doing on Christianity—but again, WHY? At any rate, here are the predecessors:

This is the latest installment in my occasional series of conversations about Christianity. Previously, I’ve spoken with the Rev. Timothy Keller, Jimmy Carter and Cardinal Joseph Tobin. Here’s my interview of William Lane Craig, professor of philosophy at Talbot School of Theology and Houston Baptist University.

The interview is a gold mine of apologetics and laughs as Craig weasels and wobbles and waffles about Jesus, Scripture, and miracles. Have a look; I’ll put some of the Q&A below.

It’s hard not to reproduce the entire text! But here we go:

Kristof: Merry Christmas, Dr. Craig! I must confess that for all my admiration for Jesus, I’m skeptical about some of the narrative we’ve inherited. Are you actually confident that Jesus was born to a virgin?

Craig: Merry Christmas to you, too, Nick! I’m reasonably confident. When I was a non-Christian, I used to struggle with this, too. But then it occurred to me that for a God who could create the entire universe, making a woman pregnant wasn’t that big a deal! Given the existence of a Creator and Designer of the universe (for which we have good evidence), an occasional miracle is child’s play. Historically speaking, the story of Jesus’ virginal conception is independently attested by Matthew and Luke and is utterly unlike anything in pagan mythology or Judaism. So what’s the problem?

Note the “(for which we have good evidence)” after he mentions God. That, presumably is Craig’s dumb Kalam Cosmological Argument (read the link), which somehow gets from the assumption that “all things have causes” to “God is the Christian god and Jesus is His son”. He adduces additional “evidence”, like “fine-tuning” later on.

The “problem”, of course, is that even if you accept the existence of a creator, that doesn’t get you to miracles and Jesus.  And “independently” attested by Matthew and Luke? Really? Were they both there when God manufactured a haploid genome and inserted it into one of Mary’s eggs? And how independent were these Gospels? Although “Biblical scholars” (i.e., believers) consider them evidence of the writers being independently motivated by God to write the Truth, I think it more likely that they’re recounting a common myth, or even copying each other.

But wait! There’s more! Craig does some bobbing and weaving after Kristof asks him why he takes the New Testament as gospel truth but not the Old Testament. You’ll enjoy Craig’s response. Then Kristof asks him about why he thinks the New Testament is inerrant. (To be fair, he’s pressing Craig pretty hard, but pressing Craig is like trying to wrestle a greased eel.)

[Kristof] How do you account for the many contradictions within the New Testament? For example, Matthew says Judas hanged himself, while Acts says that he “burst open.” They can’t both be right, so why insist on inerrancy of Scripture?

[Craig] I don’t insist on the inerrancy of Scripture. Rather, what I insist on is what C.S. Lewis called “mere Christianity,” that is to say, the core doctrines of Christianity. Harmonizing perceived contradictions in the Bible is a matter of in-house discussion amongst Christians. What really matters are questions like: Does God exist? Are there objective moral values? Was Jesus truly God and truly man? How did his death on a Roman cross serve to overcome our moral wrongdoing and estrangement from God? These are, as one philosopher puts it, the “questions that matter,” not how Judas died.

But don’t the core doctrines of Christianity include all of us being imbued with Original Sin, that Jesus was crucified and then resurrected, and that there’s an afterlife in which you either go up or you fry. It’s interesting that he says “leave the contradictions to us Christians” and then says the important questions are those that aren’t contradicted but also have no answers. But Craig does think there are “objective moral values”—since he believes in Divine Command Theory, he thinks that whatever God says is correct and moral by virtue of God having said it. Ergo, we can kill anybody who picks up sticks on the Sabbath and curses their parents. I wish Kristof had pressed him on that!

I like this exchange best.

[Kristof] Why can’t we accept that Jesus was an extraordinary moral teacher, without buying into miracles?

[Craig] You can, but you do so at the expense of going against the evidence. That Jesus carried out a ministry of miracle-working and exorcisms is so widely attested in every stratum of the sources that the consensus among historical Jesus scholars is that Jesus was, indeed, a faith-healer and exorcist. That doesn’t prove these events were genuine miracles, but it does show that Jesus thought of himself as more than a mere moral teacher.

