Every few years I check what the top ten books are in Christian apologetics (by Amazon ranking). And what I have recently noticed is that Christian apologetics is in a state of intellectual stagnation or even decline. Seven of the top ten are old, long-refuted, intellectually terrible treatises—measuring by current standards of philosophical sophistication, and their ability to respond to the best work in atheism today, or indeed even the best atheist YouTube show. All those are by the same three dudes: C.S. Lewis, Josh McDowell, and Lee Strobel. The only “new” work in that top ten is Timothy Keller’s The Reason for God (at number ten); Bobby Conway’s Does God Exist? (at number two); and Hillary Morgan Ferrer’s Mama Bear Apologetics™: Empowering Your Kids to Challenge Cultural Lies (at number four; and yes, “TM” is literally in the title—she is that obsessed with policing her mammon-chumming trademark).
Keller’s book I already addressed in my series Timothy Keller: Dishonest Reasons for God. He already is resorting to lies, distortions, and tactics designed to fool fellow Christians rather than convincing actual atheists, all indicative of that decline I was talking about (following the Trumpian trend of William Lane Craig, probably the most famous Christian apologist of the last half century, and increasingly the least honest). But Conway’s book is only a simplistic, preachery listicle for conservative Christians; it spends barely four pages on whether God exists, and six on whether Jesus rose from the dead, and none of it up-to-date or even relevant to any informed atheist today. Ferrer’s is even worse. It can best be described as an embarrassingly stupid rant by a klatch of ignorant, bigoted, must-have-been-Trump-voting soccer-moms who “did their own research.” Sophisticated it is not. The weakest of tea.
Christians have essentially given up trying to answer atheists for real; they pretend to, but are really only trying to keep fellow Christians in the fold (or even just convince themselves to stay). That is their actual audience. They know now that their arguments are too crap to actually persuade a nonbeliever; they only work on the wavering dupes. There are still some sincere attempts to actually convince atheists, but they exhibit, instead, remarkable naivety—mostly outright harebrained nuttery; but for an example of the best attempt I know of, see my critical series on Unbelievable: Justin Brierley’s Epistemic Failure (whose book currently ranks 687th). So Christians simply don’t have the goods. And some of the most popular among them know it (otherwise they wouldn’t be resorting to lies to shore up their defenses).
As Christianity increasingly fails to win new converts and begins its decline, and in result American Christianity becomes more radicalized and extremist (and, correspondingly, more ridiculous and gullible), apologetics is taking the same direction: either abandoning any hope of winning minds, and just desperately trying to stop the bleeding (by disseminating grifty propaganda among their own ranks to try and talk some of them off the idea of leaving), or resorting to increasingly naive and embarrassingly ignorant and incompetent argumentation. This reverses the trend from Lewis to Strobel, which went towards increasing sophistication and smarter, better informed, more engaged argumentation (I remember the days when the people to beat were J.P. Moreland and, indeed, W.L. Craig). Now it is declining back to Scopes Monkey Trial shit—it’s almost all Mama Bear Apologetics™ now.
In future I might write on the exceptions I find to this trend (in comments, do please recommend any books you think are actually good, and written in the last ten years, and that actually defend Christianity as a whole against actual critics of it). So far, the best I’ve found is Brierley’s book, and honestly it’s not that great. But it’s at least honest; and not written by a loon. He did some work. Far worse is Feser’s Five Proofs of the Existence of God; but again, he’s at least still trying. But today I shall write on the other, more popular New Apologetics, which is dumb, and still using old, long-refuted claims and arguments as if they’d never even been responded to before, and which really any smart high school student today could refute before closing bell. Which bespeaks how useless it will all be at winning minds; it only sells to believers who’ve already been duped and just want to be reassured in their folly. But who knows? Perhaps there are naive-enough kids (or even adults?) who will actually fall for this stuff—folks unable to refute it by themselves after five minutes of fact-checking it on Google.
Bobby Conway on God and Stuff
Bobby Conway is a classic new-school minister hip to the trends (like shortform video), with a masters in theology and a doctorate in “ministry and apologetics,” degrees that intellectually encompass only fiction. He is literally a highly-trained expert in convincing people imaginary things are true. Still, he is completing a doctorate in the philosophy of religion as well. And I assume with these same skills he has convinced himself (and that he isn’t a grifter like so many older apologists have become). I hope at least that he really believes what he is saying, because that would be refreshing. But his book, Does God Exist? And 51 Other Compelling Questions About God and the Bible, doesn’t give us much information by which to tell. It’s too simplistic. He does not appear to have even attempted significant research into any of the subjects he covers. He just pronounces opinions from the armchair, armed at most with whatever his ministerial peers have told him.
There is a reason this is a telling observation here. The infamous “Cold Case Detective” J. Warner Wallace forewords Conway’s book with an email from a parishioner asking him for advice on how to re-convince their atheist son to be a Christian again, framing Conway’s entire book as intended to help with that conundrum. Yet it is clear Conway never seriously asked an atheist why they don’t buy his religion anymore; or if he did, he never listened to them. Because nothing in his book is at all capable of changing that. As advice to his parishioner, his parishioner is simply doomed. His son will just be giggling at the advice he got. It’s not going to move the needle. The atheist is well more informed than this, and doesn’t fall for the kind of rhetoric Conway is selling; indeed, the atheist today doesn’t even accept the inept methodology that defines Conway’s entire approach to knowledge.
Wallace’s foreword also frames Conway’s book as a volley in the “culture war,” a common theme we’ll notice in Ferrer, too. Both Conway and Ferrer really don’t write their books so as to convince an atheist their religion is true at all; rather, they write their books as listicles mostly concerned with telling fellow Christians what they are supposed to think about things (like gay people—they’re abominations, just FYI). They don’t really give any reasons to believe this (they ignore all relevant science and philosophy, swear overmuch that they’re not fools or bigots, and handwave about select verses of scripture, all while hoping no one actually reads the whole Bible). So atheists clearly aren’t their real audience. We respond to evidence and reason, not specious logic applied to factless premising, much less ancient superstitions written up by ignorant bigots. “The Bible says gay people are an abomination; therefore you should agree with me that they are” is a laughably bad argument. And that is why we aren’t Christians.
Doubling down on dumb arguments like this is only dooming your religion, not helping it. Rather than bailing water out of your sinking ship, you’re hacking holes in it with an axe.
Youth: “We’re leaving because this Bible shit is bigoted, stupid, and contrary all evidence.”
Pastors: “Quick! To stop our youth leaving, we need to really press that Bible shit more!”
That’s the New Apologetics for you. “We’re sick of picking on gay people. We want to feed the poor.” “What’s the matter with you!? The Bible says gay people are abominations!” This is the discourse that is destroying Christendom. Conway is oblivious. He’s all axe, no bucket. Ferrer, likewise.
I won’t waste time fisking Conway’s entire book. It’s all like this. For today, I’m only interested in direct apologetics: defenses of Christianity per se against arguments that it is a false religion. Christianity can be true and not disturbingly obsessed with gay people. Likewise all the other “culture war” bullshit, like lamenting the legalization of marijuana. Yes, Conway has two—seriously, two—chapters condemning marijuana. Though to be fair, he’s sort of okay with “legit” medicinal use. But for a nerdy drinking game, get your friends together and copy his paragraph condemning the use of “eisegesis” to justify gay marriage (concluding his chapter on “homosexual behavior,” and not, ironically, his chapter against gay marriage; because yes, Conway also has two chapters on why being gay is bad), and then splice it into his first chapter on marijuana (after in it switching out “gay marriage” for “marijuana”); the first one to laugh in realization at what just happened, takes a shot. Then see how many more chapters you can do that with. Because contradicting themselves is the number one Christian ministerial technique.
So let’s do the more fundamental stuff, like “Does God Exist?” Conway has one three-page chapter on that. He has a second chapter on the silly scoff “Who made God?” but as that’s a straw man hardly any atheist spends much time on, we can ignore his reply to it as moot. Instead, this is all he’s got:
- The Bible says God exists. (No, I am not kidding. That’s his first argument. Like it was 1925.)
- The Bible says that it’s obvious God exists—because look how all the planets orbit the Earth, and animals exist and stuff. (No, I am not kidding. He simply quotes Romans 1:19-20. I have even made his argument stronger by actually mentioning animals and planets; he does not. But, of course, Paul was talking about the false but popular belief in geocentrism, and a world where they thought animals all just spontaneously started existing; that’s prior to confirmation that the planets orbit the sun, and because of gravity not design, and animals evolved from cousins of bacteria over billions of years, they didn’t just pop out of the mud one Thursday morning.)
- The Bible says only fools say there’s no God. (Nope. Still not kidding. Literally his third argument. I’ll let Randal Rauser take this one.)
- “The universe had a beginning,” because Einstein. Wow. He didn’t get the memo. Scientists aren’t so sure of that anymore (see Justin Brierley on the Science of Existence). But it’s also a non sequitur to go from “had a beginning” to “began with God.” Of all the theoretical models of even a past-finite cosmology that have passed peer review in science journals, that has never been one. It doesn’t even meet the minimum bar for scientific credibility. But. Eeesh. Note to Dr. Conway: many other “beginnings without gods” models have passed that bar, as have many models without beginnings. See my debate with Dr. Wallace Marshall, a dying breed of apologist, the straps of whose sandals Conway is not worthy to stoop down and untie, and yet who’s still wrong on every point of fact and logic. But Marshall was at least trying.
- Then Conway says something to the effect of “where’d DNA come from?” (No, really, that’s about as detailed as he puts it. Evidently he didn’t check up on that one. He does drop the word “information” here, though, suggesting he hasn’t read anything on this since 2001. That’s so old, there are college graduates today who weren’t even alive then.)
- Then he asks where our moral sense came from if not God, because (again) the Bible says so, and “a moral law requires a moral lawgiver.” (No, really. That dead trope. He does not develop this argument any further than that. Yeah. Fish in a barrel, this guy.)
- Finally, Conway throws in a quip at the end about how “ironic” it is that atheists “pride themselves” in being “mindful” when they believe “the universe is the product of mindlessness.” I cannot even reconstruct what his argument is supposed to be here. Maybe this?
Atheists already know all these arguments and have already refuted them—indeed, anyone who has left the faith and become an atheist almost surely did so because they found those refutations. You can’t win them back by just repeating the same old arguments they’ve already seen refuted. You do actually have to make an argument, you know? You can’t just shout “DNA” and “information” and expect to have said anything even clever, much less convincing. It is clear that these are just tropes being repeated for already-duped, uninformed, hopelessly gullible believers. They aren’t even meant to convince atheists. Unless Conway is so head-in-the-sand that he actually thinks they could. Which is worse. You can’t market your product if you won’t even listen to the customer who already ditched it to find out why. Only someone who never had a serious conversation with any informed atheist could have written this chapter. Yet this is literally the number two best selling book in Christian apologetics today. This is the decline of Christian apologetics happening right before your eyes.
Conway adds near the end two chapters defending the resurrection of Jesus (as one would expect to be de rigueur for a Christian apologist). But they are so lame and out-of-date I feel embarrassed for him even to describe them. He uses dry, old, unsophisticated tropes like “no one could have stolen the body, because no one would die for a lie.” He never addresses the problem that the ones who died might not have been the ones who stole the body; or that we have no evidence anyone died for this (see Did the Apostles Die for a Lie?). Nor does he address the problem that there is no evidence there was ever actually a missing body in the first place; that appears to be a legend invented a lifetime after the fact (see Why Did Mark Invent an Empty Tomb?). Conway is way behind the curve here.
