Connect Apologetics

Is Richard Carrier Right About Zalmoxis and Jesus?

2018-10-29T23:26:00.000+11:00

I was investigating the claim a few years ago that the gospels just copy and repeat the well-established dying and rising god myths that were allegedly common in the time before Jesus. During my research, I came across the name of a deity that was unfamiliar to me: Zalmoxis. This video is the result of my investigation into who Zalmoxis was and whether or not he is an example of a dying and rising god.

I particularly interacted with some statements made about Zalmoxis by prominent atheist Richard Carrier, who likes to draw parallels between aspects of the Zalmoxis story and the resurrection of Jesus. As the video shows, these comparisons are thin and sometimes very badly stretched in order for Richard to make his point. I won't repeat here what I have said in the video, so please watch it if you are interested.

Is Our Universe Natural Or Created?

2018-10-13T16:09:00.002+11:00

I recently found some footage of a talk I gave at my church a couple of years ago on the beginning and fine-tuning of the universe. The focus is on comparing naturalistic accounts of these scientific discoveries with the explanation provided by the existence of God.

I would like to note here that a couple of my statements in the video are a touch dogmatic and I would be a little more nuanced if I were to give that talk now. It still essentially reflects my view though and I thought it may benefit someone to share it online.

Peace, and I hope you enjoy it.

Truth Can Be Known

2018-07-17T12:35:00.000+10:00

Can truth be discovered? Can it be known? Some critics of objective truth theories like to argue that we cannot know the truth. Let's put that claim to the test.

In the first instalment of this series on truth, we determined that truth exists. We then went on to discuss the nature of truth; that something is true if it corresponds with reality, that truth is narrow, and that it is discovered rather than created.

We Can Know Truth

So what about the claim that we cannot know the truth? Truth might well exist, but maybe it's somewhere out there, above our finite and limited comprehension. Maybe we don't have the capacity or the tools to discover the truth. This question is important, because for someone to arrive at the conclusion that the Christian worldview is true, it has to be possible for us to know that something is true.

Not small things, like the colours of chairs or the kind of weather that we are able to observe that day. It is easy to determine the correspondence between claims and reality when it comes to simple facts like these. Instead we want to know if it is possible to know the truth about big things. Worldview questions such as "Is there a God?" or "Does my life have objective meaning?" Can we possibly discover the truth about existential questions such as these?

Let's demonstrate firstly that it is possible to know truth. Consider the claim "We can't know the truth."

This is another example of a self-destructing statement, just like "truth does not exist," which we examined in the first part of this series. When we apply the claim to itself, we are forced to wonder how we could know that it is true that we can't know truth. There is no way to verify the claim without falsifying it at the same time.

This means that it is possible to know the truth, which is important for our investigation into the truth of the Christian worldview. There is a fact of the matter about Christianity, that it is either a true or false worldview, and the truth or falsity of it can be known. But this leads to an obvious question: how do we determine what is true?

Discovering Truth

There are a few different ways that we can arrive at truth and be confident that we have found it. Let's consider a few complimentary approaches.

Science: Using the scientific method, we are able to observe repeatable phenomena and determine how natural systems and processes work. This is an excellent tool for investigating objects, forces and beings within the universe, but is not well-suited for determining whether or not God exists. This is because if there is a God, he is not made of matter or energy and is not located somewhere within the space-time universe, meaning that he cannot be subject to direct scientific observation. Still, we can use the findings of science about the nature and workings of the universe as evidence to support our theories or to guide our thinking about the question.

Logic: Reason itself helps us arrive at truth too. We can use the laws of thought to determine what is logically possible or impossible. For example, if it could be demonstrated that the concept of God contains a logical contradiction, such as the idea of a married bachelor does, then we could be confident that God cannot exist. A married bachelor cannot exist because to be a bachelor is to be unmarried by definition. The law of non-contradiction tells us that a thing cannot be its own opposite at the same time and in the same way. A man cannot be both married and unmarried at the same time and in the same sense. These logical boundaries also help us discover truth and will be very useful in determining whether or not the Christian worldview is true.

Philosophy: In addition to logic we can use other philosophical tools to arrive at true conclusions. While some people hold the view that philosophy is mostly about pointless navel-gazing, the reality is that philosophy is just about thinking clearly. If we want to arrive at truth, we need to think carefully and analyse the evidence to see where it leads. Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that particularly deals with things that transcend the physical and natural world, which makes it an important contributor to any worldview discussion involving supernatural beings.

It is possible to know truth, including the truth about the existence of God. The tools of philosophy and science help us to evaluate the evidence and arrive at a reasonable conclusion about which worldview is ultimately true.

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Have a comment or question? Please leave a response in the section below or write a question using the form on the right hand side of the page. You can also interact with me on Twitter via @ConnectApx

What Is Truth?

2018-07-16T15:50:00.002+10:00

In the previous article we established the simple idea that truth exists. Having done so, we can now take a brief look at the nature of truth and determine just exactly what truth is.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Truth Corresponds to Reality

Put simply, truth is telling it how it is. Philosophers call this the “Correspondence Theory” of truth, because true statements correspond with a reality or fact.

For example, the statement “The chair is green,” is true if the chair it refers to is green. Similarly “It is a sunny day today,” is true on the condition that the day is indeed sunny.

This view of truth ties the truthfulness or falsity of statements to observable facts. If the chair is blue, then the statement above is false. If it is raining outside then it is not true that it is sunny today. This kind of thinking about truth is intuitive and natural for human beings to engage in.

The correspondence theory of truth is a helpful model when it comes to investigating religious claims because it allows us to arrive at conclusive answers. If truth corresponds to reality, then it is either true or false that God exists. There is a fact of the matter which can be determined through investigation.

Truth is Exclusive

On the Correspondence view, two people may disagree about whether or not God exists. Because there is ultimately a fact of the matter (God either exists, or he doesn’t), this means that one of the people will be wrong. This tells us something else about the nature of truth: that it is narrow, or exclusive.

Consider a mathematical equation such as 2 x 3. There is one correct total for that equation; any true solution must equal 6. However there are an infinite number of incorrect answers you could give. 7. 12. 8 billion. Guacamole.

Only one total corresponds to the equation in a true and accurate manner. All of the other possible answers are false and should be discarded. Accordingly there is a narrow, singular truth about how and why the universe exists. All of the other theories will be false because that’s the nature of truth. It excludes all contradictory answers.

Truth is Discovered, Not Made

This flies in the face of post-modern theories of truth which say that we can construct our own truths, or that “you have your truth, I have mine.” These views are extremely popular, at least when it comes to religious or ethical questions.

However adherents of these more subjective theories of truth usually fail to live consistently with their own beliefs. When they read their doctor’s instructions for taking medications, they ultimately demonstrate that they believe that there is a fact about the drugs they are taking and that they need to be taken in the correct dosage and at the right times to be used safely.

When they enter a car park and pull out their keys, rational people head straight for the car they know to be theirs. They don’t try to unlock every car in the lot or take whichever car they feel like. Even if they did, using the excuse “It is true for me that this is my car,” would not be an adequate legal defense when they are arrested for stealing someone else’s vehicle. There is a fact of the matter about which car they own and are free to drive.

Truth is discovered, not made. When we consider the universe and the question of whether or not it is the product of an intelligent mind, we cannot just project what we would like to be true onto the question. This is literally making things up. Any conclusion we arrive at using this method is pure fiction. To learn the truth about the origin of the universe or to discover what life is all about, we must instead investigate and look for the evidence that will point us either towards or away from the conclusion that God exists.

Application

What does this mean for our investigation of Christianity? The statements “God exists,” or “Christianity is true,” are either true or false. There is a fact of the matter in both cases. If they are found to be true, then other conflicting worldviews are immediately demonstrated to be false, because truth is exclusive by nature and it does not permit contradictions to exist. Christianity and opposing worldviews cannot both be true at the same time, for example.

Additionally, we must investigate the evidence to determine which worldview corresponds best with the realities we observe in the universe. We cannot invent our own worldview apart from the facts; to do so is to create a delusion for ourselves. If Christianity is true, it must align with observable features of the universe and explain them adequately. I will go on to demonstrate in future posts that this is precisely the case.

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Truth Exists

2018-07-03T22:51:00.004+10:00

Does truth exist? This question is extremely important to answer because it is foundational to all learning and discovery. If we are investigating deep questions about life, the universe and God, then we need to be clear about whether or not there is a truth regarding these kinds of matters. In order to make the case that Christianity is true, we are assuming that it is possible for statements, or beliefs, or ideas to be true. But is that a valid assumption to make?

If there is no truth, then Christianity (or atheism, or "insert your worldview here") cannot be true. And if that’s the case then we should probably abandon the project of trying to convince one another about the views that we hold.

Now it may not have ever occurred to you that truth might not exist. Most of us innately believe from a very early age that it does. However, rather than merely assuming that truth exists, it is easy enough to demonstrate that it does with a simple thought exercise.

Consider the claim “There is no such thing as truth.”

Once you think about it, you will quickly see that the claim self-destructs. If there is no truth, then it quite simply can’t be true that there is no such thing as truth. The claim undercuts itself and so must be rejected. There absolutely must be such a thing as truth, because the statement that there is no truth cannot be believed unless truth does actually exist.

Consequently, when we evaluate the beliefs or worldviews that different people hold, we can be confident that the ideas we are assessing could possibly be true. This means Christianity is on the table as a live option. There is such a thing as truth, so it is possible that the Christian worldview is true.

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The Evidence Against Jesus Mythicism in Paul

2018-03-31T21:39:00.000+11:00

This Easter I have had the privilege of engaging with a devout Jesus Mythicist via Twitter on the topic of whether or not we have evidence that Jesus is a historical person. While I have written about this topic once before, I thought I would celebrate the season by laying out all of the evidence that persuades the overwhelming majority of scholars and historians that a human being named Jesus existed and was the subject of the New Testament writings. Let's investigate the data.

The Writings of Paul

While the existence of Jesus is not really controversial among professional scholars, the existence of the apostle Paul is virtually unquestioned. Even radical scholars agree that Paul is the genuine author of at least 7 of the New Testament books traditionally attributed to him. A body of writing that can be tied to one consistent author is superb evidence of the author existing, so no objective scholar working in New Testament studies today advocates the view that Paul is not a historical person.

The writings of Paul contain 2.5 mentions of Jesus per chapter, so you would naturally think that this constitutes very strong evidence that the Jesus he writes about is a historical person too, but Mythicists argue that Paul believed in a celestial Christ who was not an actual human being as Christians have traditionally understood. Therefore, they claim, Paul does not provide evidence for the historicity of a man called Jesus. They cite the following New Testament verses as evidence for Paul's belief in a spiritual, non-human, archangel Christ:

Proof Text 1

Galatians 1:11-12 (NASB)

For I would have you know, brethren, that the gospel which was preached by me is not according to man. For I neither received it from man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.

Proof Text 2

Philippians 2:5-8 (NASB)

Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men. Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

Response to Proof Text 1

Mythicists argue that because Paul received his gospel not "from man", a non-human source of his message is required. They see this passage as bolstering their claim that Paul worshipped a cosmic Christ. However a contextual reading of Galatians 1 combined with the story of his conversion to Christianity documented in Acts 9 gives us a more satisfactory interpretation: Paul is reminding the Galatian church that his apostolic authority does not come from the Jerusalem council but rather straight from the risen Lord Jesus, who he believed had appeared to him and appointed him the apostle to the Gentiles.

Paul's purpose in claiming that his gospel did not have its origin in man is to emphasise his God-given authority over the Gentile churches and has nothing to do with believing that Jesus was a spiritual non-human being.

That Paul is declaring the divinity of Jesus rather than denying his humanity is made certain by verses 18 and 19 of the same chapter, where Paul describes a later visit to Jerusalem to check that his gospel message aligned with those who led the the Christian church in Judea:

Galatians 1:18-19 (NASB) - emphasis added

Then three years later I went up to Jerusalem to become acquainted with Cephas, and stayed with him fifteen days. But I did not see any other of the apostles except James, the Lord’s brother.

The implication of Paul mentioning that Jesus had a human brother is clearly that Jesus was human himself, which in turn shows that the earlier section in Galatians was not claiming that Jesus was a non-human.

James is cited as a historical person by the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, meaning we have both biblical and extra-biblical evidence for him. This makes his existence basically undeniable and the reference to him very difficult to dispose of. Mythicists have to tie themselves in knots to explain how a cosmic Christ can have a flesh and blood historically-existent brother. While they do try to offer theories such as that perhaps James was only a fraternal brother and therefore Jesus was not genetically related and still possibly not human, these wilder explanations are less parsimonious than the plain reading of the text and scholars tend not to be persuaded by them.

Response to Proof Text 2

The next Mythicist claim is that the meaning of Philippians 2:5-8 is that the archangel Jesus took on the appearance of a human body but was not actually a human being. They also claim that the events that happened to him need not have happened on Earth. Rather than his death being a physical/historical occurrence within human history, they say that the crucifixion Paul alludes to in this passage is rather a spiritual event taking place in one of the spiritual dimensions identified in pre-Christian Jewish beliefs. But do these claims hang with Paul's ideas expressed elsewhere?

