True Reason

True Reason: Christian Responses to the Challenge of Atheism Edited by Tom Gilson and Carson Weitnauer

Copyright © 2012 by Campus Crusade for Christ, Inc. Published by Patheos Press, 383 Inverness Parkway, Suite 260, Englewood, Colorado 80112 patheos.com All Rights Reserved True Reason: Christian Responses to the Challenge of Atheism Tom Gilson and Carson Weitnauer, Editors

Table of Contents Chapter One: The Party of Reason -- Tom Gilson Chapter Two: The Irony of Atheism -- Carson Weitnauer Chapter Three: Dawkins’ Delusion -- William Lane Craig Chapter Four: Richard Dawkins: Long on Rhetoric, Short on Reason -- Chuck Edwards Chapter Five: Unreason at the Head of Project Reason -- Tom Gilson Chapter Six: John Loftus and the “Outsider-Insider Test for Faith” -- David Marshall Chapter Seven: The Explanatory Emptiness of Naturalism -- David Wood Chapter Eight: By It, We See Everything Else—The Explanatory Value of Christianity for Meaning and Ethics -- Samuel J. Young Chapter Nine: Reason in a Christian Context -- Peter Grice Chapter Ten: The Marriage of Faith and Reason -- David Marshall Chapter Eleven: Are Science and Christianity at Odds? -- Sean McDowell Chapter Twelve: God and Science Do Mix -- Tom Gilson Chapter Thirteen: Historical Evidences for the Gospels -- Randall Hardman Chapter Fourteen: The Problem of Evil and Reasonable Christian Responses -John M. DePoe Chapter Fifteen: Christianity and Slavery -- Glenn Sunshine Chapter Sixteen: Did God Command the Genocide of the Canaanites? -Matthew Flannagan Epilogue About the Authors Acknowledgments Endnotes

Chapter One: The Party of Reason Tom Gilson The New Atheists have branded themselves the party of Reason. Richard Dawkins leads his Foundation for Reason and Science. Sam Harris is the founder of Project Reason. The Council for Secular Humanism publishes Free Inquiry: Celebrating Reason and Humanity. The American Atheists define atheism as “the mental attitude which unreservedly accepts the supremacy of reason . . .” On March 24, 2012, Dawkins will headline a rally in Washington, D.C., “the largest gathering of the secular movement in world history.” They’re calling it the Reason Rally. We say, really? It has been our observation that reason is not their strength: that their books, articles, and debates are riddled with fallacy, appeals to emotion, and mishandling of evidence. We believe that their claim to reason is much more a matter of public relations than it is of competence in reasoned discourse. We believe furthermore that there is good reason to believe that Christianity as a whole is more reasonable than atheism. Admittedly that is a bold statement. We who have collaborated to write this book have all had considerable experience in communications with atheists, and we know with what derisive astonishment we can expect it to be met. Of course we do not say that all Christians practice sound reason. There are better and worse thinkers in any large group of people. Our point is that Christianity as a whole supports sound reason, and that this can be demonstrated both by argument and by example, such as we offer in this book. We also argue that parallel examples and arguments are lacking among the popular and popularizing New Atheists. My own first encounter with the New Atheism was in reading Richard Dawkins’ 1986 book, The Blind Watchmaker. The term New Atheist had yet to be coined, and I certainly had no idea then that before long Dawkins would be regarded as their chief spokesman and spiritual leader (so to speak). I picked up the book because I was intrigued by its subtitle: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design. I had never seen an argument of that sort made successfully, and I couldn’t imagine how it could be done. I had heard positive things about this book, though, so I dove into with genuinely high hopes that I would encounter a real challenge.

My hopes grew as I read. Sure, there were places where Dawkins’ reasoning seemed quite a stretch, such as when he tried to illustrate evolution’s unintelligent capacities by comparing it to an intelligently designed computer program. Still on the whole he revealed himself to be a master of his scientific subject matter and a gifted writer, as he told the story of evolution’s climb up “Mount Improbable”: how evolution could explain the astonishing complexity of the biological world. He made a few early, brief, forays into discussion of design in this book, but not to the extent of developing a decisive argument against it. So I kept reading, anticipating what he might have to say to cap it all off, to fulfill the promise of the subtitle and tell us just why the evidence of evolution reveals a universe without design. Finally, after 300 pages he got there, near the end of the last chapter. Evolution, he said, makes God superfluous, thus there is no design in the universe. There is a way nature could have come about without design, therefore it came about without design. What a letdown! I practically sputtered out loud. “Dawkins, you rascal, you’ve had me thinking for 300 pages that you were going to deliver an argument against design— and this is all you’ve got?!” I was genuinely disappointed. The Blind Watchmaker up to that point had presented the longest and one of the most fascinating arguments for a first premise I had ever read: A. All of biological nature came about through evolution. All the way through, I knew the conclusion he was heading toward: C. Therefore the universe has no design. The book title had led me to believe that Dawkins had some premise B that would tie those two together—but he didn’t. Without that missing second premise, the whole book ended up being a build-up to nothing. Later the eminent philosopher Alvin Plantinga would offer his own wry assessment. At its best, he said, the argument would show, “given a couple of assumptions,” that it is not astronomically improbable that the living world was produced by unguided evolution and hence without design. But the argument form

p is not astronomically improbable therefore p is a bit unprepossessing. I announce to my wife, “I’m getting a $50,000 raise for next year!” Naturally she asks me why I think so. “Because the arguments against its being astronomically improbable fail! For all we know, it’s not astronomically improbable!” (Well, maybe it is pretty improbable, but you get [1] the idea.) This was my introduction, as I have said, to what was to become the New Atheism. It set a pattern that I and the other contributors to this volume have seen played out over and over again: failures of reasoned thinking. This failure comes in multiple shapes and forms. Sometimes it is in the form of logical fallacies, as in The Blind Watchmaker. Sometimes it’s mischaracterizations of Christian belief. In The God Delusion, Dawkins takes it for granted, contrary to any developed Christian theology, that God must be an example of “organized complexity” whose origins stand in need of explaining. Or consider how Christopher Hitchens treats historical fact: The best argument I know for the highly questionable existence of Jesus is this. His illiterate living disciples left us no record and in any event could not have been "Christians," since they were never to read those later books in which Christians must affirm belief, and in any case had no idea that anyone would [2] ever found a church on their master's announcements. No reputable scholar doubts the existence of Jesus. Few would agree with Hitchens’ radical rejection of the historical record. (See Randy Hardman’s related essay in chapter thirteen for more.) Hitchens also writes, [Maimonides] fell into the same error as do the Christians, in assuming that the four Gospels were in any sense a historical record. Their multiple authors—none of whom published anything until many decades after the Crucifixion—cannot [3] agree on anything of importance.

Set aside for a moment his misunderstanding of New Testament historicity. Scholars and would-be scholars may debate that. One must still wonder whether he genuinely thinks Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, very prominent in all four Gospels, are unimportant. It’s just silly that Hitchens continues to be lauded for promoting what can only be described as both false and prejudicial. The point is that there is a wide variety of rational errors in the New Atheist literature. Sometimes it’s misinformation with respect to the evidences for belief, and sometimes it’s appeals to emotion rather than to evidence and reason. Whatever form it takes, each example is one more piece of evidence that the New Atheists are not as rational as they claim to be. Yet “reason” is stamped on virtually all of their products. Again we say, really? Views of Reason But perhaps we are viewing reason wrongly; and perhaps also at the same time we are thinking of faith in the wrong manner. Maybe the two really are opposed, as Sam Harris says in The End of Faith: The truth is that religious faith is simply unjustified belief in matters of ultimate concern. . . . Faith is what credulity becomes when it finally achieves escape velocity from the constraints of terrestrial discourse—constraints like [4] reasonableness, internal coherence, civility, and candor. If Harris is right to say that faith can never be reasonable, then of course the discussion is over. That seems rather illegitimate as an argument, however: shall we define faith out of rational existence, or shall we make our decisions about faith on the basis of standards of evidence and logic? If the former, that’s both premature and terribly ironic, for it leads to a conclusion divorced from all evidence, which is exactly what the New Atheists complain that faith does (falsely; see the ninth and tenth chapters in this volume). But if we let ourselves be guided by proper standards of evidence and logic, then we are bound to look for objective signs of the truth or falsity of our views—both Christian and atheist—accepting Harris’s “constraints” of reasonableness, internal coherence, civility, and candor. There is a hint here, at any rate, of how a leading New Atheist would define reason. Does he have more to say? One looks in vain for anything like a pithy and authoritative definition in The End of Faith, but that’s of little consequence; his views are not hard to discern. To be reasonable is to let your beliefs comport with evidence.

He makes that case repeatedly, and in this he reflects what seems to be what the New Atheists mean by reasonability: to confine one’s beliefs to that which can be demonstrated by objective, empirical, preferably scientific evidence. This is the first part of what they mean by reason. That’s fine as far as it goes, although it cuts too fine a line, as many thinkers have noted (see for example Sean McDowell’s work on faith and science in chapter eleven). If I take it to be true that I am only to believe what can be empirically demonstrated to be true, how can I demonstrate that that is true? Its truth can’t be empirically demonstrated. As a canon of reason, “only believe what can be demonstrated by objective, empirical, preferably scientific evidence” is appropriate for those matters for which it is appropriate, but clearly it does not fit all questions of truth. There is a second dominant theme in New Atheists’ use reason, which is to act reasonably. Sam Harris writes, for example, The Nazis disparaged the “Jewish physics” of Einstein, and the communists rejected the “capitalist biology” of Mendel and Darwin. But these were not rational criticisms—as witnessed by the fact that these dissenting scientists were [5] often imprisoned or killed. I think all of us, atheist and believer alike, support acting reasonably, although just what that looks like to one will differ from how it looks to another. If there is a God, it is reasonable to worship and to obey him. If there is no God, then it’s unreasonable. Therefore the decision, “was that a reasonable thing to do?” is a lower-order decision compared to “what can reasonably be regarded as true?” These two themes—first, confining belief to what can be supported empirically, and second, reasonability—are prominent among the New Atheists, in my observation at least. There is another aspect of reason that I do not hear them promoting. It is the skill and practice of what we might call reason proper: the appropriate use of reason and logic (along with evidences) in the forming of one’s conclusions. It is the ability to draw proper deductive inferences from premises, or proper inductive inferences from evidences, or properly credible explanations of observations and phenomena. It is the ability to proceed from evidences and/or premises to an appropriate conclusion. The lack of this ability (or the failure in its practice) is shown when one commits formal or informal logical fallacies, makes appeals to emotion rather than sound

reasoning, or uses evidence selectively. This reason proper is, as I said, prior to the other forms of reason; for unless one knows how to draw a valid conclusion from evidences or premises, one cannot know what beliefs to hold to in light of evidences—even scientific evidences. No one who is deficient in this level of reasoning can credibly claim to represent reason. In my reading of New Atheist literature, there is very little said about reason proper. It could be that I have missed it. Even if they talked about it everywhere, though, still we would want to know, how well do they practice it? The first few chapters of this book will offer evidence that some of their most highly respected leaders do it very poorly. True Reason Just to make that claim, however, would be an empty act of our own, no matter how well we demonstrated it. As Christians we are convinced that reason is from God. I do not mean that we do as the New Atheists seem to do, and raise the flag of Reason over our troops as if it were our one main thing. We see life as more multi-dimensional than that. The greatest commandment, said Jesus Christ (Mk. 12:28-31), is to love the Lord our God with our whole selves: heart, soul, and strength, as well as mind. There is mystery in Christianity. There is worship. There is a lived-out life of action in Christ’s name. We embrace the imagination, the power of narrative, the importance of beauty and the arts, and the value of community. Still, wrapped up in all this there is a deep and essential reasonableness to the faith. Christianity is a friend to reason. This claim, like the prior one that the New Atheism does not practice reason well, is bound to astonish some readers. Again, we only ask that you examine the evidence, some of which we offer in this book. Christianity has a tradition of strength in philosophy, the sciences, literature, and the arts, such as the New Atheists have ignored or swept aside. I do not mean that we can boast a heritage of unbroken success, for we have had our seasons of anti-intellectualism, and our moments (sometimes long ones) of embarrassment. We do not defend that, even among ourselves. We want it to be noted that we are not looking at New Atheisms’ weakest representatives, but its leaders, and specifically those who stand at the head of groups that claim reason in their titles. It would be unfair to judge the New Atheism’s reasonability by anything other than its reasoning leadership. Likewise it would be unfair to judge Christianity by anything but its reasoning leadership. Book Overview

This, then, is the argument of this book: the New Atheists’ ownership claim on the brand of reason is empty. It doesn’t fit their system of thought, and they don’t practice it at all well, either. Reason belongs to Christianity. We want to claim the word back where it rightfully belongs. True Reason divides into three sections: Atheism and Reason, Christianity and Reason, and Christianity’s Reasonability. I. Atheism and Reason The book’s opening section provides evidence that atheism (in its New Atheist form, especially) fails to live up to its claimed connection with reason. Carson Weitnauer leads off this section with an exploration of the ironic gap between how atheists claim to love reason and their actual irrationality, examining along the way some very interesting atheist testimonials for unbelief. Chapters three and four, by noted Christian philosopher William Lane Craig and Chuck Edwards, respectively, take a stereoscopic look at Richard Dawkins, providing objective evidence of frequent failures of logic and reasoning—and even a surprising disregard for science—in his anti-religious writings. In chapter five I show why one might reasonably wonder how Sam Harris came to be associated with Project Reason, and whether that connection is appropriate. In chapter six David Marshall examines John Loftus’s “Outsider Test for Faith,” and finds it to be a fine test for truth, but one that leads to a conclusion opposite of the one Loftus thinks it does. Chapter seven, by David Wood, takes a broad view of naturalistic atheism as a worldview, showing that it fails to explain many of the most important truths of nature and human experience. II. Christianity and Reason Our second section presents a wide range of arguments for the rationality of the Christian worldview. Samuel Youngs provides counterpoint in chapter eight, arguing strongly for Christianity’s explanatory adequacy regarding a wide range of human experience. The following two chapters attempt to straighten out common misconceptions concerning Christianity, reason, and faith. In chapter nine, Peter Grice demonstrates reason’s compatibility with biblical truth, and in chapter ten David Marshall continues that theme, speaking of the tight biblical and historic relationship between faith and

reason. Sean McDowell writes in chapter eleven of Christianity’s close conceptual and historic connections with science, which I follow in chapter twelve with a response to the common objection that God and science do not mix. In view of the reasonable expectation that Christianity submit itself to historical investigation, Randy Hardman’s chapter thirteen offers detailed evidences for the reliability of the New Testament documents. (Because of its 1st-century subject matter, this chapter runs more on the technical side than others in this volume.) Finally for this section, John DePoe explains in chapter fourteen that there is no contradiction in the existence of a good God and of evil in the world. III. Christianity’s Reasonableness There is reason, and there is reasonableness; and Christianity has often been charged with failures of reasonableness. To answer each specific such charge would be beyond the scope of this book, but we have selected two representative topics to showcase and to correct some of the most common New Atheist misunderstandings of Christianity. In chapter fifteen, Glenn Sunshine takes a biblical and historical look at slavery, and finds that the repeated charges that the Bible supports slavery are quite wrong, and that with a few sad exceptions, Christianity has been the major force in history for the abolition of slavery. Chapter sixteen presents Matthew Flannagan’s biblical and (again) historical rebuttal of another misinformed objection: that God in the Old Testament supported and endorsed genocide. (Like chapter thirteen, this chapter is also somewhat technical, as appropriate to the subject matter.) Conclusion Finally, Carson Weitnauer closes the book with a review of all that we have covered, and a look toward its personal implications, both for us and for our communities.

Chapter Two: The Irony of Atheism Carson Weitnauer One of the great ironies of the contemporary atheistic movement comes from its ubiquitous use of rhetoric, branding, and emotional triggers to advocate for reason. The leading atheists trumpet their devotion to reason in all their public communications, typically featuring the word in bold type across the names of their books, websites, organizations, and events. For instance, Sam Harris, co-founder and chairman of Project Reason, has said that, “The only angels we need invoke are those of our

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better nature: reason, honesty, and love.” Christopher Hitchens tells us in God Is Not Great: “We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, open-mindedness, and the pursuit of

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ideas for their own sake.” In the BBC (Channel 4) documentary The Enemies of Reason, Richard Dawkins, the founder of The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, claims that

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“Reason has built the modern world.” Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Michael Shermer have gone so far as to argue that atheists should really be called “brights,” in light of their insistence on a reasoned approach to all knowledge. Throughout their books, talks, and websites, the New Atheists consistently promote their allegiance to the glory of reason. This is not a novel development; the ‘new’ atheists are hardly the first atheists to claim the brand of reason for themselves. In Aristophanes’ play The Knights, written in 424 B.C., Demosthenes asks

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Nicias, “Do you then believe there are gods? . . . What proof have you?” There is in actual fact a well-established tradition that connects the skepticism of religion with a love for reason. Some of these connections are more dubious than others. For instance, during the French Revolution, a “Cult of Reason” was formed, which besides ransacking churches for their silver and gold, also ‘converted’ these churches into Temples of Reason. In the government-sanctioned “Festival of Reason” that accompanied this movement, a young woman was presented as the Goddess of Reason. At other times the connection has been presented hyperbolically, without reference to serious historical or sociological research. To provide just two examples, Nietzsche once wrote that “all founders of religions and their likes . . . feel a thirst for things which are contrary to reason and do

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not put too many difficulties in the way of satisfying it” (emphasis added). Even more recently, H.L. Mencken said, “Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration—courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth.”

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For the New Atheists, as for some of the ‘old,’ their ardent love for reason is apparently what motivates their visceral disgust of religion. As Sam Harris has said, “Religious faith is the one

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species of human ignorance that will not admit of even the possibility of correction.” Richard Dawkins has even gone so far as to say that molesting children “may be less harmful in the long run” than giving children a religious education.

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(See further on this in Chuck Edwards’ essay, chapter

four.) As if that wasn’t clear enough, Christopher Hitchens shared his thoughts on religion in a letter to the American Atheists in 2011: Our theocratic enemy is in plain view. Protean in form, it extends from the overt menace of nuclear-armed mullahs to the insidious campaigns to have stultifying pseudo-science taught in American schools. But in the past few years, there have been heartening signs of a genuine and spontaneous resistance to this sinister nonsense: a resistance which repudiates the right of bullies and tyrants to make the absurd claim that they have god on their side. To have had a small part in this resistance has been the greatest honor of my lifetime: the pattern and original of all dictatorship is the surrender of reason to absolutism and the abandonment of critical, objective inquiry. The cheap name for this lethal delusion is religion, and we must learn new ways of combating it in the public sphere, just as we have learned to free ourselves of it in private.

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Despite such attacks, as Christians we are delighted that those who consider themselves our opponents are such ardent appreciators of reason. After all, Jesus famously proclaimed that the most important commandment includes loving God “with all of your mind” (Mk. 12:30). So, ironically, we believe that atheists are honoring God unawares when they reason well! And it is because of our own intentional desire to honor God that we want to demonstrate why Christianity provides the most reasonable framework for the existence and use of reason. The contrasts are clear: atheists claim that religion is the main barrier to reason. Christians believe our capacity to reason comes from being created in the image of an all-knowing God, and that the active use of reason is an important way to honor Him. Atheists brand themselves as a community united by reason. Christians marvel at how this group rallies together even as their most prominent leader, Richard Dawkins, argues that evolution favors the selfish gene, not the reasonable group. Atheists work hard to eradicate religion for the sake of a brighter future. Christians are amazed that atheists so blissfully ignore the scientific fact that, if religion is a false consolation, the future always ends in death. Leading atheist Sam Harris says that “faith is a conversation stopper.” Christians reply that Sam Harris has also said that none of us are “the author of your thoughts and actions in the way that people generally suppose.” The reductionistic, deterministic, and materialistic worldview of many atheists seems, to reasonable Christians, to exclude the existence of transcendent, immaterial things like propositions, the rules of logic, and, most important of all, the very existence of minds. These aren’t straw men, but rather, a description of how many atheists see the stakes as well. Consider the famous Madalyn Murray O’Hair’s speech on atheism from 1962: We must look to materialistic philosophy which alone enables men to understand reality and to know how to deal with it . . . Atheism is based upon a materialist philosophy, which holds that nothing exists but natural phenomena. There are no supernatural forces or entities, nor

can there be any. Nature simply exists. But there are those who deny this, who assert that only mind or idea or spirit is primary. This question of the relation of the human mind to material being is one of the fundamental questions dealt with by all philosophers, however satisfactorily. The Atheist must slice through all obfuscation to bedrock, to the basic idea that those who regard nature as primary and thought as a property (or function) of matter belong to the camp of materialism, and that those who maintain that spirit or idea or mind existed before nature or created nature or uphold nature belong to the camp of idealism. All conventional religions are based on idealism.