That parishioner’s atheist son would eat his parents alive if this is what they tried on him. Likewise Conway’s naive straw man of the hallucination theory (see Then He Appeared to Over Five Hundred Brethren at Once!), and his reliance on the “women at the tomb” argument that even its inventor (Gary Habermas) has given up after it was proved historically false (see N.T. Wright Demonstrates the Bankruptcy of Christian Apologetics in Under Nine Minutes). Even Conway’s attempt to take on the “swoon” theory is hopelessly out of date (anyone who wants to trod that out had better catch up to the times and read Robert Price’s steel man of that theory in Chapter 9 of The End of Christianity; and remember, if your theory is less probable than a theory you already agree is false, then your theory is also false!).
Conway also doesn’t know that the idea the “Jews would just pull out and display the corpse if the Christians claimed it was missing” would have been useless (the body would be unrecognizable fifty days later, the first time Christians told anyone about this) and a death penalty offense—enough reason for the Sanhedrin not to try that; and that’s all assuming the Christians even believed Jesus rose in the same body he died in, which the first Christians appear instead to have denied. He also doesn’t know the claim that “You can’t explain the development of the Church without a real resurrection” was refuted a decade ago (J.P. Holding, who developed that apologetic, soon abandoned it after my exposé of its falsehoods in Not the Impossible Faith: Why Christianity Didn’t Need a Miracle to Succeed, summarized in Chapter 2 of The End of Christianity). But above all, Conway is still using the old conflation of the Gospels and Paul, even though they contradict each other, and nothing in Paul supports any of the wild exaggerations in the Gospels. Conway makes no effort to resolve this problem; he doesn’t even seem to be aware that it exists (see Resurrection: Faith or Fact? My Bonus Reply).
In all, Conway’s apologetics is a step backwards, to simplistic positions trounced decades ago, as if he doesn’t even know these arguments have sophisticated refutations that he needs to answer. Instead, he thinks just repeating the same claims that one can debunk in five minutes on Google will somehow help a parishioner bring his atheist son back into the fold. It’s sadly naive. Yet as Conway exemplifies, this is the regressive trajectory Christian apologetics is taking today. And I am here to tell you, that’s doomed.
Hillary Morgan Ferrer on God and Stuff
Yes, she’s literally a ministry. And yes, she publishes workbooks for her books. But at least she has a masters degree in a thing that actually exists (biology). Hillary Morgan Ferrer did not write all of Mama Bear Apologetics™: Empowering Your Kids to Challenge Cultural Lies; it has a number of contributors, all women, and all sound pretty similar to her, so we’re looking at a group of similar mind and training. Like Conway’s number two entry, Ferrer’s number four entry is pretty much just another “culture war” listicle aimed at telling conservative Christians what they are supposed to believe about things—like, again, gay people. And yes, both Ferrer and Conway have chapters winging about transgender people too; but Ferrer goes full MAGA and throws her cabbage at race and social justice theory as well. It hardly qualifies as an attempt to convince any informed atheist to become a Christian, or even argue that Christianity is true. Axes rather than buckets. Yet its whole raison d’etre is to help “moms” explain to their “kids” how to refute the arguments they’ll hear at school (or really, on the internet). It’s an attempt to inoculate believers against critical thinking. Which kids typically see you doing; they aren’t going to fall for that. To the contrary, your very need to do this is what will drive them away. Because it gives away the game.
Unlike Conway, who could be sincere and just gullible and bad at critical thinking, I am less certain of the honesty of this project. In this book’s foreword, Nancy Pearcey claims that in high school no one could answer her question, “Why do we think Christianity is true?” Not even her pastor or the dean of a seminary. I call bullshit. This is one of those typical “lying-ass-minister” stories where nothing behaves like it does in reality. It makes me suspect no one is telling the truth in this book. “No one had any answer to this question—but behold, we have the answer now!” is like those midnight infomercials showing an actor implausibly incapable of cutting paper with scissors, “But worry not—behold, electric scissors!” A second clue is that this book sometimes cites real facts, showing they know how to do real research when they want to. Indeed their whole “the world is ending” introduction documenting all the statistics of youth leaving Christianity is detailed and honest. So when they suddenly act like some fact or argument doesn’t exist, they can’t have the excuse that “they didn’t check.” Yet it sure looks like they didn’t.
For example, at no point, even in that chapter about the decline of their religion, nor anywhere else in the entire book, do they ever discuss the actual reasons youth are leaving Christianity today. There is no evidence they ever asked, ever checked, ever sought any “exit interviews.” They don’t even seem interested in knowing why. The best they get is “Satan did it” (I am not kidding; he is the credited responsible party in their chapter on the problem). And yet this book is explicitly written and constructed as a training manual for Christian moms to rescue (or, rather, inoculate) their kids from atheism, or even, as they do sometimes explicitly state as their goal, liberalism—because the only thing worse than your kids becoming atheists is their becoming Christians who care about the poor and oppressed (this is most definitely a book promoting worship and service to the Antichrist). Once again, how you expect to sell a product to customers who already rejected it (or soon will) by ignoring their complaints escapes me. But this is, alas, the New Apologetics. Head-in-sand, bucket kicked aside, axe in hand. Race to the bottom.
I’ve written on Christian anti-intellectualism before. This book shares some common themes with it. They propose a methodology that centers the role of testing claims and gathering information—but never discuss any reliable way of doing either. To the contrary, what they mean is, verification bias and “knowing your Bible.” The tests they propose never relate to discerning the actual epistemic merit of a claim; they only ever relate to the whether the claim contradicts pre-accepted dogmas, Biblical and modern Evangelical teachings. If it sounds immoral by their presupposed system, then it is false. Never mind that this is a non sequitur (things you consider immoral could well often be true; in fact there is no correlation at all between moral status and mere factual truth). It’s also straight-up circular: you are expected to test a challenge to your faith by whether it goes against your faith. Whether that challenge is true is not pertinent; just being already declared false by your faith is sufficient to dismiss it, you just have to come up with some additional “reasons,” to rationalize the status quo. This is exactly the opposite of taking The Outsider Test for Faith. This is building a hall of mirrors. They are explicitly training themselves and others to avoid discovering the truth.
There are almost exceptions. On one page they do insist on getting an opponent’s arguments correct and not straw manning them. But they never develop or exemplify this principle in the rest of the book. They spend some pages on being nice and empathetic, then fill the book with snark and insults. Likewise they spend some pages on the technique of finding and admitting to what in an opponent’s position (particularly their motives) you agree with, before critiquing it. For example, they correctly argue that one should concede that a communist has a lot of valid complaints about capitalism that you even share, and then instead focus on why, nevertheless, communism is not a good solution for them. Thus, they can admit they care about the poor, but want to help them in some other way. Though what other way that is is never really explained, much less proved by any evidence to actually work on a societal scale; thus in the end simply ignoring the communist’s valid complaints, as if they will go away by magic and prayer. So while sometimes this book articulates a good principle, it never really exemplifies or carries it through.
Of course this book is full of the kind of crazy conspiracy theories and delusions that reactionary conservatives are all plagued with these days. I won’t waste any time on that nonsense. Again, today I’m only interested in direct apologetics: defenses of Christianity per se against arguments that it is a false religion. Christianity can be true and not obsessed with fiscal libertarianism, factual distortions of reality, and pwning “the SJWs.” Not all Christians are asshats. So my question instead is: what does this book have to offer in the way of actual apologetics? Like Conway, this book really has only one chapter specifically on whether God even exists—but, weirdly, no chapters on whether Jesus was actually resurrected from the dead. I guess that one’s not important to these gals, even though they say Christianity is false without it. Though there is one lone mention of the same “women at the tomb” false claim as in Conway, buried in an endnote, it isn’t used to argue for the resurrection, but God’s niceness in choosing women for things. We’re otherwise just told “lots of witnesses” saw Jesus after his death; no discussion, no evidence, no response to the well-developed refutations of both the fact and the logic of this argument. Seriously. This is the decline of Christian apologetics.
Okay. So. The God chapter. First, it wastes several pages on irrelevant discussions of how many manuscripts of the Gospels there are (it never does anything with this information—like get “God” out of this somehow; never mind that it’s again naively ignorant of the actual state of that debate). Then they waste several pages complaining about “naturalism” and “Hume,” but never get anywhere with this (they never actually present in this chapter any evidence that naturalism is false—though granted, it’s hard to honestly do that—nor do they get into how its being false would even ensure any god exists, much less specifically the Christian God, or indeed, their hyper-specific version of Him). They burn several more pages complaining about “hyper-skepticism,” but never get to explaining what healthy skepticism looks like, or how it would get any different results.
Then they spend some pages complaining about how “mean” the New Atheists were. Why these authors are still talking about Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens (Dennett, curiously, has vanished), who haven’t published a book on atheism in over fifteen years—Hitchens has sadly even been dead for over ten—I cannot explain, except to note that this appears to be how New Apologetics works: it relies on old, played tropes, and never does any new research. But what’s really strange here is that they never even describe any of these guys’ arguments so as to rebut them. So why they even get mentioned is bewildering. Instead, Ferrer et al. insert a bizarre several pages complaining about how redefining atheism as a mere lack of belief in God makes debating the existence of God impossible; which is neither true, nor relevant to anything. Eight pages into this chapter now and still I have yet to see any argument for the existence of God (much less the truth of Christianity). In fact nowhere in the rest of this chapter will any be given. Instead, all they do is winge about more culture war issues (like, ‘How dare atheists show concern for religious trauma and child abuse in conservative faiths!’).
To get anything close to an actual apologetic—as in, an actual defense of Christian belief against its critics—we have to dig into the middle of the preceding chapter, where there is a brief, confused section on why we should reject naturalism (for some vague and increasingly implausible supernaturalism). There is never any clearly formulated argument here, but there are several “implied” arguments, off-hand assertions that could be worked up into an argument for the existence of God (though still not specifically any Christian one). For example, there is at one point a brief mention of the claim that “information only comes from a mind” (a claim abundantly refuted twenty years ago, and even denounced by the very creationist who invented the information argument). One might work that up into an argument (things exist, like galaxies and DNA, that contain information; therefore they come from a mind). These authors never do that. But someone could; maybe. The only problem is that the premise is false. And anyone can find out that the premise is false in five minutes on Google. So how does merely asserting an already-refuted claim respond to anything? How is this a defense?
Similarly, these authors attack multiverse theory, but never develop that into an argument for anything, nor does their attack ever address any actual multiverse theory—thus violating their own instruction to avoid a straw man. And I suspect this is because they simply rarely do any actual research. They literally have no idea what they are talking about here and don’t even want to (compare this with, for example, Six Arguments That a Multiverse Is More Probable Than a God and A Hidden Fallacy in the Fine Tuning Argument). Asking “where did all the multiverses come from” is as stupid as asking “where did God come from,” and for exactly the same reason: it ignores what the theories you are talking about actually assert. This is not a defense of Christianity; this is simply a failure to respond to its critics at all
Similarly what they say on biogenesis, where at least a brief, off-hand mention of correct facts exhibits Ferrer’s knowledge of biology (she doesn’t make the casual mistakes of Conway). Yet here I think because Ferrer is a biologist we have evidence of actual lying. Because with a graduate degree in a subject you cannot claim you don’t know how to research and correctly describe a position in that field. Yet in this book they claim no theories of biogenesis and the evolution of DNA “have gained traction.” This is a plainly dishonest way of describing a scientific research subfield in which numerous such theories have passed peer review and are considered far more probable than magic by nearly all experts in it (whereas “God did it” has never passed peer review; it doesn’t even meet the minimum standards of the subject, yet numerous godless theories have; and unlike the God claim, actually have evidence in their support). More importantly, they give no argument for this. They never describe any of these theories, nor offer any evidence any of them are false. How then are they defending anything here?