That reminds me of the famous passage from C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity, where Lewis pretends to exhaust all the possibilities:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

I prefer the Poached Egg Hypothesis, but that’s not acceptable to most people.

Several times in the interview Craig appeals to “the consensus of historical Jesus scholars”, a consensus that of course is based on construing truth from what’s in the Bible. And I’m deeply suspicious of that consensus, especially in the absence of extra-Biblical evidence for even a historical person on which Jesus was grounded.

I remain agnostic about whether there was a real person on which Jesus was based, and even about whether that person could have claimed magical powers (a bit more of a stretch), but, as Craig says, “that doesn’t prove these events were genuine miracles.” Indeed—and there lies the rub that Craig avoids. Even if you accept the premise that some first-century charismatic preacher said he could do magic, that doesn’t mean that he could, or that such a person, now dead, continues to perform miracles.

And there’s this.

[Kristof] Over time, people have had faith in Zeus, in Shiva and Krishna, in the Chinese kitchen god, in countless other deities. We’re skeptical of all those faith traditions, so should we suspend our emphasis on science and rationality when we encounter miracles in our own tradition?

[Craig] I don’t follow. Why should we suspend our emphasis on science and rationality just because of weakly evidenced, false claims in other religions? I champion a “reasonable faith” that seeks to provide a comprehensive worldview that takes into account the best evidence of the sciences, history, philosophy, logic and mathematics. Some of the arguments for God’s existence that I’ve defended, such as the arguments from the origin of the universe and the fine-tuning of the universe, appeal to the best evidence of contemporary science. I get the impression, Nick, that you think science is somehow incompatible with belief in miracles. If so, you need to give an argument for that conclusion. David Hume’s famous argument against miracles is today recognized, in the words of philosopher of science John Earman, as “an abject failure.” No one has been able to do any better.

Although Kristof doesn’t ask him the logical question—”How do you know you’ve found the right god and the right faith?”—it’s implicit in the query. And Craig gives an implicit answer: that Christianity is not as “weakly evidenced” or as “false” as are other faiths. How does Craig know this? Not because the Bible is more credible than the Qur’an, but that Craig has personally experienced “the self-authenticating witness of God’s Holy Spirit.” Yep—”self authenticating” (see the link for a takedown).  And really—”the best evidence for God from contemporary science” is the Cosmological Argument and the fine-tuning argument? I don’t think many physicists would say, “Yes, that evidence pretty much convinces me of a God.”

As far as Hume’s argument against miracles, which is basically that you should accept a miracle only if a genuine God-produced miracle seems more likely than false testimony or dubious claims, that doesn’t seem to me an “abject failure,” but rather an exercise in judicious skepticism. But perhaps you feel otherwise.

I have to say that publishing this interview seems rather dumb, unless it exposes Craig’s philosophical weaknesses to a public that, by and large, considers him serious and learned. But I think people would nod their heads in assent at Craig’s answers.

And perhaps that would be true of all of Craig’s interviews with Christians. But somehow I don’t think, despite Kristof’s hardball questions, that he’s trying to do a number on Christianity.

h/t: Barry

My anti-accommodationism article at The Conversation

December 21, 2018 • 9:00 am

A while back I posted a critique on this site of an article by Tom McLeish at The Conversation, “Religion isn’t the enemy of science: it’s been inspiring scientists for centuries.” In that critique I wrote, “I think it’s time I contributed an article to The Conversation showing why science and religion are incompatible, as that site appears to be very soft on faith.”  Since then I’ve learned that The Conversation has several independent branches, and that piece was published by The Conversation UK, not The Conversation US.