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That is the question: do we have minds, or are we neurological processors akin to robots? And which worldview can better account for the existence and use of reason? In short, this book directly challenges the goals of organized atheist communities. Our hope is their fear: a revitalization of faith and thinking Christianity. Their identity as reasoning individuals depends upon the truth of our worldview. Their communal ideals of honesty, freedom, love, and justice are borrowed from the Bible. The very existence of reasoning Christians responding to atheist rhetoric undermines their fallacious, straw man depiction of religious people. Again, consider Christopher Hitchens’ depiction of religion: Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody—not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms—had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as for comfort, reassurance, and other infantile needs). Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion.

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This is a low bar indeed. To demonstrate that Christianity offers a coherent, reasoned explanation for the most important features of life, as this book does, is enough to show the hollowness of these descriptions. It is, in fact, remarkable to read such churlish remarks against a worldview that has thrived for millennia, in hundreds of cultural contexts, and now serves as a reasonable and welcome guide to life for billions of people in today’s world. Our book argues that the existence of reason depends upon the existence of God, and furthermore, provides abundant proof that atheists are as guilty of irrationality as anyone religious. This book may come across as threatening or psychologically challenging to the “brights” who believe themselves to be uniquely and supremely rational individuals. The stress of encountering such arguments can easily generate misunderstanding. For a parallel example, consider the moral argument for the existence of God. The moral argument seeks to establish that if God does not exist, then objective moral values and duties do not exist. However, since objective moral values and duties do in fact exist, therefore, God exists. In response to this argument, atheists have sometimes complained that they are falsely being characterized as immoral.

But that is a misunderstanding of the argument. The moral argument isn’t about atheists. It is about atheism. To rationally discuss the strengths and weaknesses of a worldview is an entirely different project from attacking someone’s character (to do so is, in fact, to commit the logical fallacy known as an ‘ad hominem’). For the record, we do affirm that atheists are morally aware people, are morally responsible for their actions, and may be as moral or more so than any given believer in God. In the same way, in this book, we are claiming that atheists are reasoning people, though inconsistently, and at the same time, that atheism lacks a foundation for the existence and use of reason. In Boston, where I work as a campus minister to students at Harvard and other campuses, I’ve found that this distinction is somehow consistently confusing. The experiential reality of being able to reason, and reason well in many areas of life, is sometimes simply assumed to be compatible with atheism. The thinking is, “On the one hand, I am an atheist, on the other hand, I love reason and use reason all the time. What’s the problem? Actually, how could there even be a problem?” If that describes you, and if you wonder why Christians go to so much trouble to respond to the atheist worldview, imagine for the sake of argument that the Christian faith really is true: there is a God, we are made in His image, and our capacity to reason is a gift from our loving Creator—a gift that could not have existed without both God's existence and God's benevolence. In this world, the situation of the reason-loving atheist would be a paradox: able to reason by the grace of God, but using his or her reasoning ability to deny God’s existence. From the Christian perspective, the atheist’s situation is akin to climbing the world’s tallest building in order to more ably broadcast the message that a belief in architects is a primitive fantasy. One of the most interesting themes of atheist literature is unbelievers’ testimonials about how they came to “unbelieve.” To give just four examples, Aldous Huxley in the 1930s, Thomas Nagel in the 1990s, and Michael Shermer and Richard Lewontin in the past few years, have all offered nonrational explanations for their beliefs. For instance, in 1937, Aldous Huxley acknowledged that: For myself, as, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom; we objected to the political and economic system because it was unjust. The supporters of these systems claimed that in some way they embodied the meaning (a Christian meaning, they insisted) of the world. There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and at the same time justifying ourselves in our political and erotical revolt: we could deny that the world had any meaning whatsoever.... Those who detect no meaning in the world generally do so because, for one reason or another, it suits their books that the world should be meaningless.

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(Emphasis added.)

Five decades later, in 1997, Thomas Nagel honestly admitted to an irrational motivation for unbelief

in his book The Last Word: I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that. My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about life, including everything about the human mind. Darwin enabled modern secular culture to heave a great collective sigh of relief, by apparently providing a way to eliminate purpose, meaning and design as fundamental features of the world. (Emphasis added.)

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And Michael Shermer, executive director of The Skeptics Society, has explained his deconversion story in a similar way: Socially, when I moved from theism to atheism, and science as a worldview, I guess, to be honest, I just liked the people in science, and the scientists, and their books, and just the lifestyle, and the way of living. I liked that better than the religious books, the religious people I was hanging out with—just socially. It just felt more comfortable for me. In reality I think most of us arrive at most of our beliefs for non-rational reasons, and then we justify

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them with these reasons after the fact.

(Emphasis added).

Richard Lewontin, who served as the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology and Professor of Biology at Harvard, has made similar comments: We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the

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regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.

(Emphasis added.)

For Huxley, “most” of his contemporaries rejected Christianity not because it was false, but in order to justify their political and sexual desires. Nagel believes that what is “responsible for much of the

scientism and reductionism of our time” is a fairly widespread “cosmic authority problem.” Shermer suggests that “most of us arrive at most of our beliefs for non-rational reasons, and then we justify them with reasons after the fact.” Lewontin admits that science doesn’t determine atheism, but rather, the “a priori adherence to material causes” mandates an explanatory cap that limits the results of atheists’ scientific research. In addition to this, when it comes to their defined philosophical positions, many of the leading atheists of our day have staked out commitments which seem to defy any reconciliation with the human ability to reason. For instance, Sam Harris denies that we are able to choose how we reason or what we come to believe: Yes, choices, efforts, intentions, reasoning, and other mental processes influence our behavior—but they are themselves part of a stream of causes which precede conscious awareness and over which we exert no ultimate control. My choices matter, but I cannot

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choose what I choose.

Like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins also acknowledges the non-rational factors that motivate atheistic beliefs. For instance, he has written that “human psychology has a near-universal tendency to let belief be coloured by desire.” In addition, he suggests that humanism—not God—is the best fit for our psychological needs: Does religion fill a much needed gap? It is often said that there is a God-shaped gap in the brain which needs to be filled: we have a psychological need for God—imaginary friend, father, big brother, confessor, confidant—and the need has to be satisfied whether God really exists or not. But could it be that God clutters up a gap that we'd be better off filling with something else? Science, perhaps? Art? Human friendship? Humanism? Love of this life in

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the real world, giving no credence to other lives beyond the grave?

However, we can actually go beyond atheist testimonials and the statements they’ve made which attribute their atheism or reasoning ability to deterministic forces outside of their control and psychological wish-fulfillment. In January of 2011 CNN ran a story about a study on atheists, led by psychologist Julie Exline at Case Western Reserve University, that found: In studies on college students, atheists and agnostics reported more anger at God during their lifetimes than believers. A separate study also found this pattern among bereaved individuals.

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What’s interesting about this study, of course, is that these individuals don’t necessarily even believe that God exists, yet they report greater levels of an angry emotional investment in God’s hypothetical character than people who actually believe that God is real. The correlation is certainly confirmed by the anecdotal evidence from Richard Dawkins’ writing. Recollect with me one of the most wellknown passages from his bestseller The God Delusion:

Yahweh: "The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser, a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal,

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filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. Yes, atheists’ belief systems are certainly “coloured by desire”!

From the outside looking in, it appears that many atheists, out of an overwhelming desire to crush religion and win a cultural battle on behalf of secularism, have convinced themselves that they are an exceptional group of human beings who are uniquely governed by reason. Freed from the perceived handcuffs of faith and dogma, they believe they have been singularly liberated to exercise rational thought and the tools of science on behalf of human progress. Unfortunately, these loud, public, and often repeated declarations of their great love for reason have also blinded them to some obvious realities. The truth is that atheists, like people across different religious traditions, are prone to believe things on faith, assume without argument the coherence of their belief system, blindly follow their leaders, accept what they want to be true, and dismiss contrary evidence. These are practical fallacies, if you will, or fallacious approaches to deciding one’s beliefs. I have highlighted in this chapter how this characterizes much of atheism today. As this book continues, we will also argue that atheism itself lacks the intellectual foundation to ground the ontological reality and daily use of reason. To those who consider themselves to be reasonable people by virtue of the fact that they are not religious, few things are more paradoxical than Christians who think that religious truth provides the necessary foundation for reason. We are prepared for you to respond to our arguments with scorn and invective, as the quotes that opened this chapter illustrated. But regardless of your response, our desire is respectfully and thoughtfully to continue the conversation about what is reasonable and what is true. You claim to love reason. We invite you to move out of the ironies of atheism and into the coherent rationality of the Christian worldview.

Chapter Three: Dawkins’ Delusion William Lane Craig Used by permission Excerpt taken from Contending with Christianity's Critics Edited by Paul Copan and William Lane Craig © 2009 B&H Publishing Group Richard Dawkins has emerged as the enfant terrible of the movement known as the New Atheism. His best-selling book The God Delusion has become the literary centerpiece of that movement. In it Dawkins aims to show that belief in God is a delusion, that is to say, “a false belief or impression,”

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or worse, “a persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence.” On pages 157-8 of his book, Dawkins summarizes what he calls “the central argument of my book.” Note it well. If this argument fails, then Dawkins’ book is hollow at its core. And, in fact, the argument is embarrassingly weak. It goes as follows: 1. One of the greatest challenges to the human intellect has been to explain how the complex, improbable appearance of design in the universe arises. 2. The natural temptation is to attribute the appearance of design to actual design itself. 3. The temptation is a false one because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer. 4. The most ingenious and powerful explanation is Darwinian evolution by natural selection. 5. We don’t have an equivalent explanation for physics. 6. We should not give up the hope of a better explanation arising in physics, something as powerful as Darwinism is for biology. Therefore, God almost certainly does not exist. This argument is jarring because the atheistic conclusion that “Therefore, God almost certainly does not exist” seems to come suddenly out of left field. You don’t need to be a philosopher to realize that that conclusion doesn’t follow from the six previous statements. Indeed, if we take these six statements as premises of an argument intended to logically imply the conclusion “Therefore, God almost certainly does not exist,” then the argument is patently invalid. No logical rules of inference would permit you to draw this conclusion from the six premises.

A more charitable interpretation would be to take these six statements, not as premises, but as summary statements of six steps in Dawkins’ cumulative argument for his conclusion that God does not exist. But even on this charitable construal, the conclusion “Therefore, God almost certainly does not exist” simply doesn’t follow from these six steps, even if we concede that each of them is true and justified. The only delusion demonstrated here is Dawkins’ conviction that this is “a very serious argument against God’s existence.”

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So what does follow from the six steps of Dawkins’ argument? At most, all that follows is that we should not infer God’s existence on the basis of the appearance of design in the universe. But that conclusion is quite compatible with God’s existence and even with our justifiably believing in God’s existence. Maybe we should believe in God on the basis of the cosmological argument or the ontological argument or the moral argument. Maybe our belief in God isn’t based on arguments at all but is grounded in religious experience or in divine revelation. Maybe God wants us to believe in him simply by faith. The point is that rejecting design arguments for God’s existence does nothing to prove that God does not exist or even that belief in God is unjustified. Indeed, many Christian theologians have rejected arguments for the existence of God without thereby committing themselves to atheism. So Dawkins’ argument for atheism is a failure even if we concede, for the sake of argument, all its steps. But, in fact, several of these steps are plausibly false in any case. Take just step 3, for example. Dawkins’ claim here is that one is not justified in inferring design as the best explanation of the complex order of the universe because then a new problem arises: Who designed the designer? This objection is flawed on at least two counts. First, in order to recognize an explanation as the best, one needn’t have an explanation of the explanation. This is an elementary point concerning inference to the best explanation as practiced in the philosophy of science. If archaeologists digging in the earth were to discover things looking like arrowheads and hatchet heads and pottery shards, they would be justified in inferring that these artifacts are not the chance result of sedimentation and metamorphosis, but products of some unknown group of people, even though they had no explanation of who these people were or where they came from. Similarly, if astronauts were to come upon a pile of machinery on the back side of the moon, they would be justified in inferring that it was the product of intelligent, extra-terrestrial agents, even if they had no idea whatsoever who these extra-terrestrial agents were or how they got there. In order to recognize an explanation as the best, one needn’t be able to explain the explanation. In fact, so requiring would lead to an infinite regress of explanations, so that nothing could ever be explained and science would be destroyed. So in the case at hand, in order to recognize that intelligent design is the best explanation of the appearance of design in the universe, one needn’t be able to explain the designer. Second, Dawkins thinks that in the case of a divine designer of the universe, the designer is just as complex as the thing to be explained, so that no explanatory advance is made. This objection raises all sorts of questions about the role played by simplicity in assessing competing explanations—for example, how simplicity is to be weighted in comparison with other criteria like explanatory power,

explanatory scope, plausibility, and so forth. If a less simple hypothesis exceeds its rivals in explanatory scope and power, for example, then it may well be the preferred explanation, despite the sacrifice in simplicity. But leave those questions aside. Dawkins’ fundamental mistake lies in his assumption that a divine designer is an entity comparable in complexity to the universe. As an unembodied mind, God is a remarkably simple entity. As a non-physical entity, a mind is not composed of parts, and its salient properties, like self-consciousness, rationality, and volition, are essential to it. In contrast to the contingent and variegated universe with all its inexplicable physical quantities and constants

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(mentioned in the fifth step of Dawkins’ argument), a divine mind is startlingly simple. Certainly such a mind may have complex ideas (it may be thinking, for example, of the infinitesimal calculus), but the mind itself is a remarkably simple entity. Dawkins has evidently confused a mind’s ideas,

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which may, indeed, be complex, with a mind itself, which is an incredibly simple entity. Therefore, postulating a divine mind behind the universe most definitely does represent an advance in simplicity, for whatever that’s worth. Other steps in Dawkins’ argument are also problematic; but I think enough has been said to show that his argument does nothing to undermine a design inference based on the universe’s complexity, not to speak of its serving as a justification of atheism. Several years ago my atheist colleague Quentin Smith unceremoniously crowned Stephen Hawking’s argument against God in A Brief History of Time as “the worst atheistic argument in the history of

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Western thought.” With the advent of The God Delusion the time has come, I think, to relieve Hawking of this weighty crown and to recognize Richard Dawkins’ accession to the throne.

Chapter Four: Richard Dawkins: Long on Rhetoric, Short on Reason Chuck Edwards

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“If this book works as I intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists when [31] they put it down.” With this challenge, Richard Dawkins lays down the gauntlet in his best-selling book The God Delusion, declaring that only an atheist can claim the intellectual high ground of logic, science, and reason, and that those who believe in God are not only irrational, but delusional. Dawkins is no intellectual lightweight. He was the inaugural holder of the Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford and is founder of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. He has authored a number of best-selling books, including The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, and The Greatest Show on Earth. While his earlier books focused on science, and in particular the evidence for Darwinian evolution, in his 2006 bestseller The God Delusion, Dawkins directs a frontal attack on religion, expounding the thesis that belief in a supernatural creator qualifies as a delusion: “a persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence.” The God Delusion was on the New York Times Hardcover Nonfiction Best Seller list for at least 51 weeks. To date, the English version has sold over 2 million copies. The book received many positive reviews. For example, The Economist praised “Dawkins's incisive logic and rapier wit,” concluding that "Everyone should read [32] it.” [33]

But other reviewers and subsequent books have taken Dawkins to task. In The American Spectator, for example, Richard Kirk wrote, “Far from being a serious philosophical book, this illedited and garrulous

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diatribe contains just about anything that crosses the author's mind” with

“page after sarcastic page of attacks against any foe Dawkins considers an easy target.”

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Who is right? Is The God Delusion full of “incisive logic” or is it a “garrulous diatribe”? This question is crucial, since Dawkins claims his purpose in writing is to convert religious believers to his brand of atheism. Are Dawkins’ arguments persuasive? More to the point, does he accomplish his goal of showing the irrationality, indeed, delusion, of belief in God?

The purpose of this chapter is to respond to a few issues that are most relevant to the question of whether belief in God is reasonable and whether atheists have the upper hand when it comes to rational thought regarding religion in general and Christianity in particular. The focus will be on further issues Dawkins brings up in The God Delusion, beyond those that William Lane Craig addressed in the previous chapter. Calling God Names The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

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Thus Dawkins begins Chapter Two, his discussion of “The God Hypothesis.” Imagine if a heavyweight prizefighter, at the starting bell, took off both gloves and started punching his opponent below the belt. In his opening round Dawkins does just that: with his first remark, Dawkins takes a below-the-belt swipe at God and religion. However, this swing at God turns out to be full of logical blunders and, thus, misses its mark completely. A little analysis reveals the flaws and fallacies. First, by attacking God in this way, Dawkins uses a tactic suspiciously similar to a fallacy called “poisoning the well.” It’s a rhetorical ploy often used in place of reasoned argument, with the intent to bias the reader emotionally against the opposing position. Dawkins uses practically every negative descriptor known to modern man in his portrayal of God. This produces a strong gut reaction: who would want anything to do with a God like that? Again, this is hitting below the belt; appealing to emotions rather than to reason. Knocking Down Straw Men But that is not all. Dawkins’ opening statement is a classic straw man (or, if you will, a straw God) argument. That is, like a scarecrow made only of straw, Dawkins’ description of God is easily knocked down, but it turns out to be a weakly constructed fake, an inaccurate description, a distortion of his opponents’ position. Dawkins admits a few paragraphs later, “It is unfair to attack such an easy target,” but the problem here is that Dawkins is aiming at the wrong target. Contrary to Dawkins’ claims, Jewish and Christian theologians throughout the centuries have never described God the way he imagines. In addition, he ignores the most basic understanding of the passages of the Bible from which he draws his outlandish claims. He demonstrates his misreading of the Bible, for example, in Chapter 7 of The God Delusion. Dawkins recalls a story from Judges 1921 of a man who allowed his concubine to be raped and murdered, then cut her to pieces and sent them to the twelve tribes of Israel as a rallying cry to battle. Dawkins writes, “Let’s charitably put it

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down again to the ubiquitous weirdness of the Bible.” One critic of Dawkins countered, “Why not put it down to the ubiquitous weirdness of people? One might as well blame Darwin for finches

dying in the Galapagos. Dawkins seems under the strange assumption that the author approves of [this episode].”

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When it comes to understanding the Bible, Dawkins’ arrogant bias against it and ignorance on how to read it are palpable. In the instance just mentioned, he fails to read the rest of the story, where he would have found that the last verse of Judges sums up the entire book with this editorial comment:

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“In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as he saw fit.” In context, this sentence summarized the message of the entire book: people left to their own devices often go wrong. So by pulling this isolated episode out of its historical and literary context, Dawkins demonstrates that he has not done his homework and, in fact, has no idea what he is talking about. Dawkins may feel satisfied making snide remarks, but when they are so lacking in substance as this, they mean nothing. Dawkins misses more than just the historical/literary context of the Bible. He also fails to appreciate how the Bible has shaped civilization down through the ages, even from passages such as these. On this point author David Marshall (a co-contributor to this volume) writes, Judges describes the classic tradeoff between tribal freedom and the violence it allows, and the systematic oppression of a controlled agrarian society. The Old Testament is ambivalent about “progress” from one to the other. As we’ll see, that ambivalence ultimately helped Western civilization keep the best of both worlds. Here roads diverge: one leads to the Aztecs and their bloody pyramids, the other to Oxford. Whatever the virtues of the former, or vices of the latter, only a fool would deny that there are huge differences between the destinations. Dawkins is too busy looking down his nose at the ancient Hebrews to have an inkling what

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they did for him.