They also tell another lie at this point, and I think this illustrates why you really can’t trust these people; probably many other lies exist in this book (I didn’t exhaustively check), making this an example of the dishonest apologetic wing of the New Apologetics I’ve mentioned already. In an endnote they claim Richard Dawkins “admitted” that aliens created life on Earth; but the corresponding video shows he was answering a different question: he was asked in what way design could be possible, and he outlined a possible scenario (which incidentally began without design, refuting any notion that aliens were the only cause he could think of). Dawkins also made clear that that’s not probable, because there is currently no evidence for it, that more likely life arose here the same way it would begin there: with a spontaneous chemical accident—and all the evidence in fact supports exactly that conclusion. But that latter part of his point was dishonestly cut from the video. In that documentary Dawkins was lied to and conned and edited out of context. (And Christians like Ferrer shouldn’t be endorsing liars and con artists. It’s really not helping their case.) But you can still tell from the context remaining in the edit what Dawkins was actually saying. And only a liar would continue to misrepresent that.
And this is what is suicidal about the New Apologetics: atheists aren’t stupid; and your kids know how to use YouTube. When they catch you in this lie (or any lie), and they will, what authority do you think any other damned thing you have to say is going to hold with them? You cannot more surely destroy your own religion than by this very behavior. This is why your kids are ditching your faith. You aren’t going to get them back by continuing to lie to them. Your only hope is to ask forgiveness for ever lying to them in the first place, and genuinely commit to only telling them the truth from now on. May the Spirit of Your God finally move you to do that. May you one day renounce your wicked, sinful, lying ways. May you get Satan out of your heart and join the rest of us who believe in telling the truth. I won’t hold my breath.
Conclusion
Whether incompetent liars or the sincerely gullible, the New Apologetics is a major step backwards for Christianity. It is only going to contribute to the demise of the very religion it wants so desperately to save. By getting dumber and more dishonest, by retreating to old refuted claims rather than responding honestly to their refutations, by losing all sophistication and seriousness, Christianity will be made by this effort to look even more ridiculous than atheists already see it to be. Once upon a time, Christian apologists worked to add sophistication, fact-checking, detail, real engagement with their critics. This is now in decline. We are returning to the laughable apologetics of the early 20th century, easily dispatched. I guess that’s a good thing. After all, the world will be better off once Christianity finally dies out for want of anyone gullible enough to still believe it. But as a passionate intellectual who would prefer competent opponents who at least challenge me and make me think and improve, it is disappointing to see the popular Christian elite retreat instead to childish propaganda void of any intellectual merit.
The best Christian apologist IMO is Dale Allison. I read his book on the resurrection and he seems like you and Robert Price.I think he admits his belief in a God that wins for humanity is personal and not based on the evidence
Has he written anything that is actually a defense of Christianity as true, though?
My impression was that his book on the resurrection is just an inconclusive historical analysis; it at best argues that Christians “can” believe in the resurrection on faith, but he never really defends that position against factual, logical, or methodological criticism. Or do you see pages in there that go beyond that? Or does he have some other work that tackles that?
Conway has another PhD from Birmingham in the Philosophy of Religion. Doesn’t help his arguments unfortunately.
Thank you! His Amazon bio must be out of date. I’ll update my article.
I remember in 2014 inviting a friend of mine to a Reasonable Faith chapter meeting that I went to. She asked, “is it even possible to combine those two words?” (she was and I think still is a Buddhist convert from Christianity). Anyway, she didn’t come and the chapter eventually folded as my friend who ran it became the president of the university’s philosophy club (as I would later on). By this time apologists had since shaken off the YEC types among them and so it had renewed respectability that was hindered by Ravi Zacharias among others. I tried my best with that religion, even getting a master’s in theology but I still can’t see how any thinking person can be an (orthodox) Christian. The fact that dinosaurs aren’t mentioned, along with evolution, fermions, bosons, etc. to me shows that it was written by humans. I get it that knowing about Spinosaurus is not necessary for salvation but was all the shit in almost all of the Torah (sprinkling bird blood all over the house, not mixing fabric, etc.) necessary either?
Catholic apologists like Steve Ray, Trent Horn, and Jimmy Akin have all long since stopped replying to me. Horn was shocked when I told him that Pope Pius IX may well have molested Edgardo Mortara and Akin was just overwhelmed by my questions about Kenotic Christology vs. Kryptic Christology. Ray is just a hack. Jehovah’s Witnesses aren’t really apologists not least because they deny their own history despite said history being in print both physically and digitally. The mainline protestants aren’t any better and to my knowledge Methodists never had a real apologetics thing going but went after the poor in West Virginia who couldn’t even write their own names (I’m talking about the really poor there), let alone understand the controversies surrounding everything Christian. So yeah, apologetics does seem to be in the grave, partially at least.
Why did Xtianity flip to arguing historicity again? Now conditions are adverse, like the Peppered Moth and the Clean Air Act, Xtianity can access its own DNA and argue FOR mythicism.
That it is mythology never bothered anyone who is a Hindu, just as it never bothered my ancestors that Red Thor and the rest of their gods were mortal.
In the last couple of hunded years we’ve accumulated a vast store of knowledge of what mythology is and how it works; and having to be literally true plays no part in that.
Why the appendix? One answer is “If conditions revert…” I’d argue that is why the Bible is streaked thru’ from start to finish with material that in various ways blows it to bits several times over: it’s a resevoir for when conditions become hostile.
For the faithful, the other shoe needs to drop. But I’m not holding my breath.
The “It’s so ironic that atheists reject mindfulness in the cosmos” bit is so bad and so indicative of the level that Conway is at that it’s literally a VenomFangX video. This is garbage tier YouTube apologetic bait, and I bet VenomFangX defended the argument better.
What I find funny about it is that it’s yet another version of the way Christianity makes the universe less special and remarkable while pretending it does the opposite, by pretending that magic is in and of itself better than non-magical alternatives. Yes, the universe isn’t mindful. That makes our mindfulness really incredible special and fragile and wonderful. We should be proud of it. If the universe were made by a mind, we would be a lot less special, wouldn’t we? The whole universe would be predicated on a mind. Mindlessness would be the abnormality, the deviation.
(Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s true or not. “X has Y property while Z does not” is never inherently contradictory, no matter if it somehow seems ironic. But they are clearly banking on this being an emotionally and intuitively compelling “Gotcha!” rather than a valid argument).
All well put.
Your scholarship stands on its own. I deconverted last year in a big part because of your work. Please avoid petty digs at soccer moms and Trump voters as it is harder for me to point Christians to your work. I don’t mean to criticize but I want to maximize the audience of your work.
They won’t be appeased by appeasing them. They need to be told the truth. It is precisely because they cannot handle that, that no way of framing it would get through to them. So truth it is. Best case scenario, they’ll get pissed off enough to be motivated to try and prove me wrong. Then when they fail, then and only then will they recognize their folly and reform.
In other words:
Rely on making them angry. That is the only way they can’t dismiss what they are hearing, and will have to try and angrily refute it. And it is that effort, and that effort alone, that will ever wake them up.
Yeah, Richard has a point here. I do agree that sometimes snide asides directed at a group can turn them off when they were listening, but that target audience would be incensed far before that comment anyways.
Broadly speaking, managing courtesy and honesty is difficult. But I’ve found that there’s countless courteous takes out there in the world. No one reads them. They don’t get promoted. A take that has a little bite to it gets attention.
Moreover, people are not actually as convinced, especially when it’s not on an interpersonal level (where you notice Richard is much nicer), by someone bending over backward to be nice as one might think. If that were true, the Dems would have converted every Republican. It has been the default mode of communication for that party for decades. People don’t just need to see that you’re not a bigot against them. They need to also be convinced that you give a shit. And you won’t convince most people that you do without actually showing them. Even Dr. King could excoriate loudly. He criticized, he attacked, he even mocked. (And was hugely controversial in his life!) If you’re not acting angry about what you view as dishonesty or something else, people will quite naturally assume you don’t really care about dishonesty . I actually think this is part of why liberals get the “virtue signaling” accusation, above and beyond the projection and the well-poisoning and all the other elements to it.
You’ll notice Richard picked a very specific set of targets. Nor “wife”. He used the phrase “mom” in scare quotes, but he wasn’t talking about moms. He was targeting “a klatch of ignorant, bigoted, must-have-been-Trump-voting soccer-moms”. Not all soccer moms, not Trump voters. He only mentioned Trump twice, and once in the context of William Lane Craig.
Appeasing fascists historically has a very bad success record. Consider that.
Slightly off topic but I read an article in the atlantic regarding Christianity needed a revival in america. While most of it followed similar claims that I’ve heard dozens of times there was one at The Atlantic that I’m curious of your thoughts on.
The claim was that Immigration will play a key role in America in keeping Christianity alive ( with the hope of the author being that this will become a second wave of America becoming Christian again). Do you think Immigration will have any significant impact on religious thinking or will it at best keep a small minority hold on people in America?
The idea of the argument runs afoul of what we know about immigrants. Immigrants actually very rapidly assimilate, especially when they are allowed to. Their values converge toward the society that they’re in pretty quickly. Whatever structural and cultural factors are causing their loss of numbers among the native population will be mirrored in the immigrant population very quickly.
Is there any research or polls done on this that you know of. Id be interested in knowing how immigrant demographics change as well as how much the society they come into changes. Where I live there is a significant spanish/native cultural influence because of the deep history of spanish interaction with native people( in many cases this was done by conflict or bribery).While this lead to a significant Catholic presence, there is still some semblance of the believe systems of the native populations.
Note also that religion is in decline in developing nations in rough proportion to their economic advancement. So, for example, atheism has been on a notable and public rise in Mexico (among other markers of Christianity’s decline there, e.g. huge drops in church attendance, Catholic affiliation, etc.).
Also note that it is typical that an immigrant population assimilates within three generations, e.g. highly religious families in their first generation will be highly secular families by their third generation. Exposure to a developed nation’s culture and economics has a universal degrading effect on religious faith (in alignment with the general secularization thesis).
Tyler: Richard linked to some of the literature, I can find more if you want but it’s essentially the consensus among immigration studies. Just Google “immigrants cultural convergence”. (Or consider how very rarely you hear Gaelic, German, Greek, Polish, Hebrew, Yiddish or any other non-English language in this country from the descendants of previous generations of immigrants). Obviously this process isn’t total, no matter how much a society assimilates or doesn’t, and there’s complications such as racism (e.g. African-descended people have maintained a distinct culture for centuries even through slavery and segregation precisely because they were at the bottom of a racial caste and not allowed to assimilate) which are relevant for Latina/o and Asian immigrants which are two of the leading categories.