Romans 5:15 (ESV)

But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if many died through one man’s trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift by the grace of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for many.

In one of the clearest and most indisputable statements in Romans, Paul says that Jesus Christ was a man, using the Greek noun ἀνθρώπου (anthropou, from which we get the word anthropology). The plain meaning of ἀνθρώπου is a human man and it is consistently used that way throughout the letters of Paul.

It is clear from this passage that Paul thought of Jesus as an actual man, as opposed to being a celestial figure merely in the guise or form of a man, so the Mythicist claim that Paul believed only in a spiritual Christ is false.

The second part of the Mythicist explanation of Philippians 2:5-8 is that Paul believed that the crucifixion was not an earthly event but took place in a heavenly dimension just above the level of the earth. But this claim is also hard to take seriously when one looks at Paul's statements elsewhere.

1 Corinthians 15:3-8 (NASB)

For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that He appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. After that He appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom remain until now, but some have fallen asleep; then He appeared to James, then to all the apostles; and last of all, as to one untimely born, He appeared to me also.

Paul believed in the same Christ every other Christian believed in at that time - the man Jesus, whose disciples believed they had seen him alive again after his death. This early tradition that Paul quotes, dated by even very skeptical scholars to have appeared within a few years of the crucifixion of Jesus, demonstrates that the belief of Paul in a human Jesus was shared with the Jerusalem leaders. Paul specifically names Peter (Cephas), James and the twelve. These men were known for exactly one thing - being disciples or relatives of Jesus, the man.

The gospel traditions may have emerged later than the writings of Paul, however they speak of the same people Paul appeals to as his fellow witnesses of the physically risen Christ. Mythicists have to ignore the obvious support the various texts of the New Testament lend each other in order to pretend Paul believed in an angelic Jesus.

Further Evidence from Paul

In addition to the verses supplied, the writings of Paul also give us several other details about the life of Jesus that make the Mythicist hypothesis highly improbable. They include the following:

1) That Jesus was a descendant of Abraham.

Galatians 3:16

The promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed. Scripture does not say "and to seeds," meaning many people, but "and to your seed," meaning one person, who is Christ.

2) Jesus was a descendant of David.

Romans 1:1-3

Paul, a bond-servant of Christ Jesus, called as an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, which He promised beforehand through His prophets in the holy Scriptures, concerning His Son, who was born of a descendant of David according to the flesh,

3) Jesus lived under Jewish law.

Galatians 4:4

But when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law,

4) He was betrayed, and on that same evening instituted the Lord's Supper.

1 Corinthians 11:23-25

For I received from the Lord that which I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus in the night in which He was betrayed took bread; and when He had given thanks, He broke it and said, “This is My body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of Me.” In the same way He took the cup also after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in My blood; do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of Me.”

5) Jesus was crucified.

Galatians 3:1

You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? Before your very eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified.

6) The Jewish authorities had something to do with his death.

1 Thessalonians 2:14-15

For you, brethren, became imitators of the churches of God in Christ Jesus that are in Judea, for you also endured the same sufferings at the hands of your own countrymen, even as they did from the Jews, who both killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out. They are not pleasing to God, but hostile to all men,

All of this information comes from books that are considered genuine Pauline letters by basically all New Testament scholars. However 1 Timothy, considered a disputed book within modern scholarship but accepted as genuine by the church as early as the Muratorian fragment (circa 170 AD), also offers further evidence of the humanity and historicity of Jesus. If you accept it as a genuine Pauline letter, you get two bonus verses:

7) Jesus is a man (as already stated in Romans 5:15).

1 Timothy 2:5

For there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus,

8) Jesus testified before Pontius Pilate.

1 Timothy 6:13

In the sight of God, who gives life to everything, and of Christ Jesus, who while testifying before Pontius Pilate made the good confession, I charge you

The evidence from Paul overwhelmingly points to Jesus being a historical person. The idea that Paul didn't believe in the existence of a man despite claiming to have met both the man's brother and also a disciple who followed him for 3 years is hard to swallow. On the basis of Paul alone, Mythicism is extremely unlikely to be true.

There are further sets of evidence that NT scholars and historians provide for the existence of Jesus, and we will look at some of those in a future article.

Do you agree that Paul believed in a human Jesus? Do you have a counter-argument? Please leave a comment and continue the discussion.

Memebuster #3: I just believe in one less God than you

2018-01-24T22:54:00.002+11:00

A mighty impressive list, but does it really do anything to disprove the existence of God?

One of the pithier quotes that does the rounds online and is frequently injected into debates between Christians and atheists is the following, originally coined in the mid-90s by Stephen F. Roberts:

"I contend we are both atheists, I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."

...Stephen F Roberts

The particular meme I have shared is a variant of Roberts' idea, containing the end of his quote and a long list of deities from various cultures and religions from across the globe. Both the meme and the quote are interesting to reflect on and it is perhaps even challenging for some Christians to formulate a response. But never fear, this meme is as busted as they come. Let's look at the three claims contained in the quote and see whether they stand or fall.

Claim 1: We are both atheists

This claim is clearly false, if it is being offered to someone who believes in the existence of God. Someone who believes in God is not an atheist at all. Nothing offered in the rest of the argument justifies this claim, so it can be dismissed as empty rhetoric. It may sound impressive, but it means nothing. And to compound things, it sloppily contradicts the very next claim.

Claim 2: I just believe in one fewer god than you do

So what? This is stating the obvious. A Christian theist believes in one God, while an atheist believes that there is no God. We can count too, you know. Sometimes this comment is made like it's a profound declaration, but really it's just a statement of obvious fact and hardly an earth-shattering revelation.

Meanwhile, if Stephen F. Roberts and his atheist brethren believe in one less god than we do, then Claim 1 is contradicted, because we are not both atheists.

Let's move onto the final and most important claim.

Claim 3: I dismiss your God for the same reason you dismiss all other gods

And again, this statement is false - depending on the reason for which you dismiss all other gods.

If, like me, you reject the existence of Apollo, Dionysus and Thor (etc, etc) because there is no evidence to justify belief in them, then you stand on solid ground.

"Aha!" cries the atheist. "That's exactly why I reject your God."

Well actually no, the evidence for the God of Christianity is utterly unlike the evidence for the gods listed in the image at the top of this article in terms of abundance, depth and quality.

Atheists sometimes make the mistake of imagining the concept of God as being some kind of "sky dude" who is similar to Thor or the Greek and Roman deities. That he's merely an immortal anthropomorphic being with superpowers and an interest in the moral behaviour of his human pets. But this is a strawman representation of God. I reject that kind of god too, he's far too small and weak an idea to be worth more than a cursory investigation.

When Christians talk of God we are offering a philosophically robust hypothesis. We are speaking of the uncaused first cause, the necessarily existent being that terminates the infinite regress of causes and brought all of contingent reality into existence. We are talking about the architect who fine-tuned the initial big bang conditions to be just right for producing a universe in which intelligent life can exist, despite the range of possible life-permitting values being infinitesimally narrow. We are talking about a perfect being whose nature is the objective standard by which we measure right and wrong moral actions. We are positing a unified explanation for the existence of life, love, physics, chemistry, beauty, truth, information, goodness, design, logic, mathematics and human free will.

None of the other gods rise to this level. Even in their own mythologies, virtually none of the finite gods are responsible for the existence of all other things. None of them can plausibly account for the existence of observable features of the actual universe, such as the fine-tuning of the universe for life, or the existence of objective moral standards and duties. Information is caused by intelligence, yet genetic information pre-existed the first intelligent beings. How many of the gods on that list could be the solution for that little chicken and egg paradox? Very few of them, because they are not the type of thing that creates and designs genetic processes. Perhaps most damningly of all, there are no current philosophical arguments being offered and defended by modern philosophers for the existence of these lesser gods. As ideas go, they just do not hold water.

Yet by contrast there are many logical and time-tested arguments for the existence of God being articulated and defended by philosophers in the current academic sphere. There are also millions of people worldwide who testify that they have experienced the love of God, yet how many Dionysians does one meet? How many devoted worshippers of Thor? Subjective personal experiences may be weak, unconvincing evidence on its own, but paired with valid intellectual reasons for believing in God, it amounts to extremely strong evidence worth sincere investigation.

This Meme and Quote are Busted

First the quote falsely claims that theists are atheists, then conflictingly states the obvious that theists believe in a God and atheists don't. Then it engages in a very bad comparison between a philosophically rigorous idea (God) and a whole bunch of weak, vapid ideas (the lesser gods). The reason anyone rejects these gods is a lack of evidence, but the same cannot be said of the Christian God when there are so many good arguments and features of the universe that point to his existence, not to mention his ongoing activity in the world. Meme officially busted.

Memebuster #2: Eric the God-eating Penguin

2017-01-21T00:50:00.002+11:00

One of the things I have meant to do on this blog (aside from writing regularly, which never seems to happen despite my best intentions) is to round up popular atheist memes and see how they fare when given a close inspection. I did this once already with the hilariously bad Sinai Bible meme, which remains my most popular article, so when I came across this atheist penguin meme that made me hoot with laughter, I knew I needed to have a crack at this one as well.

Who wouldn't love a penguin named Eric?

When I say I hooted with laughter, I mean it. Despite the fact the objection housed within the Eric the God-eating Penguin meme is actually weak and is easily demonstrated as false, I could see the humorous side of both the penguin element and the attempt to parody the structure of the Ontological Argument for God's existence.

At the same time this meme is wildly popular on Twitter, with many people sharing it like it's a good argument against the existence of God. But is it really? Let's take closer look.

To summarise the God-eating Penguin objection, if Eric exists, he eats God and renders God non-existent. If it's possible to prove that Eric doesn't exist, then the same proof will render God non-existent. The structure of the argument is to force a dilemma in which both branches end with God not existing. The author's first challenge is to prove that Eric doesn't exist.

Challenge accepted.

Eric is Logically Impossible

There are certain types of things that can never exist. Not only do they not exist in this particular universe, but they could not exist in any possible universe. Their existence is completely impossible, because they violate logic. Such things include contradictions-in-terms, for example married bachelors or square circles - in fact I hesitate to call them things, because in reality these are just meaningless phrases, a conglomeration of contradictory words that don't refer to anything that can actually exist.

Sadly for Eric, God-eating penguins also end up falling into this category of logically impossible things that cannot exist. How so? The key is in understanding what we mean when we talk of God.

One of the persistent weaknesses in internet-warrior atheistic critiques of the idea of God is that they generally attack their own "straw man in the sky" caricature of God and fail to engage with the philosophically robust hypothesis that informed Christians offer. If God is just an unembodied sky-man, then sure, there's nothing about Eric that violates logic. But that's not what Christians mean when we talk about God.

Drawing from the Cosmological arguments, Christians posit God as the "uncaused first cause", the thing that everything else derives its existence from. If we follow the chain of cause and effect backwards through time and space, then to avoid an infinite regress of causes, we must arrive at a first, primary cause. This first cause exists independently of other things, and therefore the effects that it produces (everything contained within the universe) exist secondarily, in a dependent way.

Philosophers call this "contingent" existence. Everything within the universe - every person, every tree, every atom and molecule of every physical element, exists contingently. They don't logically HAVE to exist, it's quite possible there could be a universe without me, or without you. You exist because you were caused to exist by factors and agents external to yourself.

But the very first existent thing must be uncaused, otherwise we end up in a nonsensical infinite regress of causes. So the first cause is not contingent, depending on outside factors to exist, but rather it exists necessarily, in and of itself. It exists with logical necessity. It MUST exist.

And that's where Eric the God-eating Penguin smashes beak-first into the impenetrable wall of logical impossibility.

If God, the uncaused first cause, exists, then he has necessary existence. He cannot stop existing because it is logically impossible for him to do so. And therefore a penguin that causes a necessarily-existent being to stop existing violates logic in the same way that a married bachelor does, or a square circle. Such a creature is a contradiction-in-terms, entailing a logical impossibility - and therefore cannot exist in any possible universe.

And if he doesn't exist, then of course, he can't eat God anyway.

God is Logically Possible

The author goes on to make a second claim which also needs examination, saying:

"... and even if you can prove that Eric doesn't exist, that same proof will also be applicable to God."

I have shown that Eric is not able to exist because he is logically impossible, but it is unclear why the author presumes that this evidence also disproves the idea that God exists. There is no sense in which the concept of God entails a logical impossibility in the same way that Eric does.

If there was a logical flaw in the concept of God, this would be how serious academic-level atheists would refute the Ontological Argument. It would be the silver bullet that would end the God hypothesis once and for all. But it does not exist, because God is logically possible.

This premise in the argument is false, because the proof that shows that Eric does not exist fails to concurrently show that God does not exist.

Eric is Practically Impossible

There is another sense in which this scenario is impossible. Eric is a penguin, and just as the word God evokes certain properties or qualities, so the word penguin has a specific and limited use. Penguins are animals, creatures who live in the physical realm. Any non-physical penguin would not actually be a penguin - it would be entirely something else.