But the former site, which may indeed be soft on faith, recently published yet another accommodationist article, “War between science and religion is far from inevitable” by David N. Livingstone, Professor of Geography and Intellectual History, Queen’s University Belfast, and John Hedley Brooke, Emeritus Professor of Science and Religion as the University of Oxford. And that was the last straw for me. That article, if you can get through it, is an encyclopedia of all the tropes of accommodationism: scientists can be religious, religion inspired scientific discoveries, and religion can provide useful values in a discussion with scientists. (It even begins with a mention of Faith versus Fact, whose thesis of course Livingstone and Brooke reject.). The prose, too, was deadly; get a load of this:

In our own day, there may well be benefits to be derived from a dialogue between theological anthropology and those advocating transhumanism. New technological possibilities are raising profound questions about what it means to be human, a subject on which theologians have had much to say. At the very least, theology might prove to be a useful conversational partner in articulating values by which to adjudicate among the human capacities that might be prioritised for enhancement.

The article winds up with a firm but plaintive assertion that religion, after all, isn’t going away. (Of course it is, at least in the West.)

I didn’t write about the piece here, as I finally decided to respond at The Conversation itself—if they’d let me. I sent The Conversation U.S. a pitch, they were interested, and I wrote a piece that didn’t directly attack the ideas of Livingstone and Brooke, but linked to their piece (and others), and asserted that yes, there is a kind of war between science and religion. This was published this morning. It was a pleasure to work with my editor and the site. (I didn’t realize that you have to be an academic to publish there, and have to link to every quote and claim that you make.)

At any rate, you can read my piece below (“Yes, there is a war between science and religion“) by clicking on the link. If you’re interested, give them some traffic, and stand up for empiricism! (You’re welcome to make comments and to engage with the commenters who, inevitably, will be upset by my ideas.) The Conversation also published under a creative commons license, so anybody can republish the article for free.

As Andrew Sullivan might say, “See you next Friday,” except I’ll be here all week, folks.

“Peanuts” and theology

August 10, 2018 • 12:30 pm

I used to assidulously read “Peanuts” cartoons when I was a kid, but the religion in them—and apparently there was quite a bit—went over my head. Atlantic has an 2016 article called “The Spirituality of Snoopy,” which recounts how often the artist Charles Schulz used religious themes in his strips.

“Many familiar with the Peanuts strip don’t think of Charles Schulz as a Christian pioneer,” said Stephen Lind, the author of A Charlie Brown Religion: Exploring the Spiritual Life and Work of Charles M. Schulz. “But he was a leader in American media when it comes to both the strength and frequency of religious references.”

More than 560 of Schulz’s nearly 17,800 Peanuts newspaper strips contain a religious, spiritual, or theological reference. To put this into perspective, Schulz only produced 61 strips featuring the famous scene where Lucy pulls the football away from Charlie Brown as he tries to kick it. Particularly later in his career, the religious references came so frequently that pastors and religious publications regularly requested permission to reprint Peanuts strips, which Schulz almost always granted.

Although Schulz was a Christian and often preached and quoted Gospel—sometimes indirectly—he became less religious as he aged:

Later in his life, Schulz’s began to refer to himself as a “secular humanist,” as his theology became less traditional. This did not mean he was no longer a Christian, but rather that he now believed other faiths might also provide legitimate paths to God. He was also less certain about other Christian doctrines, such as the existence of a literal heaven.

The more Schulz wrestled with faith, the more he led his readers to do the same. In a 1985 strip, Sally asked Charlie Brown, “When we die, will we go to Heaven?” Charlie responded, “I like to think so.” This mixture of hope and skepticism reflects Schulz’s own evolving faith, which came to assume an increasingly central role in his work. When you map religious references in Peanuts over time, the trend line shoots up and to the right.