In particular, sects don’t tend to go away: We have Catholics in this country precisely because of that. But they do change. American Catholics are very different from other Catholics throughout the world, and visibly so. (It’s actually a miniature problem within the Catholic Church, which has always had this issue that they want to modernize and look less embarrassing but face hardliners, and a huge number of the conservative hardliners are Americans, many of whom reject Vatican II!)
For Christ’s sake, can we please stop acting like Vatican II was the scientific revolution of Catholicism? For one thing, church architecture is shit now because of it, second, modern bible translations and the use of lower and higher criticism had already been sanctioned by Pope Pius XII before Vatican II, the half-assed “apologies” to Jews and the faux-pass at religious tolerance make the Church’s position look like it was borrowed from the Bhagavad Gita: “You worship me (the only true god) even if you think you’re worshiping someone else”, etc. The inclusion of laypeople was alright as was the decision to allow people to cremate their dead, but let’s not act like the whole thing was one big progressive step.
Also, the majority of opponents to Vatican II are European as the seminaries from these offshoots are all situated in small landlocked European countries. If anything, it’s the exact opposite: most American Catholics, even the most conservative, DO support Vatican II since without it their status as lay preachers would not exist and so their podcasts, YouTube Channels, and speaking engagements would not exist without it. Offshoots from the Roman Church are even more aggressive when it comes to who can and cannot preach and so by default there aren’t a lot of lay defenders of Pre-Vatican II Catholicism which fetishized the priesthood (now you see priests dressed in street clothes, which you shouldn’t have in my opinion since it makes them look like everybody else but that’s a personal preference) and made any publication of official teaching solely in the hands of the clergy.
Being an American Catholic who opposes Vatican II makes sense insofar as there were some problems with its “reforms” that even non-Catholics can agree with them on, but on the whole it is easier for one’s personal salvation and career (if one is a Catholic apologist or speaker) to simply take the good with the bad.
The only real similarity that I’ve noticed among the conservative Catholics I’ve met with SV types is their love for the Latin mass. I should perhaps note that even here it’s typically converts or reverts who attend the Latin Mass, in either Roman churches or its offshoots. The majority of Catholic conservatives in this country cannot go to them because typically only one or two churches in any given diocese are allowed to perform them and then only with permission from the bishop. They may not do them on the same day as the “regular” mass.
tl;dr: some of V-2 was good, some of it was crap. The majority of American conservative Catholics do not oppose V-2 in its entirety or even partially (aside from maybe the aesthetics) and the majority of its critics live and attend seminary outside the US. For evidence of this, Church Militant, no friend of liberalism in any form, strongly condemns schismatic Catholics. In essence, people not super familiar with Catholicism tend to view V-2 as somehow making it like Unitarian Universalism. If V-2 was really earth-shattering, it would have had to abolish the papal infallibility stuff and void the two dogmas about Mary (Immaculate Conception and Bodily Assumption) or at least recognize the Jesus had real biological brothers and sisters from Mary.
Actually, administratively, the Catholic Church is more centralized now than it has ever been since in the 1920s local secular authorities had the power to appoint bishops, a practice not abolished until about twenty years later! So a lot of V-2’s critics it seems just want to form their own group to have power for themselves OR they are ignorant of how pre-V-2 Catholic administrative procedures like appointing bishops (1940s) is identical to today.
We agree on this though: Catholics in Brazil IN MY EXPERIENCE tended to be more sexually liberated but that probably has less to do with the priests teaching that it’s okay to have sex outside of marriage and more to do with the independent thinking of the people in general? I will say though that among my peers from Catholic school, only a small number still think sex outside of marriage is bad so maybe we are misunderstanding this: maybe we just tend to think Catholics from Brazil are not as sexually repressed because for whatever reason, culturally or otherwise, they aren’t as shy about giving their opinions on it as much as Catholics in America who may have more open attitudes but fear social stigma?
Bill: The problems with rejecting Vatican II are… pretty obvious. And even if you dislike Vatican II for some reason (I thought you were Buddhist?), you can see the correlation between the rejection of it and very ugly views (views far to the right of you).
Let’s get the papal authority bit out of the way first. Those rejecting Vatican II are showing that, whatever their authoritarian and inerrantist beliefs, they will reject an authority that moderates or reforms at all . In other words, their leaders are to be trusted totally when they remain conservative and to rejected when not. The double standard is so obvious, and so obviously fascistic, that that alone should be telling. Non-Catholics can maybe look at Vatican II however critically we like, but when Catholics do it, it’s always very telling.
Beyond that, though…
Vatican II ended the official anti-Semitic position of the church and opened it up to greater religious pluralism. Rejecting Vatican II is thus very often associated with anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and the ugliest politics of the right wing.
Vatican II was generally part of an attempt toward the slightest liberalization. Rejection of it is thus often expressly authoritarian (like, not “anti-woke” though they will lie and claim that’s what it is but against the very idea of democracy and in favor of repressive theocracy). In particular, Vatican II codified a commitment to religious freedom. So, you know, theocrats oppose it .
It’s easy to go down the line. From revelations to indulgences, Vatican II meant the church no longer committing to some tellingly hypocritical, silly and harmful ideas.
As for the art: I’m going to bet that that has a lot less to do with Vatican II and more to do with the decline of the power of the Catholic Church. Maybe they shouldn’t have been complicit with Nazism? Seems like that would have been a better bet.
So, yeah, it wasn’t a uniformly progressive document at all, Bill. But it was generally, as you yourself note, a step in the right direction.
Which should tell you something about the extreme position of the nutcases who oppose it from the right .
“shouldn’t have been complicit with Nazism”
We need to be careful here. The Church did introduce the Yellow Star into Europe via Pope Innocent III and Paul IV installed the papal ghettos and Gregory IX did have over ten thousand copies of The Talmud burned BUT the position of the Catholic Church as a whole to Nazism was complex. The man who headed operation Valkyrie, Clauss von Stauffenberg, was Catholic as were the members of the White Rose. Pope Pius XI condemned nationalism twice, once in 1922 and again in 1938. The latter is especially noteworthy since the encyclical was written in German, unprecedented as they are normally in Latin, and copies were sent into Germany and read from pulpits on Easter Sunday. Also, Bonhoeffer was inspired not by the Reformers but by Aquinas in his decision to lead assassination plots against Hitler.
Part of the reason why people think the Church was complicit with Nazism in toto was because Hannah Arendt wrote a book where she claimed that Pope Saint John XXIII declared The Deputy (a play critical of Pius XII) to be based on reality, but that story has been debunked. The Catholic Church has had strained relations with the Jews as even occasional defenders like Pope Innocent IV sometimes oppressed Jewish worship in the Papal States. However, it would be error to see Pope Pius XI for instance as being complicit with Nazism as it is still believed that Mussolini’s son in law poisoned him. As for Pius XII, I’m agnostic at this point.
Bill, being only sometimes complicit with Nazism is having been complicit with Nazism . Many people globally saw through the Nazis. The Church didn’t. Hashing out their exact scale of their moral terpitude and asking about things like Hannah Arendt’s accusations, while interesting historically, are irrelevant to this discussion here. The Catholic Church did not solidly rebuke Nazism but instead enabled it. Period. And that alone, to say nothing of everything else they did throughout the 20th century (from trying to stamp out liberation theology while saying nothing of their ideology being used by right-wing extremists and tolerating that internal debate, as continues even now , to their vile behavior in Africa to the whole molest-a-lot-of-kids-and-cover-it-up thing) and before, destroyed their moral credibility, which is why they plummeted from the position where they could command the kind of money to do the sometimes-great-art they commissioned. I’m not an art historian so there’s probably other components going on there (it’s not the Renaissance anymore in a lot of ways), but that is surely far more central to that story than their lame attempt to fix their moral cowardice.
(And bear in mind that “We wanted to assassinate Hitler”, while itself a laughably low moral bar, was the position of many people who actually in principle had no problem with Nazism or at least with some of its earlier incarnations but instead thought that Hitler in particular was a disastrous and incompetent leader. The Wehrmacht were, as Dan Arrows of Three Arrows documents quite well, deeply subordinate to the Nazis and quite happy to commit atrocities just as they had for right-wing regimes. So some Catholics turning against Hitler late outside of government policy gets them precisely no brownie points. If the Church had spoken up when it mattered and not entered in the Faustian anti-Communist bargain that elites so often enter into with fascists, Hitler may not have risen to power or may have faced many more checks in his rule).
“So some Catholics turning against Hitler late outside of government policy gets them precisely no brownie points. If the Church had spoken up when it mattered and not entered in the Faustian anti-Communist bargain that elites so often enter into with fascists, Hitler may not have risen to power or may have faced many more checks in his rule).”
Re-read the part above about the encyclical, “With Burning Concern” that was suppressed in Germany a full year before the war broke out. Also, the Vatican issued fifty-five protests against the Reich for violating the terms of the concordat, so it’s not as though the Vatican was idle during this time. It’s also worth pointing out that the Catholic Church had far less power during this time than it did a hundred years earlier when it actually had military and Papal States. Germany was mostly non-Catholic anyway, with Hitler and Himmler both being neo-Pagans and most other Nazis and regular volk being Protestant. History if filled with Popes named “Pius” who rebuked earthly rulers and only made things worse for all concerned. Pius V’s excommunication of Queen Elizabeth I only led to disaster for Catholics in England and Pius VI’s excommunication of Nepoleon led to the Pope’s arrest at gunpoint. Similarly Pius IX’s criticism of secular rulers did him no favors and led to the loss of the Papal States. So there was ample precedent for things going further south than they already were if a less cautionary approach were taken by the Pontiffs during this time. Keep in mind both PS Pius X and Benedict XV tried their best to prevent and mediate peace before and after WWI and we all know what happened next…..
Bill:
You mean the document that doesn’t mention Hitler or Nazism or national socialism by name? The one that, as Wikipedia pointed out, “states that race is a fundamental value of the human community, which is necessary and honorable but condemns the exaltation of race, or the people, or the state, above their standard value to an idolatrous level”? The one that came after the concordat and didn’t threaten it? The one that barely mentioned any policies and just weakly gestured at ideas? Yeah, weak sauce. Some people by 1937 had been assisting Jews and trying to deal with Nazism for four years. Like I said, again, being sometimes complicit with Nazism still means you’re complicit with Nazism. And we all know the Catholic Church can be far more explicit when they actually seriously oppose something rather than tut-tutting. As anyone in Latin America can tell you.
America and Britain also complained about the Nazis while appeasing them and actively backing them. That’s how complicity and propaganda work, Bill. Actual resistance is something else. Like, say, opposing the Holocaust, for realsies . https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=Pp7DZigCaDcC&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=catholic+church+complicity+against+the+nazis&ots=0vqy5NEBGR&sig=1uf10UDY3_jgikeXWWdyroS-M4w#v=onepage&q=catholic%20church%20complicity%20against%20the%20nazis&f=false is a pretty good accounting of the Catholic Church’s complicity.
Alan Bullock points out, “Neither the Catholic Church, nor the Evangelical Church … as institutions, felt it possible to take up an attitude of open opposition to the regime”. You know, unlike the fucking partisans. And Mary Fulbrook noted that the Catholics would resist when the church pushed the issue and that “it seems that, for many Germans, adherence to the Christian faith proved compatible with at least passive acquiescence in, if not active support for, the Nazi dictatorship”. And that’s the really critical point. The active participation by countless Catholics in these atrocities, with no serious attempt to push them out or anything else.