Dawkins cites several other examples from the Bible that he finds “strange,” “disgraceful,” and “appalling.” In each case, Marshall points to the context and historical significance of these passages,

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showing that Dawkins does not understand what he is talking about.

Dawkins’ triumphalism over having vanquished the God of the Old Testament is misplaced. He acknowledges none of the rebuttals to negative characterizations of God and the Bible. He does not give us accurate information, simply a series of bold-faced but uninformed assertions at that. Not only does Dawkins fail to land a blow on his theistic opponent, he demonstrates a profound ignorance of what he’s fighting over. But this is only the opening round. Dawkins has only begun his fight to demolish God. He next turns his attention to refuting the traditional philosophical arguments in favor of God’s existence. Dismissing Proofs for God’s Existence In Chapter 3, Dawkins turns to classic arguments for the existence of God developed by the medieval Christian philosophers Anselm (late 11 th century) and Thomas Aquinas (13 th century). For example, Aquinas’ cosmological argument relies on the principle of cause and effect to establish the existence

of a necessary Being (God) who is the cause of the physical universe. But Dawkins dismisses this argument by claiming it makes an “entirely unwarranted assumption that God himself is immune to the

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regress.” In Dawkins mind, if we assume that everything has a cause, then what caused God? “Smack-down argument, I win!” he says in so many words. Dawkins’ offhand dismissal of the cosmological argument makes many philosophers cringe. Noted Christian philosopher and recently retired professor at the University of Notre Dame, Alvin Plantinga, stated, . . . Despite the fact that this book is mainly philosophy, Dawkins is not a philosopher (he's a biologist). Even taking this into account, however, much of the philosophy he purveys is at best jejune. You might say that some of his forays into philosophy are at best sophomoric, but that would be unfair to sophomores; the fact is (grade inflation aside), many of his arguments

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would receive a failing grade in a sophomore philosophy class.

Even atheist philosopher Michael Ruse declared, “Dawkins is a man truly out of his depth. Does he honestly think that no philosopher or theologian has ever thought of or worried about the infinite regress of the cosmological argument?” Ruse goes on to write, “The God Delusion makes me embarrassed to be an atheist.”

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Ruse is right to feel embarrassed. Not only does Dawkins not understand the cosmological argument, he fails to mention, or does not even know, there are actually three different forms of it. Aquinas offered one form, but Gottfried Leibniz (d. 1716) proposed another, and Arabic philosophers developed a third form during the Middle Ages. This last form, known as the kalam cosmological argument, is considered by many current Christian theologians to be the strongest of the three. It has been defended over the years by many Christian philosophers. Simply put, the kalam cosmological argument proposes:

1) 2) 3)

Whatever begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

Defenders of this form of the argument offer two philosophical reasons for the first premise, and both philosophical and scientific reasons for the second. On that basis, since the form of the argument is valid, the concluding third statement is true. Regarding the conclusion, William Lane Craig states, “philosophical analysis reveals that such a cause [of the universe] must have several of the principal

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theistic attributes.” Therefore, not only must God exist, but he must have many of the qualities generally ascribed to God in the Bible, i.e., omniscience, omnipotence, rationality, personhood, etc. Sophomoric Smugness What is so breathtaking about Dawkins’ smug dismissal of the cosmological argument is that he does

not attempt to respond to any of the specific points that Craig and others bring up. He doesn’t even acknowledge them; it’s as if he is completely ignorant of them. Craig is not an obscure author with whom Dawkins would not be familiar. He has defended this argument in three books dating back to 1979, written numerous articles over the years, and he has publically debated the issue with many skeptics, including the well-known atheist philosopher Quentin Smith. (More recently, since publication of The God Delusion, Craig toured England and challenged Dawkins to a debate. Atheistic philosophers in Dawkins’ own Oxford urged him to accept, but Dawkins demurred.) Instead of dealing with the serious points that Christian philosophers bring to the discussion, as others have, Dawkins simply asks, “Where did God come from?” With this, Dawkins shows he is totally unfamiliar with the wealth of literature on the subject and the strongest arguments currently employed. If he had done his homework, he would have realized his question misses the point entirely. The first point of the kalam cosmological argument is that whatever begins to exist must have a cause. God, by definition, never began to exist. God is the “Uncaused Cause.” So the question “Where did God come from?” is irrelevant! One might counter, why postulate God as having always existed? Isn’t it simpler to assume that the universe has always existed? Craig notes two reasons this is not reasonable to assume. First, logically it is impossible (for reasons that are beyond the scope of this chapter to explain) to cross an infinite span of time. But if the universe has existed since eternity past, we must cross an infinite amount of time to reach the current moment. Since that’s impossible, it follows that the physical space-time universe could not have existed since eternity past. Second, scientific evidence for the “Big Bang” and the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics indicates that space-time-matter had a beginning.

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To simplify the matter, we can say that “something” must be eternal. That something could be either a material thing or immaterial thing. Since we have good evidence that matter (i.e., the universe) has not always existed, then the remaining alternative is that something immaterial is eternal and must have brought the material universe into existence. An immaterial, powerful, creative, intelligent, personal being has the qualities we refer to as God (using Dawkins’ own definition of the “God

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Hypothesis,” by the way

).

Dawkins brings up several other arguments that have been used to argue for God’s existence, and in each case dismisses them by arguing from a weak form of the proof. Over and over again, he builds straw men to knock down. So much for Dawkins’ “incisive logic.” In The God Delusion, Dawkins sets out to prove why there is “almost certainly no God.” In analyzing these opening chapters, however, we have found a flurry of unsubstantiated claims, straw man arguments, non-sequiturs, and question begging. Not a very good start for a book that claims to have banished God to the dustbin of ignorance and superstition. And not a very good representation of a professor who founded a self-named Foundation for Reason and Science (italics added). Since Dawkins is not trained in philosophy or theology, one might excuse him for bumbling the major philosophical arguments for the existence of God and misunderstanding the nature and intent of the

Bible. But when it comes to the area of science, particularly biology, is he any more cogent? The answer to that question might surprise you. Dawkins’ “Sheer Luck” Scenario In chapter 4 of The God Delusion, Dawkins is more in his element, that of biology. And this is the chapter that Dawkins claims to make his strongest argument for why God does not exist, giving it the title, “Why There Almost Certainly is no God.” Dawkins writes, “This chapter has contained the central argument of my book . . .” In Chapter Three of this book William Lane Craig deals with Dawkins’ six points of his central argument and shows them to be logically lacking. My purpose here is to point out additional ways in which Dawkins practices sloppy logic, poor reasoning, and worldview bias. In this chapter, Dawkins is fond of using the analogy of climbing a mountain—Mount Improbable, he calls it, drawing from an earlier book—to illustrate how natural selection works to arrive at improbable things like eyes and wings. He adds in a generous dose of genetic mutations as the raw material for moving, step by step up the mountain, from simple to more complex structures. This is all standard Darwinian evolutionary biology. But mutations presuppose that the genetic code of life is already present to begin with. So the real question is not, can the genetic code be rearranged or changed? We know it can, at least to some extent. (We also know that most mutations are harmful to the species, or neutral, with a few being adaptively positive.) But the real question is: what is the origin of this unique molecular coding in the first place? Here we discover a major flaw with Dawkins’ mountain analogy—how does the first living cell arrive at the foot of the mountain to begin the ascent to more complex life? Or, put differently, what is the origin of the first life? You will be amazed at Dawkins’ reasoning, or, rather, lack thereof. Getting to Mount Improbable How does Dawkins account for the origin of life? Dawkins’ explanation is an “initial stroke of

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luck”! (I’m not kidding, those are his actual words.) But that’s not all. In addition to the origin of life, Dawkins acknowledges there are a number of other unique, “one off” events in the history of life. He mentions the origin of the eukaryotic cell (a complex cell with a membrane-bound nucleus), consciousness, plus other unspecified events. In each case, Dawkins admits the need for a “stroke of luck,” “sheer luck,” “some luck,” and “major infusions of luck.” To be fair, Dawkins couches each of these lucky scenarios in the context of the “anthropic principle,” which I will deal with shortly. The point here is that appeal to luck is an incredible admission from one of today’s most vocal atheists and defender of rationality. Here Dawkins is reduced to basing his theory on “major infusions of luck” and “momentous, difficult and statistically improbable” steps! This is an unabashed appeal to chance. It is a scientific “explanation” that lacks any semblance of explanation. Yet, earlier in his book, Dawkins chastises people who claim that evolution is based on chance, writing that these people know nothing about the process of natural selection. But when it comes to the major events that make life possible, Dawkins is at a total loss to produce any scientific

explanation other than appealing to chance, or, as he puts it, “sheer luck.”

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Dawkins is unfazed by this inconsistency. He attempts to provide a way out of this impasse by the following assertion: However improbable the origin of life might be, we know it happened [without God’s help] on Earth because we are here.

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This is a classic instance of “begging the question,” also known as circular reasoning. Dawkins assumes that nature is all there is, he knows therefore life must have come from natural causes. How does he know life came from natural causes? Because he assumes nature is all there is! This illustrates Dawkins’ dogmatic adherence to atheistic naturalism no matter how counter-intuitive or incredibly improbable the process might be. But apart from Dawkins’ naturalistic dogmatism, the question is how non-living matter could conceivably have morphed into the first living, reproducing cell. Dawkins answers that question by

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appealing to a lucky break and “by postulating a very large number of planetary opportunities.” What he means is that if there are enough planets in the universe, eventually some of them are bound to produce life. As it turns out, this proposal of multiple earth-like (or life-friendly) planets sprinkled throughout the universe is another unfounded assumption on his part, and Dawkins fails to be persuasive in any scientific sense. That’s because the actual likelihood of other life-supporting planets has been investigated and found absurdly improbable. In their book, The Privileged Planet, authors Guillermo

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Gonzalez and Jay Richards describe groundbreaking research into how the Earth is uniquely situated to sustain complex life. These “just right” conditions include the optimal distance from the right kind of star, plate tectonics, a nearby moon of the right size to stabilize the earth’s rotational axis, the shielding presence (from asteroid bombardment) of larger planets nearby, the right amount of oxygen and water . . . just to name a few. Mathematically speaking, Gonzalez and Richards suggest the probability of a planet having all of the necessary conditions to sustain complex life is 10 to the negative fifteenth power, or one thousandth of a trillionth. Dawkins’ last bastion of hope for a naturalistic explanation of all these factors coming together in one place requires massive infusions of luck! (Note to self: don’t take these odds to Vegas!) The Anthropic Principle to the Rescue? Dawkins is unfazed by (or perhaps ignorant of) the improbabilities. He estimates that a conservative

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number of available planets in the universe to sustain life is a billion billion. Based on this assumption, he writes, “Suppose it [the spontaneous arising of life] was so improbable as to occur on only one in a billion planets. . . . life will still have arisen on a billion planets—of which Earth, of

course, is one.”

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Dawkins concludes that given these odds, and since we are here, the highly improbable has obviously happened. This is a version of the anthropic principle, which, simply stated, says that the reason we can be confident a planet suited for life is not impossible, regardless of how improbable it may be, is because we’re here. He turns the anthropic principle into a reason to support his thesis that God is not needed for the origin of life. He writes, “The anthropic principle, like natural selection, is an alternative to the design hypothesis. It provides a rational, design-free explanation for the fact that we find ourselves in a situation propitious to our existence.”

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But is the anthropic principle really an alternative to the design hypothesis? Dawkins seems to think so. But notice the following observation by Oxford mathematician John Lennox: All the anthropic principle does is to tell us that for life to exist, certain necessary conditions must be fulfilled. But what it does not tell us is why those necessary conditions are fulfilled, nor how, granted they are fulfilled, life arose. Dawkins is making the elementary mistake of thinking that necessary conditions are sufficient. But they are not: in order to get a first class degree at Oxford it is necessary to get into the University; but, as many students know, it is certainly not sufficient. The anthropic principle, far from giving an explanation for the origin

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of life, is an observation that gives rise to the need for such an explanation.

Imagine standing before a firing squad of fifty expert marksmen and after hearing their rifles fire in unison, you realize that you are still alive; they all missed! Would your first thought be, “Well, of course they all missed; I’m still here!” No, you would naturally wonder why they all missed, and

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common sense would lead you to conclude that there must be a reason for what just took place. This scenario illustrates how Dawkins misunderstands the point of the anthropic principle by overlooking the obvious question, “Why are things arranged this way?” What we find, then, is that Dawkins is wrong to use the anthropic principle as an alternative to design for explaining the origin of life. But not only that, he is unable to give a scientific explanation for life’s origin. Instead, he states, “. . . The origin of life is . . . [a] major gap in the evolutionary story that is bridged by sheer luck . . .” section.

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He’s only left with lucky guesses. We will see why in the next

Thinking Impossible Things! Dawkins wants us to believe that given multitudinous opportunities and a whole universe full of luck, presto-chango, anything can happen, right? Well, only if the “anything” is in the realm of possibilities. On the other hand, some things will never happen no matter how many tries or how much luck you have. That’s because some things are simply not possible. For example, drawing a square circle is not within the realm of possibility because, by definition, a square has four sides of equal length and a circle does not. That is one kind of impossibility. Another

type of impossibility is based on what we know from well-established science, like the principle that it is impossible for an unaided human to survive in the vacuum of space. It is this second kind of impossibility that Dawkins fails to fully appreciate. Dawkins’ anthropic

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induced origin-of-life assumption turns a blind eye to the well-established law of biogenesis. To understand the significance of this law, we need to go back over 350 years to when people thought that life generated itself spontaneously. For example, it was once believed that live worms popped out of the mud. But through careful observations, scientists refuted that idea. One of the first was Italian physician Francesco Redi, who demonstrated as far back as 1668 that spontaneous generation was a false notion. Redi showed, for example, that maggots do not generate spontaneously on meat, but instead come from eggs left by flies. Later, in 1860, one year after Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species, French chemist Louis Pasteur further confirmed Redi’s initial observations. Through a series of experiments, Pasteur proved conclusively that microorganisms appear from airborne sources and not spontaneously. This laid to rest the controversy over spontaneous generation. The law of biogenesis was confirmed. The law of biogenesis states that life only comes from pre-existing life. In other words, You don't get something living from something non-living. This is one of the most fundamental laws of biology. It has never been refuted. All of our experience and experiments confirm this law to be true. Worms come from other worms, not from inorganic mud. Green mold on bread comes from pre-existing mold spores in the air. Human babies come from living human parents. Since the law of biogenesis is confirmed scientifically, why does Dawkins insist that life originated from non-living matter? Isn’t that a contradiction of well-established scientific law? This is the fallacy of wishful thinking, not the rigors of scientific inquiry. Good-bye rational, scientific observation; hello dogmatic naturalism. Primordial Soup, Anyone? In order to get around the contradiction with the law of biogenesis, naturalistic/atheistic scientists like Dawkins rely on a story line that assumes things were different “back then.” Of course conditions on the early earth would have been different, but does that mean it’s possible to start with inorganic elements and arrive at something alive? Verification for this idea is sought in various "origin of life" scenarios, including “primordial soup” experiments and “RNA world” conditions. Yet, these laboratory experiments and models have never produced anything close to a living cell. In fact, there are a number of known major problems with these experiments that would keep any molecule from

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becoming a living, reproducing cell. Scientists working in origin-of-life studies admit that they have yet to propose a theory for the first life that does not run up hard against these barriers. These roadblocks are well-known laws of chemistry understood by all chemists. But Dawkins must get life from non-living matter, so he makes whatever assumptions he must make. It seems Dawkins is not dealing with improbabilities, but impossibilities. Even dump-truck loads of luck and billions of planets on which to experiment won’t help Dawkins out of this predicament.

The problem that Dawkins faces is there is no natural process known to man that can produce something living from something non-living. Atheists are fond of accusing Christians of “God of the Gaps” argumentation, where God is simply inserted to fill in our lack of knowledge. But it is clear that the issue here is not our lack of knowledge; to the contrary, it is what we do know from chemistry and biology that leads us to the conclusion that getting something living from something non-living is impossible. In fact, the entire trajectory of the past 60-plus years of research into the composition and inner workings of single-celled bacteria is toward greater and greater specified and complex interaction of multitudes of proteins and, thus, research is moving further from a reductionistic/naturalistic solution. For this reason, Dawkins is reduced to appealing to “lucky” scenarios: Luck of the Gaps, actually. But even all the luck in the entire universe won’t change the laws of nature. Some will object to the above reasoning by reminding us that science progresses and discovers new laws, overturning what was once thought to be true. So, for example, what if future laboratory experiments produce life? Does that override the law of biogenesis? Would it change the game in favor of atheism? Actually, it does not. Even if “life” is someday produced in the lab, it would only demonstrate that scientists are finally able to get the right ingredients and conditions “fine-tuned” to reproduce what may have originally happened. That by itself does nothing to negate the idea that God exists or is superfluous as the Creator of life. In fact, it would strengthen the “anthropic principle” and the need for an intelligent “fine-tuner,” as mentioned above. The reason Dawkins continues to maintain his position on the question of life’s origin is because he has locked himself into a naturalistic universe. This decision comes from his worldview. Dawkins’ theology excludes any supernatural God and his philosophy assumes nature is the totality of reality and the scientific method the only way of gaining knowledge. From this a priori foundation, he attempts to build an explanation for first life. Therefore, we conclude Dawkins’ explanation is not scientifically based, but instead, an assumption made necessary by his religiously held belief in atheism/naturalism/scientism.

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Does Religion Cause Child Abuse?