At any rate, here are two of Schulz’s more thoughtful cartoons about theology, with the first reflecting his doubt about the claims of a given faith:

I don’t have the dates of these, but this one sounds a bit sarcastic:

Edward Feser godsplains why atheists don’t understand religion, and why there is absolutely, positively a God (the Catholic one)

April 6, 2018 • 1:00 pm

Edward “Dogs Don’t Go to Heaven” Feser is able to discern the most extraordinary conclusions about reality from simply plumbing his brain and channeling revelations, being sure to weed the true revelations from God’s Fake News (see the first link). In other words, he’s a theologian: a Catholic who’s an associate professor of philosophy at Pasadena City College.  His schtick (and I’ve written about him quite a bit) is this:

  1. Thomas Aquinas is the greatest philosopher who ever lived, and Aquinas’s “Five Ways” of knowing (which, as Feser admits, weren’t original with Aquinas) constitute definitive proof of God’s existence.
  2. Aquina’s God (aka the Real God) also happens, mirabile dictu, to be Feser’s god: the god of Catholicism.
  3. New Atheists don’t understand the subtleties of Aquinas’s arguments, and so are attacking strawmen. In order to come to grips with genius philosophers like Feser, one has to read extensively, particularly Aquinas (see #1), and most especially Feser’s own writings. As I wrote several years ago:”Edward Feser, a Catholic philosopher at Pasadena City College, is notorious on this website for touting the Cosmological Argument for God’s existence (short explanation: every contingent thing has a “cause”; the universe is contingent; therefore the universe has a cause; therefore God). He’s equally notorious for claiming that one can’t truly understand this compelling argument without reading at least six books and seven articles, two of which of course, are by Feser himself.  (Go here, here, and here to see Jason Rosenhouse’s refutation of Feser’s arguments.)” [JAC: Jason’s links don’t seen to exist any more, but you can see his critiques of Feser here.]
  4. Feser’s a nasty piece of work, especially towards atheists—far more vitriolic than the New Atheists he decries. That’s very un-Christian of him.
  5. He thinks that New Atheists like Dawkins and I (we’re mentioned explicitly) rely almost entirely on the “argument from design” in our rejection of God. That, of course, is pure bullshit: both of us have dealt with most of the arguments for God, sophisticated or not. The reason we concentrate on creationism is because it was the alternate theory of origins dispelled by Darwin, but is still plaguing biologists in America and the Middle East. But fighting creationism is different from saying that we think the argument from design is the best and most central argument for God. I’m surprised that Feser, who prides himself on his intellect and nuanced thinking, doesn’t realize that.
  6. Dogs don’t go to heaven because they don’t have souls. (See first link for explanation).

In the latest installment of his never-ending exposition of the Prime Mover argument, Feser lists at Five Books “The best books on arguments for the existence of God.” Here they are, with three being about Aquinas.

It’s amazing, as I said, all the things Aquinas (and Feser) can conclude about God without any need for empirical observation. From the Prime Mover argument, both accept that there is a God, that He/She/It/Hir are outside time and the Universe, that there is only one God, and that that God is omnipotent. The rest—and of course Aquinas bought the literal existence of Paradise, Adam and Eve, a young Earth, and the Jesus story, as well as the existence of angels (Aquinas was positively obsessed with angels and their characteristics)—comes from “divine revelation”. Further, Feser argues that you can judge which revelations tell you True Stuff through reason alone! That is, using reason, Feser can supposedly prove to everyone that God is the Catholic God, that the Jesus story is true, that there’s a Trinity, and so on. How curious that the “reason” he adduces hasn’t manage to convince Hindus, Jews, or Muslims!

Here’s some of Feser’s theobabble:

The way that Aquinas divides up the territory is that he thinks there are some things that we can know about God through purely natural reason. From a modern reader’s point of view, it might be surprising just how much Aquinas thinks we can know in that way. We can know not only that there is a God — in Aquinas’ view this can be strictly demonstrated through philosophical arguments — but  we can deduce a great number of the divine attributes: that God is all-powerful, omniscient, outside of time and space, and so on.

There are other things about God’s nature, however, that in Aquinas’ view cannot be known through philosophical reasoning alone. They could not be known simply through applying our natural powers. If we’re going to know them, then, we need to rely on special divine revelation. God has to reveal them to us through some prophet or sacred text or the church, for example. The doctrine of the Trinity and the doctrine of the Incarnation would be two examples of this. Now, does that mean that Aquinas thinks that these are not ideas that are susceptible of rational investigation? No.