Oh, and also, Catholic priests helped Nazis escape after the war. No, that’s not an institutional effort, but if we want to count activity aside from the highest leadership, we have to count their collaborators too.
Seriously. The only criteria that count are, “Did they actually identify Nazism as a moral evil to its core and aim to stop it?” No. Many individual priests did, but the Catholic Church as a whole did not put themselves behind the partisans, behind anti-Nazi resistance.
You can talk about Napoleon et al. all you want, but for one thing Hitler’s position was actually a lot more precarious for a long time than when Napoleon was a threat and Hitler was so obviously something else so the moral calculus is totally different, and more importantly, again, look at the history of the Catholic Church all over the world. They can be politically efficacious when they want. They just happen to not want it that much when they can get stormtroopers beating up Jews and Commies. The Catholic right was critical to Hitler’s rise.
Why are you fighting this issue? I don’t think the Catholic Church is 100% evil because that’s not how institutions work. But they just so obviously have been complicit with so many world crimes that there’s just no defense of them as any kind of bulwark for justice. And that’s the actual reason behind Vatican II, and the decline of their moral authority.
“Alan Bullock points out, “Neither the Catholic Church, nor the Evangelical Church … as institutions, felt it possible to take up an attitude of open opposition to the regime”. ”
Alternative facts. Pius XII’s first encyclical, Summi Pontificatus (1939):
“52. But there is yet another error no less pernicious to the well-being of the nations and to the prosperity of that great human society which gathers together and embraces within its confines all races. It is the error contained in those ideas which do not hesitate to divorce civil authority from every kind of dependence upon the Supreme Being – First Source and absolute Master of man and of society – and from every restraint of a Higher Law derived from God as from its First Source. Thus they accord the civil authority an unrestricted field of action that is at the mercy of the changeful tide of human will, or of the dictates of casual historical claims, and of the interests of a few.” (paragraph 52, https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xii_enc_20101939_summi-pontificatus.html)
This is a blatant condemnation of the totalitarian regimes that were the Nazis and Fascists. Also, if With Burning Concern didn’t mention the Nazis, they surely acted like it did since it was suppressed heavily and one protestant pastor caught with it was arrested. As Pinchas Lapide notes in his book Three Popes and the Jews, “That Hitler clearly realized its import was obvious from the next day’s Volkischer Beobachter, which carried a vitriolic counterattack on the ‘Jew-God’ and his deputy in Rome.” (p.110).
https://www.amazon.com/Three-Popes-Jews-pinchas-lapide/dp/0285501976/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3GFRGLSM50M8H&keywords=three+popes+and+the+jews&qid=1677027447&sprefix=three+popes+and+the+jew%2Caps%2C155&sr=8-1
“This is a blatant condemnation of the totalitarian regimes that were the Nazis and Fascists”
No, it’s not, Bill! And once again we’ve detected one of your woobies because it’s not there .
It’s not just that you’re disagreeing with a historian and calling that historian’s reasoned assessment “alternative facts” which is closed-minded, disrespectful and a category error (an assessment isn’t a fact, it’s a conclusion drawn from a set of them). It’s not even just that your quote says nothing about Hitler, the Nazis, the fascists, Mussolini, or anything specific whatsoever.
It’s that this quote is fucking weak sauce . It isn’t a defense of any kind of liberalism. All it says is that there is an “error contained in those ideas which do not hesitate to divorce civil authority from every kind of dependence upon the Supreme Being – First Source and absolute Master of man and of society – and from every restraint of a Higher Law derived from God as from its First Source. Thus they accord the civil authority an unrestricted field of action that is at the mercy of the changeful tide of human will”. First of all, this is an express endorsement of the violation of church and state and a theocracy, something you apparently missed. It is incredible that you think that this expressly authoritarian sentiment is anti-authoritarian just because you think it very, very weakly defends some kind of natural law objection to authoritarianism.
Second, this is literally what the Nazis and the fascists would claim is what they were avoiding . You can disagree with the Nazis and the fascists, but they did not present themselves as atheists who were flipping off the church. They wore “God Is With Us” on their belts, they virtue-signaled to Christians, they acted as if they were in line with the Supreme Being’s intentions. You can’t beat a totalitarian by invoking their very reasoning. Richard’s work showed what a lot of others had already suspected, that Hitler was a positive Christian, no different from modern Klan members or neo-Nazis. (In fact, your own second quote proves this point: That “Jew-God” bit? That’s positive Christianity, which argued that the real Jesus was a Nazi and Paul diluted it).
In fact, to me this reads like a much more direct attack on Stalin, because there there is a clear dismissal of the idea of God.
This is not a fully-throated objection to Nazism. The fact that you read it that way is intellectual blindness.
” Also, if With Burning Concern didn’t mention the Nazis, they surely acted like it did since it was suppressed heavily and one protestant pastor caught with it was arrested”.
Totalitarians do what totalitarians do. By your reasoning, the SS must have been vehemently anti-Hitler and anti-Nazi because many of their members got targeted during the Night of the Long Knives. (I won’t even bother pointing out how anti-Wehrmacht the Triumph of the Will was because I suspect you may also engage in Wehrmacht apologetics, because it is politically useful for you for Nazism to be an aberration that appeared suddenly in mass hysteria rather than being deeply connected to powerful institutions). Countless groups who were innocent or supportive of the regime got targeted.
The fact remains that not only did German Catholics end up happily working with the Nazis but the church itself made peace with evil instead of waging war on it. You’re squirming out of this conclusion. And you’re doing it with reasoning that would defend the early SS.
And please don’t suggest that the Church couldn’t have resisted more loudly. They’ve been happy to go to war in their history. They could have decided to side with the Jews, the gays, the Roma, and put their own people on the line, just as the partisans did.
Again, I am not saying that the Church never resisted, in ways that were ultimately utterly milquetoast and pathetic in my view. I’ll grant that there was some courage in some of these moves. But they were also complicit . As I said originally, complicit some of the time is complicit, some of the time . So, again, Bill, why are you fighting this one? Right, yet another woobie.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/vatican-documents-show-secret-back-channel-between-pope-pius-xii-and-adolph-hitler is a quite balanced accounting based on documents that shows Pius to be neither a caricature of an anti-Semite or a hero against the Nazis. https://www.bc.edu/content/dam/files/research_sites/cjl/texts/cjrelations/resources/articles/dietrich.htm and https://www.timesofisrael.com/german-bishops-said-to-admit-complicity-in-nazi-actions-in-new-report/ also go into it. And, frankly, if Pius were actually truly ideologically anti-Nazi rather than a pragmatist, we know from liberation theology that he could have policed his members, including excommunicating anyone who directly endorsed and worked with the Nazi regime like numerous Catholics did. He didn’t . Swallow that or don’t – not my integrity on the line.
Fred, again, excommunicating a non-Catholic who expressly declared himself GOD (as Hitler did) is meaningless! Also, Goebbels himself noted in his diaries how Pius XII accused Nazi Germany in his 1942 Christmas message of genocide.
Bill:
First of all, why are we only talking about excommunication of Hitler? It’s not just him, it’s the Nazi party and their supporters. There were German priests actively acting in ways that endorsed the regime and its crime. Excommunicate them.
Second, where did Hitler call himself God? Again, he was a positive Christian. He may have been megalomaniacal, but his belief system wasn’t that he was God.
Third, and most importantly, excommunication is rarely about actually trying to change the mind of the excommunicated. (Catholics may pretend otherwise, but come on). It’s about the signal it gives. And this would have indicated that the Church would in no way abide Hitler’s evil, that his acts did not represent Christianity and thus warranted such an action. And they had plenty of grounds to do so. Hitler and the party were engaged in a theological goulash, including Teutonic revivalism and atheism. Hitler’s personal beliefs, whatever they were, were moot: The party as a whole did what they did in all contexts and appropriated what they wanted. Surely that would have been sufficient grounds above and beyond the moral concern.
Part of the reason why that didn’t happen is because anti-Semitism has been so deeply rooted in the Church (and in many Protestant movements like Lutheranism) that there just wasn’t the fervor or the grounds to do so. And that’s a problem, and part of why Nazism has fertile soil.
And accusing the Nazis of genocide by 1942 is a joke. The Blitz was 1940-1941. The concentration camps started in the early 30s and were engaging in forced labor and mass executions by the end of the decade. That was already genocidal behavior. It just got worse from there. Not condemning any of that and only starting to condemn it when it was clear that they were becoming death camps is such moral terpitude that the fact that you think it doesn’t count as complicity is just so deeply telling.
Seriously, what hills won’t you die on?
The Vatican did not have confirmation of the camps until later. Most Germans, let alone the Pope in Italy, had no idea they existed and that includes rank and file Nazi soldiers. It’s true that the Vatican then and now has a vast spy network, but it is also true that the Nazis and Fascists had their own moles inside the Vatican who were in a position to sabotage information coming in and out.
That doesn’t excuse the antisemitic articles published for several decades leading up to WW2 by (mostly French) Catholic newspapers like Civilta Cattolica and La Croix, though even here Pope Leo XIII tried to cool the flames and openly sided with Alfred Dreyfus in one of his interviews. I will say as an observation that there exist no books to my knowledge documenting the holocaust denial on the part of the Hare Krishnas who to this day, some of them of course not all of them, maintain websites calling Hitler Kalki Avatara and are filled with the sort of pseudo-eastern mysticism which was also used by the Nazis (the swastika is, after all, an eastern symbol, not a Christian one).
So, the question is for the Vatican, why didn’t they have evidence of the camps? Because other people did. And were talking about it. The answer is: They didn’t pay attention until it became so obvious as to be politically embarrassing. They didn’t trust sources that were telling them how evil these people were, because they were ideologically conservative. Like all of the other elites (including many in the US government and business sectors), they were happy to have stormtroopers beating up Commies until it got out of hand for their interests. That’s venal cowardice. Their spy network could have very easily talked to partisans and resisters. They didn’t because that’s not how the Vatican operates, because it always gets into bed with power.
Remember that the Vatican officially endorsed the fascists, repeatedly. Take Franco. They de facto recognized Vichy in 1937 and Pius said the following about Franco’s victory: “Peace and victory have been willed by God to Spain… which has now given to proselytes of the materialistic atheism of our age the highest proof that above all things stands the eternal value of the religion and the Spirit” (https://books.google.com/books?id=uRAyAQAAIAAJ&q=Pius+Peace+and+victory+have+been+willed+by+God+to+Spain…+which+has+now+given+to+proselytes+of+the+materialistic+atheism+of+our+age+the+highest+proof+that+above+all+things+stands+the+eternal+value+of+the+religion+and+the+Spirit&dq=Pius+Peace+and+victory+have+been+willed+by+God+to+Spain…+which+has+now+given+to+proselytes+of+the+materialistic+atheism+of+our+age+the+highest+proof+that+above+all+things+stands+the+eternal+value+of+the+religion+and+the+Spirit&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=1&printsec=frontcover&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjXvKCYlNf9AhXHk2oFHWF-Bt4Q6AF6BAgGEAI) . You know, the same kind of rhetoric you pretended was anti-fascist! Straight up endorsement of fascism. This support went all the way back to 1929 for Mussolini (https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1022&context=thetean) . And by being supportive of Hitler’s allies, they were helping Hitler , quite directly. Come on. This is not worth defending.