Similarly, eating is a physical act, the process of one physical organism materially consuming another. Everything that can be "eaten" is made of atoms and molecules arranged in the three dimensions of space.

This creates a practical problem for Eric, because if it was somehow logically possible for him to exist, there's no way he could actually eat God. When we say God, we are not referring to a physical object that can be eaten by a physical creature. God is spirit, he is an immaterial mind that is causally active in all locations in space, but not present physically at any finite location.

Practically speaking, it is impossible for physical Eric to physically eat an immaterial God.

Claiming that Eric is God-eating "by definition" will not get us there, because this definition causes both a logical and a practical impossibility. When Christian philosophers and apologists defend the concept of God by appealing to his defining qualities, they aren't causing logical or practical impossibilities, so it's not the same thing. If you want to argue this point, feel free, but please provide specific examples.

The Dilemma

Eric's creator would like us to believe that the two horns of his dilemma lead inescapably to the conclusion that God does not exist. But on closer inspection, using logic correctly, we find this to be untrue. Eric proves to be logically impossible, and the premise that any disproof of Eric will also disprove God turns out to be false. This is a twice dead objection.

Nothing I've said here proves that God exists - all I've done is disproven the existence of Eric and dismantled the objection that he can prevent God from existing. But for those who believe that there is no positive evidence for the existence God, I invite you to read some of the articles on my website and on the sites I link to. The open-minded reader will find plenty to consider.

Sorry Eric. I do like penguins, just not logically impossible ones.

Agree? Disagree? Please comment below, or feel free to direct any queries, responses or criticisms to my Twitter page, where they will be gratefully received. You can find me at https://twitter.com/WarrantedFaith

Weighing Up the Evidence for the Historical Jesus: A Response to Raphael Lataster

2016-12-27T23:33:00.000+11:00

If Christianity is true, then one of the key questions it has to be able to answer is whether or not Jesus was an actual historical person. It might seem obvious to spell this out, but I will anyway - if there's no Christ, there's no Christianity. If Jesus is invented, then so is the religion named after him. Nobody should believe the Christian message - no matter how inspiring one finds it - if it isn't actually true and there never was a man named Jesus of Nazareth.

Charles Roffey/Flickr

If however there was an actual Jesus, then we can learn about him and determine the truth about him based on the historical records we have of his life. So it is important for any seeker of truth (religious or historical) to answer the question of whether Jesus existed in the first place.

Recently I stumbled across an article on The Conversation website on this topic that I think warrants a response. You can read the original article here, but to sketch out a brief thumbnail summary, the author wants to argue that we should divorce the Christian "Jesus of faith" from the "Jesus of history". He would argue that the former is mythical, and that the latter is only briefly attested to in a handful of secular historical documents, leading to the conclusion that we should be agnostic about whether or not Jesus actually ever existed.

This is a methodology and conclusion I find highly questionable, and I will document the reasons for my skepticism about the article as I respond to the author's claims one-by-one.

Did a man called Jesus of Nazareth walk the earth? Discussions over whether the figure known as the “Historical Jesus” actually existed primarily reflect disagreements among atheists. Believers, who uphold the implausible and more easily-dismissed “Christ of Faith” (the divine Jesus who walked on water), ought not to get involved.

Why ought Christians not be involved in any quest to find the truth about Jesus? Thinking Christians care deeply about whether or not the object of their faith is who they believe him to be and are very interested in the evidence that points in either direction. One suspects that this opening paragraph is written to preempt the overwhelming challenge to "Mythicism" from New Testament scholars who also happen to be Christians.

Numerous secular scholars have presented their own versions of the so-called “Historical Jesus” – and most of them are, as biblical scholar J.D. Crossan puts it, “an academic embarrassment”.

This is true. Perhaps the article could have finished there? The reason these academic reconstructions of Jesus all suffer so terribly is that the attempt to delineate between the historical Jesus and the historic Christ whom Christians follow is an artificial one. The earliest and most reliable depictions of Jesus we have all unanimously describe a miracle-worker who was resurrected after his execution. It might be difficult to make sense of 2000 years later, but that's the data we have. Trying to ham-fistedly force the story to fit various interpretive frameworks has so far only brought us academically embarrassing dead-ends.

The first problem we encounter when trying to discover more about the Historical Jesus is the lack of early sources. The earliest sources only reference the clearly fictional Christ of Faith.

Here we encounter an old chestnut: The earliest sources (the Gospels) "only reference the Christ of Faith." and therefore the assumption is that they are of no historical value to us today. This contention is laid to ruin by the fact that all of the contemporary scholars that the author mentions in his article draw exclusively from the Gospels to furnish their various reconstructions of the life of Jesus. If it's good enough for professional historians, it will do for me.

These early sources, compiled decades after the alleged events, all stem from Christian authors eager to promote Christianity – which gives us reason to question them. The authors of the Gospels fail to name themselves, describe their qualifications, or show any criticism with their foundational sources – which they also fail to identify.

"Compiled decades after the events". Sounds bad huh? What the author knows but has chosen not to mention is that having documents that were written within mere decades of a historical event is almost unheard of in historical studies. Nearly every ancient historical event we know about has a gap of centuries between the event and the first written source we have that attests to it. The fact that the Gospels were all written within the 100 years of Christ's birth makes them remarkably contemporary to the events they describe.

And so what if the authors were Christian and were keen to promote Christianity? The question is not whether they were biased (everyone is), but whether or not their biases caused them to report and record truth or lies. Choosing to disbelieve them purely because they are Christians is like choosing not to believe stories from Holocaust survivors about conditions in the concentration camps. Aren't they similarly biased in wanting people to believe their story and take up their point of view? If their bias leads them to report honestly then it's not an issue, and we can say the same for the Christian authors of the Gospels.

Filled with mythical and non-historical information, and heavily edited over time, the Gospels certainly should not convince critics to trust even the more mundane claims made therein.

"Heavily edited over time..." Anyone with a basic grasp of textual criticism knows that while there are small number of sections in a small number of manuscripts that have been edited, we have so many copies of the text that we know where the edits were made and when in history they were added. None of them concern vital elements of Christian belief, and none of them invalidate the historical testimony about Jesus. This is an argument that actually ends up strengthening the Christian position - the manuscript evidence is so very good that we are able to detect the edits and discern between them and the original phrasing.

I'm not sure that it's relevant whether or not critics trust the mundane historical claims of the gospels. The question is whether or not historians do, and they overwhelmingly do. Which means I can too.

Paul’s Epistles, written earlier than the Gospels, give us no reason to dogmatically declare Jesus must have existed. Avoiding Jesus’ earthly events and teachings, even when the latter could have bolstered his own claims, Paul only describes his “Heavenly Jesus”.

Raphael, you've just stepped into a world of pain. Gary Habermas would like you to pay attention. 1 Corinthians 15 has a section in it that scholars date to within 3-5 years of the crucifixion of Jesus:

3 For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, 5 and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. 6 Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. 7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. 8 Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. [1 Corinthians 15:3-8]

Firstly, can a "Heavenly Jesus" die and be buried? Paul also says "I delivered to you what I also received", which is the language of passing on rabbinical traditions. He references living eyewitnesses - Cephas (Peter), James and more than 500 fellow believers, and we know from Galatians that Paul met both Peter and James and learned from them. Any notion that Paul believes in a heavenly Jesus with no ties to actual history or human witnesses is dead because of this passage.

Also important are the sources we don’t have. There are no existing eyewitness or contemporary accounts of Jesus. All we have are later descriptions of Jesus’ life events by non-eyewitnesses, most of whom are obviously biased.

"No existing eyewitness or contemporary accounts of Jesus." Richard Bauckham has shown convincingly the onomastic evidence that places the gospels squarely in 1st Century Palestine, when the eyewitness lived (tick). He's demonstrated from the writings of the church father Papias that the eyewitness testimony of the apostles was valued highly amongst the early Christians, who wanted to know about Jesus from people that knew him personally (tick). He's demonstrated the internal evidence that supports the tradition that Mark wrote his gospel based on the eyewitness accounts of Peter (tick), the evidence that suggests the authors of Matthew and John were both eyewitnesses themselves (tick) and the evidence that Luke was well-accustomed to the accurate historiographical approach of contemporary Greek historians of his day, which emphasised interviewing eyewitnesses (tick). While I can't do more than simply mention his work here, it gives the mythicist or anybody who claims that the gospels were not written by eyewitnesses more evidence than can be easily dismissed.

Given the poor state of the existing sources, and the atrocious methods used by mainstream Biblical historians, the matter will likely never be resolved. In sum, there are clearly good reasons to doubt Jesus’ historical existence – if not to think it outright improbable.

We've already touched on the exemplary manuscript evidence for the gospels, and that there are a multitude of good reasons for thinking they were written by eyewitnesses. The methods used to derive historical information from the gospels are the exact same methods used in every area of historical study, with every other ancient text. It seems ludicrous to dismiss the entirety of the historical process just because we dislike a conclusion that it leads to about the historical existence of a particular Galilean carpenter.

The author may think that there are good reasons to doubt the existence of a historical Jesus, but I'll let the atheist New Testament scholars have the last say on that:

I don’t think there’s any serious historian who doubts the existence of Jesus …. We have more evidence for Jesus than we have for almost anybody from his time period. - Bart Ehrman, UNC Chapel Hill

This view [that Jesus didn’t exist] is demonstrably false. It is fuelled by a regrettable form of atheist prejudice, which holds all the main primary sources, and Christian people, in contempt. …. Most of its proponents are also extraordinarily incompetent. - Maurice Casey, University of Nottingham

Did Women Have to Marry Their Rapist Under Old Testament Law?

2016-09-11T23:41:00.000+10:00

No. They didn't. You can all browse elsewhere now.

But for those inquisitive members of the species who simply must know more, welcome, and please enjoy the rest of this post.

Were women such as these forced to marry men who raped them?

One of the common criticisms levelled at the God whom Christians worship is that he is morally deficient in some way, and most often the ammunition for this claim is drawn from Old Testament texts. The brutality of life in the Ancient Near East is reflected in many of the stories we find in the Old Testament, and this leads some people to question the goodness of the God depicted in those events.

In particular I want to address the issue of whether or not the Hebrew law mandated that women who were raped should marry their rapists. There's really no way to dress this up; if a rape victim was forced by God's law to marry the man who violated them, this would be a horrific injustice. It would reflect very badly on God and strongly undermine the Christian claim that God's loving nature is the standard by which we judge the morality of human activities. A God who not only sanctions this law but demands it of his people is not a perfectly good God.

So where does this argument originate? What evidence do we have available to us to determine the truth of the claim that a woman had to marry their rapist under the Mosaic Law?

Critics appeal to Deuteronomy 22:28-29 (ESV).

“If a man meets a virgin who is not betrothed, and seizes her and lies with her, and they are found, then the man who lay with her shall give to the father of the young woman fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife, because he has violated her. He may not divorce her all his days."

And on a plain reading of an English text, it would appear they have an argument, right? Well, not really. The key piece of evidence is not what the English translation says, but more crucially what the original Hebrew says, and what it means in context with the verses around it. In this case the original language gives us great confidence that God is not prescribing that a woman must marry a man who rapes her.

Starting from Deuteronomy 22:13, Moses writes a string of laws concerning sexual immorality: What to do if a man falsely claims that his new wife was not a virgin. What to do if a man commits adultery with a married or betrothed woman. And then we get to a law that is actually about rape.

Deuteronomy 22:25-27 says this:

“But if in the open country a man meets a young woman who is betrothed, and the man seizes her and lies with her, then only the man who lay with her shall die. But you shall do nothing to the young woman; she has committed no offense punishable by death. For this case is like that of a man attacking and murdering his neighbor, because he met her in the open country, and though the betrothed young woman cried for help there was no one to rescue her."

This passage directly precedes our original verses, and gives us some really helpful clues about how to interpret them.

Firstly this passage describes a betrothed woman who is forcibly raped, and we know this because there have already been instructions for dealing with a betrothed woman who is committing wilful adultery in the previous passage. By contrast this section must be talking about a woman who is not giving consent. The harrowing image of her crying for help and the analogy to murder makes this certain.

Additional confirmatory evidence for this reading is found in the Hebrew verb chazaq, which is translated as "seizes" in the English, This is a strong verb that connotes a violent strength in laying hold of a woman forcibly. It is this word chazaq that tips us off to the realisation that verses 28 and 29 must not also be talking about the same kind of forceful action.

But before we take a look at those verses again, we should note that nothing in this passage reflects badly on God - here the law is protecting the victim from any consequence but condemning the rapist to death, which was the standard penalty for serious sexual misconduct during this period of time.

As we read earlier, verse 28 also has the English word "seizes" in the ESV translation, but this comes from an entirely different Hebrew verb, taphas. Compared with chazaq , the word taphas is generally a milder verb which literally means "to take in the hand" or wield, like someone handles a mug of coffee or picks up an instrument. Crucially, Moses could have repeated the stronger word chazaq if he wanted to in verse 28, and the fact that he chooses a much milder term indicates that rape is not in view anymore.