True, he thinks that we can only know about them through divine revelation, but, there are two things that have to be emphasised here. First of all, Aquinas would not deny for a moment that when we ask ‘How do we know that these doctrines have really been divinely revealed?’, we have to be able to give a rational answer to that. He doesn’t think that the fact that divine revelation has occurred is itself something that we have to appeal merely to faith in order to know about. He thinks that you need to be able to give rational arguments for the conclusion that an act of divine revelation has actually occurred.

Good luck in showing that you can figure out the difference between real divine revelations and phony revelations. I presume, that if Feser’s argument is rational, such distinctions can have nothing to do with their content!

I could go on, but Feser’s word salad runs a long time (it’s a terrible interview, conducted by Oxford student Charles Styles, who is reluctant to pose any hardball questions).

Just a bit more fun: watch how Feser claims there’s an objective morality that more or less conforms to Sam Harris’s “well being” argument, but remains grounded in God because what constitutes our well being depends in our nature and, as the canny theologian argues, “we wouldn’t have the natures we have if God weren’t keeping us in existence.” Slick move, Dr. Feser!

He also has a “good” argument against the atheists’ claim that the existence of evil is incompatible with an omnibenevolent Christian God. To wit (my emphasis):

The existence of such evil gives us good grounds to doubt the existence of God or to deny God’s existence, even though it doesn’t count as a strict proof. That’s the kind of argument that an atheist would have to develop in order to get the problem of evil off the ground as an objection to theism.

The problem with that, though, is that if you do have an independent demonstration that God exists, if you’ve got something like a successful version of Aquinas’ Five Ways, then you already know independently that there is a first cause of the world who is infinite in power, all-good, and so on. So, you independently know that for any instance of evil that occurs, there must be some reason why God allows it, even if we don’t know what that reason is. 

Another great finesse! Of course the Prime Mover argument doesn’t show that God is “all good”, but presumably, using rationality, Feser (and Aquinas) managed to deduce that from revelation. I’m stunned with admiration for Feser’s Sophisticated Theology™.

I’ll just end with a passage from Faith versus Fact (p. 58), eminently applicable to Dr. Feser but aimed, I believe, at Feser’s hero Aquinas:

Philosopher Andrew Bernstein describes such theological analysis of arcane and unevidenced claims as “the tragedy of theology in its distilled essence: The employment of high-powered human intellect, of genius, of profoundly rigorous logical deduction—studying nothing.”

Note: Feser has a thin skin and will undoubtedly respond, and his response will consist in noting my failure to have spent half my lifetime studying the works of Aquinas and Feser. I will respond in advance that Feser knows nothing about the proper use of evidence, and is simply confecting tortuous arguments to prove what he finds emotionally comforting.

As an update: Reader Pliny the in Between has a relevant cartoon:

 

h/t: Barry

Two scholars: Jesus was a #MeToo victim because he was stripped before the Crucifixion

March 23, 2018 • 9:45 am

The Conversation, which I thought was a site for intellectual discourse (its motto is “Academic rigor, journalistic flair”), is increasingly publishing bizarre pieces that lack both rigor and flair. One of these, by Katie Edwards and David Tombs, insists on dragging Jesus into today’s sexual harassment debate, arguing that because Jesus was stripped during the Crucifixion, he should be recognized as a victim of sexual abuse and violence. Click on the screenshot to see this dire piece:

Dr. Katie Edwards is Director of SIIBS [the Sheffield Institute for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies], and Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Culture and Society, and she participates in The Shiloh Project: Rape Culture, Religion and The Bible, a joint venture of the Universities of Sheffield, Leeds, and Auckland. Tombs is the Howard Paterson Chair of Theology and Public Issues at the University of Otago. Both are insistent that we pay attention to the fact that Jesus was stripped as part of his Crucifixion. And both apparently see this as a historical reality.

As I just verified by reading the bits of the four Gospels dealing with the Crucifixion, most mention the disrobing of Jesus. Although Luke doesn’t note any stripping, Matthew, Mark, and John say that Jesus was first cloaked in a robe to mock him as King of the Jews, and then the robe was removed and Jesus walked to the site of the Crucifixion. There he was apparently stripped, for his clothes were “parted” (divided among the soldiers) after he was hung up on the cross. But he wasn’t naked while dragging the cross to Golgotha.