Throughout Chapter 9 of The God Delusion, Dawkins turns his attention to religious training. He maintains that teaching religion to children is child abuse. This is not just an arresting figure of speech or an exaggeration to make a point; Dawkins soberly compares religious upbringing to sexual abuse, and finds religion the worse of the two. Surprisingly for the scientist that he is, he supports this with no systematic data; just a few pages of anecdotes from people who suffered at the hands of ill-advised religious education. Stories like that, sadly, can be found; but what do they represent? If religious training is thought to be child abuse, an obvious hypothesis follows: Children with religious upbringings should show some of the symptoms that are

typical of abused children. These symptoms are well known. They include fear, panic attacks, eating disorders, depression, low self-confidence, irritability, difficulty relating with others, substance abuse, and so on. Not every abuse victim experiences most or all of these, but outcomes like these are typical. If a religious upbringing equals abuse, there ought to be signs that something like this happens to children of religious families. There is empirical data to test such a hypothesis. It was published well before Dawkins’ book, so he had ample opportunity at the time to know what science had to say. Christian Smith, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, led a massive, authoritative study called the National Study of Youth and Religion. The results were published in the 2005 book, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Eyes of American Teenagers (with co-author Melinda Lundquist Denton), published by Oxford University Press (yes, that’s Dawkins’ university). It is a goldstandard study, the best of its kind to date. This study sorted its 3,290 participants into levels of religious involvement: the Devoted, the Regulars, the Sporadic, and the Disengaged. Because America’s predominant religious groupings are Christian, the “Devoted” and “Regulars” were predominantly Christian—Protestant and Catholic. Therefore these results can fairly be taken as relating specifically to Christianity. (Results for other religions are difficult to determine from the data.) What effect, then, did a religious upbringing have, as compared to a non-religious one? The closer teenagers were to “Devoted” rather than “Disengaged,” the less they engaged in these negative behaviors: Habits: Smoking, drinking, marijuana use, TV watching, pornography use, “action” video game use, R-rated movies; At school: Poor grades, cutting classes, getting suspended or expelled; Attitude: Bad temper, rebellious toward parents; Sex: Early physical involvement, including number of partners and age of first sexual contact. Those more “Devoted” on the scale showed higher rates of these positive outcomes:

Emotional well-being: Satisfaction with physical appearance, planning for the future, thinking about the meaning of life, feeling cared for, freedom from depression, not feeling alone and misunderstood, not feeling “invisible,” not often feeling guilty, having a sense of meaning to life, getting along well with siblings; Relationships with adults: Closeness with parents, number of adults connected to, feeling understood by parents, sensing that parents pay attention, feeling they get the “right amount of freedom” from parents; Moral reasoning and honesty: Belief in stable, absolute morality; not pursuing a “get-ahead” mentality; not just pleasure-seeking; less lying to parents and cheating in school; Compassion: Caring about the needs of the poor, caring about the elderly, caring about racial justice; Community: Participation in groups, financial giving, volunteer work (including with people of different races and cultures), helping homeless people, taking leadership in organizations. The findings are overwhelming. On page after page, chart after chart, on every one of the ninety-one variables studied, the closer teens were to the “Devoted” end of the scale, the healthier their lives were. These are the results of Dawkins’ “child abuse.” This is what he complains is so bad for children. H. Allen Orr wrote, “[Dawkins] has a preordained set of conclusions at which he’s determined to arrive. Consequently, [he] uses any argument, however feeble, that [62] seems to get him there.” In other words, he sees just what he wants to see. Isn’t it ironic? That’s what he accuses believers of doing, but he is manifestly guilty of this himself. What can we conclude? This study suggests (though its methods cannot prove) that growing up Christian is a very good thing. Concerning Dawkins and his book, we can easily see that his attack is entirely inconsistent with scientific knowledge on the subject. So it appears we can also draw a conclusion concerning Richard Dawkins himself. He is the founder of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. We have already seen how severely his illogic in The God Delusion undermines the Reason

side of his self-proclaimed identity. His training, though, is as a scientist; and his last professorial position was (as noted earlier) Professor for the Public Understanding of Science. He insists that science is the standard for all knowledge. And yet here we have him claiming that raising children to hold religious beliefs is child abuse. He doggedly maintains that position in the teeth of all that science has to say about the subject. He is, to be blunt, as thoroughly prejudiced and anti-scientific as he could be on this topic (not to mention the scientific questions attached to his “sheer luck” scenario for the origin of life). What is the Public to Understand of Science if this is their example? Perhaps that it is a tool to be employed when it suits one’s purpose, and to be ignored otherwise. One has to wonder whether Dawkins’ Foundation ought to be named the Foundation for Reason and Science That Supports His Atheism But Ignores Reason and Science That Supports Any Other Belief. It’s cumbersome, to be sure. But it’s considerably more accurate. Resources Among the books rebutting many other topics found in The God Delusion are: The Truth Behind the New Atheism (2007), by David Marshall The Dawkins Delusion? Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine (2007), by Alister McGrath and Joanna Collicutt McGrath God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens (2008), by John F. Haught The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions (2008), by David Berlinski For a unique learning experience, purchase the iPod tutor: the argument against richard dawkins’ the God delusion, a project of the Intelligent Community Initiative. This audio tutor, consisting of a User Guide and over 200 companion audio tracks, carefully dissects Dawkins’ arguments and exposes its numerous logical fallacies and factual errors, and demonstrates that Dawkins’ primary argument is itself a faith-based construction.

Chapter Five: Unreason at the Head of Project Reason Tom Gilson The outcome was predictable enough, in retrospect. On one side of the debate floor stood the cofounder and chairman of Project Reason, a non-profit organization “dedicated to reason,” which “draws on the talents of prominent and creative thinkers in a wide range of disciplines to encourage critical thinking and erode the influence of dogmatism, superstition, and bigotry in our world.” This was the man who would later write, It seems to me that many nonbelievers have forgotten—or never knew—what it is like to suffer an unhappy collision with scientific rationality. We are open to good evidence and sound argument as a matter of principle, and are generally willing to follow wherever they

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may lead.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the floor stood a man often (and accurately) described as a theologian: a religious man, in other words. The one man’s first book was on reason in opposition to religion: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. The other’s first published book was on ancient history, and of course religion: The Son Rises: The Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus.

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So the outcome could hardly have been in doubt; and from one perspective, it proceeded as might have been expected. One debater brought forth a series of logical arguments based on precise definitions, carefully delineated lines of thought, and technically sophisticated modal and syllogistic logic. He put forth one logical argument that he boldly described as a completely unanswerable “knock-down” defeater for the other person’s position, and indeed, if his reasoning proved sound, the other’s central claims would end up being demolished. His opponent, astonishingly, ignored most of his arguments completely, as if he hadn’t even heard them. If he did, then it seemed he failed to recognize how much damage they had done his position— not in a rhetorical manner, but by the strength of their logic. He offered nothing whatever in response to the “knock-down” argument. Instead he simply held forth on his own views, with no regard for how utterly they had just been undermined. Or maybe he did recognize how thoroughly his position was being dismantled, and decided it would be imprudent to acknowledge his opponent’s advantage. For he took an entirely different tack: one based largely on rhetoric and emotion instead of reason. For twelve long minutes he hammered on all that could be considered disreputable, not so much in his opponent’s position, but among the worst of those who agreed with his opponent. Though his argument was not entirely lacking in rational appeal, it was peppered with enough identifiable fallacies and distortions to seriously undermine any claim he might have made to reasonability. He employed red herrings, equivocations, and straw man versions of his opponent’s claims. His opponent called him on many of these errors, but to no avail.

It’s a good thing at least one person was there representing reason. The contrast seemed all too predictable, but for one thing: the one who focused on a reasoned approach to discourse was the theologian and philosopher, William Lane Craig. The one who appealed to emotion, whose arguments were choked with fallacies, was the man representing Project Reason, Sam Harris. In the introduction to this book I proposed that the New Atheists have misappropriated the term “reason.” This April 7, 2011 debate was a paradigmatic case of that, illustrating weaknesses in Harris’s rational discourse that can also be readily found throughout his published works. Of course

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my critique of the debate demands substantiation, which I will now attempt to offer. In this chapter I will show that Sam Harris, despite his self-promotion as defender of reason, resorted to classic fallacies including semantic tricks, equivocation, begging the question, poisoning the well, and more. To show that this wasn’t just a bad night for him, I will also look at parallel examples from his published work. I must of course begin at the beginning. William Lane Craig’s Reasoned Approach Craig gave the opening speech. The question to be debated was, “Is the Foundation of Morality Natural or Supernatural?” From the beginning Craig agreed with Harris that objective morality exists. He proposed a definition for objective morality, and then moved on to clarify the terms of the debate. The issue at hand, he said, was which of two worldviews provides a more adequate foundation for objective morality: theism (belief in one good Creator God), or naturalism (roughly, the view that nothing exists but matter and energy, and their interactions according to necessity or chance). Crucially, Craig made it clear that this question could be addressed independently of whether naturalism or theism was true. For purposes of the debate topic, he argued, the relevant questions were, if naturalism is true, can it ground objective morality? And, if theism is true, can it ground objective morality? These were questions that could be discussed without resolving their conditionals, their if clauses. So for Craig, the debate was not about the truth of theism, but about the implications for ethics that would follow from the truth of either theism or naturalism. Harris did not object to this point. Craig briefly explained how a morally perfect God, if he exists, could be the foundation for objective moral values and duties. He then suggested a number of difficulties naturalism has in providing a foundation for objective moral values and duties. I will not attempt to build Craig’s case all over again, for that is not necessary for my purpose in this essay. (For his full argument, I refer you to the debate itself.) Neither is it germane to my purpose to show whether Craig’s arguments prevailed. I propose instead to demonstrate the rational manner in which Craig approached the issues, and to contrast that with the approach Harris took. Craig opened the door for Harris to respond, rebut, and even refute him on rational grounds, if such rebuttal or refutations were possible. Harris did not take that opportunity, as we shall see; instead he responded, to a disturbing extent, with appeals to emotion, fallacious logic, and rhetorical maneuvering.

A Logic-Oriented Approach Craig argued (the numbering is mine, not his):

1) If humans are products of nature and nothing else, and if nature intrinsically lacks moral values and duties, then it follows that humans have no objective moral values and duties. 2) To regard humans as having moral significance while animals do not is, on naturalism, to assign a groundless, speciesist, (borrowing Peter Singer’s term), and probably false ontological distinction between animals and humans. 3) To hold, as Harris does, that objective morality is grounded in the well-being of sentient creatures, is to re-define goodness, not to explain its grounding. As Craig said, To ask, “Why is maximizing creatures’ well-being good?” is on his definition the same as asking, “Why does maximizing creatures’ well-being maximize creatures’ well-being?” It’s just a tautology. It’s just talking in circles! So, Dr. Harris has quote-unquote “solved” the Value Problem just by re-defining his terms. It’s nothing but wordplay . . . His so-called “solution” is just a semantical trick of an arbitrary and idiosyncratic redefinition of the terms “good” and “evil” in non-moral vocabulary.

4) Harris claimed, “If we have a moral duty to do anything, we have a duty to avoid the worst possible misery.” Unfortunately the dependent clause here is the very issue at stake in this debate. Do we have a moral duty to do anything? This is the conclusion Harris needs to establish, and it begs the question to begin with it. 5) Ought implies can, but Harris’s denial of human free will implies cannot. That is, if humans cannot actually make choices as human agents, then it follows we cannot make morally significant choices. Therefore there can be no moral duties. 6) Harris identifies moral goodness with sentient creatures’ well-being, but that is impossible. This point bears further attention. Rather than trying to summarize, I will quote Craig on it. On the next-to-last page of his book, Dr. Harris makes the telling admission that if people like rapists, liars, and thieves could be just as happy as good people, then his “moral landscape” would no longer be a moral landscape. Rather, it would just be a continuum of well-being whose peaks are occupied by good and bad people, or evil people, alike. Now what’s interesting about this is that earlier in the book, Dr. Harris explained that about

three million Americans are psychopathic. That is to say, they don’t care about the mental states of others. They enjoy inflicting pain on other people. But that implies that there’s a possible world, which we can conceive, in which the continuum of human well-being is not a moral landscape. The peaks of well-being could be occupied by evil people. But that entails that in the actual world, the continuum of well-being and the moral landscape are not identical either. For identity is a necessary relation. There is no possible world in which some entity A is not identical to A. So if there’s any possible world in which A is not identical to B, then it follows that A is not in fact identical to B. Now since it’s possible that human well-being and moral goodness are not identical, it follows necessarily that human well-being and goodness are not the same, as Dr. Harris has asserted in his book. Craig may have left some debate listeners behind with his language of “possible worlds” and “identity is a necessary relation.” It is a technical point of logical reasoning, to be sure. But the debate audience could hardly have missed what Craig said next, when he asserted emphatically that if he was arguing correctly, the logical foundation undergirding Harris’s position utterly collapses. It’s impossible to overstate the importance of this challenge. This was the argument that Craig identified as an absolute “knock-down” of Harris’s position. That’s because Harris rests his grounding for morality entirely on morality goodness’s being identical with the well-being of sentient creatures. Craig argued that this identity is logically impossible. If Craig were right, then Harris’s moral theory would be finished, overthrown from its very foundations. Right or Wrong: A Rationally-Ordered Question Were Craig’s claims correct? If so, then Harris’s position would be in deep jeopardy. Points 5 and 6 in particular seem fatal. Craig claimed that denying free will, as Harris does, makes moral duties literally impossible (5); and that Harris’s “moral landscape” cannot be identified with the well-being of sentient creatures (6), as Harris insists it must be. To put it bluntly, if Craig’s reasoning for either point 5 or 6 (especially 6) was on the mark, then everything Dr. Harris writes and teaches about human morality is wrong. Everything. But let us pause and set this discussion in context of the overall point I’m making in this chapter. Some readers may think Craig’s logic succeeds, and some may think it fails. For present purposes, what counts is that the success or failure of Craig’s logic is precisely the right question. Craig’s success (if he succeeded) would be in the realm of logical reasoning: his ability to demonstrate that his conclusions followed validly from accurate or reliable premises. His failure (if he failed) would be a failure to do just that. He mounted his battled on the field of logical reasoning. There he would stand or fall. The Debate: Sam Harris’s Failure of Rationality So it could have been—and it seems that for the founder of Project Reason it should have been—the perfect opportunity to show this theologian he had picked the wrong field to fight on. It could have been Harris’s shining opportunity to show what reason really means. All he needed to do was to meet Craig with his own reasoned response.

So what rational, logical, reasoned arguments did Harris use to respond? One struggles to find any reasoned answer at all! He paid Craig’s deadliest arguments—points 5 and 6, the ones that would prove Harris’s moral theories irrecoverably wrong—no attention whatsoever. These (especially 6) were “knock-down blows” aimed square at the heart of Harris’s argument. Harris didn’t deflect them. He didn’t counter-punch. He didn’t even duck! Unlike in a boxing match, of course, Harris didn’t literally fall to the mat. Another sports analogy may be more fitting. Let’s think of Harris as the founder of Project Baseball, and Craig as having hit a long fly ball with three men on base. Unless Harris catches it deep in the outfield, Craig’s team wins the game. So what does Harris do? He places a football on the ground and attempts a field goal. It’s a ridiculous image, but not, I think, an unfair one. Craig came to the debate ready to reason. Harris came and played a different game altogether. When he did join in the reasoning game, he did it poorly. To Define Irrationality I’m sure Harris doesn’t see it that way. In his books, articles, and speeches, he insists that religion is by nature irrational; therefore Craig, as a believer in God, is by definition irrational. By contrast, Harris, as a skeptic, stands as a representative of reason. Harris’s image of rationality needs a closer look, however. A complete analysis of the term is beyond the scope of this chapter, but clearly it cannot just be a matter of holding one set of beliefs and rejecting another. In fact, it cannot even be defined simply as holding true beliefs and rejecting false ones. Suppose George believes the earth is round. That’s true, but is it rational? We can’t answer the question until we know why George believes the earth is round. If he believes it (as most of us do) because trustworthy authorities agree on the matter, that’s rational. But maybe George believes it because he likes basketball, basketballs are round, and therefore the earth is round. That’s irrational. Suppose on the other hand Antonius in 7th-century Italy believed that the earth was at the center of the universe. He was wrong, but was he irrational? I don’t think so. Based on the best evidence at hand, and the overwhelming consensus among authorities on the subject, he drew an appropriately rational conclusion. I do not mean that he came to the right conclusion, but that there is nothing to indicate a flaw in his reasoning processes. He simply lacked important evidence. What then does the state of being irrational look like? Irrational is an imprecise word, a loaded word, with almost medical implications. I wouldn’t be surprised if Sam Harris thought religious faith was pathological, but to debate that question could hardly be fruitful; it’s little better than namecalling anyway. There is, however, an aspect of rationality that is freely available and appropriate for examination and discussion: competence in rational discourse. One who is competent in rational discourse bases his beliefs, and his arguments on their behalf, on adequate evidence and sound logical processes. He is open to changing his beliefs when shown that his evidence or his reasoning is wrong or inadequate. We ought to be able to expect such competence from any strong proponent of reason.

One who is incompetent in rational discourse can be identified by his supporting his beliefs with poor evidence and/or fallacious logic, by calling upon feelings to support his conclusion in place of evidence and logic, or by resorting to empty rhetorical methods of persuasion. The incompetent person (in this sense) will often refuse to acknowledge flaws in his use of evidence or reason, and will also refuse to adjust his beliefs when shown that they are based in fallacies. To be incompetent in rational discourse does not mean that one never presents a sound argument; it rather it means that one mixes the unsound with the sound in excessive degree, or without apparent awareness of the difference. In this debate, Sam Harris displayed that kind of incompetence. Incompetence on Display That is a strong claim that requires backing. Unfortunately there are many examples to be found in Harris’s debate with Craig.

1) Harris stated, “I hope it’ll be clear to you, at the end of this hour, that religion is not an answer to this problem. Belief in God is not only unnecessary for a universal morality, it is itself a source of moral blindness.” Craig had not argued that either religion or belief could supply the grounding necessary for morality. He said that only God himself could. Therefore religion and belief were strictly irrelevant to Craig’s argument. If he thought Craig had erred in pointing to God, rather than belief in God, as the relevant issue, he never took the opportunity to say so. Instead he treated them throughout the debate as if they functioned as some kind of rebuttal to Craig’s position.

2) Harris assumed the existence of objective moral values and duties, and used that assumption as a question-begging basis for his argument that science must provide a foundation for these objective moral facts. He built a key portion of his case on assertions such as the following: What I’m saying is, the minimum standard of moral goodness is to avoid the worst possible misery for everyone. If we should do anything in this universe, if we ought to do anything, if we have a moral duty to do anything, it’s to avoid the worst possible misery for everyone. Combining this assumption with his belief that naturalism was true, he came to the conclusion that naturalism provides adequate grounding for objective morality. But the assumption he was making, as Craig pointed out (Point 4 in Craig’s case, above) was the very thing he needed to demonstrate. He was arguing in a circle. Harris ignored Craig on this point of correction.

3) Harris begged the question again when he assumed there is no God behind the existence of human minds:

Questions of right and wrong, and good and evil, depend upon mind. They depend upon the possibility of experience. Minds are natural phenomena. They depend upon the laws of nature in some way. Morality and human values, therefore, can be understood through science. How do we know that minds are natural phenomena unless we know that naturalism is true? Imagine if Craig had done the same thing: “Questions of right and wrong depend on the mind, minds are made by God, therefore, morality comes from God.” That would obviously be begging the question. Craig avoided basic logical fallacies like this, whereas Harris never seemed to realize he was making such mistakes.

4) In a most interesting moment of the debate, Harris committed not one but two offenses against sound reason: poisoning the well, and the fallacy of non sequitur. “Poisoning the well” is not so much a logical fallacy as it is an illegitimate rhetorical maneuver to prejudice the audience against one’s opponent. Non sequitur, Latin for “it does not follow,” refers to drawing a conclusion that does not follow from the stated premises. Harris said, Science has always been in the values business. We simply cannot speak of facts without resorting to values. Consider the simplest statement of scientific fact: Water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen. This seems as value-free an utterance as human beings ever make. But what do we do when someone doubts the truth of this proposition? Ok, all we can do is appeal to scientific values. The value of understanding the world. The value of evidence. The value of logical consistency. What if someone says, “Well, that’s not how I choose to think about water. Ok, I’m Biblical chemist, and I read in Genesis 1 that God created water before he created light. So I take that to mean that there were no stars. So there were no stars to fuse hydrogen and helium into heavier elements like oxygen; therefore there was no oxygen to put in the water, so either God created, either water has no oxygen, or God created special oxygen to put in the water—but I don’t think he would do that, because that would be Biblically inelegant.” Ok, what can we say to such a person? Ok, all we can do is appeal to scientific values. And if he doesn’t share those values, the conversation is over. Ok, if someone doesn’t value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide to prove that they should value it? If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument could you provide to show the importance of logic?

I think this split between facts and values should look really strange to you on its face. His characterizations of a “biblical chemist” and “biblically inelegant” are deeply disconnected from reality. No thinking Bible-believer thinks the Bible leads science to such conclusions. Thus he poisoned the well against both Craig and Christianity. Who knows? Some listeners to this debate might not have known how false these representations were. Harris, however, certainly knew. (Either that or he was speaking out of an irresponsible ignorance.)

But that’s not all. In this passage he was attempting to support his claim that ethical values can be derived from facts of nature. In favor of that conclusion, he offered the evidence that those who study nature do so under the guidance of certain “scientific values.” The conclusion unfortunately has no logical connection to the evidence: that which guides a field of study does not thereby become a conclusion to be drawn from that field of study. This was a non sequitur, a clearly identifiable flaw in his reasoning.

5) Harris confused denying a negative claim (for example, “I’m not sure this is false”) with asserting a positive one (“I’m sure this is true”). Echoing language he used twice in his book The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (pp. 37 and 91), he told Craig, “It is not unscientific to say that the Taliban are wrong about morality.” Later he repeated, “And if science is unscientific . . . if having a value assumption at the core renders science unscientific, what is scientific?” It seemed that he wanted us to conclude from this that it is scientific—it is a conclusion that can be derived from science—to say that the Taliban are wrong about morality, and that it is scientific for science to place value assumptions at its core. But this is confused. To say something is not unscientific is not the same as to say it is scientific. It is not unscientific to say that I like blueberries on my breakfast cereal; it is not scientific to say so either.