This is reflected in the entirely different consequences prescribed for each action. If you chazaq a woman and then sleep with her, you deserve to die. If you taphas a woman into bed, you'd better be prepared to marry her too and provide for her material needs responsibly.

Commentators down the years, aware of this difference in verbs, have referred to verses 28-29 as speaking about the seduction of an unbetrothed woman, rather than a rape. He takes her in his hand (taphas) and lies with her. Seduction is also implied in that the couple are "found" together, presumably caught in the act, the woman a willing participant. Nobody is crying for help in this illustration.

But verse 29 says the man must pay the woman's father because the woman has been "violated". Surely this suggests rape? Again, the Hebrew is our guide here.

The word translated as "violated" is 'anah, and it carries connotations of humbling someone or making them low. In the honour/shame culture of Mosaic Israel, a woman was not able to be married unless she was a virgin and brought not only shame upon her family but also potential ruin, if she lost her virginity outside of the safety net of marriage. Women were completely dependent on men for income, protection and provision in the Ancient Near East, meaning that sex outside of marriage had more than just moral repercussions. A woman who was not eligible for marriage was a survival burden to her parents, who would be forced to provide for her throughout the rest of her life. In difficult times this literally could jeopardise the well-being of her entire family.

Because the man who seduced her had humbled ('anah) her in the process and potentially ruined her chances of long-term stability and survival, the law protected the woman by forcing the man to meet his obligations and provide for her as husband. Laws like this had the benefit of discouraging men from using women for sex - there were serious strings attached.

And just in case the seducer was a slimy creep, the extended form of this law in Exodus 22:16-17 explains that the girl's father had the right to deny him his daughter in marriage, even though he was required to pay a bride-price for her. The family are financially protected from ruin, and crucially the woman is protected from a malicious deceiver.

Far from being laws that exploit women and force them to marry rapists, the laws in Deuteronomy 22 repeatedly protect women during an era of incredible vulnerability. Men who raped women received the death penalty, while rape victims were considered innocent (unlike in the honour-killings that still tragically happen in many parts of the world today). If a man seduced a woman and made her un-marriageable, it was his responsibility to provide for her as husband and to pay her family a bride-price.

It seems God may still be good after all.

Natural Evil: Is It a Good Argument Against God?

2015-12-05T00:52:00.000+11:00

One of the most common arguments against the existence of God is called the Problem of Evil. The existence of evil and suffering in the world is taken by many people as evidence that either there is no God, or that he isn't good and loving as Christians claim. I regularly come across people who hold this as THE main reason for why they don't believe in God.

Zoriah Haiti Earthquake by Zoriah / CC BY-NC 2.0

While I've already written a series of articles looking at the nature and origin of morality, which somewhat deals with the concept of moral evil committed by humans, there is another category of evil often put forward by atheists that requires further examination: natural evil.

Natural evil is defined at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy as any kind of evil "for which no non-divine agent can be held morally responsible for its occurrence." In other words it is supposedly a kind of evil only God can commit. There are no human perpetrators here, only human victims.

An example of natural evil might be a tsunami that kills thousands of people, such as the one in northern Japan in 2011 that claimed around 18,550 lives. The argument is that because such disasters happen, then it must challenge either the existence or goodness of God. Either he is powerless to stop catastrophic natural events from occurring, or he doesn't care that they happen.

This is an interesting topic, and one worth considering carefully as a Christian. Certainly we should be moved to act compassionately when such disasters occur. But it is my contention that natural evil fails to provide any compelling reason to abandon the idea that a good and loving God exists.

Is Natural Evil Bad or Wrong?

Firstly I reject natural evil as a category. When you look at the kinds of things considered to be natural evil - floods, earthquakes, droughts, famines, diseases, cancer, birth defects, etc - then it's clear that all of these things are morally neutral in and of themselves. They're certainly natural, but are they evil?

Cancer sucks. I lost a good friend to it a couple of years ago. But nothing about the circumstances he lost his life in have any element of moral blame attached to them. Nobody is accountable for his cancer, it's just a biological event that occurred in his body. Sure it makes me sad, but there was no moral component to his cancer. It was bad, but not wrong - and that's a key distinction we need to make.

Part of why this argument gets so much popular traction is because it is very easy for us to conflate whether something is good or bad with whether it is right or wrong. But these words actually communicate very different concepts, as a couple of simple illustrations will demonstrate.

Good and bad are goal-oriented. They speak of whether something will achieve its purpose or not. The goodness or badness of an action or thing are determined by the outcomes of it. A hammer is good for hitting nails. My grasp of languages other than English is bad, because I can't use them to communicate with the people who speak them. When we see the words good and bad, we need to ask "good or bad for WHAT?"

Right and wrong describe our moral duties - the things we should do are right, and the things we should not do are wrong. Many actions and attitudes have an intrinsic moral quality: It is right for me to love my children, and wrong for me to treat them harshly.

It is both bad and wrong to torture children for fun - bad because it has negative outcomes for the health and welfare of the child, and wrong because the moral law forbids that I should cause another person that kind of harm. My friend's cancer? It was bad for him biologically, and bad for me relationally, but no moral precept was broken.

The whole concept of natural evil is questionable because it tries to smuggle moral freight into events that can only be good and bad in the pragmatic, goal-oriented sense. A hurricane can be bad, but I don't think it can be wrong.

It is only when arguments from natural evil make the next step and introduce God as the moral agent to be held responsible for not preventing certain events from taking place that using the language of right and wrong becomes justified. But doing this only leads to more trouble for the atheist.

Can You Hold God Morally Accountable?

A more serious problem for the natural evil argument comes when atheists try to hold God morally accountable for the occurrence of natural disasters. They argue that he should prevent these events from happening and thereby save the lives of the people who die in them. To fail to do so is morally wrong. But many atheists don't realise that their world-view is completely unable to sustain this kind of moral claim against God.

The real difficulty lies in grounding an absolute moral framework that God is as equally accountable to as we are. Where would these moral duties come from? How could they exist beyond God, external to him? What would make them morally binding on both him and us?

These questions are impossible for the atheist to answer, because as I already discussed in another article, they have no way of grounding absolute morality. The usual attempts to base morality in evolution or human society fail to apply upwards to God. The only standard they can hold God accountable to and explain satisfactorily is their own personal moral standard - but this fails too because it is only their subjective opinion about morality they are judging him by, rather than a universally true set of values that exist beyond themselves.

There is just no way for the atheist to account for a universal law that exists even beyond God and applies to him also, so it is impossible for them to hold him morally responsible for the outcomes of natural disasters.

Can Christianity Explain It Better?

Here is a brief summary of how Christians might understand the interplay between God, morality and natural disasters:

God is the source of the Moral Law, he is the Lawgiver. His perfect nature is the standard by which we judge right and wrong. He is not subject to the requirements of the Moral Law, but rather it emanates from his moral perfection. He is what grounds absolute morality that applies to all people, everywhere.

Furthermore God is the source of all life. Life is his, not ours, and he is free to give it and take it as he sees fit, and in whatever way he chooses. It would be morally wrong for us to cause 18,550 people to die because we don't have the authority to take life on that scale. We are just humans. But God is not human and can take any life at any time because he rightfully owns it.

The natural evil argument assumes that people who die in a hurricane or a tsunami are innocent and don't deserve death, but the scriptures tell us that everyone is guilty of sin (Romans 3:23) and that death is the due penalty for our sin (Romans 6:23), which is why Jesus Christ had to die in our place. There are no "innocent victims".

Much of the devastation and loss-of-life during catastrophic weather events can actually be blamed on human morality. People who live in the world's poorest nations are often plagued by structural inequality and governmental corruption. They are forced to live in poorly constructed buildings which become death-traps during earthquakes or tsunamis. When similar events happen in developed countries, the death toll is usually far lower.

The scriptures sometimes show God causing natural disasters (the Egyptian plagues in Exodus 7 onwards, Noah's flood in Genesis 7) but it's not really described as something he does all the time, and when he does it, he's working for the good of his chosen people. Which brings me to my last point:

We believe that God is working providentially through human history to build his church, disciple by disciple. The scriptures tell us that "we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him. who have been called according to his purpose." (Romans 8:28) This doesn't mean that everything will go smoothly and nicely for the Christian, in fact we are promised a life of suffering while on Earth. But it also explains to us that even when bad (for WHAT?) things happen, God is bringing about the good and right for his purposes and his church, and that natural disasters are part of the experience, whether God causes them directly or not.

Are The Gospels All Just Hearsay?

2015-11-23T00:51:00.000+11:00

One of the more popular arguments at a lay-level against the reliability of the gospels is that the evidence for the life, death and resurrection of Jesus is all based on hearsay. While you won't find too many scholars or historians making this point, it is such a prevalent assertion among the masses that I think it's important to take a critical look at the argument and determine whether or not it impacts our ability to trust the content of the New Testament documents.

So firstly we need to ask the question: What is hearsay? One atheist website I looked at defined hearsay as "information received from other people that one cannot adequately substantiate". Often when people use the word hearsay, they are referring to information that comes from a third-hand source. It's important to note that these are common usages of the term, because there is also a legal definition that is considerably different in meaning.

Hearsay in the Legal Setting

In a day and age of fictional legal dramas, everyone is familiar with the idea that hearsay is inadmissible as evidence in a court of law. In U.S. law, hearsay refers to a statement made out of court that is then used in court to assert the truth of a matter. Under the Federal Rules of Evidence, only statements made in a trial, under oath, by someone who can be cross-examined, can be used as evidence.

In a simple example on the Wikipedia page for hearsay in US Law, if a witness makes a statement such as "Sally told me Tom was in town", this would be inadmissible evidence that Tom was in town, because it relies on a statement made by Sally outside the courtroom. To satisfy the requirements for evidence, Sally would need to make this statement herself in court. The hearsay rules are similar across most legal systems around the world.

However the common misconception that hearsay is never permitted in court is factually incorrect. Under U.S. law there are nearly 30 exceptions to the hearsay rule, which mean that out-of-court evidence may be used if it falls into a particular category, such as business records, spontaneous or excited statements, recorded past recollections, or my personal favourite - statements in authentic ancient documents (more than 20 years old).

So it's not enough to say that hearsay is unreliable evidence - such a blanket statement doesn't accord with the reality of the legal courts, where precision in the use of evidence is sometimes literally a matter of life and death. The truth is that certain kinds of hearsay evidence are used to prove the innocence or guilt of a defendant on a regular basis.

This is a great system for determining truth in contemporary legal matters, where we can examine witnesses directly in a court setting and compare their claims to the evidence provided by the prosecution and defense attorneys. Here only the strictest rules for evidence apply.\

Hearsay in Historical Inquiry

But is such a high standard of proof logical or even workable when it comes to determining the truth of past events in which all the witnesses are no longer alive? Under such circumstances, documentary evidence is all we have. While this would be considered hearsay in a court of law, historians have developed more appropriate methods for establishing historical truth.

By examining primary and secondary source documents, and cross-checking these with external sources such as archaeological evidence, historians formulate hypotheses about what happened in the past and determine the probability of an event having occurred.

Using this process, professional historians have come almost unanimously to the conclusion that Jesus was a real person who actually existed, on the basis of the New Testament documents, along with some brief external evidence from the historians Tacitus and Josephus. As fiercely critical atheist scholar Bart Ehrman puts it:

“He certainly existed, as virtually every competent scholar of antiquity, Christian or non-Christian, agrees.”

Beyond this, historians use criterion of authenticity to sift through statements in the New Testament writings to determine their historicity. Rather than deciding on the reliability of the books as a whole, individual sentences are compared to the criterion to determine their historical credibility one-by-one.

As for ancient historians, the vast majority of what they have recorded for us must be considered hearsay by the consistent critic. Given the limits of technology in early times, what alternative did historians have other than to record their own testimony concerning the statements they had heard from eyewitnesses?

In the words of Polybius, one of the founders of Roman historiography:

"For since many events occur at the same time in different place, and one man cannot be in several places at one time, nor is it possible for a single man to have seen with his own eyes every place in the world and all the peculiar features of different places, the only thing left for a historian is to inquire from as many people as possible, to believe those worthy of belief and to be an adequate critic of the reports that reach him." (The Histories 12.4C.4-5)

Neither modern scholars or ancient historians reject indirect evidence as hearsay, instead they probe the sources they have to determine their reliability.

Hearsay Can Communicate Truth

The reliance of historical investigations on documents and recorded testimony to determine the truth of history proves an important point - hearsay can communicate truth. This becomes obvious as soon as we imagine a simple scenario.

I was born too late to meet any of my great-grandparents. The only information I have about them comes from my parents, who knew them and could provide eyewitness testimony about them. But as soon as I tell my friends about my great-grandparents, repeating the things my parents told me, that information becomes hearsay.

Provided the testimony of my parents is true, the hearsay I pass on is also true. The fact that a statement is hearsay doesn't make it false, it just means that the truth factor needs to be investigated in order to be established as fact - which is exactly what historians do.