As for Hare Krishna Holocaust denial: What a weird whataboutism. I’m not a Hare Krishna and I’m not defending them. Dude, lots of people end up engaging in Holocaust denial globally, it’s useful for localized anti-Semitism or anti-Israel signaling or to try to make “Aryan” or nationalist sentiment seem less dangerous. It’s not that weird to see fascist sentiments in lots of places. People straight up show off Hitler and swastikas globally, as John Oliver has documented. The difference is, none of these groups engaged in direct support at the time in ways that actually buoyed the regime . Holocaust denial is awful and condemns anyone who engages in it to the worst pits of lost integrity and evil, and insofar as that is a sentiment among Hare Krishnas that community should be ashamed. But that’s just not in the same zipcode as what we’re talking about.
And, of course, notice your position here . You see that the Hare Krishna position here, even after the fact , is evil. Well, gee, if it was evil now, it was way more evil then, right? But nope, you have to defend the Catholic Church because that’s your woobie for the day.
As you yourself say, anti-Semitism was an official Catholic position. Had they fought against the racism and anti-Semitism of the fascists early on, the fascists may have not garnered support from Catholics. Instead, the Church repeatedly made official and unofficial alliances or truces with the fascists. In so doing, they became complicit. I hope we’re in essential agreement.
No. Not only is the net atheism of immigrants increasing (so, even first gen immigrants are less religious now than they used to be), all evidence proves the opposite is the case in the long run: within three generations, immigrants normalize to the surrounding population trends. In other words, as believing families immigrate to the U.S., within three generations they are as nonreligious (and becoming as more so over time) as everyone else here.
Also…
The same is true of fertility: even when the religious have more kids than the nonreligious, all they are doing demographically is making more atheists, as their kids increasingly leave the faith, and their kids’ kids even more so. Religion simply isn’t biologically inherited. It is equally eroded by culture and access to knowledge, freedom, and security, no matter how religious the vagina was that brings someone into the world.
And then…
As to The Atlantic article, it exemplifies the head-in-sand ignorance of apologists today.
For example, it proposes that “growth can happen if the Church learns how to speak compellingly to non-Christian people.” It’s been thousands of years; they’ve never figured out how to do that. They’ve never been won over by persuasion; only ever by coercion (physical, political, or social). This indicates there is no way to do that. Religion simply doesn’t appeal to the nonreligious at scale. The odd few, sure; but they are overwhelmed by the defectors and rejectors, leaving a net drain on religion, not a net gain. Once people are free to not be religious, increasingly, they simply won’t be. And that’s that.
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One should instead ask why was religiosity so steady in America, while declining everywhere else in the developed world, until recently, when it has hit such a precipitous decline here as to be legitimately describable as disastrous? Usually credited is the internet. But why that broke through in America remains to be explained. Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan—they didn’t need the internet. What was America doing differently that it took a radical new technology to finally get America where everyone else already was?
The only thing prominent to point to is, ironically, poverty and oppression.
Poverty: America has always been among the worst of developed nations in terms of income disparity, poverty, and economic injustice (and not only because of literal Jim Crowe racism for a whole century, and actual slavery across a whole century before that). And it is well-established that religiosity is a function of despair: the less security and social safety nets people have, hence the more poverty and crime there is, the more they turn to religion in desperation, whereas the more a society actually takes care of its people, the less they need religion and thence the more they abandon it, which is what happened everywhere else (cf. a recent study of the Gregory Paul thesis).
Oppression: America has not been the land of liberty it claims to have been, with its McCarthyism and censorship (Hayes commission and beyond) and social punishment of atheists as “commies” and its privileging of the religious (prayer in schools, legislatures and councils, pledges to god still normed, suppression of science education that challenges faith dogmas, public vilifications, hiring prejudice) combined with its institutional racism, which, for example, kept black community Christianity alive through desperation: it was their most available community vehicle of resistance, harder for white Christians to denounce or suppress. Though not without trying—many a black church was burned. But the alternative, experimentation with atheism within a subset of the black power movement, was targeted even by the FBI, not just the KKK, being falsely or impertinently associated with “terrorism” and “communism.”
This all kept atheism suppressed through fear, and Christianity bolstered through privilege. Quite simply, it was just easier to be a Christian in America than not to be.
With the decline of offline American social networks from unheeded obsolescence, and increased economic oppression, whereby wages fell stagnant as cost of living rose, wiping out almost all free time, from vacations to tolerable work hours (see Bowling Alone), coupled with the rise of the internet, which allowed an unlimited ability to fact-check as well as the coordination of communities of interest regardless of geography, resulting in the corresponding ability to choose your community, which degraded every IRL community’s ability to control through social pressure, American society’s ability to maintain its oppressive religious conditions collapsed as well.
It then had the inevitable backlash effect: once it became acceptable, and practically unpunishable, to be an atheist, defectors’ increasing proof by example increasingly freed countless more to follow suit, producing a snowball effect.
There is no getting the old conditions back—short of a literal reinstitution of fascism, which is admittedly being tried. But odds are, once the last older generations die off, America will never be religious again. There is no solution to this. Religion is simply not sellable. It’s a lie. And once people know that, they aren’t going back. The religious can’t “retool their message” to get them back. They don’t have anything to sell.
This is why the rest of what The Atlantic article says is a pipe dream. Religions aren’t true. So there isn’t any way they can get around the problem of being false—short of returning to the old way of getting around that: coercion (social, political, or physical). This is proved out by observing the fate of churches that meet the article’s recommendations (becoming more interested in actual justice, diversity, and modernity over traditionalism): they decline and fail. Because no one cares. Once you retool your religion to that, it has nothing to offer that isn’t already available without it.
This is why religion only thrives at scale by actually being ideologically bankrupt: it now exists mainly to cater to ideological extremists (and, still, the desperate and the indoctrinated). A large proportion of American Christians now are white supremacists (whether they admit this or not) with extremist agendas. Religion remains for them only a dying tool of oppression, not a genuinely defensible faith. The bulk of the remainder of American Christendom serves the poor, whose social and economic desperation leaves them trapped there. They don’t need religion, though. They need justice. But once you give them that, they don’t need religion.
So that article is really ignoring the whole reality of what’s happening in America and the world.
And the kicker?
The author of that article?
This guy.
Noam Chomsky pointed this connection between our extreme dysfunction as a society and the religiosity out in some of his interviews and public talks. He points out that the numbers in America as far as things like young Earth creationism are just embarrassing by global standards, liking it to polls of little old ladies in Sicily or people in a mosque in Tehran. When secular institutions fail to serve people, religious ones fill the gap. That’s also a huge part of what happens with groups like Hamas and al Qaeda: Insofar as there is any need for groups fighting for the poor and colonized in the Muslim world, and those secular groups like the PLO get destroyed (and/or undone by their own internal incompetence and corruption, the PLO an example of both), they get replaced with radical religious organizations.
Do you have a response to this? Multiple people have linked this to me:
https://uncertaintist.wordpress.com/2017/01/04/epiphanius-didnt-write-about-a-pre-christian-jesus/
Please try briefly summarizing the argument you think is being made there, and on what evidence it is based.
Because I am failing to see any argument there, or evidence for one. So help me out.
If the Nazoreans accept the Gospel of Matthew (Panarion 29.9), that goes against the claim that they believed Jesus died under Alexander.
Is that the only argument you find there?
Because that isn’t what Epihanius says. Epiphanius says, “And [the Nazoraeans] have the gospel according to Matthew very complete in Hebrew. For among them this is clearly still preserved, just as it was written from the beginning in Hebraic letters. But I do not know if it has taken away the genealogies from Abraham to Christ.” Notice this is not our Gospel of Matthew. It was never in Hebrew. And he is admitting that whatever Gospel they are using, lacks material in his own Matthew (it is not complete only “very” complete; he doesn’t know if it’s missing stuff; etc.). From the link you’ll see their Gospel was actually known as The Gospel of Hebrews or the Gospel of the Nazorians, and quotes from it clearly show it was a substantially different Gospel from ours.
Christian authors often did not have a clear idea which Gospels were used by which heretical sects or how they were related, and made dubious assumptions biased toward their canonical dogmas. Papias, for example, thought Matthew was translated from Hebrew, but we know that’s false (it copies verbatim the Greek of Mark, and uses the Greek Septuagint as the base text for its use of the Old Testament). Epiphanius clearly is following the same false legend, and thus mistaking a Hebrew Gospel that “looks like” Matthew as actually Matthew.
But Epiphanius clearly never actually saw the Gospel in question so as to know this. He admits, for example, that he doesn’t know whether their “Matthew” has the genealogy or not. So he has never actually seen this Gospel. Notably, he probably chooses to mention that one thing about it precisely because he knows it would conflict with what he reports is their chronological teaching, and thus it matters to his argument whether that chronology was there.
I suspect he just heard their Gospel included a Marian mythology (confirmed in other quotations and the Talmudic version), and since they were Torah observant and had a Gospel in Hebrew (and “legend had it” Matthew was translated from Hebrew), he just assumed that their Gospel must be the one he knows as Matthew. But he clearly has no actual knowledge of this; he is guessing. And he indicates by his question about the genealogy that he is aware there is a problem with his assumption—the very same problem you are alluding to. Since other quotations show the Gospel he is talking about isn’t our Matthew at all, we cannot proceed with the argument.
Note other quotations and references to their Gospel may also suffer similar confusions. For example, there is mention of a “Greek” version, but there is no evidence that the Greek version actually was the same as the Hebrew version. And so on. So you have to take care in using what Christians report. They aren’t that careful or reliable. But there are enough exact quotations and discussions to indicate the Gospel of the Nazorians was quite strange, and not at all our Matthew (though it could have been loosely based on it).
Four names that deserve mention on the Protestant side are Dr. Gavin Ortlund (a Calvinist Baptist whose Youtube blog, Truth Unites, is well worth checking out), Dr. Rebecca McLaughlin (author of “Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World’s Largest Religion”), Dr. Andrew Loke (a doctor turned philosophy professor, and author of “The Teleological and Kalam Cosmological Arguments Revisited,” “Investigating the Resurrection of Jesus Christ: A New Transdisciplinary Approach” and “A Kryptic Model of the Incarnation”), and atheist-turned-Calvinist Dr. Guillaume Bignon (author of “Excusing Sinners and Blaming God: A Calvinist Assessment of Determinism, Moral Responsibility, and Divine Involvement in Evil” and “Confessions of a French Atheist: How God Hijacked My Quest to Disprove the Christian Faith”). I regret to say that there aren’t many Catholic authors of the same caliber, but Cameron Bertuzzi (a recent convert to Catholicism, and owner of the Youtube blog, Capturing Christianity) is definitely worth keeping an eye on. Cheers.
I like Cameron a lot, but he does seem to sometimes erect some serious strawmen of those he disagrees with and him being generally more reasonable (from what I’ve seen) can mask that.
I find Bignon’s book titles interesting. Assuming it’s not just the standard “Atheist turned Christian who was a big meanie misotheist” dishonest trope, I find it so interesting that you had so many people “on a quest” to disprove God rather than just, you know, not accepting it because it’s not a good theory. That kind of burning antipathy actually can mask some irrational reasons for rejection, so maybe that’s a part of the impulse there.