6) Harris was careless with his terminology, tripping over a logical fallacy known as equivocation (using the same word twice as if it means the same thing in both contexts, when in fact it does not). Craig carefully identified a specific case of Harris doing so, saying, Now here Dr. Harris, I think, is guilty of misusing terms like “good” and “bad,” “right” and “wrong,” in equivocal ways. He will often use them in non-moral senses. For example, he’ll say there are objectively good and bad moves in chess. Now that’s clearly not a moral use of the terms “good” and “bad.” You just mean they’re not apt to win or produce a winning strategy. Harris gave no response to that.

7) Harris’s first rebuttal was essentially twelve minutes of appeals to emotion rather than to reason. Worse, this tirade came against a deity he wanted his audience to identify as the Christian God, but which was actually a clumsy caricature of the God Christians worship. For example: We are being offered a psychopathic and psychotic moral attitude. It’s psychotic because this is completely delusional. There’s no reason to believe that we live in a universe ruled by an invisible monster Yahweh. . . .

This to me is the true horror of religion. It allows perfectly decent and sane people to believe by the billions, what only lunatics could believe on their own. If you wake up tomorrow morning thinking that saying a few Latin words over your pancakes is gonna turn them into the body of Elvis Presley, ok, you have lost your mind. But if you think more or less the same thing about a cracker and the body of Jesus, you’re just a Catholic. This doctrine is astride a contemptible history of scientific ignorance and religious barbarism. Granted that Harris thinks religion is wrong, bad, and evil. Granted that he thinks his conclusion is the only rational one. What we want to know is, what makes his conclusion more rational than Craig’s? A tirade is no answer. Ignoring logical arguments that undermine your position is also no answer. Arguing fallaciously is no answer either. These are, rather, signs of rational incompetence, hardly befitting the chairman and co-founder of Project Reason. I think I have made my point. Craig made a point of employing rational argumentation in his speeches. If he committed any logical fallacies, Harris didn’t notice them, or at least did not remark on them as such. If on the other hand Craig’s reasoning was sound, Harris’s case was (not to put it too finely) thoroughly demolished. What kind of rationally-ordered defense against this did Harris offer? Not much of one; and in a sense, none at all. It’s not that there was no logical reasoning to be found in Harris’s debate performance, but that it was completely lacking where it counted most. He completely ignored the logic of Craig’s most serious challenges to his position. When he did attempt to respond to Craig’s logic, he committed multiple identifiable fallacies of reasoning. Besides that, he engaged in taunting, emotional appeals, and other tactics of pure rhetorical maneuvering. In Print as Well as In Public Of course this was just one evening’s discussion. One might say in Harris’s defense, “Maybe he’s just not skilled as a debater. Maybe he’s much more competent in other contexts.” So what about his published work? The same flaws appear there as well. It must be noted first of all that Craig’s “knock-down” argument, that goodness cannot logically be equated with human well-being, was not directed to some minor, tangential thread. It was aimed squarely at the main thesis upon which Harris’s entire Moral Landscape book depends. If Craig was correct, then virtually the entire book is constructed upon a failed foundation. It seems odd that Harris would have considered a point of such central importance not worth rebutting in debate. His long anti-religious tirade in the debate was in character with his published materials. Consider these two passages in The Moral Landscape, first from page 174: There is now a large and growing literature—spanning dozens of books and hundreds of articles—attacking Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and me (the socalled New Atheists) for our alleged incivility, bias, and ignorance of how “sophisticated”

believers practice their faith. It is often said that we caricature religion, taking its most extreme forms to represent the whole. We do no such thing. We simply do what a paragon of sophisticated faith like Francis Collins does: we take the specific claims of religion seriously. It sounds fine there; but on the next page he writes, Let’s be honest about how Mooney and Kirshenbaum view public discourse in the United States: Watch what you say, or the Christian mob will burn down the Library of Alexandria all over again. By comparison the “combativeness” of the “New Atheists” seems quite collegial. We are merely guilty of assuming that our fellow Homo sapiens possess the requisite intelligence and emotional maturity to respond to rational argument, satire, and ridicule on the subject of religion—just as they respond to these discursive pressures on all other subjects. Of course we could be wrong. (Emphasis is in the original.) Here he seems to defend, rather than deny, New Atheist incivility. (Not incidentally, it is quite likely a myth, and therefore further poisoning of the well—attributable to Harris rather than Mooney or Kirshenbaum—that Christians burned the Library of Alexandria.

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)

Indeed, consider his assessment (The Moral Landscape, p. 160) of Francis Collins, an evangelical Christian and currently the head of the National Institutes of Health. He describes Collins’s book The Language of God as a genuinely astonishing book. To read it is to witness nothing less than an intellectual suicide. It is, however, a suicide that has gone almost entirely unacknowledged: The body yielded to the rope; the neck snapped; the breath subsided; and the corpse dangles in ghastly discomposure even now—and yet polite people everywhere continue to celebrate the great man’s health. On one page, Francis Collins is guilty of “intellectual suicide.” A few pages later, he is “a paragon of sophisticated faith.” Let’s remember: Dr. Collins successfully led the Human Genome Project, was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom by George W. Bush, and was appointed as the Director of the National Institute of Health by President Obama. By what rational criterion can Sam Harris describe him as brain dead? For Harris to slander Francis Collins’ intellect and then deny that the New Atheists caricature religion is clearly false. Harris frequently distorts his opponents’ position in print, just as he did in his debate with Craig. In his 2006 Letter to a Christian Nation (p. 6), he writes, Consider: every devout Muslim has the same reasons for being a Muslim that you have for being a Christian. And yet you do not find their reasons compelling. Do Muslims really believe in Allah because of the historical evidence for Jesus Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection? I think they would be most surprised to learn that!

In the same book (p. 16) he writes, The only real restraint God counsels on the subject of slavery is that we not beat our slaves so severely that we injure their eyes or their teeth (Exodus 21). And on page 17, It should be clear from these passages [of Scripture] that, while the abolitionists were morally right, they were on the losing side of a theological argument. For a picture of how desperately distorted this is, see Glenn Sunshine’s essay in this book (chapter fifteen) on Christianity and slavery. Is Harris ignorant of these relevant facts, or does he twist them intentionally? It’s hard to say. In The End of Faith (p. 19), he writes, In fact, every religion preaches the truth of propositions for which no evidence is even conceivable. That’s an odd position for him to take, considering all the historical and philosophical evidences that have been put forth in favor of Christianity. It could be that he thinks those evidences don’t mean what Christians take them to mean—but that’s not what he wrote. Rather he said that he cannot even imagine that such things could count as evidence in any possible world. That’s a sadly closed-minded position. One might suggest that Harris merely means that some Christian propositions are unsupportable by any conceivable evidence. Perhaps he means, for example, that one can hardly imagine any evidence showing up to support the specific belief that God called Abraham out of Ur. To me, though, the overall tone of his book mitigates against such a charitable interpretation. It seems to me he finds it incredible that any evidence whatsoever could speak in favor of any religious belief. This suggests an intellectual rigidity and dogmatism on Harris’s part that seems far removed from the flexibility and imagination of a truly reasonable thinker.

Finally, we find that Harris is not above committing obvious contradictions. He [67] devotes most of pages 102 through 110 in The Moral Landscape to tearing down "the illusion of free will." For example: All of our behavior can be traced to biological events about which we have no conscious knowledge; this has always suggested that free will is an illusion. . . . Many scientists and philosophers realized long ago that free will could not be squared with our growing understanding of the physical world. . . .

No account of causality leaves rooms for free will. . . . our belief in free will arises from our moment-to-moment ignorance of specific prior causes. . . . From a deeper perspective (speaking both subjectively and objectively), thoughts simply arise (what else could they do?) unauthored and yet author to our actions. Yet there is this on page 139: This does not mean, of course, that we have no mental freedom whatsoever. We can choose to focus on certain facts to the exclusion of others, to emphasize the good rather than the bad, etc. And such choices have consequences for how we view the world. . . . It’s hard to imagine how could that make sense in light of his strong denial of free will. He had opportunity to clarify it in his March 2012 Free Will, which he has said [68] would be an extended answer to questions he has been asked on the topic. There was this: People feel (or presume) an authorship of their thoughts and actions that is [69] illusory. And there was this: Choices, efforts, intentions, and reasoning influence our behavior—but they are themselves part of a chain of causes that precede conscious awareness and over [70] which we exercise no ultimate control. . . . I cannot choose what I choose. If our felt authorship of our thoughts is illusory, if we have no control over our intentions and reasoning, and if we cannot choose what we choose, then certainly it does mean that we have no mental freedom whatsoever. Again, if we cannot choose what we choose, then we cannot “choose to focus . . .” Harris’s claim that we have some mental freedom seems like a futile grasping for something that he wants to be real, though he denies its possibility. Whether that’s the case or not, the contradiction [71] remains unresolved, another instance of illogic in print. Conclusion To be a person of reason means many things. One of them must be the ability to conduct reasoned

discourse: to use only valid logic, to shun fallacies, to correct oneself when shown to be in error, to reject rhetorical maneuvers that muddy the waters of reasoning. None of this describes Sam Harris’s performance in his debate with William Lane Craig. Nor do Harris’s books maintain a consistent standard of reasoning. All this makes it very difficult to see why we should accept his claim to be a competent representative of reason.

Chapter Six: John Loftus and the “Outsider-Insider Test for Faith” David Marshall As author of one of the first books rebutting the New Atheism, over the past several years I’ve spent considerable time dialoguing with atheists, including such quasi-luminaries as Hector Avalos, Richard Carrier, Jerry Coyne, PZ Myers, and Victor Stenger. All seem to take it on faith that the New Atheism is eminently reasonable. Aside from atheists who also happened to be philosophers (who tend in my experience to argue more effectively), many have seemed to regard reason much as the young Augustine of Hippo saw chastity: “Lord, make me logical, but not just yet.” One New Atheist I have enjoyed talking with, though, has been former pastor John Loftus, who has written and edited several books attacking Christianity. Loftus sees himself as a sort of missionary to the working classes. Usually shown in his trademark cowboy hat, John wears his heart on his sleeve, being passionately self-promoting in an oddly humble way. Loftus’ signature argument is what he calls the Outsider Test for Faith. In its simplest form, the “OTF” is just the contention that Christians should be as skeptical about the faith in which they were (presumably) raised, as they are about, say, Islam or Inca worship of the Earth Goddess Pachamama. But Loftus expects that if Christians dare view their religion from an objective, outside perspective, they will abandon it in droves. So the OTF is also presented as an argument against Christianity. I have found this somewhat amusing, coming from an atheist from Indiana, who has been surrounded by Middle Americana all his life and never actually lived outside “Christendom” or the secular humanist philosophie that is its rebellious stepchild. By contrast, G. K. Chesterton told the story of a man who sailed a yacht to discover England, under the misconception that it was an island in the South Pacific. This combined, he said, the “fascinating terrors of going abroad combined with all the humane security of coming home again.” That has been my experience. I have spent most of my adult life far from the Christian ghetto: in secular universities, communist China, Buddhist Taiwan and Japan, post-Christian England, and swimming in a sea of ancient religious texts. I have also taken up academic interest in the process by which much of the world went from “outside” to “inside,” that is the history of Christian missions. Like Chesterton’s imaginary sailor, the further I left Christendom behind, the more the facts seemed to bring me back to Christ. In this chapter, I will first describe John Loftus’ version of the OTF, then note some of its problems. I’ll argue that the test should not be regarded a mere rhetorical question: it should pay close heed to the grand experiment that has sifted human beliefs, including secular humanism, over the past few millennia. I’ll then argue that Christianity has survived that sifting in four ways, not only from the outside, but also in its ability to find purchase from the inside of cultures and our hearts, transforming the human story from within.

Outsider Test for Faith John summarizes his argument in four points:

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(1) The Religious Diversity Thesis: “Rational people in distinct geographical locations around the globe overwhelmingly adopt and defend a wide diversity of religious faiths due to their upbringing and cultural heritage." (2) The Religious Dependency Thesis: "Consequently, it seems very likely that adopting one's religious faith is not merely a matter of independent rational judgment but is causally dependent on cultural conditions to an overwhelming degree." (3) Therefore, it is “highly likely that any given adopted religious faith is false." (4) In practice, one should hence test one’s religion “from the perspective of an outsider with the same level of skepticism used to evaluate other religious faiths." The reader may already see flaws in this argument. I think that hidden within it there lies a fundamental misconception of how Christians understand other faiths. Yet I also think Loftus is on to something, the flip side of four good arguments that support the unique truth of the Christian message. Let’s begin with some of the problems. For one thing, "diversity of religious faiths" is genuine, but deeply ambiguous. As G.K. Chesterton also noted, religions around the world commonly include four beliefs: in "God, the gods, philosophy,

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and demons." In years of studying world religions, I have found his observation to be largely true. Peel away labels, and many beliefs seem to be universal or at least very widespread. This could be called the "lack of religious diversity thesis,” and should be kept in balance with its alter ego. Nor is Loftus' second premise as obvious as he makes it sound. Often (as Loftus himself admits) people do adopt religions they were not taught as children. Even Americans born into one religion, as Michael Shermer in effect demonstrated in a broad survey of why Americans believe, often do

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rationally evaluate their beliefs. In most of the world, serious Christian faith is not the default position; even most American Christians go to secular schools, listen to secular music, watch secular movies, and (in extreme cases) read the blogs of John Loftus or PZ Myers. (And let us not pretend that secularism only appeared in Western culture with the internet.) So cultural dependency is real, but not "overwhelming." None of us is purely an insider to “Christian culture.” Also, atheist worldviews seem as “culturally dependent” as any other. Loftus has claimed that "Atheists do indeed take the

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OTF. That's why atheists are atheists in the first place.” But in fact, people also "adopt and defend" skeptical ideologies because of where they were born and how they were educated. In the fall of 2011, I surveyed 124 Chinese intellectuals, mostly in northern China, on their religious

beliefs. Among college students who gave clear answers, about two-thirds avowed atheism. But young Chinese who had already graduated from college were far more likely to identify themselves as believers of some sort or another—especially in Zen, Confucianism, or Christianity—with only onethird clearly choosing the “there is no God” option on the survey. Younger Chinese were predominantly atheistic, yet there was a clear trend away from atheism among intellectuals as they advanced in age and/or education. So evidently Marxist propaganda succeeds in making young Chinese into atheists, at least until they get out of school and experience the real world. Most atheists today live and have been raised in communist countries, where denying religion is the default position. (A broader survey conducted under the direction of Menchen, Johnson, and Stark, et. al., showed that about two-thirds of Chinese claim no religion.) And in western countries, many atheists are raised by unbelievers, while others convert (Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris explicitly say this should be a goal of education) through the influence of “godless professors,” as Dennett calls himself. Finally, even with these caveats, one must ask, does Loftus’ initial conclusion—point three—really follow from the premises that precede it? If we adopt certain beliefs because we have been taught them, does that really mean they are probably false? Obviously not. The general form of Loftus’ argument is: 1) Ideas about X vary among cultures; 2) The beliefs one adopts about X originate in one's culture, and in that sense depend on it; 3) Therefore one's beliefs are probably wrong. This seems to commit the genetic fallacy. This is the idea that the origin of an idea disproves it: "Guino is Italian, so of course he thinks olive oil is healthier than corn oil!" Maybe Guino's cultural bias does incline him to favor olive oil; but that doesn't mean olive oil isn't superior, or even that Guino doesn't hold his view for sound medical reasons. My belief that Earth circles the Sun is "culturally dependent." If I grew up in ancient Carthage, or among the Yali in Papua New Guinea, I would probably not believe it. I believe it not because I’ve proven it for myself, but because teachers told me it was so. Skeptics like Loftus commonly reply, “But you don’t have to take heliocentrism or the health benefits of olive oil on faith; you can prove them scientifically, unlike religion!” But who does? How do you know that electrons circle the nuclei of atoms? That earth contains a core of iron and nickel? Or even that you have two lungs? If we had to personally prove everything by the scientific method—no peaking at Wikipedia! Nothing on the web, or in books, or in classrooms, or even in academic journals, is itself “scientific evidence!”—we’d all toss our hands in the air and remain ignorant savages. Not having to “prove everything scientifically” is one of the great benefits of even the crudest forms of civilization. At a Neolithic town site in the Fertile Crescent, archeologists found seeds from more than a hundred different plant species. These seeds represented a cumulative knowledge of edible plants that had been tested and handed down from generation to generation, and would ultimately pave the way for civilization. This was culturally transmitted knowledge, accepted by each new generation based on human testimony, not “scientific testing.” Did that make it false? Obviously not.

Aristotle, one of the inventors of science, pointed out that aside from direct, scientific proof, it is rational to accept truth by attending to the “undemonstrated dicta and opinions of the skilful, the old, and the wise,” who over many generations serve as gatekeepers of truth in every tribe. Indeed, if his ancestors had not already been doing that for millennia, Greek civilization could not have produced an Aristotle. And if we care deeply about some matter, we may take time to research it more deeply —as many have with the resurrection of Jesus. The True Value of the Outsider Test For Loftus, the OTF is a rhetorical gambit by which to persuade Christians to cast a gimlet eye at the Gospel. John admits this forthrightly: We must offer them a shocking test, one that may help get them out of their dogmatic slumbers like nothing else can do. And they will object as strenuously as they can to the OTF because they know their faith does not pass that test. That’s why Christians argue against it just like Muslim scholars would . . .

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But Christians don’t need to “argue against” the Outsider Test for Faith. I want instead to ask skeptics to open their windows and step out, to sail to the South Seas, to take the history of religions more seriously, not less. Religions have played a three-thousand-year game of “Survivor” on a planetary scale, and Christianity has been voted onto the island of the human soul not once, but billions of times. The first problem for skeptics is empirical, not just theoretical. Why have the promises of a powerless, penniless 1st-century rabbi, preaching from a boat on an inland lake in what is now a mostly dead (and was even then an archaic) language, in a long-extinguished empire, been so spectacularly fulfilled? Converts Are Hard to Make Christianity did not succeed because conversion is easy. It is not! A former Muslim imam studying for his doctorate at Oxford University told me how he became a Christian. He was leader of a prominent mosque in Africa and an Islamic scholar successful enough to have been invited overseas to lecture. But one day, at the mosque, he heard the audible voice of God calling him to believe in Jesus. He left his home, and may never be able to return. I asked him whether he, as a scholar of Islamic Law, would have approved of applying the death penalty to Muslims who converted to Christianity. “Of course!” he replied. Muslims must mete out the death penalty to infidels, because Muhammad himself approved and carried it out. This is especially relevant, since John Loftus first formulated the OTF in reference to Saudi Arabia: So let me propose something I call The Outsider Test: If you were born in Saudi Arabia, you would be a Muslim right now, say it isn't so? That is a cold hard fact. Dare you deny it? Since this is so, or at least 99% so, then the proper method to evaluate your religious beliefs is with

a healthy measure of skepticism. Test your beliefs as if you were an outsider to the faith you are evaluating.

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Of course most people in Saudi Arabia are Muslim, because converts from Islam are killed. Even non-Saudi Christians, such as workers from the Philippines, are sometimes imprisoned and tortured. “Believe or die!” is not what one can call a “fair test.” When I lived in Japan, our family often soaked in a mountain hot spring. Nearby were a series of pools—“hells,” they call them in Japanese—where Catholic Christians were once boiled alive. Christianity spread rapidly in Japan in the 16th century, an “outsider test” that Japanese authorities put to an end not with friendly persuasion, but with torture and mass murder.

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Skeptics may reply that Christianity also spread that way—a claim I will dispute below. Some Christians, like the Inquisitors, did use force to prevent the spread of other beliefs, true enough. Most social pressure, while undoubtedly effective, is of a more subtle sort. Before she became a Christian, as a Japanese, my wife told me, “I feel I would be betraying my family, my culture, and my country.” Even in a country that has had religious liberty for more than a century, like modern Japan, tradition remains a powerful disincentive against conversion. For this reason, sociologists recognize that people are usually reluctant to convert to other religions. We like to “preserve our religious capital,” as Rodney Stark and Roger Finke put it, stating as a general proposition, “Under normal circumstances, most people will neither convert nor reaffiliate.”