In the meantime, should my friends be automatically skeptical about the details I give them about my great-grandparents? Should they reject my claims until I provide further evidence? If we presume that all hearsay is untrustworthy, then we should reject any kind of indirect news reporting out of hand - yet nearly everybody believes that there is a basis of truth to current events news stories that they hear from a reporter who was not an eyewitness to the actual events.

This kind of hyper-skepticism is unworkable and impractical. By all means critically examine the New Testament texts to see if they tell the truth - but don't reject them because they contain hearsay. This is a historical investigation, not a criminal trial.

Are The Gospels Even Hearsay?

The last consideration we need to make is whether or not the gospels, along with Acts and the letters of Paul, are even products of hearsay in the first place.

Using the common definitions in regards to hearsay, we want to determine how many mouths each gospel passed through to determine whether it is second or third-hand. We also want to decide whether or not the information within the gospels can be adequately substantiated.

In the case of John and Matthew, much of what occurs in their gospels is their own eyewitness testimony. Both men were members of the inner circle of Jesus and were positioned to hear and record statements directly from other eyewitness as well.

In addition to multiple secondary sources that link Mark's gospel to the eyewitness testimony of the apostle Peter, notable scholar Richard Bauckham points out internal evidences within Mark that support this claim. An inclusio device bookends Peter's involvement as a disciple and witness of Jesus, indicating that he is the original source of the material. There is also a literal framing device throughout Mark that records events initially from a plural perspective ("we went there", "we did this") that moves to a singular perspective as the action gets underway. This is as clear an indication of eyewitness testimony as we can get from a writing system that didn't have a mechanism like speech marks for indicating quotations. At worst, Mark's gospel is secondary reporting of Peter's eyewitness testimony, and on par with anything recorded by Polybius.

Luke seems more vulnerable to the claim that his gospel is hearsay. While the evidence shows he was closely connected with Paul, there aren't too many links to the original disciples who were eyewitnesses of the life of Jesus. Nevertheless, the material he shares fits with the things established in the other gospels, and in fact Luke often uses portions of Matthew and Mark directly and unabridged. He explains in the prologue to his work that he has carefully interviewed eyewitnesses and is connected enough within the early church to plausibly gain access to them.

Luke benefits more than the other gospel writers from the corroborative historical evidence that has validated him as an outstanding and accurate recorder, so even though he is further from the inner circle of Jesus than the others, we can be confident that he has carefully recorded the events as they took place.

The gospels are a mixture of direct eyewitness testimony, along with secondary reports from eyewitnesses. While some of this would not be admitted as evidence in an actual court, this is no problem for the Christian, since this is not a legal matter but a historical one. The fact that there are four separate accounts of the life of Jesus, each of which contains original material not found in the others, mean that the accounts can be substantiated. This is made even more certain by the references to Jesus in Acts and the other New Testament documents.

How To Help Your Kids Develop A Faith That Lasts

2015-11-16T18:44:00.000+11:00

Right at the end of the book of Matthew, Jesus commands his disciples to "Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you."

"DSC_8457" by Cassidy Lancaster / CC BY 2.0

Some of us make disciples by sharing the gospel with people who don't yet know Jesus, but nearly all of us are given disciples - children - for whom we as parents have the responsibility of teaching to follow the commands of Jesus.

But doing this well is tricky. I want to admit right at the top of this article that I don't have all the answers, in fact I don't even have very many of them. But as a father of young children, my greatest responsibility is not my ministry work in my church and here online, but is instead to help my children to become faithful disciples of Jesus who have a vibrant, steady faith of their own.

One of the great problems besetting the church is the exodus of young people at university age who discover other worldviews, often for the very first time, and begin to wonder whether or not Christianity is true. This wondering is not a bad thing, in fact I think it is a foundational part of the Christian life - all of us are sifted, all of us are tested to see if we stand firm on the solid rock of Jesus Christ.

However, young people must be prepared for this testing, which can be an overwhelming experience even for those young people who truly want to follow Jesus. We need to prepare our young people to be inundated with messages about religion and truth from our culture that run contrary to the claims of Christianity. Our kids need to enter this battle with real weapons, not rubber swords and plastic guns, because their opponent is fully armed. They need to be firmly anchored, because the sea is rough.

Simplistic answers, or even worse NO answers won't get the job done. As the maxim goes, if we fail to prepare our kids, we will prepare them to fail. So we must ensure they are ready to defend their faith against the objections they will hear from their friends, peers or professors, and this starts when they are small children.

So how do we go about this? I'd like to suggest some ideas and in particular some resources that I find particularly helpful as a Christian parent who wants to prepare my children well for a lifetime of following Jesus.

1. Get Your Hands Dirty

Every child who has at least one caring Christian parent already has everything they need to continue on in their faith - provided that the parent is active in talking about and living out their faith. This is not an assertion of mine, it is the finding of sociological research done by the National Study of Youth and Religion. Lead researcher Christian Smith, from the University of Notre Dame, labelled the link between parents who practice what they preach, value their faith highly and speak about it regularly in the home, and young adults who are active participants in their religion, as "nearly deterministic".

You are the primary factor in your kids continuing on in the faith. If Christianity is a cultural habit you do on a Sunday morning, your kids are probably going to find something else to do on that day when they are old enough to choose for themselves. But if you are an active disciple, following Jesus with all of your life, and you do the normal relational things kids need like spending time with them, the chances are your kids will follow after your example. Get your hands dirty for the Kingdom of God, but also get your hands dirty in the lives of your children. Your children need you to!

2. Encourage Questions and Discussion

The next thing that I highly recommend, although I find this personally the most difficult part of our family routine to do well, is to foster questions and discussion about our beliefs. One of the most vital parts of developing a strong faith in our children is to let them ask questions. As a primary school teacher, I value interest-based learning, because I find that when kids (and also adults!) are investigating a question that has personal significance, they are more likely to value and internalise the answer they receive. This also rings true for teaching our kids about the Christian faith. If we want our kids to know what they believe and why they believe it, we have to get them thinking about it enough to ask questions.

Asking questions and opening our beliefs to critical evaluation also sends our children an important message:That Christianity is strong enough to withstand questioning. For Christianity to be worth our time, it has to be true, and if it's true, it should be able to stand up to scrutiny. The fact that the Christian worldview has withstood the fiercest criticism at the highest academic level and remained an intellectually viable option for thinking people to believe on the basis of the evidence is powerful, and differentiates it from other worldviews that discourage questioning (such as Islam). If you want your kids to have a faith that can endure trying times, don't shy away from running the rule over Christianity with them.

3. Be Informed

However, to be able to guide your children through questions about faith and truth, you have to have some answers to their questions! And if you don't have the answers, you at least need to have some resources available to help you find the answers. When our kids have a pressing concern about their own faith, they're probably going to ask us about it, and if we don't or can't answer their question, it can begin to give them the false impression that Christianity doesn't check out in reality, when in fact the opposite is true. You are the resource your child needs when they have a question about the Christian faith.

Intimidated? Don't be, One of the insights you get as a primary school teacher is that you only need to be one step ahead of your students in any domain of knowledge in order to teach them well. And the more you teach them, the more your own knowledge will grow - in my early lessons as a new teacher I probably learned more than the students did about the content of the curriculum! Rather than seeing this as an impossibly enormous tasks, begin by taking one step at a time, and you will develop the capacity to be the kind of guide your child needs.

One particularly good resource for finding the answers to questions is the website gotquestions? which is a searchable database with hundreds of thousands of answers to questions about Christianity and the Bible. I would also recommend for parents (or just Christians in general) to read Lee Strobel's books "The Case for Christ", "The Case for Faith" and "The Case for a Creator", which are entry-level, easy to read books looking at some of the evidence that points towards Christianity being true from scholars who work in the relevant historical, philosophical or scientific fields.

4. Kids Bible App

This one should be fairly obvious, but one of the challenges I've had as a parent is finding a way of sharing the scriptures with my children (aged 3 and 5) in a way that is engaging and suitable for their age group. Both of my children love using the bible app, which is available both on Android and for Apple devices. Full of animated, interactive stories from Genesis 1 right through to the end of the New Testament, the App also has quiz questions, achievement stars and collectable items that add some gamification to the experience.

The app is regularly updated with extra animations and features, and new stories are added from time to time. The stories are narrated and you can prompt the app to read the quiz questions aloud, which is helpful for children who are not yet able to read. While it's perfect for younger children, it's also interesting enough for older children to use independently. There are a lot of laugh out loud animations that we have enjoyed sharing together as a family.

You can get the download links from the website here: The Bible App for Kids. And the best news is, it's completely free, although I would happily pay money for it.

5. Buy Good Books

Kids love to read books, and books that teach them about their faith are particularly important. I have recently bought several books for my kids that I recommend for all Christian parents:

Firstly there is the What is God Like? series of picture books for young children about the attributes of God which have titles like "God is Spirit" and "God is Three Persons". They are written by world-class Christian philosopher and apologist William Lane Craig and have been appealingly illustrated. There are 10 books in total, and you can get these individually on Amazon, but I bought them as an entire set from the Biola University Apologetics online store.

Secondly I bought a series of three picture books by Melissa Cain Travis entitled "How Do We Know God is Really There?", "How Do We Know God Created Life?" and her newest release "How Do We Know Jesus is Alive?". These have excellent pictures and are good discussion starters as well, which I highly recommend for parents of 5-10 year olds.

For the older child who likes to nut out puzzles and problems themselves, I recommend Resurrection iWitness, by Doug Powell. It has bits to open and close and you kind of investigate or navigate as much as you read, with the focus being the "minimal facts" about the resurrection of Jesus that virtually all scholars (Christian, atheist, Jewish) agree on. I haven't read this with my kids, because it's over their heads right now, but I have it put away for the appropriate time.

6. Read This Blog

The last tip I can give you is to become a regular reader of Natasha Crain's blog Christian Mom Thoughts. I'm sure I'm not the only Christian Dad lurking on her website! Natasha has literally written the book on Christian parenting: Keeping Your Kids on God's Side. While I haven't read the book yet, it's been developed from some of the material on her blog which I have read and which is excellent. She gives ideas for starting discussions with children, has a recommended reading list I am working my way through and also highlights issues Christians need to learn about to be successful Christian ambassadors and evangelists - there's so much more than just parenting on offer at her blog. In fact stop reading this blog and start reading hers!

Is God any better than ISIS? The Canaanite Slaughter

2015-11-15T00:36:00.000+11:00

One of the questions I’ve heard recently from both concerned Christians and outraged unbelievers is about what differentiates the atrocities being committed by ISIS in Iraq and Syria from the actions of the Israelites as they followed God’s commandments to destroy both the Canaanites and the Amalekites in the Old Testament. And I think this is an important, worthwhile discussion to have. Can the Christian denounce ISIS while upholding God’s judgement and remain consistent? Are the Canaanite conquest and the destruction of the Amalekites similar to the situation we see in Iraq and Syria now?

Flagof the Islamic State / Public Domain

On a surface level it’s easy to make the comparison. ISIS have shocked the world with their brutality, using violence and fear to gain control over large swathes of land, unlawfully seizing and destroying public infrastructure, slaughtering children and executing people from other religious sects. Not that I agree, but I can see how someone might find some similarities to God’s commands to the Israelites in Deuteronomy 7:1-2:

“When the LORD your God brings you into the land that you are entering to take possession of it, and clears away many nations before you, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations more numerous and mightier than you, and when the LORD your God gives them over to you, and you defeat them, then you must devote them to complete destruction. You shall make no covenant with them and show no mercy to them.”

Clearly no Christian can be blasé about these kinds of passages. In fact the gravity of these verses has led some believers to question whether or not the writers of the Old Testament books were mistaken in recording God’s commands. From a purely New Testament view, it can be sometimes hard to reconcile our image of the merciful, forgiving Father with the almighty, fearsome judge of the Old Testament period. But I don’t think we need to give up the integrity or cohesiveness of the scriptures to develop an understanding of these issues that is theologically, morally and intellectually satisfying.

In truth it is the Canaanites who need to be compared with ISIS, not God. There are many parallels in the Canaanite culture to the terrible, depraved acts carried out by ISIS, including their despicable treatment of children, their degrading and disgusting sexual practices and their destructive influences on the societies around them. The comparison between God and ISIS can only be made if you decide to ignore the more startling analogy to the Canaanites or the Amalekites in the first place – a move which makes no logical sense and has questionable motives.

So let’s take a brief look at how the Canaanites/Amalekites and ISIS resemble each other:

Violence:

Human rights observers estimate that ISIS have killed more than 10,000 people in Iraq and Syria since they first began their violent campaign to establish a global caliphate operating under Muslim Sharia Law. Their brutal methods include beheading their enemies, drowning them, burning them alive, stoning them to death and throwing them from the top of tall buildings, in addition to shooting and suicide-bomb attacks. In the past 24 hours at least 149 people have been killed in Paris as a direct result of a co-ordinated terrorist assault on innocent civilian targets, and ISIS have claimed responsibility.