I know The Simpsons do not qualify as “peer-reviewed” but in one episode the residents have visions of Maude Flanders. I was reading my Interpreter’s Bible (the older edition) where it notes, “So it was no mere physical body which Paul saw…but a radiant form in the sky…” (vol.7 p.177). Is the Simpsons episode a good analogy? Maude doesn’t take a physical form but the residents “see” her form in the sky floating about. Would that be an accurate portrayal of what the 500 had seen in 1 Cor.15?
I don’t know the episode so I can’t answer your question that way. In mass hallucination events, the stimulus is usually ambiguous and “interpreted” individually under the influence of group suggestion (usually through anchoring, i.e. a charismatic leader tells them what they see, and that’s what they see). Though mass reports of seeing a specific actual person exist, they are not the norm.
It isn’t usually so specific as an actual “photo image” of a person. Like in the Fatima vision (see Then He Appeared to Over Five Hundred Brethren at Once!), what people “see” is typically vague (an amorphous light or visual effect; like the tongues in Acts 2 or the talking “skylight” in Acts 9); they report this as seeing an entity (Jesus, an angel, the Virgin Mary) because they believe that’s what it was. You would have to interrogate them very precisely to learn that what they actually saw was just a vague light or visual effect, and that really they were interpreting that as being the person they saw.
That’s why it is fatal to any Christian apologist’s case that Paul never specifies what was actually seen when he says people thought they saw Jesus. Because we lack that data, we have to assume it’s what would be most typical, which is a vague or amorphous light or similar ambiguous visual effect (just as Acts 2 depicts). To argue for an exception in this case requires specific evidence for an exception, which is the very thing we don’t have (see Resurrection: Faith or Fact?).
Okay, thanks. I also noticed this same commentary dated Hebrews pretty early, sometime in the 70s, around the time of the traditional dating for Mark. I’m wondering if Hebrews could have been composed shortly before Mark and thus represent a christology more in line with Paul (even though Paul didn’t write it), thereby showing Mark to be a “break” from this high christology? Even if we grant “Son of God” as original to Mark’s Gospel in the opening, it still of course has a relatively low christology. It could be that this is a reaction to the Pauline-Hebrews thought much like some sects in other religions lower the divinity of their god.
1. I personally am sure Hebrews was written before Mark (in the 60s; IMO it can’t have been written in the 70s), for the same reasons as 1 Clement surely was (see How We Can Know 1 Clement Was Actually Written in the 60s AD). I make this case (for both) in On the Historicity of Jesus, and there are many scholars who agree.
Hebrews’ entire argument requires the Jewish temple cult to still be operating. Its authors thus do not know it has ceased to exist. But it so famously ceased to exist in 70 AD that it is impossible that anyone after that year could have written it.
Additionally, though the following point is more the case for 1 Clement, it also is true for Hebrews: if the Jewish War were in progress, it would present a rhetorical point or imminent worry that could hardly have gone without any comment (not least because of the messianic-apocalyptic driver of that war, but also its posing a looming doom or, conversely, hope for the temple cult). So I don’t think it could even have been written after 66 (when the war began). It also appears written after Paul’s letters. So it must be the early to mid 60s. Just as for 1 Clement.
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2. IMO, Mark is not advocating a low Christology. He is depicting the high Christology via a concealing allegory. Because he is so thoroughly reifying the letters of Paul, he clearly is pro-Paul, not in argument with him, and he knows all about his high Christology, and yet never “argues against it” (or against anything in Paul; Mark is thoroughly pro-Paul). So he must be concealing it in figurative, deliberately misleading narrative (a practice he even hints that he is doing as an entire project across the entire Gospel in Mark 4). See Mark’s Use of Paul’s Epistles for more on that point.
For example, in Mark the cosmic messianic secret of 1 Cor 2 is “portrayed” with the narratively incoherent repetition of Jesus telling everyone not to say anything and them saying it anyway. Likewise the demons recognizing him before his resurrection also makes no internal or external sense (if they knew, they’d have stopped the whole affair, precisely as Paul says), so can only be meant to capture mythically the idea that his power will be recognized upon his resurrection, when his real glory is (actually) revealed (in like point, Paul pretty much says in Philippians 2 that Jesus surrendered all his miraculous powers and submitted to the natural world; so Mark does not likely actually believe any of these miracles or exorcisms really happened; the public miracles just create models for Christian practice via mythic representation, while the private miracles are just metaphors for elements of the gospel message).
Another example is the empty tomb, which Mark builds as a metaphor for the defeat of death (I analyze all the symbolism and figurative features in the “legend” section of my chapter “The Spiritual Body of Christ and the Legend of the Empty Tomb” in The Empty Tomb but I explore some of them in “Why Did Mark Invent an Empty Tomb?”). Even though Paul is against the idea of the body that died being the one to rise (we are supposed to rise in new, better bodies, having discarded the old ones like a shell). Mark is thus not “literally” saying the opposite of Paul (and thus defending sarcisict resurrection instead of pneumatic; that only starts happening in Luke and John), but “figuratively” articulating Paul’s very notion. Hence the linen-robed boy become naked at Jesus’s arrest, figurative for his death and death in general (reifying Paul’s message in 2 Corinthians 5), becomes the white robed boy at the empty tomb: a theme of using low and high quality garments to explain (and represent) two-body resurrection found across Judaica of the time (and explicitly, again, in Paul).
So I don’t think Mark should ever be taken literally in anything, much less his “Christology.” And he kind of warns us not to in Mark 4, which is a cipher for the whole Gospel; as reflected in the thesis of John Dominic Crossan in The Power of Parable. Mark never teaches with a literalist device. So if you are reading him literally, you are the very outsider he has Jesus condemn as those who are “ever hearing but never understanding.” Christians shifted more and more towards literalism later (and started leaking their secret doctrines onto the page more and more over time).
Okay, I remember asking my advisor back in 2019 about Hebrews and this is what he said, ” Regarding date, I’m not sure the references to sacrifice are decisive one way or the other, since in fact the author talks of a tent, not a temple, and so is anachronistic in any case, with priests and sanctuaries as figures more than historical referents.”
My Greek is amateurish so I’m relying on secondary sources for this. I then asked him about 8:4 since that’s one of Doherty’s favorite verses, specifically about the imperfect verb “en” and how it lends support for Doherty’s reading and he replied, “Yes, the verb is imperfect, but that is because it’s part of a conditional sentence — a second-class (“contrary to fact”) condition, to be precise, and these generally take an imperfect in both the protasis (the “if” part) and the apodosis (the “then” part) when they describe a present condition, and an aorist in both protasis and apodosis when they describe a past condition.”
(1) That wouldn’t matter even if true, because the author’s argument is that they don’t need to rely on the temple cult. So the fact that it no longer existed would be the author’s number one argument. That the author would somehow “forget” this super awesome, slam-dunk argument exists is simply extraordinarily improbable, indeed effectively impossible. That’s why it can’t date after 70 (or even 66, for the other reasons I note).
But it also isn’t true. The tent is referenced as in the Biblical past as a guide to the present, but its extension into the present (indicating awareness that it was still ongoing, which can then only refer to the temple) is clearly demarcated in Hebrews 9:9-10, 13-14, 22, 25, and especially in 10:1-4, 8, 11-12. All those verses entail the author thinks this is still happening (he even outright says so in 10:11-12), and thus is still an option for his readers, an option that he thus then must dissuade them from availing themselves of.
So I think your advisor is just repeating a lazy apologetic and not actually checking the text. This is a very common behavior for professors in the field. It’s frustrating. They haven’t thought to question the apologetics they were taught by going back to the text to actually confirm they even make sense (they almost never do; when checked, these things fall apart, as we see with the verses I mentioned).
(2) On Hebrews 8:4 (interlinear), I’ll just quote what I wrote twenty years ago:
So, Doherty can’t argue from “if he had been on Earth.” Though that could be meant, it is not singled out by the author’s choice of grammar, which by itself is ambiguous as to whether he is thinking Jesus “had never” been on Earth. The line is perfectly compatible grammatically with thinking he had been.
To get Doherty’s conclusion, then, can’t be done from the grammar. It has to be done from a careful analysis of the rhetoric of the author’s entire argument. If Jesus had been on Earth, given this line, does the author’s rhetoric make any sense? The answer is: not as much as one would want. But that is not as slam dunk an argument as Doherty would want, either. It remains compatible with thinking Jesus had been on Earth, and just didn’t need to be a priest when he was there (he only needs to be when he arrives in the celestial temple).
See my analysis in OHJ, pp. 540-44.
P.S. I found a rather thorough analysis of the grammar of Heb. 8:4 on BCHF. I didn’t vet it all but at a skim it looks sound, and basically demonstrates my point in thorough detail.
Okay, I’ve been thinking: let’s assume that Mark pushes a high christology. The fact that a NT text (Mark) is in a canon organized by those who also held to a high christology is evidence of nothing since if it contradicted, say, Paul, it would not have been included. I don’t believe the apologists who argue that Mark was included (among other reasons) because it is the earliest since that fact was not known until the advent of higher criticism.
I’ve also heard that Mark has more Aramaisms than Matthew and that there may therefore be an Aramaic original behind our Greek Mark. G.Scott Gleaves however argued that Mark and the other gospels betray no evidence of being “translation Greek”.
The Aramaic in Mark appears derived from targums (paraphrases of scripture; cf. OHJ, index, “targums”) or doesn’t exist at all (most are actually Septuagintalisms). See my discussion in respect to Casey (the section after that shows more errors in his work on this point, where he keeps mistaking ordinary Semitic Greek for Aramaicism).
Gleaves is thus correct. Mark is simply writing in Semitic Greek, and emulating (sometimes even quoting) the Septuagint. Which indicates he isn’t translating.
As to Mark’s Christology, we can’t make any conclusion statements. Mark is not composing literally, so we do not have direct access to what he is selling. So we have to infer, and inferences can be fraught. We also can’t conclude based on canon selection, because the canonizers clearly did not care about contradictions (Matthew is directly refuting Mark on many points, for example; yet both were included). Inclusion of texts were more likely political rather than ideological decisions. The compilers wanted to include as many texts revered by the sects they counted allies as they could, without so blatantly undermining their own mission as to make apologetic “fixes” untenable.
In short, as long as they could “explain away” contradictions, a text would not be excluded; its exclusion would solely be based on whether it was too closely associated with an enemy sect, or wasn’t popular enough to politically require including. The same logic governed the invention of the wildly self-contradictory Nicene Creed. On which see Bart Ehrman’s excellent summary at the end of How Jesus Became God.
As with the case of Christology: one can easily “explain away” Mark’s apparent low Christology as compatible with rather than in rebuttal to high Christology. Since that was easy to do, it would not matter to them what Mark actually meant. It only mattered whether enough Churches they wanted as allies used Mark. So we cannot determine Mark’s Christology by appeal to the intentions of the canonizers. Since those intentions were so disconnected from what Mark “really meant,” it tells us nothing about what Mark really meant.
Do you think there can be historical evidence to warrant belief in the supernatural? What if there was an alleged supernatural event in an ancient source that meets all the historical criteria (early, independent, multiple, sources, etc.), would it be rational to believe that the supernatural is real or probable, even though there’s no scientific evidence of it?
Of course all scientific evidence is already a subcategory of historical evidence (studies and data records become history the moment they are made). And there are explicitly historical sciences (see History as a Science). So there isn’t really a difference on that metric. The difference is solely in terms of quantity and quality of evidence. That is actually the point of science: to apply methods to rule out error (and fraud and deception) as much as possible and acquire evidence in such quantity and quality that is highly improbable on any other explanation than the demonstrated hypothesis.