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Like stocks or jewelry, people perceive their cultural traditions as among their most valuable possessions. Ancient peoples also often had powerful incentives to reject Christianity. While Christianity fulfilled much in Greek tradition (as we will see), it also challenged many things: Homer’s gods, the idol industry, gladiatorial fights in the Coliseum, the subservient status of women. Not to mention, some converts were fed to lions. Later, the Gospel was often wed to threatening cultures. Charlemagne cut down the Sacred Ash and killed Saxons who would not convert. Frankish Crusaders “glorified God” by massacring many of the inhabitants of Jerusalem. Spanish conquistadors exported the Iberian Peninsula’s hostility to the New World. Sometimes power served the desire to convert new believers. More often, however, officious European power created a series of barriers to Asians, Africans, and Native Americans who might think about becoming Christians. Many non-westerners protected their cultures by stigmatizing or even killing believers. “One more Christian, one fewer Chinese” not only expressed the common feeling that to convert meant betraying one’s nation, but also that conversion required a kind of de-

culturalization—drinking English whiskey, eating English beef, and going about “in European clothes, including a hat,”

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in effect spitting on the graves of one’s ancestors.

If Christianity were not also often seen as a friend to non-Western cultures, it would be a miracle for it to have spread as far as it has. It has often been recognized as a friend. And miracles in fact sometimes occurred. “Go Into All the World” The message of Jesus arrived in Athens, the cultural capital of Greco-Roman civilization, in the person of Paul, member of an unpopular ethnic minority. Paul walked about the city and surveyed its religious sites: the city famously overflowed with gods, mostly Greek, but also Egyptian deities and shrines to Roman emperors. Paul began debating followers of Zeno and Epicurus in the city market, where Zeno’s Stoic school had long ago been birthed. He was accused of “marketing foreign gods”; the locals may have found his accent hard to follow. He was invited to Mars Hill to explain himself. This was a forum where, according to legend, after the Trojan War, Apollo had defended the son of Agamemnon against the charge of murder, arguing before Athena, the city’s patron deity. After a brilliant philosophical introduction, Paul spoke of a Jewish preacher, for whose sake (based on astounding claims of a resurrection, which Apollo himself had denied at that earlier trial), he asked his hearers to “turn away” from the foolishness of idols. The city was in no rush to be rid of its rich heritage, the source of pride and profit, and many of his listeners scoffed out loud. Yet some did believe Paul’s message. Beginning from a little wandering band, like Neolithic huntergatherers (“fishers of men”), by the time of Constantine, Christianity had become a force to be reckoned with. By the time of Theodosius, most Greco-Romans claimed to be Christians. And in two more millennia, the message Paul preached had transformed wild northern Europe into the world’s greatest civilization, then spread across the Americas, to hundreds of tribes in African and Australia, and reformed, in deep and needed ways, the ancient civilizations of Asia. Nor has modernity halted its progress. A hundred years ago, there were few Christians in subSaharan Africa; now there are more than 400 million. A century ago, most Latins belonged to a syncretistic "Christo-paganism." Today tens of millions of evangelicals live in South America, and I have heard — my own field is East Asia, so I cannot verify this — that many Catholics have become more orthodox. In the past twenty years, some 60-90 million Chinese, and tens of millions of Indians, have taken the OTF, found that Christianity passed, and converted. Most others have probably not yet really considered Christianity, or been reluctant to convert for non-rational reasons—cultural inertia, vestiges of persecution, love of money or sexual sin, unexamined atheistic propaganda, continued anger over 19th-century "Christian" imperialism. Probably at least a million or more contemporary Muslims have also prayed to Jesus, despite the dangers, and despite rivalry with the (post) “Christian” West and natural attachment to their own traditions. Is not this vast movement of hearts and minds over centuries and continents, a more objective test of the Christian faith than the abstract mental exercise of an Indiana skeptic? Loftus compares choosing a religion to the scene in Cinderella in which the prince looks for the girl

he danced with, out of “45,000” (apparently relying on some forgotten fairyland census) who claim to have lost the glass slipper. “We would need to be skeptical of each claim and demand an empirical shoe fit before we should believe.” Of course one should ask tough questions about religious claims; no Christian philosopher suggests otherwise. Our claim is that we have found a snug “empirical shoe fit” between the claims of the Gospel and the real world. In Cinderella, though, the prince only finds one slipper. Billions of people claim to have found Christ. We should, therefore, narrow Loftus’ test down from tens of thousands, to religions that have already passed the Outsider Test, not in fairyland, but on the proving grounds of real human cultures. Assuming a broad definition of religion, on the surface five faiths seem to have met that challenge: in historical order, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Marxism-Leninism, and Secular Humanism. Islam and Communism spread mostly by violent conquest. Like the Borg of Star Trek fame, what Islam conquered, it mostly assimilated, its conquests being geographically contingent, dependent on the range of camels. If a Muslim converted out of Islam, said Muhammad, he should die. Stalin and Mao were also unkind to infidels. Yet the success of Islam and Marxism-Leninism does show there is credibility in their deepest claims: that God is one (on the one hand), and the call for justice for the poor (on the other). Buddhism and Secular Humanism, by contrast, spread mostly through persuasion. Buddhism is considered a great missionary faith, and it did, in some sense, capture the hearts of East Asians. But the forms of Buddhism that proved most popular owed little to the austere, self-help philosophy of the Indian Buddha. What really caught on was the aesthetic of Chinese and Japanese Zen—“in the chopping of firewood and the hauling of water, therein lies the wonderful Tao”—building on the cheerful wit of the Chinese humorist, Zhuang Zi. Pure Land Buddhism, which frankly sought a savior (“If you think of the power of Avalokitsvara, the ship will not be sunk by waves”), proved even more popular. Even so, by modern times few Chinese were serious Buddhists, because the faith repudiated family and Chinese dining customs (don’t eat meat!); and rather than improving society and creating science, the great scholar Hu Shi complained, it “made Chinese society a tragedy” by encouraging contempt for human life. Secular humanism does encourage science and social progress, because it is watered-down Christianity, a weed that grows in fields plowed by the Gospel. So even on a simple, historical level—the level of choices by billions of passionate, intellectuallyengaged people, not meme-numbed robots—Christianity is one of just a few belief systems that can be said to have passed the OTF, and to have done so most spectacularly. Furthermore, in the face of natural hostility, it has been found credible by many of the “old, wise and skilful” of those civilizations. So really, the glass slipper is on the other foot. The real intellectual challenge is, how do skeptics explain the unique empirical success of the Gospel?

Two New Atheists have offered explanations that defame the rationality of Christian conversion. Richard Carrier suggests in his book, Sense and Goodness Without God, that like Islam (presumably), Christianity “spread by the sword.”

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But in fact, usually it did not. In response to Carrier’s claim, I looked at twelve great regions and periods in which Christianity spread most impressively: ancient Rome, the Nestorian Middle East, China from the early Tang Dynasty to the present, Medieval Europe, Latin Christianity, Modern Europe, North America, Africa, India, Korea, the recent spread of evangelical Christianity in Latin America, and hundreds of tribes worldwide that have adopted Christianity. As Stark shows (The Rise of Christianity), by the time Christianity was legalized by Emperor Constantine in 313 A.D., about 10 percent of Romans had already become Christian, in the face of 300 years of persecution. Had Christianity simply continued to follow the same upward growth path, the Roman Empire would have become mostly Christian by mid-4th century, even without any political advantages. Force was a factor in the success of Christianity during only two of twelve periods: occasionally in Medieval Europe (for example when Charlemagne “converted” the Saxons after defeating them in battle), and the original, superficial conversion of Latin America. Christianity has probably been opposed by force more often than it has been spread that way. So this “explanation” simply doesn’t hold water: the vast majority of converts have believed because they wanted to. In The Religious Virus, Craig James offers a somewhat more subtle explanation. Having evolved in a competitive religious environment, like a successful invasive species—say, rats, mill foil, or blackberries (fruit or phone, take your pick)—Christianity acquired a set of adaptive traits, including the prestige and power of western science, that made it a stronger competitor in local intellectual marketplaces: Christianity was a highly evolved set of memes, filtered and improved by ten thousand or more years of the harshest meme competition in the history of the world. The aboriginal religions of places like the Pacific Islands, Australia and New Zealand never had a chance (169). But the environment in which beliefs flourish or fade is the human mind. Like all forms of what C. S. Lewis called “Bulverism,” patronizing talk about “memes” can just as easily be turned against skeptics: you are not people who think about ideas, accepting some and rejecting others because you find them valid or fallacious, you are unwitting “hosts” to “memes,” like body-snatching pods. Fulfillment James also takes a “zero-sum” understanding of religions for granted, but this is fundamentally mistaken. What is wanted is not one rigid system that merely overwhelms all prior beliefs held by the

“wise, old, and skillful” of every culture—which I think better describes the New Atheist vision of the future—but a universal belief that embraces the insights of many traditions. Loftus makes the same fatal mistake James does in his theology of religions: “At best there can only be one true religion in what we observe to be a sea of hundreds of false ones . . .” (99).As Lewis once pointed out, that is the position an atheist is forced to adopt, but not a Christian. Indeed, as a former pastor, Loftus ought to know better: the first premise of Christianity is that Judaism is true. After all, the Bible has two halves, and the first half is longer. Jesus said, "Don't think I've come to abolish the Law and the Prophets. I have come not to abolition, but fulfill" (Mt. 5:17). That makes at least two true religions. This principle can be extended, to some extent, to the deepest truths in other spiritual traditions as well. In general, a good theory is not one that completely displaces prior theories, but one that incorporates what truth can be found in them. Kepler didn't refute the idea that the planets revolve around the sun, but described their motion more economically and accurately. Einstein didn't render Newton's model of gravitation null and void. He showed that it was a special case, still useful for everyday observation. When I tried to explain this to Loftus, he challenged me: Maybe (David) can show us someone who was raised in a tribal religion in Africa who had no outside influence on him from another culture (i.e. no Mormon missionary) who became a right wing Christian Republican? Brushing aside the irrelevant political jibes, the substance of this challenge is easily met. Yale historian Lamin Sanneh notes, “When they came to Africa, missionaries began with a methodical inquiry into the nature and character of God among Africans, and before long it was obvious Africans had a deep sense of the reality of God” (Translating the Message, 158). John Mbiti describes African perceptions of God that agree with what the Bible says about him in rich detail. Missionaries can point to millions of Africans who believed in God, sin, the spirit world, life after death, and sacrifice for sins, before they ever saw a Bible. This is but one reason hundreds of millions of African tribesmen, and people in other cultures, overcame the stigma of believing an “outside,” even an “imperialist” religion: Jesus came to fulfill, not destroy, the most fundamental foundations of African religion. The same was also true in the Pacific Islands that James mentions. Polynesians often believed in God, whom they called Io, and who some say prepared Hawaiians for the Gospel. (Only the upper class was allowed to worship Him, though: the Gospel expanded the franchise.) In the best (and most orthodox) Christian thinking, religion is not a zero-sum game. World religions are not like so many fruits in the market, from which (having just one dollar) you must choose a single item, which is true, and leave the rest, which are totally false. It is a singularly "fundamentalist" way of thinking that insists one must choose one religion and simply dismiss everything in the rest. Loftus here tossed an accusation at me (which always makes me laugh) of lapsing into liberalism:

David has a bit more enlightened view of religion than people held to in previous centuries. Bloodthirsty wars were fought over them, and there's a lot of killing going on today because of them too. I find it utterly ignorant though, for someone like David to think he can stand up in the midst of stadium filled with religionists to tell them all: ‘Hey, I've got the answer. We don't need to choose between Yahweh, Elohim, theos, Allah, and Shang Di, or Xenu, Thor, Odin, and the thousands of dead gods, or that guy who claims he's Jesus living in Texas. No, we share common ground . . .’ I only ask where David's enlightened view comes from and how far is he willing to take it? It doesn't come from the Bible, that's for sure. Actually, I have stood up in biblical churches of many denominations around the world (though no stadiums, yet), and argued that “pagans” in cultures recognize God by many names. And I quote the Bible itself to make my case, because that is, indeed, where I get the idea. In perhaps the most dramatic passage of Acts (17:28), Paul stood on Mars Hill and cited several Greek thinkers: “As some of your own poets have said, ‘In him we live and breathe and have our being . . . ‘ ‘We also are his offspring.’” Paul refers to two Greek words for God here: first theos, which Loftus mentions. One poem he likely refers to is by Aratus, and is written to Zeus. As Paul surely knew, Stoics and other Greek thinkers had been talking about God in a serious way for centuries by this time, as described in Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods, and Stoic philosopher Cleanthes’ Hymn to Zeus, which Paul may also have been citing. (“Most glorious of the immortals, invoked by many names, ever all-powerful, Zeus, the First Cause of Nature, who rules all things with Law . . . from you we have our being, we whose lot it is to be God’s image, we alone of all mortal creatures that live and move upon the earth . . . “) Even Richard Carrier, in a chapter Loftus edited, recognizes that Greek thinkers were “motivated to pursue scientific inquiry” by their pious belief in “a Creator who had intelligently ordered the cosmos,” study of whose works honored God (The Christian Delusion, 407). A millennium and a half later, Matteo Ricci told the Chinese literati (joining a few quotes here): “After closely studying your ancient scriptures, I found that the great men of old revered Shang Di, the High Sovereign of Heaven and Earth . . . whom we call Deus.” Loftus dismisses evidence of God in other cultures as follows: Similarities show nothing except that concepts of god have gravitated toward monotheism because such a concept is a simpler one. This again is how religions evolve . . . No religion in a world community could hope to have a big enough god anymore unless that god is the only god. As people became more aware of other city-states their god had to encompass their religions too. So god concepts grew bigger as the world got bigger. This is based on a false and outdated theory of anthropology. We now know that God has not, in fact, evolved at all. Peoples in Africa, Australia, Asia, and the Americas who lived the most primitive

lifestyles were often the most aware of God, understanding Him very much as the Bible does.

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Of course, the residents of Athens and Beijing had not heard of Jesus, which is why Paul and Ricci came, and why it was “Good News” that they brought. But even there, just as the Jews spoke of a Messiah, a Son of David whose influence would go to the end of the world, and a Suffering Servant who would “see the light of life” after suffering to redeem mankind, so locals sometimes recognized that Jesus fulfilled archetypes and prophecies given by Plato, Homer, Confucius, Lao Tzi, and Mencius. The deepest truths in each great tradition find themselves not only fulfilled but strengthened in Jesus, and great errors corrected, while he “takes away the sins of the world” in a collective, social sense as well as for individuals. The Gospel affirms, with Islam, that there is one God, and that he sends prophets to teach us how to live. The Koran even names the greatest of those prophets—Jesus, not Muhammad—the “Messiah” and the “Breath of God.” But what can I say to a girl from Saudi Arabia who tells me, “I’ll only go back to Saudi in a body bag?” Jesus also showed compassion for women that changed the world, and needs to change Islam today. Ancient Hindus recognized the centrality of divine sacrifice. India later descended into caste

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divisions and the burning of widows on funeral pyres, until the Gospel prompted reform. Buddhists recognized the importance of compassion. Lao Tzi wrote of the power of weakness to overcome strength, and of a Sage who incarnates the Way and is “lord of the sacrifice.” Confucian texts spoke of a great God who rules over humanity. Confucius also looked to a future “Holy Man” who would benefit all peoples of the world. His greatest disciple, Mencius, prophesied that such a Sage would appear 500 years after Confucius, just as the Diamond Sutra prophesied a transcendent Buddha 500 years after Siddhartha. Both dates bring us to about the time a Galilean fisherman asked a friend to “Come and see!” a remarkable new rabbi. If you're an atheist, you have to believe that most of what people in every civilization have always believed is wrong. The Gospel, on the other hand, digs deep into the heart of tradition and reveals forgotten and overlooked truth, bringing it out into the open, and invigorating it with new life. The West took hundreds of years to come to faith. With all the trouble jackbooted European imperialists gave the rest of the world, maybe we can give Chinese and Indians time to mull things over, like a mustard seed that grows into a tree and gives shelter to many birds, to which Jesus compared the Kingdom of Heaven. Tens of millions are already responding. The Outsider Who Comes as an Insider The first people to accept the Gospel were Jews who saw Jesus as the fulfillment of hopes that their race had held for centuries. They were, in fact, both "insiders" and "outsiders" in relation to Christianity. Jesus said, "Don't think I've come to abolish the Law and the Prophets. I've come to fulfill them." Yet the Gospel was alive to injustice and came to judge human traditions: Jesus also challenged time-honored Hebrew conventions, like a seed planted in the ground, dying, and bringing forth new life from old soil. What about the first Gentile Christians? People like Justin, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and

Augustine were clearly "insiders” in relation to Greco-Roman tradition. Yet much that was already present within their own culture—the theism that had grown popular; the heroic example of a sage, Socrates, who willingly died for truth; the moral teachings of the Stoics; the “altar to the Unknown God” that Paul found while exploring Athens; even the figure of Odysseus, like Jesus (said Clement of Alexandria) tied to the mast to pass the sirens and bring his ship home—encouraged Greeks and Roman to trust in Jesus. One of Clement’s students, the brilliant Origen, saw this clearly: If anyone were to come from the study of Grecian opinions and usages to the Gospel, he would not only decide that its doctrines were true, but would by practice establish their truth, and supply whatever seemed wanting, from a Grecian point of view (Contra Celsus, 1, 2). Can you best tell the value of a house from inside, or outside? Both perspectives, of course, are important. You want to check its foundation, look for sags in the roof, check for water marks on the ceiling, or holes in the linoleum. You also observe how the house sits on its site, whether the neighbors are the sort you’d borrow a cup of sugar from, or call the police on at 3 a.m. To appreciate the value of Christianity, it does help to go outside it, either historically (by studying what Christianity fulfilled and changed in the ancient world), or geographically (by getting to know other traditions). So while I think Loftus formulates and uses the Outsider Test for Faith wrongly, I approve of it. I think Christianity is affirmed by this test in four ways, or in four versions of the test: 1) The test of history. In a straightforward sense, Christianity has attracted more believers from more ethnic and cultural groups than any other religion. If the OTF shows anything empirically, it shows that Christianity must possess remarkable reserves of plausibility to have convinced so many people, in so many cultures, to risk so much, to follow Jesus. 2 ) The test of prophecy. In Genesis 12, God tells Moses, “All the peoples of the earth will be blessed through your seed.” From early Genesis to the end of Revelation, the Bible is abuzz with predictions that the Good News will spread to the “ends of the Earth.” Those hundreds of prophecies have demonstrably and remarkably (if you think about how improbable they must have seemed on a remote hill in the Levant, or on a fishing boat on the Sea of Galilee) come true. 3) The Insider Test . Christianity affirms truths of which peoples around the world have been aware, for millennia. Christianity provides a larger map of the world that embraces deep insights known to David, Isaiah, Socrates, Plato, Zeno, Epictetus, Buddha, Confucius, Lao Tzi, and informed "outsiders" who become insiders. 4) The Insider-Outsider Test. The Gospel also fulfills specific archetypes and prophecies, beginning with the Jewish Scriptures, but even prophecies among Gentile writers who foresaw such a Savior. The Outsider Test is nothing new, though. Chesterton formulated one version a century ago, with his imaginary trip (back) to England. In conclusion, let me repeat the “Insider-Outsider” version of the test I wrote in Jesus and the Religions of Man, six years before John Loftus came up with his useful

gimmickry: What should a Christian say to an idealist setting out on a journey? Seek the good in every spiritual tradition and cherish it; but don’t be naïve. Allow yourself to become desperate enough to be heretical, and even desperate enough to be orthodox. Give credit where credit is due, but also blame where blame is due. Take ideals seriously enough to live by, even die for. But be careful to whom you open your heart. Follow each star to the place where it leads. Then come and look again in a town called Bethlehem. What is it you are looking for? Look, then, for a god among the gods of humanity. Look for a guru among the gurus of humankind at whose feet to find enlightenment. Wear tennis shoes out upon the holy hills of the Incas. Shake clouds of dust from ancient manuscripts of the sacred libraries of Lhasa and Alexandria. Ponder every sect, tribe and teacher from Tierra Del Fuego to Tibet. Then come, open the New Testament. Look again at the life and teachings of the man who said of the Jewish writings, “You investigate the Scriptures, because you suppose you have eternal life in them, and yet they bear witness to me” (John 5:39).