Violence was also a regular part of existence in the Ancient Near East, and the Amalekites in particular were an aggressive tribe. In Exodus 17:8-15 we are told that the Amalekites attacked Israel without provocation when the Israelites had only just escaped from Egypt, despite the fact that the Israelites were more concerned with survival and finding water in the desert. The Amalekites were not a Canaanite tribe, so they knew the Israelites weren’t trying to take their lands. In all probability they were acting opportunistically, hoping to gain livestock and women from a soft, unprepared target. From Moses through to the time of Saul, Israel never once attack the Amalekites, yet they are repeatedly attacked and raided by groups of them (Numbers 14:45, Judges 3:13, Judges 6:3). We have a modern word to describe this kind of repeated, unprovoked violence perpetrated against innocent victims: terrorism.

Sexual Depravity:

Sexual immorality is another key similarity we see between ISIS and the Canaanite tribes. One particularly disturbing report I read recently described how ISIS have used captured women as young as 12 years old as sex slaves, ritualizing rape as a pathway to deeper spiritual connection to Allah. These extremists actually view rape as an act that purifies and cleanses the world. This frightening practice finds its equal in the sexual depravity of the Canaanite culture.

In Canaanite mythology, their god Ba’al is depicted engaging in incest on different occasions with his mother, his sister and his daughter. In fact one story depicts Ba’al raping his sister while she was in the form of a calf “seventy-seven, even eighty eight times,” or A LOT, as we would say. It is no stretch of the imagination to suggest that if a god they worshipped was famous for repeated incestuous rape, it was more than likely an embedded practice within their society. And this is reflected in what we know of Canaanite laws: while early Canaanite societies killed or banished those found guilty of incest, these penalties were reduced to merely a fine by the 14^th century BC. Not only was incest (and therefore quite likely the molestation of children) a part of Canaanite society, but they also engaged in religious sex rituals in their temples involving multiple people and encouraged each other to practice bestiality, for which they also relaxed their laws.

Crimes Against Children:

Every parent shudders at the thought of their children falling into the hands of evil men, and ISIS are the stuff of parental nightmares. Recently ISIS were thought to have killed hundreds of Syrian children in a mass execution, while their use of child soldiers and executioners has also been well documented. In Mosul last January they executed 13 teenage boys by firing squad for watching Iraq play Jordan in the Asian Cup football tournament, and families were unable to collect their bodies from the public square for fear of being attacked.

The Canaanites executed children too, burning them as live offerings to Moloch or Ba’al (sometimes called Kronos), often in payment of a vow. Cleitarchus records for us: “There stands in their midst a bronze statue of Kronos, its hands extended over a bronze brazier, the flames of which engulf the child. When the flames fall upon the body, the limbs contract and the open mouth seems almost to be laughing until the contracted body slips quietly into the brazier.” We also have a reference from Plutarch, who tells us that “the whole area before the statue was filled with a loud noise of flutes and drums so that the cries of the wailing should not reach the ears of the people.” In addition to these (and other) classical sources we also have archaeological evidence, multiple inscriptions and an Egyptian depiction of the practice occurring within Syria-Palestine, so that in the words of Oxford professor John Day, “There is therefore no reason to doubt the biblical testimony to Canaanite child sacrifice.”

It would be remiss here not to mention that children were probably killed by the Israelites as part of the Canaanite conquest, and definitely killed by them in the destruction of Amalek. We must remember though that these children’s deaths came about as the consequence of their parents’ actions and choices. The children are victims, but not of the Israelites. Instead the parents and the culture must bear the blame for the deaths of their children, because it was their persistent sinful action that placed their children in the unfortunate circumstances of having a quick, merciful death by the sword or a slow, painful death left by themselves in the wilderness, as their only options. Christians certainly need to wrestle honestly with these distasteful circumstances, but we also need to keep in mind where the culpability lies.

Some Questions:

The atheist or critic however must wrestle with three questions: Firstly, can you be consistent in taking a stance against ISIS while excusing the actions of the Canaanites? If you think ISIS needs to be stopped and you support military action against them, can you then also complain about military action taken against similar threats to humanity, safety and decency by the Israelites at God’s command?

Secondly can you be consistent if you find the execution of Canaanite children by the Israelites immoral, but you yourself are pro-abortion? If you can conceive of one set of circumstances under which it is permissible to terminate a young human life, why decry another? While the clever respondent may try to flip this problem back onto the Christian, it doesn't really work: Unborn babies will usually arrive in the world with parents or at the very least adults to look after them and a blank development slate, while the Amalekite/Canaanite children had no caregivers, no resources for survival and were undoubtedly damaged from the harsh, debauched lives of their communities. The other major difference is that the killing of children in the Old Testament happened in extremely unique circumstances and was never going to be a part of everyday existence, unlike abortion, which some people want to embed into society as a normal practice. If you’re one of those people, but you take exception to the events in the Old Testament, you have an inconsistency to resolve.

Finally the biggie: Can you consistently attempt to use evil as a proof God doesn't exist, but then condemn him when he acts against evil? One of the most common objections to the existence of God is that evil exists in the world, and a good God wouldn't permit evil like ISIS to exist. “Where is your God? He should do something to clean up this mess!” But when God cleans house in the Old Testament, he’s a genocidal maniac according the very same voices that want to use evil to disprove his existence.

There is a ton more to say on this topic, but rather than read it from me, I invite you to get a more thorough treatment of the Canaanites by reading Dr. Clay Jones’ scholarly work entitled “We Don’t Hate Sin So We Don’t Understand What Happened to the Canaanites” (PDF) along with this in-depth Glenn Miller article on the Amalekites.

Why Morality Points to God

2015-11-10T00:18:00.000+11:00

In the previous two articles in this series, I laid out the reasons why I think it’s reasonable to conclude that morality is objective – that is that actions have their own intrinsic moral value according to an external standard of good and bad that almost all people recognise – and that this objective morality could not have had a human origin.

"Morality" by Dietmut Teijgeman-Hansen / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

I want to conclude the series by showing how God is the best explanation for the existence of objective morality, then take a moment to consider a common atheistic objection to this idea, before finishing up comparing the picture of morality we get in the scriptures with our everyday moral experiences.

So why believe that God is the best explanation for the existence of objective morality? Put simply, a transcendent moral law requires a transcendent moral lawgiver. Moral values exist, and they must come from somewhere – in fact they must come from someone. Given the highly personal nature of morality, an ethical code that requires me personally to do good and avoid evil can only come from a personal entity.

It makes no sense to claim that moral values such as Justice or Kindness exist independently in the universe as abstract objects, because abstract objects can’t be the cause of anything – they are causally impotent. Their existence would not be able to explain how I know and recognise what Justice and Kindness are, because as abstract objects, they would be unable to produce this effect in me.

So these values must be grounded in a person. Yet as we discussed previously, if the personal entity behind morality is a human, then morals immediately become subjective and arbitrary. So absolute, objective morals must have their root in a person beyond human status.

The person must pre-exist humanity, because intuitively we know that rape was still wrong even before there were humans to engage in it. The parallel is people who have not been born yet, but will end up raping someone. Even though they don’t exist yet, and therefore have not committed the action, we can know in advance that if they did engage in raping others, it would be wrong. If morality is objective, then rape is wrong in and of itself; the wrongness of the act is not dependent on the people who commit it. This morality had to be in place before the first people ever came along, and therefore the personal source of morality must pre-exist humanity.

This personal source of morality must also be good themselves, because the moral standard requires us to do good rather than evil. This is confirmed when we consider one of the classic arguments from history about the nature of morality that atheists regularly present to Christians today, which is known as the Euthyphro Dilemma. In this dilemma, the atheist asks: is something good because God says so, or does God say so because it is good?

This creates a problem for the Christian: If they answer that something is good because God says so, then goodness is an arbitrary quality. God could have decided that a completely different range of actions were morally good instead. He could also change his mind at any time and decide that it is good for us to inflict pain on one another. Anything could become good and anything could become bad, depending on God’s commands, which would essentially stop morality from being objective.

However if they answer that God commands moral behaviour because it is good, then goodness exists independently of God and he can’t be the basis or source of it. Accepting either option as true is an enormously problematic for the believer.

So how do we escape the horns of the dilemma? There is a simple answer. We believe that God commands moral behaviour because HE is good – it is his nature to be good and to love righteousness. So we are not stuck with either arbitrary or abstract morality. It turns out to be a false dilemma, because there is a third possible answer.

My hair is dark – this is an objective fact about my hair. Similarly God’s nature is good – and this is an objective fact about his nature.

God’s good nature is the perfect source of morality, if you think about it. It gives us an explanation of why we are able to recognise good and evil, which an abstract morality could not cause us to do, because unlike abstract objects, God has agency. God can cause things to happen, like making us personally aware of moral standards and implanting within us a conscience that reminds us that we have moral duties to uphold.

Meanwhile his nature also provides a source for moral values which is based in an objective property he has, namely goodness. He himself acts as the paradigm of goodness, the standard by which good things can be measured, and by which bad things can be immediately recognised.

I’d like to close by looking at a passage in the scriptures that fits very much with my own moral experiences, and perhaps it fits in with yours. If Christianity is true, it has to be able to describe reality, and this section explains two facets of morality that I think are universal to human beings. It comes from the apostle Paul, in the book of Romans (2:14-15).

When Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts sometimes accusing them and at other times even defending them.

This is saying that when people, who didn’t know the Mosaic law that the Jews lived by, acted according to similar values, they proved that the moral law was written on their hearts – inwardly knowable and accessible. This explains why all people today can almost universally identify what is good and bad, because it is an internal feature given to us by our creator.

And the passage goes on to say that our consciences act in conjunction with this internal moral code, giving us accusing thoughts or sometimes forcing us to make mental justifications as we wrestle with our consciences. I would be mightily surprised if you have never had this experience yourself. Can your worldview explain it?

Morality is such a powerful evidence for the existence of God, because God is the only conceivable source of an objective, personally binding moral code that pre-exists humanity and is oriented exclusively towards doing and being good. All human explanations fall short of being able to describe this morality and fall short of our universal moral experience, and therefore must not be true.

Can Morality Have a Human Origin?

2015-11-04T22:20:00.000+11:00

This is the second part of a discussion of morality. To read the first part about whether morality is absolute or relative, please click here.

"Crowd" by Kheel Centre / CC BY 2.0

Does Morality Come From People?

In our focus on morality we have so far discussed the nature of morality, comparing the views of moral relativism with moral absolutism, and I presented some basic evidence for the view that absolute morality exists. Today we want to extend the discussion to look at the idea that morality has a human origin.

Some of the theories of morality suggest that morals began as a product of human societies. In this view, morality is a universally agreed-upon set of values that humans have decided on over time and has been formed by cultural processes and institutions, such as the legal system. These societal values originally reflected the needs of ancient communities and were eventually formalised into law. But this view struggles to deal with scenarios throughout history where some actions, that were agreed upon by a society and ratified by their governments, were clearly morally wrong.

For example war criminals often hold publicly elected positions or are members of an army carrying out the orders of their government. They are acting according to the values of their society and their cultural institutions, but we can still recognise that their actions were morally wrong. This points to the fact that the moral law is separate to the legal code. During the Nuremburg Trials, American prosecutor Robert H. Jackson said of the Nazis “The refuge of the defendants can be only their hope that international law will lag so far behind the moral sense of mankind that conduct which is crime in the moral sense must be regarded as innocent in law.” Clearly our moral sense – which points to absolute morality – is a different thing to the behavioural agreements and values our culture holds.

Another problem that can’t be resolved by a communal values model of morality is that values in society change over time. Slavery was an accepted feature of society thousands of years ago, but is now universally condemned. Has it become immoral over time, or has it always been immoral? Could the morality of slavery change again in the future? Either slavery has always been morally wrong, and some communities in the past did not judge correctly, or the moral landscape is constantly shifting. If it is constantly shifting, how can we be so sure that our positions on abortion or SSM are absolutely correct, and not just correct relative to our society? Societal agreements aren’t big enough to ground a morality that applies equally to every human being in every era.

A question I have for this model of morality is how it deals with events that have never happened before. When the very first murder occurred, was it wrong? How about the very first rape? If these things had never happened before, how could the community have an agreement in place about it? While some definitions could be formed very quickly by a society that would allow them to prohibit all types of behaviour that had hurtful consequences, the idea that an act could happen before it was assigned a moral value seems problematic.

Another theory of the human origin of morality is that moral principles have had a survival benefit throughout the development of the human race. The idea is that as social creatures, humans have been able to create stronger, safer societies by adopting moral principles. But this is an even flimsier theory. Morality often requires us to be self-sacrificial and to put others first, yet our survival instinct is to look out for ourselves. Imagine a scenario where your family is in a burning building and you are the only person who can rescue them. Our moral instinct is to try and rescue them regardless of the risk to our own safety, but our survival instinct is to stay out of harm’s way. There is very often a direct conflict between moral thinking and survival thinking.