Nevertheless, The Conversation allows these two authors, who apparently have too much time on their hands, to bloviate about the “sexual abuse” suffered by Jesus, which consisted solely of his pre-Crucifixion disrobing. Some quotes:

With this in mind, during this present Lenten period, it seems especially appropriate to recall the stripping of Jesus – and to name it for what it was intended to be: a powerful display of humiliation and gender-based violence, which should be acknowledged as an act of sexual violence and abuse.

The idea that Jesus himself experienced sexual abuse may seem strange or shocking at first, but crucifixion was a “supreme punishment” and the stripping and exposure of victims was not an accidental or incidental element. It was a deliberate action that the Romans used to humiliate and degrade those they wished to punish. It meant that the crucifixion was more than just physical, it was also a devastating emotional and psychological punishment. [JAC: note that here they don’t mention sexual abuse.]

The convention in Christian art of covering Christ’s nakedness on the cross with a loincloth is perhaps an understandable response to the intended indignity of Roman crucifixion. But this should not prevent us from recognising that the historical reality would have been very different.

Historical reality? Do Edwards and Tombs not know that there is no extra-Biblical evidence for the Crucifixion, and nothing outside scripture that says he was stripped? Nowhere do they even consider the possibility that this story was fictional, though perhaps they’d just say in response, “Well, he was sexually abused in fiction! That’s just as important.”

And how do we know that there wouldn’t have been a loincloth replacing Jesus’s garments? We have no “historical reality”, as there is no way to cross-check the made-up stuff in the Bible. In fact, there is no extra-Biblical evidence for a person on whom Jesus was even based, though theologians twist themselves into pretzels trying to claim that the Bible itself is sufficient to prove Jesus’s existence if not his divinity. (Similarly, Paul Bunyan is sufficient evidence for a giant blue ox, and Beowulf for a fearsome monster named Grendel.)

Stripping Jesus, even if it did happen, would most likely have been to humiliate him, not sexually abuse him. Still, the authors strain at gnats to consider such stripping not just humiliation or simple abuse, but sexual abuse.

It seems to me that if abuse is to have a “sexual” aspect, then there has to be something sex-related in it. Jesus wasn’t leered at (at least, the Gospels don’t mention it), nor was he sexually violated. Although the authors say that if Jesus had been a woman, the sexual abuse would have been obvious, I don’t buy that, for a naked woman is more likely to be the object of sexual attention than a naked man. An equally plausible interpretation is that, by being stripped of his clothes, as was Vercingetorix in the paragraph below, he was stripped of his authority and dignity:

Some sceptics might respond that stripping a prisoner might be a form of violence or abuse, but it is misleading to call this “sexual violence” or “sexual abuse”. Yet if the purpose was to humiliate the captive and expose him to mockery by others, and if the stripping is done against his will and as a way to shame him in public, then recognising it as a form of sexual violence or sexual abuse seems entirely justified. The way that the stripping of Vercingetorix, King of the Arverni, is depicted in the first episode of the first series of the HBO series Rome is an example of this.

Wikipedia, by the way, tells a different story of Vercingetroix’s fate:

According to Plutarch, Caes. 27.8-10, Vercingetorix surrendered in a dramatic fashion, riding his beautifully adorned horse out of Alesia and around Caesar’s camp before dismounting in front of Caesar, stripping himself of his armor and sitting down at his opponent’s feet, where he remained motionless until he was taken away. Caesar provides a first-hand contradiction of this account, De Bell. Gal. 7.89, describing Vercingetorix’s surrender much more modestly. He was imprisoned in the Tullianum in Rome for almost six years, before being publicly displayed in Caesar’s triumph in 46 BC. He was executed after the triumph, probably by strangulation in his prison, as ancient custom would have it.