Chapter Seven: The Explanatory Emptiness of Naturalism David Wood A few thousand years ago, phenomena such as thunder, a solar eclipse, or a man having a seizure would be perceived quite differently from how they are perceived today. In the ancient world, gods and demigods, spirits and monsters, magic and curses were perfectly acceptable means of explaining strange occurrences. If something seemed unnatural, appeal was made to the supernatural. Centuries of scientific investigation have greatly undermined early superstition. Thunder is a sonic shock wave caused by rapidly expanding air following a lightning strike (not the bellowing of a god). A solar eclipse is the alignment of sun, moon, and earth (not the sun being temporarily devoured by a dragon). Epileptic seizures are the result of abnormal neuronal activity in the brain (rather than demonic possession). Science books contain no reference to supernatural forces or entities to explain these phenomena, for the natural world, when properly explored, is all too happy to reveal its causal chains. The success of scientific investigation has led many thinkers to conclude that science will ultimately (if it hasn’t already) make all supernatural explanations obsolete. Whatever gaps remain in our understanding of the world, they are steadily being filled in. Since these ever diminishing gaps form the basis of Natural Theology, arguments for God’s existence will soon have no foundation whatsoever. God has nothing left to do. Thus the past few decades have seen a growing shift from mere Methodological Naturalism (which holds that the sciences should confine themselves to natural explanations) to Metaphysical Naturalism (the claim that the natural world is all that exists). The reasoning that underlies this shift may be summarized in a syllogism:

1. If science explains things, then Naturalism is probably true. 2. Science explains things. 3. Therefore, Naturalism is probably true. The first premise is the crucial one. It seems to be based on the notion that the explanatory success of science is itself a kind of data favoring one hypothesis (Naturalism) over its competitor (Supernaturalism). To see why such a notion is plausible to many people, consider what we would expect given the truth of each hypothesis. If Naturalism were true, we would expect all effects to have natural causes. The only breaks in our scientific explanations would be due to our ignorance, not to an actual break in any natural causal series. But if Supernaturalism (the claim that non-natural entities exist and can affect the natural world) were true, we might expect significant and regular breaks in chains of natural causes, due to supernatural intervention.

When we investigate the world using the tools of the biologist, or the geologist, or the physicist, we find that natural effects are preceded by natural causes. Science gives us explanations without appealing to the supernatural. Since this is exactly what we would expect if Naturalism were true, we say that the success of science confirms Naturalism over Supernaturalism. Or so the story goes. The problem with the naturalist’s story is that it is grounded in extraordinarily superficial thinking. Contrary to the claims of several popular atheists, science offers no support for Naturalism. Indeed, if Naturalism were true, we could learn nothing at all through the sciences. Hence, I would like to revise our original syllogism as follows:

1. If science explains things, then Naturalism is false. 2. Science explains things. 3. Therefore, Naturalism is false. Once again, the first premise is the crucial step. To see why it is true, we simply need to consider what is required for scientific investigation to take place. If Naturalism can’t account for these necessary preconditions, then Naturalism can’t account for science, and science turns out to be evidence against Naturalism. Let’s examine eight conditions without which science could not take place. As we will soon see, none of them makes sense in Naturalism. The Cosmological Problem The first thing we need for scientific exploration is a world to examine (and to live in). Without the universe around us, science obviously wouldn’t take place. But think about what happens when we ask ourselves if Naturalism can explain the existence of the universe. First Question: Has the natural world existed for all eternity, or did it have a beginning? We know from cosmology (the expansion of the universe implies an origin in the past), thermodynamics (entropy is increasing, so the universe would have died a heat-death long ago unless it had a finite past), mathematics (an infinite collection of things is impossible, but a beginningless past would entail an infinite collection of events), and philosophy (an endless series of events leads to logical absurdities) that our universe does not have an infinite past. But if the universe hasn’t existed for all eternity, then it must have had a beginning. Second Question: Did the natural world begin to exist as a result of some cause, or did it spring into existence uncaused? The second alternative is obviously absurd, for “nothing” would have no power to bring about anything. (Recent claims to the contrary by Stephen Hawking and Lawrence Krauss fail to recognize that their “nothing” is not really nothing; it is a vacuum field seething with potential and subject to natural laws.) Out of nothing, nothing comes. But this means that the universe must have begun to exist as a result of some cause. Third Question: Was the natural world caused by something apart from it, or was it self-caused?

Here again, the second alternative is absurd. Nothing can cause itself to come into being, for it would need to precede its own existence in order to bring about its own existence. Since this is impossible, the natural world must have been caused by something beyond the natural world. According to Naturalism, however, the natural world is all that exists. Hence, because the universe requires a cause of its existence, and Naturalism rules out such a cause, Naturalism is undermined by the sheer existence of our world. The Fine-Tuning Problem But will just any universe do? Could we make scientific discoveries in any old world? Not at all. In order to do research of any kind, the fundamental structure of the universe has to be finely-tuned for intelligent life. The forces, principles, and constants of physics, certain physical quantities, the ratios between the masses of atomic particles, and the properties of elements and compounds have to be just right, or scientists wouldn’t exist. Consider some of the forces of nature. Without gravity, there would be no planets, stars, or galaxies. Without the strong nuclear force, protons and neutrons wouldn’t hold together in the nucleus of an atom, and hydrogen would be the only element on the periodic table. Without the electromagnetic force, there would be no chemical interactions between atoms, and the molecules necessary for life could not form. Various principles of physics are also essential for life. The Pauli Exclusion Principle keeps electrons from all falling into the lowest orbital. Without it there would be no complex chemistry, and we need complex chemistry for life. The Principle of Quantization keeps electrons from falling into the nucleus. Without it there would be no chemistry at all. But the fact that we have the necessary forces and principles isn’t nearly as surprising as the finetuning of the numbers that physicists plug into the laws of nature. These are the constants of physics. The cosmological constant, the gravitational constant, the strong force constant, the fine structure constant—these numbers could have had a wide range of values, as far as anyone knows, and yet the values they actually have fall into the extremely narrow range that makes biological life possible. With nothing beyond the natural world to select the necessary values for these constants, naturalists have been forced to seek refuge in one of two shelters. First, many naturalists attempt to explain cosmic fine-tuning via the “Multiverse.” If reality actually consists of a vast array of universes (our universe being one among many), perhaps it isn’t surprising that at least one of the universes contains the laws, principles, and constants required for intelligent life. However, this response merely pushes the problem up one level, for the laws governing the Multiverse would themselves need to be finely tuned (and on a much grander scale!). Second, we know that improbable events sometimes occur. Perhaps the universe is finely tuned for

life due to an extraordinary run of luck. We’re here, aren’t we? Surely we must have gotten lucky, or we wouldn’t be here to recognize the astonishing coincidence! Unfortunately for the naturalist, this response won’t work either, for there are limits to what may reasonably be ascribed to luck or chance. Suppose a murderous psychopath locks you in a room, puts a gun to your head, and hands you two dice. He then says, “If you roll double sixes, I’ll let you live. If you roll anything else, you’re dead. Now roll.” So you roll the dice, and double sixes turn up. Here you might conclude that you got lucky, for you had a one in thirty-six chance of surviving: not great, but better than nothing. But your captor tells you to roll again: “Make sure you get double sixes, or you’re dead.” You roll the dice again and you get . . . double sixes. Now you might think that you’ve been very, very lucky (you had a one in 1296 chance of making it this far). But what if this keeps happening? What if the psychopath makes you roll again and again, day after day, year after year, and you keep rolling the numbers necessary for life (in this case, your life). Doesn’t there come a point when luck no longer qualifies as an explanation (perhaps because the dice are obviously loaded?). If so, then “chance” isn’t an explanation for the fine-tuning of the cosmos any more than it could have been for the dice, and Naturalism cannot account for some of the most fundamental characteristics of our universe. The Problem of Biological Complexity So we need a universe, and we need the fundamental structure of the universe to be finely tuned for life. But just as you can have a well-crafted doghouse without actually having a dog, you can have a universe finely tuned for life without actually having life. The third requirement for scientific exploration, then, is complex biology. Without the biological processes going on in our bodies—e.g., the proper functioning of the circulatory system, the endocrine system, the muscular system, the nervous system, and the respiratory system—the world would still exist, but no science would ever take place, for human beings wouldn’t exist. Where on earth did our diverse biological complexity come from? According to naturalists, life arose from nonlife through some mysterious combination of chemical interactions and chance. From there, natural selection acting on random mutation took over, ultimately giving rise to higher-level sentient creatures. But let’s consider what would be necessary for evolution to get started. The earliest life capable of evolving would have to meet three essential requirements. First, it must be capable of reproducing. Reproduction may be relatively unsurprising to us, because we are so familiar with living organisms making copies of themselves. But if we stop for a moment and think about how difficult it would be for us, with all our skill in manufacturing and engineering, to produce an object that has the ability to make more objects like itself, we might begin to see how amazing it is that the earliest life originated with such an ability already in place. Second, although potentially evolving life must be able to reproduce, the reproduction process needs to achieve a very delicate balance between variety and similarity. There must be some variety among

the offspring, for if organisms produced exact copies of themselves, there would be no variation for natural selection to act on. But there must also be a high degree of similarity, for if organisms produced offspring much different from themselves, then beneficial traits would not be passed on to future generations. Thus, for an organism to possess even the bare possibility of evolving, it must reproduce copies almost exactly like itself, but not perfect copies. Third, potentially evolving life must contain a mechanism for passing on genetic information to offspring. Most people know that DNA stores coded information in living things. However, few are aware of how sophisticated DNA is as an information storage system. As biochemist Michael Denton

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has pointed out, a single teaspoon of DNA could store all of the genetic information for every species that has ever lived, and it would still have room for the information contained in every book ever written. This is vastly superior to modern computer hard drives, and such a system would need to be in place for evolution to get off the ground. There’s much more we could say about complex biology, but I have limited my comments to what naturalists need at the beginning of their story about life. (See Chuck Edwards’ essay in the fourth chapter for more on this topic.) How do naturalists explain the origin of life? Their worldview forces them to resort to “luck” yet again. A series of happy coincidences produced the first organism capable of evolving, meeting the three criteria we’ve already noted. However, as we’ve seen, there are limits to what may reasonably be attributed to chance, and the naturalist has nothing in his explanatory tool belt that can deal with complex biological systems. The Problem of Consciousness Of course, we need more than mere biological complexity to study our world. Cats are biologically complex, but cats obviously can’t do what we do. In order to ponder our place in the universe, and to ask difficult questions, and to desire answers, and to find certain explanations satisfying or unsatisfying, we need human consciousness. And it’s important to recognize that human consciousness requires more than a large and convoluted brain. Consciousness requires what we call a “soul.” Naturalists hold that beliefs, awareness, thoughts, emotions, hopes, and decisions are simply brain states (i.e. physical states in the brain). But what sense does this make? Our beliefs are true or false. An arrangement of particles in a brain cannot be true or false (one arrangement of particles being true, and another being false). We have thoughts that are about things. It makes no sense to say that a pattern of molecules is about anything. A scientist who examines my brain might learn all kinds of things about my brain that I don’t know. But he’ll never learn more about my mind than I know. If a scientist wants to know what’s in my brain, he can give me an MRI scan; if he wants to know what’s in my mind, he has to ask me. So even though the mind and the brain are closely linked in human beings, there’s more to the mind than brain matter. If Naturalism is true, human consciousness cannot exist, because the only explanations naturalists can appeal to involve particles, energy, and natural forces. But the human mind is inexplicable in these

terms. Human consciousness is therefore inexplicable in Naturalism. The Problem of Reason When we consider science, however, we’re not interested only in human consciousness, but with a particular activity of the human mind—the mind’s ability to reason. Human beings examine and weigh evidence because we trust our reasoning ability. We wouldn’t perform experiments or draw conclusions if we thought that our cognitive faculties—the processes that produce our beliefs—were unreliable. But naturalists have a problem here. According to naturalists, our ability to reason is the product of natural selection acting on random mutation. Natural selection, of course, favors traits that help organisms survive and reproduce. So if human reasoning evolved naturally, it’s because it helped human beings survive and reproduce. Does this give us any basis for trusting our reasoning ability when it comes to questions of cosmology, or quantum mechanics, or neuroscience? Not at all. At best, our cognitive faculties would be reliable when it comes to finding berries, or using a spear against an enemy, or doing something to attract a mate. Interestingly, Darwin himself noticed this problem. He once admitted:

[W]ith me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?

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In other words, our reasoning ability serves the same evolutionary purpose as the traits of other animals (e.g., the claws of a lion, the song of a canary, or the colorful buttocks of a baboon). We wouldn’t trust the traits of animals to lead us to the truth, because they weren’t developed for that purpose. Why, then, would we trust our own convictions, which are the result of the same evolutionary process? There’s no way around this problem for naturalists, for in order to escape the Problem of Reason, they would need to construct an argument. But this argument would presuppose the reliability of human reason, which is precisely the issue under investigation. Hence, if we take Naturalism seriously, we cannot take our reasoning ability seriously, and science falls apart. The Problem of Logic Human reason would be even less reliable if it weren’t governed by certain logical truths, e.g., the Law of Non-Contradiction, the Law of Excluded Middle, various valid argument forms, and so on. When we present arguments (whether in science, philosophy, politics, etc.), we’re presupposing that there are logical absolutes—rules of reasoning that cannot be violated. If I say that God exists, and a naturalist says that God doesn’t exist, we can’t both be right. Why? Because if you say we’re both right, you’re saying that God both exists and doesn’t exist, and this violates the Law of NonContradiction (i.e., “a statement cannot be both true and false at the same time and in the same

sense”). But what are logical laws? They obviously aren’t material objects. We don’t learn about them through the senses. We can’t see them, hear them, touch them, taste them, or smell them, and we’ll never find them with a telescope or a microscope. We don’t discover laws of logic the way we discover laws of nature (e.g., the law of gravity). We learn about laws of nature by making observations, performing scientific experiments, and producing generalizations. Logical laws are abstract and conceptual. They’re concepts, which means that they only exist in the mind. However, logical laws don’t depend on human minds. The Law of Non-Contradiction was true before there were any human beings, and if all human beings were to die tomorrow, it will still be true. In fact, the laws of logic would be true in any universe, not just ours. So the laws of logic transcend time, space, matter, and all human minds. They’re invariant, unchanging, and eternal. But according to Naturalism, the natural world is all that exists, which entails that there are no transcendent logical laws. At best, logical laws would describe how human beings tend to think. And since our thinking (on Naturalism) is the product of natural selection acting on random mutation, we would have no reason to treat logical laws as foundational to correct thinking. Thoughtful argumentation would degenerate into an unguided, unstructured series of statements, with no defensible method of connecting them. The Problem of Natural Uniformity Even if we have the ability to reason logically, however, Naturalism leaves science perpetually ungrounded. To see why, consider what would happen if a skeptical questioner decided to challenge the claims of science. He asks the naturalist, “Why should I believe the results of your experiments?” “Our experiments allow us to test our hypotheses,” replies the naturalist. “And how do you know that future experiments won’t give different results?” “Because,” says the naturalist, “the laws of nature don’t change.” “But how do you know they don’t change?” “Well, we’ve been observing Nature’s laws for centuries, and we’ve never seen them change.” “I don’t care if they’ve never changed in the past. I want to know what evidence you have that these laws won’t change tomorrow?”

“Just that they haven’t changed in the past.” “But that’s exactly what I’m asking. How do you know that the future will be like the past? You obviously assume that Nature’s laws are uniform. I just don’t see how you can defend this assumption. You can’t appeal to the past as evidence that the future will follow the same laws, because that’s precisely what we’re questioning. It turns out, then, that you have no basis for believing that the results of your scientific investigation tell us how we should expect the world to behave. All this talk of natural ‘laws’ becomes groundless.” I should point out that I am not questioning the Uniformity of Nature (i.e., the assumption that natural laws don’t change from time to time, or from place to place). We all know that the same set of experiments performed under the same circumstances will give the same results tomorrow that they give today. But we didn’t learn this from science, for science presupposes the Uniformity of Nature. If we attempt to establish the Uniformity of Nature using a method that presupposes such uniformity, we will be reasoning in a circle. Thus, science remains fundamentally unjustified unless an appeal is made to something beyond science. But the naturalist has nowhere to go. Since he cannot defend the Uniformity of Nature, he cannot defend science itself. If we want to retain our confidence in science, then, we must again reject Naturalism. The Problem of Value Uniform laws of nature, however, aren’t enough to ensure the success of science, for the pursuit of knowledge epitomized by science presupposes certain values that are inconsistent with Naturalism. While scientific investigation often has a practical goal (e.g., curing a disease), we also pursue knowledge for its own sake. That is, we try to understand our universe because we believe that it is good to understand our universe, even if the knowledge we gain has no practical value whatsoever. For instance, cosmology, quantum mechanics, and most astronomical research will never make food more plentiful or lead to a higher quality of life for human beings. Indeed, our quest to understand ultimate reality (the sort of study involved in claiming that Naturalism is true) has nothing to do with making our lives more comfortable. Yet, if Naturalism is true, there are no objective values (i.e., values that are valid independent of our opinions or preferences). Of course, in a naturalist’s world, human beings would still be free to value various things, such as life, money, freedom, pleasure, and so on. But in Naturalism, such values are either personal (I like grape soda best), cultural (we like freedom of speech in the West), or a product of evolution (we should work for the good of our species). These values aren’t objective, however. There is no independent standard by which to judge that such values are more valid than their opposites. You may hate grape soda. Some cultures despise free speech. And while human beings clearly want to preserve our species, many competing species seek their own preservation, often at the expense of other species that are seeking their preservation. What makes human beings right when it comes to our values? Assuming Naturalism is true, nothing makes our values right in any objective

sense. So naturalists have yet another problem. If we seek scientific knowledge because we value knowledge as good in itself (not simply for its benefits), and Naturalism holds that nothing is good in itself, then Naturalism will always undermine science. This isn’t to say that scientific exploration will come to an end if everyone adopts the naturalist’s worldview. It’s simply to point out that there will always be an underlying tension between science (which presupposes certain values) and Naturalism (which cannot support such values). To put the matter differently, if we are going to pursue scientific knowledge of the universe and its history, we must be convinced that the results of our investigation matter (i.e., that they are significant in some sense). But if Naturalism is true, the results of scientific exploration matter very little. Our universe is a massive place, and our solar system is a trivial speck by comparison. These little creatures called “humans,” a chance product of matter in motion (yet so important to ourselves), will eventually go extinct, for the sun will run out of energy. True, some research may lead to easier, more comfortable lives for human beings, but our end is unavoidable. While practical sciences such as medicine may increase the length or quality of our lives, our days are numbered, and our understanding of quarks or quasars is entirely irrelevant to our destiny. If we seek knowledge, it is for our temporary amusement, or for the satisfaction of a biologically gratuitous desire. This is hardly the sort of thinking that could drive science and learning. Again, even in Naturalism, we’re free to value knowledge, just as we’re free to value rare coins or stamps. But if naturalists are correct, our belief in the intrinsic goodness of knowledge is a kind of delusion. Once we recognize the delusion, how can we continue pretending that truth is something we ought to pursue, or that our time wouldn’t be better spent eating, drinking, and being merry? Assessment Putting all of this together, we see that Naturalism is bankrupt as a worldview. Naturalism cannot explain the existence of our universe, the fine-tuning of the cosmos, complex biology, human consciousness, the reliability of our cognitive faculties, our access to logical laws, the Uniformity of Nature, or the values we hold. But since science presupposes and depends upon these features of our world, Naturalism provides no foundation for science, and scientific discovery is an enormous problem for Naturalism. What does this mean? It means that if science explains things, Naturalism must be false. Now that we have established the key premise in our argument, there’s no avoiding the conclusion:

1. If science explains things, then Naturalism is false. 2. Science explains things. 3. Therefore, Naturalism is false.

Hence, if science tells us anything, it tells us that Naturalism is a dead option. Anyone looking for a worldview consistent with scientific discovery will have to look elsewhere.