The other difficulty is that a survival theory of morality could only lead to a pragmatic kind of moral code, one in which the ends justify the means. If survival is the goal, then things would be morally good if they help you achieve your goal. Instead of being morally bad, lying could actually be morally good if it increased your survivability. At this point survival theorists will often say that it is the survival of the species that is the goal, not the survival of the individual. But if it’s a question of my survival vs the overall benefit of my species, why would I choose to benefit the species? If we reflect on human nature, do we think that the majority of humans throughout the history of the human world would choose to benefit the survivability of others at the cost of their own survival?

The problem with all human-origin theories of morality is that they are ultimately subjective. The morality of an action is determined by the subject – by you or I – as we respond to it. The action itself has no moral value, instead we determine the moral value of an action according to our own opinions. This puts us right back into the grip of moral relativism. If morals merely come from other people, what makes those morals incumbent upon me as an individual? If people can make moral decisions about what is right and wrong for everybody, then why I can’t I be the person making those decisions? Why am I obligated to do what you say is good and to avoid what you say is bad?

It seems to me that a morality grounded in humanity (and therefore relativism) struggles to explain the existence of moral duties – the responsibility we have to do good and not evil. Each of us experiences a compulsion to follow our moral sense most of the time and do what is good. We know somehow that we are personally responsible to behave ethically.

From a very young age this is evident in us. I teach primary school children in the junior years, and it’s my experience that 6 and 7 year olds are very aware of their moral responsibilities. They feel guilt and shame when they do something they know is wrong, even when it’s a minor issue and they aren’t in very much trouble. How does this expectation that we are to live up to a particular moral standard become developed in us so deeply at such a young age, regardless of our background, culture or the beliefs of our family, if morality is all just a matter of opinion?

Instead I think we experience a world in which morality is objective – Rape is the object, and it is wrong in itself. Not because you or I deem it to be wrong, but because the act of rape has the moral property of wrongness. Under this view rape is always and absolutely bad, regardless of the opinions of people. The goodness or badness of the action is an inherent feature of the action.

If this is true, then morality exists externally to the human race. It doesn’t come FROM us, it comes TO us. And so the question must be: From where?

Please check back soon for the 3^rd instalment of this series on morality.

Is Morality Relative or Absolute?

2015-11-03T21:45:00.000+11:00

Many of the biggest hot-topic issues in the world today require us to think deeply about morality. Every day there is a new moral outrage somewhere in the news, but also some praiseworthy event which we can be pleased about. Common discussion topics range from the ethics of big corporations and the call for governments to protect vulnerable citizens at the public level, down to the personal moral dilemmas we face in our everyday lives.

"arrows" by Dean Hochman / CC BY 2.0

Two of the biggest cultural debates involving Christians right now are the issues of abortion and same-sex marriage (SSM for short). Many people in our society view abortion as a morally good option for women facing difficult or unwanted pregnancies, and they see any public opposition to abortion as being morally wrong. Similarly a lot of people believe that SSM is morally good and that denying a same-sex couple the right to legally marry is an example of evil.

Ultimately we will decide for ourselves what we believe is right and wrong, but is that all morality is? Just a choice we make for ourselves about what constitutes good and bad or right and wrong? Let’s investigate the different views of morality and see if we can tease out some truth.

Moral Relativism

One of the common views of morality today is Moral Relativism, an idea related to relativistic claims about truth, which I have written about before. The moral relativist claims that morals are simply personal and subjective value judgements about what is right and wrong, and that each person’s individual belief about moral issues are equally valid. They reject the idea that morality exists as an external standard by which our behaviour can be measured, preferring to see moral views as merely preferences. On this view we pick and choose our moral stances based on what we as individuals think and feel is morally acceptable.

The moral relativist would say that the statement “abortion is wrong” is morally equivalent with the statement “abortion is good”. Neither is right or wrong, they are just different views, and they are true for the person who holds those views.

But moral relativism has an inherent problem. If moral choices can be made simply according to our preferences, then we can feel free to ignore people who disagree with us no matter what their moral values are, because we don’t share their preferences. We can decide that in our personal moral code, murder is acceptable and that it’s okay to rip people off. And it doesn’t matter what other people think or say about our moral code, because our morality is based on our own opinion.

When we adopt a relativistic view of morality, we throw out the classical, intuitive concepts of good and bad that we learn and understand as children, and subsequently we lose something called “moral duties”. Moral duties are the responsibilities we have to do what is good and right, and to avoid doing evil. Most people would agree that we have this responsibility, and this is one of the clues that something bigger than relativistic morality exists.

Most pro-abortion and SSM lobbyists consider their views to be absolutely and objectively right, for all people everywhere. They believe their moral views are more than just personal inclinations, so they are committed to the idea that there is an external, absolute moral standard to which all people are accountable, and which overarches our personal standards for determining right and wrong.

Moral Absolutism

This overarching moral standard can be called Moral Absolutism. People who believe in the existence of objective, absolute morals see that a kind of moral code is hard-wired into humanity, and that we are all responsible for keeping to it. Unlike relativism, where moral values are located in the individual and are arbitrary, absolutism contends that a universal moral standard exists beyond the individual, and that ethical behaviour is required of us as a result.

I believe that the evidence we have points to the existence of a universal, external, absolute moral code. From an early age, our moral experiences teach us that right and wrong exist, that some actions are bad and that others are good. Our conscience tells us – sometimes quite painfully – when we have hurt someone or acted selfishly. When we are wronged we get angry and we suffer deeply when we experience injustice. If morality is only the individual preferences of ourselves and others, would we still have these same profound experiences? Absolute morality is needed to explain our experiences of moral blame – both in ourselves and in others.

We also need absolute morality to explain how we can recognise something as being good. Humanitarians sometimes receive awards for acts that are universally recognised as good. This points to the existence of a standard of good that each of us can judge goodness by. Every person makes these value judgements every day, showing that we all recognise good and bad. Hitler’s treatment of the Jews is bad. Giving shelter to homeless people is good. Rape is wrong. It is morally right to save a drowning child. Every human being has access to this standard and can recognise when an action deserves moral praise or moral blame.

We might disagree on the some of the content of the absolute moral standard, but if you throw out enough moral scenarios, most people will eventually agree that such a standard must exist. So how do we explain the existence of a personally-binding moral law? Where does it come from? And what are the implications for each view of moral origins?

Check back soon for Part 2 where we will discuss the competing explanations for how morality came to exist, and identify which of these origins is the best explanation for the kind of objective morality we experience in reality.

Does Truth Exist and Can We Know It?

2015-10-29T12:00:00.000+11:00

Although I touched briefly on this issue in my article on intolerance, I thought it would be good to take a closer look at some of the relativistic, postmodern claims about truth that sometimes hold people back from discovering or embracing the truth of Christianity. In our postmodern society, it's very popular to claim that truth is not absolute - there is no one unified truth that applies to everyone and all of reality. Instead some people - including some very intelligent people - believe that truth is relative to the perspective of each person. You can have your truth, and I can have mine.

Given the climate of political correctness and also the clamour from the tolerance movement for all perspectives to be accepted as equally valid, it is no surprise that this view of truth is popular. It is an inclusive view of truth. I can be right, you can be right, everyone can be equally right, even if what we believe about life or the universe is completely opposite to one another.

The most obvious example of opposing views is the theist-atheist debate about the existence of God. If there is no objective truth that applies to everybody and describes the reality of the entire universe, then both views are equally valid, or in effect, equally true.

This should immediately ring our nonsense-alarm bells. How can it be true that God exists and also that God doesn't exist at the same time? Of course this is wrong - it's a logical impossibility. It is one of the foundational laws of human thought (known as the Law of Non-Contradiction) that something cannot be both true and not true at the same time.

Both worldviews could be wrong (perhaps not about God's existence, which seems to be a binary issue - either God exists or he doesn't) but it is impossible for both worldviews to both be correct. The idea that there is no singular, objective truth that explains all of reality, but that instead truth is fractured and subjective violates logic by asking us to accept contradictory claims. Clearly one singular truth must exist.

As a primary school teacher, the clearest example I see of this in my day job is in teaching mathematics. You learn over the years to analyse the incorrect answers a student gives to a maths problem to try and work out what mistake they have made, allowing you to correct a misunderstanding or procedural error. One day as I was doing this while marking some maths work, it dawned on me that there a potentially infinite number of incorrect answers a student can give to every maths equation, but only one correct answer.

This is the nature of truth, it is exclusive rather than inclusive. There can only be one correct answer to the questions "is there a God?" and "how did the universe come into existence?" - but an infinite number of incorrect theories. Objective truth in mathematics indicates the existence of objective truth in other domains of life.

Another important step is to test the claim that objective truth does not exist in reference to itself, and doing this creates an enormous problem for relativists. This is because the claim "Objective truth does not exist" is an objective truth claim itself! If there is no absolute truth that applies to everybody, then the claim "there is no absolute truth" can't be an absolute truth that applies to everybody. It is a self-refuting statement.

Clearly objective truth exists, on the basis of logic and the self-refuting incoherence of the subjective truth hypothesis.

The other claim sometimes made at this point is that even if there is an objective truth about the universe, it is unknowable. Our finite and limited senses are unable to perceive or locate absolute truth and therefore we should abandon the search.

This is where the Correspondence Theory of truth comes in. This is a description or theory of truth that we all use intuitively use every day. If there is a chair in my loungeroom, and I say "There is a chair in my loungeroom", then that statement is true, because my words correspond with a feature of reality. If I say there is no chair, then there is no correspondence, and I have not spoken the truth.

On this understanding of truth, I can know if things are true or not if they correspond to the realities of the universe - things that can be demonstrated empirically, sensed physically, implied evidentially and inferred deductively. Truth is not a mysterious, elusive, undiscoverable substance. It is the correspondence of thought to reality.

It might take some effort on my behalf to do the required groundwork and discover the truth about a particular hypothesis or historical event, but if my thoughts correspond to the realities of the evidence then I can know what is true beyond a reasonable doubt.

It's my contention here that Christianity is objectively true. Objective truth must exist, and it can be discovered and known as we sort through the ideas and theories to see which one best corresponds with the observable features of reality. Christianity does this better than any other worldview, and I hope you'll keep checking back here or follow the Recommended Website links at the bottom of my website to investigate this claim further.

Memebuster #1: "The Sinai Bible"

2015-10-28T11:20:00.001+11:00

I was sent this meme/picture by an atheist I was conversing with on Twitter today, and it gave me the idea of adding a section to the blog for unpacking this kind of image and running them through a fact check. Images like this are often rhetorically powerful, packing a 5 second punch that takes more than 5 seconds to respond to.

This is one of the strategies used online by some atheists when discussing Christianity. Rather than reply to a communication by typing a response, they will simply plonk in a picture like this one and let it do the talking. It’s actually hard to respond to these in a timely, effective manner, even when they are as bad as this one. Maybe I need to have some canned answers I could lob into discussions too!

Like many of these memes, even a quick inspection is enough to discover that the claims it makes are either factually wrong or completely pointless. Maybe it’s unfair to start with one so bad, but this is the one that was sent to me like it was some kind of a trump card, so here is where I will start. Let’s walk through the claims one-by-one:

1. The Oldest Version of the Bible is the Sinai Bible

A minor, nitpicky point, but the “Sinai Bible” is more accurately called the Codex Sinaiticus, and is really a codex, not a bible. A codex is a collection of writings collated into a book, and accordingly Codex Sinaiticus contains both canonical scriptures and other non-canonical Christian writings.

While Codex Sinaiticus (330-360 AD) is often referred to as the “Oldest Bible in the World” in media articles, another ancient book, Codex Vaticanus, is from the same time-period and often estimated to be slightly older (300-325 AD).

2. Housed in the British Museum

Another unimportant factual error, but Codex Sinaiticus generally resides in the British Library, not the British Museum. On two occasions the Library has allowed the Museum to borrow the codex for its displays (once in 1990, and in August this year).

3. 14,800 Differences Between Codex Sinaiticus and the King James Version

This is where the claims start to get really wild! Why compare a 4^th Century Greek text to an English translation published in 1611? What would it prove?

The KJV comes from the Byzantine family of texts, while Codex Sinaiticus is an Alexandrian text-type, so both come from different scribal traditions, which would account for some of the variations.

But perhaps the biggest factor creating differences would be that the KJV is derived from the Textus Receptus, which is a Greek text cobbled together in the early 1500s. Erasmus, the Dutch scholar and theologian who assembled the Textus Receptus from a number of source texts, was known to have altered some passages so that they matched the quotations of the early church fathers a little more closely.

He also lacked a source text for parts of Revelation, so he improvised, re-translating a Latin translation of Revelation back into Greek! And despite all of the variations this translation and retranslation caused, the KJV is still pretty close in what it says to the English translations we have today based on better, older Greek manuscripts.

What does this claim about 14,800 differences show? Nothing really. It’s an apples and oranges comparison, and where there are differences, we know EXACTLY why they’re different.

4. Never Mentions the Resurrection

But the last claim is by far the best. According to the person who created this image, Codex Sinaiticus never mentions the resurrection of Jesus Christ! Presumably they claim this because (like many older manuscripts) Codex Sinaiticus lacks the longer ending of Mark (Mark 16:9-20) which depicts the resurrected Christ appearing to his disciples. Christian scholars have known for centuries that these verses don’t appear until later in history and may not be original elements of the text – that’s why they’re always clearly marked or footnoted in study bibles. There’s nothing new or scary for the Christian here.