In the end, why is it so important for the authors to claim that Jesus was a victim of sexual abuse? Because, they assert, unless we recognize the sexual humiliation aspect of the Crucifixion, we’ll be resistant to recognizing sexual abuse in our own society!

This is not just a matter of correcting the historical record. If Jesus is named as a victim of sexual abuse it could make a huge difference to how the churches engage with movements like #MeToo, and how they promote change in wider society. This could contribute significantly to positive change in many countries, and especially in societies where the majority of people identify as Christian.

A HUGE DIFFERENCE? Are these authors living in Cloud-Cuckoo Land? But wait—there’s more!

. . . We may not want to dwell on the disturbing indignity of crucifixion for the whole year, but it is not right to forget about it completely either. The sexual abuse of Jesus is a missing part of Passion and Easter story retellings. It’s appropriate to recognise Jesus as a victim of sexual violence to address the continuing stigma for those who’ve experienced sexual abuse, especially men.

Lent offers a period in which this stark reality of crucifixion might be recalled and connected to the important questions that movements like #MeToo are raising for the churches and for wider society. Once we acknowledge the sexual abuse of Jesus perhaps we’ll be more willing to acknowledge sexual abuse in our own contexts.

There is nothing, it seems, that can’t be folded into the movement against the sexual abuse of women by theologians who desperately want to be relevant. But we don’t need theology to have this important discussion. Yes, men can be sexually abused too, but where is the “sex” dimension of the crucifixion? In fact, dragging fictional characters into the movement (and we might as well include the rape victims in novels The Raj Quartet and A Passage to India) does absolutely nothing to help abused women. Are Edwards and Tombs serious about the urgency of recognizing the abuse of Jesus as helping us recognize the abuse of women (and some men) in the present? You have to be either nuts or an intersectional theologian to think that.

All this goes to demonstrate that theologians have too much time on their hands, as expected when they’re studying, as Dan Barker puts it, “A subject without an object.” And they want their dusty old works of fiction to remain relevant.

Finally, if you want more palaver, the article links to this:

 “Now available! The recording of Professor David Tombs and Dr Jayme Reaves speaking at the Sheffield Institute for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies (SIIBS) on 16th January 2018.”

If you want to sit through an hour of this, click on the screenshot below.


h/t: Michael

Does the nature of the Universe show that there’s no God?

November 4, 2017 • 12:15 pm

That, at least, is the contention of Emily Thomas, an assistant professor of philosophy at Durham University, in an essay at RealClear Science (“Does the size of the universe prove God doesn’t exist?“) This point has been made by many people before, including, as I recall, Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins: the Universe is unbelievably large and all those extra galaxies and planets would seem to be superfluous if God’s real concern was Earth. After all, the Bible refers to this planet, not others, and so what’s going on with all those other planets, even if they do harbor life?

The good bits in Thomas’s essay are simply the facts she gives (these are quotes from her piece):

  • Scientists estimate that the observable universe, the part of it we can see, is around 93 billion light years across. The whole universe is at least 250 times as large as the observable universe.
  • Our own planet is 150m kilometres away from the sun. Earth’s nearest stars, the Alpha Centauri system, are four light years away (that’s around 40 trillion kilometres). Our galaxy, the Milky Way, contains anywhere from 100 to 400 billion stars. The observable universe contains around 300 sextillion stars. 

The last fact is for just the observable universe. 300 sextillion is 300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars, and multiply that by at least 250 (or more, if the 250 is a linear dimension and not volume). That’s HUGE–even bigger than William Howard Taft! Thomas quotes Douglas Adams here as saying the Universe is “big really, really big”, but as I’m reading The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I’ll give the full and accurate quote:

Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.

The Universe is also old: about 13.7 billion years. Why did God wait so long to create Earth, and then wait another 4.5 billion years—until about 4000 years ago—to reveal himself to us?