“Merely” historical evidence thus can do this as well. All it has to be, to be of the same weight and thus effect as scientific evidence, is to be as improbable on any other explanation.
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The problem that all reliable evidence has gone the other way for thousands of years (hence now Naturalism Is Not an Axiom of the Sciences but a Conclusion of Them) creates an additional requirement: one has to overcome the enormous prior probability against it (this body of evidence is extraordinary; it therefore requires more extraordinary evidence to overcome it).
This didn’t have to be the case. The evidence could have gone for the supernatural the last few thousand years, and it would then be naturalism that required extraordinary evidence, not supernaturalism (as I explain in Defining the Supernatural). But that’s not how it went. So supernaturalism faces an uphill battle because of this contingent outcome. It wouldn’t had history turned out differently; and indeed that is what indicates to us that there is nothing supernatural: we should have found some by now (already empirically putting supernaturalism in the same set as all other Cartesian Demons: see §2 in Eight Questions and A Hidden Fallacy in the Fine Tuning Argument).
But that could in principle still happen (unless we ever discover a formal proof that the supernatural is logically impossible: see The God Impossible and my first step toward formalization in The Argument from Specified Complexity against Supernaturalism).
I give examples of how historical evidence could do this in Proving History and my talk Miracles and the Historical Method. I give specific examples of what would suffice to prove Jesus actually rose from the dead at the end of my chapter on that in The Christian Delusion.
More broadly all one would need to do is reverse the evidence that currently undermines any (or several) of the ten Arguments for God. The most likely way to do that (if it could ever be done) is with scientific methods and scientific-quality data, simply because those are the most reliable methods. To do it with “merely historical” data is harder but not impossible; generally, it then requires a lot of evidence (defining evidence as any fact that is more probable if supernaturalism is true than if naturalism is true), and that usually means the best kind of evidence one can get for historical facts (because low reliability evidence is as expected—as probable—on alternative explanations, e.g. erroneous cognition, fraud, or mythologization, and therefore cannot ever be “evidence” for the supernatural, once we define evidence properly).
Yeah, I’d argue that that evidence really couldn’t ever rise to the conclusion of doing anything but tipping the evidence back a little toward the supernatural being on the table in future .
Historical sources can’t be interrogated. We can’t see what they saw. We can’t be sure what intervening ideological filters were present, what agendas were present, etc. In the real world, we routinely find that what appear to be organic observations and movements are Astroturfed. We know that people today will repeat myths and ideas, and believe them, that are fisked immediately and whose refutations are available. (I just watched the excellent “Awful Archaeology” on the Dendera Light on YouTube as well as potholer54 responding to “Ancient Apocalypse”, and the refutations for everything in these very commonly held conspiratorial beliefs that have been promoted through outlets like the History Channel are readily available). So we have no reason to think that even large waves of attestation in the distant past that lacked any known naturalistic counter-explanation they couldn’t rule out and had no obvious indication of some kind of collusion or propagandistic intent or motivated reasoning didn’t have some kind of alternative explanation.
What’s more likely, after all? That we’re being lied to or hearing delusions in ways we can’t catch, or that the supernatural is real and had obvious evidence then but doesn’t now? In fact, as many point out, the very fact that claims of the supernatural are common in ancient historical texts and then begin to disappear and become much less impressive the moment mass technology exists that would actually capture and falsify these miraculous events decisively shows that the supernatural isn’t real .
Supernaturalists call that conclusion closed-minded, but if they were serious about it, they’d have to accept mutually exclusive and competing ideas from all throughout history. Human attestation should be sufficient to establish, with appropriate skepticism, events we know happen . But merely having seen something that is totally anomalous wouldn’t pass muster even today . It’d be a reason to use a real methodology to investigate it with proper controls and instruments. And as much as it sucks, one can’t reason from evidence one doesn’t have.
Regarding what Fred said: That’s all true only if we keep getting the same poor quality evidence we already have, since all those faults are faults thereof.
To get historical evidence to change that requires evidence of vastly higher quality and quantity than we so far have received. And that ship has sailed. That evidence could have existed. But it didn’t. And so that is why we conclude as we do, and must do.
One can say Christians were simply cruelly cheated by their God, who maliciously, as if to mock and humiliate them, deliberately ensured no quality evidence of any kind would survive. Because he could have done the reverse; yet chose not to (again, I give examples in the referenced sources). It’s almost like he wants rational persons to conclude against his narrative. Or he doesn’t exist. Which is the more likely. Coming to any other conclusion is simply delusional. It rests on no defensible epistemology.
Richard:
Obviously so, but is there any kind of historical thing that we find that would actually be sufficient evidence for some kind of miraculous or supernatural state? You yourself have pointed to all the attestations of the Thundering Legion miracle. I’d say that if coinage and a statue and a bunch of other supportive information like inscriptions about the history of the legion would not budge the needle that there would be almost nothing we’d find in situ that would change our minds.
Broadly and philosophically speaking, I guess what we’d need to find would be, well, the supernatural . If the world looked like Indiana Jones and we were just tripping over artifacts that stole your souls and melted your face and that let someone rip out a heart without making an incision and a magic healing cup, then yeah, that’d be pretty solid archaeological evidence of the supernatural! But I struggle to think about any mundane evidence we could find that would even slightly budge the needle. Which goes back to the worldview hypothesis testing: We live in a world where the supernatural is demonstrably incredibly rare and hard to find, so it’s never a good explanation for anything even if only by sheer chance.
Trent Horn recently stopped by my neck of the woods (didn’t know about it hence couldn’t go) and he argued that the fine tuning argument doesn’t require the maximum amount of life in the universe, just the minimum, but doesn’t that point in the direction of naturalism? Wouldn’t a tri-omni god make a universe where every planet or one big super planet, contained life? He brought up the example of someone winning poker nonstop but that to me seems like the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy, right? It seems to take the “fine” out of “fine tuning”. I also think the existence of parallel universes (for instance, one that might not contain any life at all) throws a wrench into the design argument but I’m not a physicist.
You are right. And this is a nice example of a very common apologetic fallacy I have dubbed possibiliter ergo probabiliter, “possibly, therefore probably.” It also counts as a straw man in that respect.
When they can’t answer a probabilistic argument, they will “straw man” it into an argument from logical possibility instead, as if we said God “can’t” have made a universe with low habitability. We didn’t say that. But by pretending we did, it is easy to disprove, and then Horn can go on pretending he has answered our actual argument when in fact he hasn’t at all.
Of course our actual argument is that a low habitability universe is virtually 100% expected on natural chance accident and is not as probable on any deliberate design for habitability. Notice we just said not as probable. That is the argument. Not “is impossible.” Not “he would never do that.” But “he would be less likely to do that.” Because it runs counter to any purpose he would have.
In effect, God would be deliberately choosing to make the universe look exactly like a universe would look if God did not exist. Which is simply a bizarre choice for him. And bizarre means unusual. And unusual means infrequent. And infrequent means improbable. QED.
This argument cannot be answered by simply saying “but God could have done it.” That simply is non-responsive. We already agree he could have. That’s not the problem.
Nor can this be answered by “inventing epicycles” to get it to be probable God would do that. Invented things, for which there is no evidence, are simply improbable. You can’t rescue something from being improbable by proposing more improbable things.
I was thinking: since so many schools (here talking primary and secondary) require job applicants for theology posts to be Christian, would it be a good strategy for philosophy departments to require job applicants to be atheist or at least, non-Christian, thereby maybe getting the former to see how arbitrary their policies are? Even though I have eight academic articles to my name and a master’s in the field, I can’t teach my subject in most of the schools that are hiring merely due to the fact that I am not a Christian. Apart from teaching at community colleges I would have to go get a Ph.D. in order to do actual teaching in my field. To me this is a scandal since anyone with the proper credentials (knowledge of Hebrew, say, and text criticism) is perfectly qualified for these types of jobs. Maybe if phl departments along with STEM departments openly excluded Christian job applicants that would cause the latter to adopt a more “open” policy for their job searches? Of course, that might just be wishful thinking but I’m sure you noticed that just about everyone coming out of faith based high schools is completely ignorant as to how the canon was formed or who St. Athanasius was (a local megachurch pastor had no idea who he was either!).
That would only make sense for explicitly atheist schools, e.g. if there was a University of Humanism or something, a specifically sectarian private school, on analogy to seminaries and Christian colleges.
Otherwise, schools cannot claim such dogmatic control over academic opinion. Secular private schools cannot, because doing so would make them as corrupt as Christian schools (forcing faculty to swear ideological fealty on pain of being fired is not a desirable academic model to emulate); and public schools cannot, because it is literally illegal (it violates both the Bill of Rights and the Civil Rights Act).
Yeah, I’d be worried about that as an academic freedom issue. The issue shouldn’t be some a priori statement of agenda or beliefs, it should be whether someone can act rationally. We all have areas where we have beliefs that are controversial or unpopular or may not be as well-founded as would be ideal, no one is perfect, and I wouldn’t want to settle some issue in advance.
It’s a shitty thing that so many of the most discriminatory people and bad actors in the world can’t ethically be shown their own medicine, an issue I was just thinking about tonight in the context of Tucker Carlson, but that is the unfortunate reality.
But I do think we could as a society do more to deal with the kind of prestige economies and abuse of systems that allow people like professors to effectively be inexcusably bad at their jobs without any consequence.
I might be the only person who thinks this but I got the impression over the past year or so that there is more gatekeeping at lower level schools (high school, etc.) than there is at Princeton or Yale. It isn’t the background check thing either (even my undergrad requires those just to clean toilets) but a seeming ignorance of how actual teachers are supposed to teach. In other words, secondary schools are looking, in large part, for babysitters whereas universities want actual teachers trained in X field. I’ll come clean and say that I don’t oppose people teaching CRT in public high schools so long as the person teaching it has a degree in philosophy or at least sociology rather than a B.S. (pun intended) in education.
I think if Catholic schools can’t realize that it lost the intellectual property rights to the Bible back during the Reformation, then we should join hands with Calvin and say that we are the “elect”. That might sound pretentious, but we’re talking about a church that had pregnant mothers burned alive for teaching their kids the Bible, a fact certainly ignored in any Catholic school curriculum.
I really feel like the guy from Plato’s Cave who couldn’t convince his fellow prisoners to come outside and see the sunshine.
There is more gatekeeping in lower schools because they house kids rather than adults and thus parents have more control over censoring what their kids are exposed to, just as they do in the home. They of course abuse this privilege, but then so do they do that at home as well. This dynamic does not exist in colleges. Nor is it to be envied by colleges. The solution is not to replicate the abuse, but to end it.
In my opinion, the most sophisticated books arguing for God’s existence today were written by Josh Rasmussen (e.g., “How Reason Can Lead to God”). Koons and Pruss also made interesting defenses of contingency arguments (and novel critiques of causal infinitism).
Happy to debate you on God’s existence – you won’t be disappointed.
Hundreds of people would. So I would need a reason to debate you specifically. Because otherwise it would be redundant and thus unnecessary. I’ve already debated the existence of God from nearly every conceivable angle. See the “debates” category dropdown menu (and that’s just for the last ten years; my debates go back twenty).