Ultimately though this claim about the resurrection being absent from Codex Sinaiticus doesn’t even hold true for Mark. The original ending is intact, including verse 6, where an angel tells some of Jesus’ women followers “He is not here, he is risen.” So any critics reading this know I’m not making this up, here it is, straight from the source: Codex Sinaiticus - Mark 16:6

Codex Sinaiticus also gives us access to the resurrection story in Matthew 28:1-20, Luke 24:36-40, and John 20:19-20. The claim that the Codex Sinaiticus never mentions the resurrection is so badly wrong you simply have to interpret it as a deliberate attempt to mislead the uninformed public. And if you have to lie to sell your worldview, it reflects badly on your worldview. Let the evidence do the talking.

5. Do You Still Think It’s The True Word of God?

It is interesting that an image discussing the Codex Sinaiticus in particular tries to draw a conclusion about the reliability of the scriptures in general. If any of these points were somehow proved true about the Codex Sinaiticus, all it would show is that one of the ancient codices was somehow radically different to Codex Vaticanus, Codex Alexandrinus and Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus – not to mention the thousands of partial manuscripts we have dating as far back as the early 2^nd Century. Any serious discrepancies in the text would lead investigators to ask why Sinaiticus is an outlier, and any conclusions they would draw would be about that text only. It would be a problem for the Codex Sinaiticus, not a problem for the reliability of the Christian scriptures. This reflects the strength and unity of the manuscript evidence, particularly for the New Testament texts.

Do I think Codex Sinaiticus is the true word of God? The canonical parts of it, absolutely. As for the scriptures, resoundlingly yes. This entire image fails to land any of its punches – it’s so dodgy I wonder if the URL on the bottom of the image is even accurate.

In the absence of any good evidence (or any evidence at all) that the biblical texts are unreliable, there is no compulsion for the Christian to abandon the classical understanding of the divine inspiration of the scriptures.

VIDEO: The Islamic Dilemma (David Wood)

2015-10-25T07:00:00.000+11:00

This video by David Wood shows the difficulty Muslims face because the Quran teaches that Christian scriptures were inspired by Allah and preserved by him. Yet those same scriptures contradict the teaching of the Quran, leaving the Muslim in a quandary.

The Intolerance of Modern Tolerance

2015-10-24T18:44:00.000+11:00

Recently on Twitter a friend and I were casually discussing the nature of tolerance. My friend (a secular thinker, not a Christian) observed that for many people these days, the word tolerance has actually come to mean an intolerance of intolerance – it might not be the technical meaning of the word, but it does appear to be the working definition for many people.

It is this definition of tolerance that seems to be driving the notion that Christians as a collective group are intolerant. For example, because Christians unpopularly support biblical standards in regards to sexuality and marriage, they are considered by the general public to be intolerant of homosexuals, and are then subjected to intolerance themselves. The whole thing is viciously circular – intolerance only ever breeds more intolerance.

Don’t get me wrong, some Christians ARE intolerant. Some atheists/hindus/muslims/etc are also intolerant. People have a tendency to divide and split over differences of opinion on all kinds of matters, and they often find it difficult to respect people on the other side of the fence from them. The problem is a human one. Nothing about this issue is unique to Christianity.

If tolerance has come to mean intolerance of intolerance, as my friend suggested, then it really is just plain intolerance. It’s a wolf in a woollen jacket. It’s dressed up like tolerance, but really its plain old intolerance with a socially-acceptable facelift. And because it’s actually intolerance, it will only lead to more intolerance.

A second definition of tolerance comes to us from the perspective of Cultural Relativism. Relativism claims that every belief or perspective is equally valid and that morality and ethics are are subject to the individual person. Under this view, everything is right and nothing is wrong - it rejects an objective standard for both truth and morality.

This has a knock-on effect for the definition of tolerance. Where Relativism has been adopted, tolerance has come to mean an acceptance that the opinions of others are equally valid to your own. There is no weighing of views to see which is factually correct and best explains the observable evidence. Instead, conflicting ideas, or even world-views that are diametrically opposed, are considered equally true.

This seems like nonsense to many of us. How can Christian claims that there is a creator God and its atheistic denial both be true? Or how can the biblical account of the death of Jesus on a Roman cross be true at the same time as the Quranic claim that Jesus never died?

Relativistic tolerance is self-referentially illogical. If you define tolerance as the acceptance that all beliefs, opinions and actions are equally valid, then the definition fails by its own standard.

If my personal view is that "all beliefs, opinions and actions are NOT equally valid", then by the definition this view has to be accepted as valid, even though it is an explicit denial of the definition. Someone operating out of the relativistic definition of tolerance would either need to accept my view as equally true to their working definition - making it true and not true at the same time - or treat my view as the one exception to the definition and choose not to accept it as true. It's an inescapable dilemma for the relativist.

The solution here is to reclaim the original definition of tolerance, because it’s the only one robust enough to carry the required burden.

According to Google, the definition of tolerance is “the ability or willingness to tolerate the existence of opinions or behaviour that one dislikes or disagrees with." Right from the get-go we can see that this idea of tolerance requires us to accept other people even if we dislike their practices or disagree with their opinions. This kind of tolerance, if practiced, is the kind that can lead to peaceful, mature discussions over differences of opinions about the nature of truth, or the origins of life, or the beginning of the universe. If we are going to truly tolerate each other, then there needs to be a provision to disagree respectfully with others, because in reality there are so many people in the world who will hold to divergent views. If we are going to get along with those people, or maybe even persuade them with the evidence for our own world-view, then we need to be able to have honest discussions about those issues that don’t descend into trench warfare.

How should I practice tolerance as a Christian? How should you practice it from your own specific world-view? We should respect other people in everything we do and say, without making ideas off-limits for critical evaluation. Criticise ideas and ideologies, without attacking the person who holds them. Disagree respectfully with each other.

I firmly believe that each world-view should be under the microscope, and that ultimately we should believe whichever view most accurately corresponds with reality. My view is that Christianity does this best - and I invite you to test it yourself. In the meantime let's practice tolerance - real tolerance - with the people we disagree with on the answers to life's big questions.

Are Christians More Biased Than Other People?

2015-10-22T23:49:00.000+11:00

In the last article I wrote about how the stereotypical portrayal of Christians as stupid or crazy people who hold beliefs that have no basis in reality is false.

In fact Christians (whether they know it or not) have extensive evidence to underpin their beliefs. But because the evidence leads to a supernatural conclusion - belief in the existence of God and the historicity of certain miracle stories - many people reject it as a viable world-view.

This raises the question of bias.

Sometimes Christians are accused of bias in the way they interpret evidence to support their view of reality. Bob Seidensticker (not the Bob mentioned in the previous post!) from the atheist blog Cross Examined makes exactly this claim: That Christians interpret every event and every piece of evidence in light of their pre-conceptions that God is real and that supernatural events are possible.

Seidensticker sees Christians attributing the goodness we observe in the world to God and the evil we see to mankind as a form of this bias, along with a few other examples. And sure - Christians CAN be inconsistent at times. He mentions a group of Christians who had their church levelled by a tornado but who found significance in the fact that three crosses were left standing - an event I'd personally attribute to chance rather than divine provision.

Nevertheless it is the issue of bias that needs to be the focus here. Seidensticker says that "Christians want to interpret or spin the facts to support their preconception. Instead of following the facts where they lead, Christians would prefer to select and interpret them to show how they can still justify their worldview."

The issue I have with this statement is that it seems obvious that many people outside of Christianity are also operating with similar biases in place. Perhaps not Seidensticker himself - he claims to be open to the possibility of God's existence but unmoved by the evidence. But my experience is that there are plenty of atheists out there who claim that the material universe is all there is and that this makes any supernatural explanation for the existence of life and the universe impossible - a preconception they hold prior to assessing any evidence for the truth of Christianity.

Carrying this kind of preconception into an investigation about the existence of God seems very circular to me. To presuppose that a materialistic/naturalistic view of the world is true prior to investigating the evidence for God's existence will invariably lead to the conclusion that God does not exist - not because that is the truth, but because of the bias the investigator holds in advance. This is how bad science is done!

I agree with Seidensticker when he says that we should follow the facts where they lead. We should follow the evidence, not our preconceptions. To completely eliminate bias from the investigation, you have to have an open mind about the existence of God before you begin to examine the evidence. Naturalistic presumptions are no help to the serious seeker of truth.

The biggest reason for this is that if you assume philosophical naturalism (the view that only the physical universe exists) you immediately wipe any potential supernatural explanation of an event or phenomenon off the table arbitrarily. Under a Christian worldview, both natural and supernatural explanations of that event are possible and acceptable. One view is closed-minded to even the possibility of supernatural explanations, while the other view can consider all possibilities with an open mind. The truth-seeker should steer well clear of the closed-minded bias of naturalistic presumptions.

Perhaps to echo Seidensticker's words above, I'd like to say: "People who hold naturalist/physicalist views want to interpret or spin the facts to support their preconception. Instead of following the facts where they lead, philosophical naturalists would prefer to select and interpret them to show how they can still justify their worldview."

The truth is that bias is an issue for both sides of this discussion, Christians don't have to shoulder all of the bias-blame. People who presuppose that naturalism is true are also guilty when it comes to interpreting the evidence on the basis of their bias.

The evidence is strong for the Christian world-view, and if you follow that evidence with an open mind, free from bias, you might even come to agree with me that on the basis of observable features of the universe, the facts of cosmology and the testimony of the historical documents that the Christian faith is not blind, but warranted by the evidence.

The Stupid Christian Stereotype is Wrong

2015-10-17T01:23:00.000+11:00

I know this guy on Twitter who is intelligent, articulate and passionate. He’s a sports fan who loves to cut through the clichéd commentary on sports with links to studies and thoughtfully reasoned critiques that show those clichés to be flimsy and stupid. He believes things only if they are based on established facts or borne out by academic study. He is an evidentialist – wherever possible, his thought is guided by the evidence. He is an atheist. His name is Bob. I like Bob.

"Stupid toy" by duncan c / CC BY-NC 2.0

Bob believes that Christians are poorly educated, simple-minded and sometimes wilfully anti-intellectual. He thinks that we blindly believe in God regardless of what the evidence says. And because he thinks we swallow “fairy stories” about God, he draws the conclusion that those of us who are educated and intelligent are lunatics. In Bob’s mind, Christians are either stupid or crazy for believing Christianity to be true.

Bob obviously has a stereotype in mind when he makes this claim. Perhaps all the Christians he has known have fit this mould. Perhaps the Christians he knows mistakenly adopt an anti-intellectual view of their own faith. Or perhaps it’s more convenient to dismiss a caricature of Christianity rather than to investigate it thoroughly. I should probably ask Bob why he thinks his portrayal of Christianity is true.

At the end of the day, it’s just a stereotype. To dismiss Christians as stupid or crazy without acknowledging the enormous amount of scientific, historical and philosophical evidence that Christians can draw on in defence of their beliefs is not a genuine or serious critique.

Christians have plenty of good reasons to believe that Christianity is true. For example the evidence that the universe had a beginning, and therefore requires a cause that exists and operates independently of time, space, matter and energy – unless you believe that things can create themselves (which falls flat when you realise a thing must first exist in order to create itself).

The beginning of the universe also requires an explanation that can account for the delicate fine-tuning of the universe that allows life to exist. There are a whole set of constants and quantities in the universe that need to be extremely finely calibrated in order for life to be able to exist. If one of these values were even slightly off, life would not be possible at all. The probability of each of these values falling within the extremely narrow life-permitting range by chance is almost incomprehensible, meaning it is far more likely we find ourselves in a universe designed to support life.

There are many observable, knowable realities in life that also need to be accounted for by any successful worldview. For example, the existence of objective morals (it’s always wrong to kill babies for fun) and duties (so I must never kill babies for fun) is inexplicable on a worldview based purely on molecules, atoms and physical forces. Without God, morality can be whatever I want it to be. Yet when it comes to killing babies for fun, we find an activity we can’t justify without engaging in serious self-deception.

Morality is only one element in a long list: The existence of reason, logic, intentionality, meaning, information and many other features of the observable world also cry out for an explanation – and a cohesive explanation that solves the entire puzzle must be preferred to explanations that only give us a series of disconnected possibilities. These are really no explanation at all.

Also consider the historical evidence for the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, in addition to the personal spiritual experiences of Christians, and the cumulative weight of the case for the truth of Christianity becomes hard to avoid.

As atheist philosopher Michael Ruse says, "I do take Christianity very seriously, it is a grown-up proposal to answer grow-up questions - it works if it is true."

And that should be our only concern as truth-seekers. Not to belittle stupid, crazy Christians, nor to vilify sceptics and atheists - but to investigate the evidence that determines whether or not Christianity is true.

I hope you’ll do that yourself this week, no matter what kind of truth-seeker you currently are, theist or atheist.

"I contend we are both atheists, I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."
	...Stephen F Roberts