As Thomas notes, this evidence—the size and age of the Universe—does not comport with a God who’s deeply concerned with what happens on Earth: the superfluity of stars and of time does not comport. As Thomas argues:

Over the last few decades, a new way of arguing for atheism has emerged. Philosophers of religion such as Michael Martin and Nicholas Everitt have asked us to consider the kind of universe we would expect the Christian God to have created, and compare it with the universe we actually live in. They argue there is a mismatch. Everitt focuses on how big the universe is, and argues this gives us reason to believe the God of classical Christianity doesn’t exist.

To explain why, we need a little theology. Traditionally, the Christian God is held to be deeply concerned with human beings. Genesis (1:27) states: “God created mankind in his own image.” Psalms (8:1-5) says: “O Lord … What is man that You take thought of him … Yet You have made him a little lower than God, And You crown him with glory and majesty!” And, of course, John (3:16) explains God gave humans his son out of love for us.

These texts show that God is human-oriented: human beings are like God, and he values us highly. Although we’re focusing on Christianity, these claims can be found in other monotheistic religions, too.

. . . Clearly, there is a discrepancy between the kind of universe we would expect a human-oriented God to create, and the universe we live in. How can we explain it? Surely the simplest explanation is that God doesn’t exist. The spatial and temporal size of the universe gives us reason to be atheists.

As Everitt puts it:

The findings of modern science significantly reduce the probability that theism is true, because the universe is turning out to be very unlike the sort of universe which we would have expected, had theism been true.

She then suggests several ways that theologians could answer this argument, including the possibility that we don’t understand God’s plan, or that God simply values natural causation and lovely stars. But these seem like post facto rationalizations (which they are), and so she concludes that this is all evidence against God:

The problem with these rival explanations is that, as they stand, they are unsatisfying. They hint at reasons why God might create tiny humans in a gargantuan place but are a million miles away from fully explaining why. The weight of galaxies, and the press of years, seem to sweep us towards atheism.

Well, this is all fine and good, but is somewhat unsatisfying on three counts. First of all, it’s not a new argument, though of course hardly any arguments against God are new.

Second, theologians have other answers to the Argument from Douglas Adams not mentioned by Thomas. Michael Ruse—an atheist who specializes in helping Christians keep their faith by telling them how to harmonize science and Jesus—has suggested that Jesus traveled from planet to planet throughout the Universe, saving aliens everywhere (I am not making this up). But of course the Bible is Earth-centered. So theologians would have to claim that each planet has its own Jesus, and that God is saving different life forms in different ways—if those forms are “made in God’s image” and have souls to be saved. (In that case, what does “made in God’s image” really mean?)

Finally, there are many other reasons beyond the size and age of the Universe that already tell us that the probability of God’s existence is unlikely. And some of these arguments, like the existence of physical evils and the death of innocents and animals from horrible diseases, simply do not comport with an omnipotent and loving God—a God also described in the Bible. There’s the fact that God doesn’t show himself to us in convincing ways, and yet could if he wanted to. Why is he a deus absconditius? There are evolutionary arguments, too: if evolution is God’s way of creating humans, why all the wastage—the terrible suffering due to natural selection, and the 99% or more of species that have gone extinct without leaving descendants? Why the superfluity of species, much less stars?

Theologians have answers for these, too, for there is nothing that a clever, committed and well-paid theologian like Alvin Plantinga cannot rationalize as comporting with God’s existence. (If you can  accept the Holocaust and God at the same time, there’s nothing that can dispel your faith.) But that, too, is an argument against accepting God: if his/her/hir/its existence cannot be disproven by anything, then we need not take God seriously.

I’m not overly impressed by arguments like the superfluity of stars as evidence against a God, though it does count for something. And I’m pleased that RealClear Science is giving arguments for atheism. But Thomas writes as if scientists and philosophers like her have just discovered this argument in “the last few decades”. In fact, we’ve known for much longer that this is not the kind of universe that argues for existence of a god, and we’ve known it from several other considerations. Unwarranted suffering alone is, to me, the strongest argument against the Biblical god, for theodicy is the Achilles heel of theology.

Readers might amuse themselves by thinking up other reasons why the sheer size and age of the Universe alone do not militate against God’s existence. If you can walk like an Egyptian, you can think like a theologian.