Chapter Eight: By It, We See Everything Else—The Explanatory Value of Christianity for Meaning and Ethics Samuel J. Youngs Seeing the World in Terms of Meaning Paul Tillich, the sometimes-maligned but undeniably brilliant existential philosopher and theologian, once said that religion and philosophy was that sort of thinking which [86] strives to answer “questions of ultimate concern.” His idea was that there are questions, and then there are questions. Some queries are so mundane that it has long been colloquial to label them “small talk” (how’s the weather? how’s work? what’ve you been up to lately?). Then there are those without which we would have no foundation from which to answer anything—not about the weather, not about work, not about anything at all. These are questions of ultimate concern: Where did everything come from? What is our destiny as a race? What is right and wrong? and What is the purpose of existence? This last one is perhaps the more recognizable, for it has become sort of the “cliché” question of ultimate concern. It is most often formulated as, “What is the meaning of life?” Not all clichés are vapid. Some are simply common. In fact, one of the hallmarks of ultimate concerns, according to Tillich, is that they are common to all peoples in some form or another. We all wonder about our origins, our destiny, about morality and meaning. And the question of meaning, of purpose, is what this essay will seek to clarify, explore, and, in its own way, exalt. When pressed on the “question of meaning,” an increasingly vocal regiment of Western thinkers resonates with Richard Dawkins’ dour pronouncement that, if one was to plumb the very depths of the universe itself, there is only to be found “blind, [87] pitiless indifference.” In this stark phrase, “blind” and “pitiless” serve the ironic role of intensifying a noun that itself signifies an utter lack of intensity, of emotion, of intentionality, of care. Indifference. What does a gong care that it is struck? What does the ocean care if human tears fall upon it? What does the wind care if it ravages a family’s ramshackle home? They care nothing. They are indifferent. Such is the universe; the center of meaning, according to Dawkins and his brand, is the absence of meaning. They cannot stop here, if they are to be thorough, nor can we in considering their position. For the “question of meaning” is not a simple grab bag of metaphysical

pronouncements. It is not just a question about prime reality or about the essential nature of this world we find ourselves thrown into. It includes these considerations, but it is not exhausted by them. Important consequences follow from the question of meaning. To phrase it in a manner both simple and cumbersome, meaning means something. What’s more, it means something for us. What I’ve come to see time and again in my experience as a student, teacher, and scholar is that thinking people all eventually tire of the abstract. Big ideas, fundamental conceptual canopies, the sort of thing that Dawkins is getting at when he talks about the rock-bottom indifference of the universe, only hold our gaze for so long. Sooner or later, we’ll rest our head on our hands or sigh heavily or lean across the table and ask, “What does all this mean for me? What do these big ideas have to do with my life?” As Dustin Hoffman incredulously exclaims as he’s nearly run over by a New York taxi, “Hey! I’m walking here!” so do we all sometimes throw up our intellectual arms and cry, “Hey! I’m living here!” We want desperately to know how much traction an idea has; we want to know how much it can really explain or justify; we want to know what ideas mean for the people we love, for the goals we pursue, for the way we think and behave, for anything and for everything. Seeing Naturalism Honestly Though Dawkins certainly has a penchant (and a talent) for weaving punchy rhetoric throughout his written work, his “indifferent universe” stands in the shadow of an even more grandiloquent and somber depiction of our human situation: That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, [88] can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built . . . Bertrand Russell, the philosophically astute and markedly brazen forefather of many

contemporary neo-atheists, pulls no punches here. If the universe is without a designer, without an intelligent cause, without a personage behind the great curtain of existence, then all is truly naught but ruins, despair, finitude, and affliction. Russell is not a fan of sugarcoating. He essentially pleads, “Come on; let’s get real. These lives we’re living now, and every life that’s been lived before, are all just churning through the garbage disposal that is our universe.” One can see his point, to an extent. Tennyson immortalized our understanding of nature “red in tooth and claw,” and incisive skeptic David Hume (one of the two great heroes of New Atheist Daniel Dennett, alongside Charles Darwin) long ago decried the notion of a perfectly designed universe, citing the often-calamitous circumstances [89] of earthly existence as evidence for only a shoddy Designer, if any Designer at all. The animal world presents us with terrifying examples of violence and suffering. Natural forces appear at best unaware of the destruction they bring on humanity and at worst utterly intent on bringing it about. These are sobering facts about our world. Rendering them more palatable, as some religious thinkers have been wont to do, is often more an exercise in rhetoric than truth telling. But as aware of the harshness of life as Dawkins and Russell are, they have still, to a significant degree, done us the disservice of missing the point. It could be perceived as arrogant—not to mention ideologically slanted—for me to state which point it is that they have missed. An excerpt from one of the most famous texts in all of philosophy, written by a strident critic of Christianity, the church, and even traditional formulations of morality, may be more germane: Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on [90] us? Friedrich Nietzsche here bespeaks the much-touted “death of God,” an event in the consciousness of post-Enlightenment mankind, a victory for naturalistic thought and anti-religiosity if there ever was one. According to Nietzsche, it propelled humanity

further into a worldview saturated with science and pragmatic notions of morality. Dawkins and Russell would find little to disagree with on that score. But what they do not do, and what Nietzsche here does more candidly than a vast array of naturalistic thinkers, is confront the existential reality of such a situation. What is the world that this scenario presents for our consideration? A world that has, quite literally, spun out of control, spun out-of-bounds, spun off-course, with no means or foundation to arrest its dizzying careen. Even Russell’s sprawling vista of hopelessness is eclipsed by Nietzsche’s insight; for Russell moves on in A Free Man’s Worship to allude to the continuing value of reason and even tries to locate a genuinely ethical outlook. But Nietzsche realizes this cannot be done. An indifferent universe, an “accidental collocation of atoms,” is by definition a world without meaning, a world where the ships of reasoning and consideration have no horizon by which to plot their course; where the beating hearts of compassion have no higher sun to warm their virtue; where the earth and all its peoples are cast adrift in the cold dregs of harrowing vastness. As I said above, what do our conceptions of our universe mean for the lives we lead, for the people we love, for the questions we ask? The response of the naturalist, when faced with honesty, comes across as rather fruitless and depleted. It asks us to accept a universe with indifference at its heart, where no ultimate meaning can be ascribed to anything. What becomes of humanity, of life itself, of interpersonal interactions, in such a situation? It would serve us well to note what Nietzsche did with his fearless peering into a godless world. He built a philosophical system that even Bertrand [91] Russell condemned as a motivator of Nazism and fascism. Nietzsche’s ultimate answer to the meaning of life was simply the acquisition and exercise of power: the one who overpowers, overcomes, dominates is the person who truly understands the meaninglessness which mires us. Because life is seen to possess no center of meaning, the pursuit of self-enhancement and domination can proceed unfettered (as it sadly has, at various points of history). The naturalist/materialist solution to the question of meaning does not go far enough—as in Dawkins and Russell—or it goes to a place where all-too-human desires and drives become the one truly legitimized concern. It is not enough, then, to phlegmatically proclaim a metaphysical position on reality and then continue bemusedly onward as if it mattered little; it is not enough to declare our universe ruinous or indifferent, brush your hands off, and go on making statements that still brim with meaning for which you have denounced any possible source. It is not enough, and the whole notion that it is enough can conceal dominating desires if we are not cautious. Aldous Huxley, surefooted and insightful as

he often was, understood this, and his will be my last word on it: The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem of pure metaphysics; he is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in the way that they find [92] most advantageous to themselves. Seeing Each Other Truly Naturalism falters on the question of meaning. Only a few atheists have understood that if there is no ultimate purpose behind existence, then ultimately none of the alleged purposes in existence have a basis. We must think about this. We must draw it out, with honesty and with constant attention to the powerful articulations of atheists themselves, and see if it resounds with everyday life. Do the articulations of naturalists have explanatory value for the lives we encounter, the things we think, the relationships we value day-in and day-out? It has been the contention of this paper that it simply does not. But only a part of the work has been done. That naturalistic viewpoint has been examined and found lacking in some forms, but I have provided no alternative reasoning. This last section hopes to fill that gap through an examination of two aspects of common human experience: 1) our existential sense of purpose and 2) ethical judgments, which have to be justified by something if they are to be binding or legitimate. Keep in mind the goal of this discussion: To continually be moving beyond big, abstract ideas in order to explore what those ideas mean for the course of our concrete, lived existence. How do we live in light of the ideas that we hold? And, conversely, what does the way we live indicate about the truth of the universe? This is what is meant when I refer to our “existential sense of purpose.” For despite all the machinations of all the thinkers in all the inscrutable tomes of academic discourse, there is much to be said for common sense. This can be thought of as that “sense” of the world that undergirds most of our everyday interactions with one another. Now, you might be thinking, “Why should our everyday, common-sense-based decisions teach us anything about the nature of truth or existence? Isn’t that a reckless assumption?” It’s a fair question, but I am confident in aligning myself with many thinkers who have answered in the negative. Esteemed American philosopher Charles S. Peirce is noted for saying, “The essence of belief is the establishment of a habit; and different beliefs are distinguished by the different modes of action to which they give

[93] rise.” In short, a conviction’s existence is most clearly indicated by the actions and habits of people who claim to hold that conviction. If we say we believe a certain thing, but our actions do not reflect it, Peirce doubts whether or not we truly believe what we say—which, of course, seems like common sense. The way we live our lives, while not offering conclusive proof for a single system of belief, can thus indicate something about truths that are intrinsic to our human condition. Beliefs held in common among people can tell us something about our nature, about what it means to be human. Despite the esteem often accorded to philosophers, I would venture to say that literary minds often prove to be the more percipient students of human nature, exploring bravely the rarefied tensions which dot our shared psychological, spiritual, and emotional worlds. Aristotle understood the value of art in understanding truth, saying, “The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.” In the world of Christian theism, there is perhaps no literary mind in recent generations which is thought to have plumbed the depths of the human condition more cogently or more insightfully than Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963), Oxford-educated, professor at the same as well as at Cambridge, prolific author, and committed-skeptic-turnedcommitted-Anglican. Lewis gained distinction during wartime for his radio broadcasts, which were intended to inspire hope in the midst of crisis by orienting listeners toward the deeper things of life. These broadcasts, in several ways, form much of Lewis’ answer to the question of meaning. We will here proceed according to the two points I mentioned above. First, concerning our existential sense of purpose, Lewis proclaimed that: The man [who remarks that another person’s behavior is reprehensible in some way] isn’t just saying that the other man’s behavior doesn’t happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behavior which he expects the other man to know about. And the other man very seldom replies, ‘To hell with your standard.’ Nearly always he tries to make out that what he has been doing doesn’t really go against the standard. . . . It looks, in fact, very much as if both [94] parties had in mind some kind of Law or Rule . . . What Lewis offers is the kind of ground-level observation we are pursuing. We interact with each other in many ways—and some would argue in every way—as though those interactions have meaning, have significance, have weight. But why should we do this? If the accidental mixing of gases and the meaningless march of

blind natural processes are all that can be said for history’s progression, why would I be inclined to interact with others as though they mean something? Why would I be inclined to be kind to them, apologize to them, sacrifice for them, or give to their charities? Yet we do all of these things, and innumerable smaller and more mundane things, as though our actions mean something. In a recent class I taught, a slide of my presentation included the above-quoted section from Russell’s A Free Man’s Worship . I read it aloud and upon finishing it noticed an acute silence had fallen over the classroom. This is a room that is mixed in spiritual affection—we have Christians, skeptics, and some who are in-between. But despite their disagreements on certain issues, they were uniform in their consternation. That’s depressing, they said. It’s unthinkable. It doesn’t make sense. They felt, with a kind of sharp existential aftershock, much of what Lewis is meaning to convey. We don’t look at each other and exclaim, “Ah! You are an accidental collocation of atoms, who will one day be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins! Your needs and rights mean nothing to me!” Unless we have been on the wrong end of a particularly stressful day, we instead see a fellow, a companion, a human, a sharer in our likeness and in our place in the world—and if our fellow is in distress or need or some state of wreckage, we are very often compelled to aid him or her. If we do not keep this “Law,” as Lewis calls it, which seems to throb so brightly within our humanity itself, we are struck by a sense of failure, of missing something vital. In fact, much of our existential sense of purpose, in Lewis’ estimation, is beset by the troubling knowledge that things ought to be a certain way—kind, gentle, forgiving, discerning—and yet very often they are not. This dual realization, knowing a right and meaningful way of acting and recognizing that we do not often practice it, lies at the root of all our lives, all our relationships. “They know the Law of Nature; they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the [95] universe we live in.” [96] Still, what am I saying? After all, Lewis was writing at a time when “sociobiology ” had not yet been conceived as a field of study, although there were markedly imperialist, racist strains of supposed “cultural evolution” that could be found among [97] the most “enlightened” of Enlightenment naturalists. Still, Lewis is not neglectful on this score, remarking that, indeed, some people believe that the Moral Law is an [98] instinct that has developed much like our other instincts. And it is here that Lewis transitions into a more proper discussion of ethics, in particular our compulsion

toward ethical value judgments. Certainly we have instincts. And certainly they run our lives in many ways. But they do not always harmonize with notions of personal preservation or advancement or dominance. Very often, we are moved to give things up for others; we judge between our own desires and the desires of others and willingly sacrifice for them. Lewis rightly notes that “this thing that judges between two instincts, that decides which should be encouraged, can’t itself be either of [99] them.” The woman who, after a long day of work, buys herself a sandwich to slake her gnawing hunger and upon seeing a homeless man with quivering hand extended gives him the food instead, is not exactly pursuing any Darwinian (Neo- or otherwise) instinctual drives. What’s more, isn’t it interesting that in our examination of any number of studies among chimpanzees which have claimed to detect “pre-moral” sentiments such as [100] altruism and reciprocity, we should have within our human selves inklings and capacities for ranking the chimps’ actions in any ethical way at all? If a naturalist [101] wants to call jumping into the water to save a fellow chimp “moral,” what standard is she using? Where did she get this idea of morality to read back onto said chimps? What’s more, when male chimps attack female chimps who are carrying [102] infants (as has long been documented ), what allows us, as humans, to look at that behavior and value it as less good, less seemingly virtuous or moral than chimps trying to save each other from drowning? Where does the mechanism for choosing and discerning among moral options come from? If this is all the directionless pursuit of species’ survival mechanisms, on what basis, for instance, can we call theocratic misogyny in Saudi Arabia any “better” or any “worse” than the way women are treated anywhere else? Lewis is again instructive on this point: The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other. But the standard that measures two things is something different from either. You are, in fact, comparing them both some Real Morality, admitting that there is really such a thing as Right, independent of what people think, and that some people’s ideas [103] get nearer to that real Right than others. These everyday occurrences of purposeful choosing, meaningful interaction, and moral valuing cry out for meaning, for an overarching explanation as to why things

are the way that they are. Can a purely naturalistic view give meaning to life on this score? An interesting case in point comes to us from a short essay by surefooted atheist Wayne Anderson, appropriately entitled “Science Can Uncover Life’s [104] Meaning.” As his essay title suggests, he is confident that “science . . . can point [105] to a highly satisfying meaning to life.” But not a full page later, after a short detour through some string theory, we find Anderson suggesting that “matter itself [106] may well be an illusion caused by the wiggles of space-time.” An illusory existence, a trick of physics? Is such a notion much removed from Dawkins’ indifferent universe? But Anderson continues, further annulling his overly optimistic hope for scientifically-imbued meaning: “By themselves scientific discoveries do not [107] give humans a purpose in life.” Instead, Anderson’s conclusion is that humans [108] are to “devise our own purpose.” Now, this is precisely the opposite of what Anderson had promised. A “highly satisfying meaning to life” is not what shimmers in the distance when he shrugs his shoulders and says that what he actually meant was that science can only describe and categorize natural phenomena, and that humans have to make their own way in the search for meaning. The bleakness rears its head again, albeit less aggressively. Anderson even says that his view on the question of meaning is “terrifying,” though [109] possibly also “exhilarating.” One is reminded of a fatal fall from a high place: exciting but terrifying, and ultimately tragic. Philip Yancey has commented on this phenomenon of naturalistic thinking struggling to infuse meaning and morality into life with no basis for doing so, saying, “These new high priests lecture us solemnly about multiculturalism, gender equality, homophobia, and environmental degradation, all the while ignoring the fact that they have systematically destroyed any basis for judging such behavior right or [110] wrong.” Further on, Yancey remarks on the naturalistic pull that lurked throughout the nauseating work of the Marquis de Sade, who infamously declared, “Nothing is forbidden by nature.” A worldview driven solely and slavishly by the discoveries of science will only find itself able to “describe” the world, not explain it, not know it deeply, not understand it. It finds itself without basis or foundation for making moral judgments or lending credence to lives which are saturated with significance, for a significance we mark

every time we are hurt, fall in love, seek higher truth, or rail against injustice. The Christian worldview provides a framework in which the valuable discoveries of science can meld with the exigencies of our lived, concrete existence in the world. For Christianity proclaims that humans are grand things, created with the stamp of the imago Dei, God’s own likeness, on our very being. Rationality, boundless creativity, wisdom, discernment, sacrificial love, authority and strength and the ability to master our environments, these are all distinctive hallmarks of humanity in the world, and theologians and Christian thinkers have suggested that these qualities echo our unique creation. What’s more, though we feel the tug of this honorable place in our desire to do good and righteous things, we are brutally aware of how often we fall short (and tell me, what is the evolutionary purpose for a sense of abiding discontentment with the world on moral grounds?). Christianity speaks to this deeply, with its understanding of a Fall, a fundamental fracture in the heart of the world, that has to be gradually set right by the co-working of God with humanity in the form of his church. This sort of abstraction, this sort of metaphysical thinking, comes underneath our lives—with all their holy terror and noonday brightness of sacrificial compassion and abiding concern—and gives them meaning. Or, more correctly, it brings into focus that meaning which we all know to be there as we go about living our lives with purpose and making ethical judgments as though they really, deeply matter. For as Lewis elsewhere says, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only [111] because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” To return to where we started: Why should life have any meaning at all? Because it finds its source in a great Creator, a Creator who desires humans to cherish one another and fight against those things which reduce meaning, truth, beauty, and goodness. Few civilizations have ever been built on the back of worldview that claimed everything was meaningless at the center. That’s why it’s important that we hear Charles Peirce when he says that our actions, the ways we live, reveal our beliefs. If naturalism is true, could even the naturalists live like it? With Dawkins’ indifferent universe, Russell’s accidental humanity, and Nietzsche’s meaningless world all ringing in our ears, perhaps we’ll realize that none of us could.

Chapter Nine: Reason in a Christian Context Peter Grice The purpose of this chapter is to encounter reason as it is understood within a Christian framework. This will involve thinking carefully about reason, and perhaps differently than you have been accustomed to. I will seek to clarify and characterize reason, survey its intimate association with Christian belief, and demonstrate how Christianity affects reason’s status. Since we are pursuing a coherent, integrated picture, we will be moving at a reasonable pace. We will cover theological, philosophical, and scientific terrain, and our focus will be on the most relevant features and issues. Some areas not discussed in depth here are explored elsewhere in this book. I will be mainly concerned with Christianity as an ancient belief system, as well as interacting with some contemporary discussions, so I intentionally leave the historic body of Christian thought unexplored. Overall, I will attempt to provide enough guidance and detail to assist the reader who may wish to do further research. Here is the general path I will follow. I will begin by framing the discussion through a series of vignettes. We will need to understand our main terms and appreciate some issues that are generally in play. Next, I proceed through a sketch of how Christianity relates to reason in theological terms. This will cover the origin and purpose of reasoning, the nature of faith and evidence, and the critical significance of reason in the Christian life. Finally, I will investigate reason as something to be explained and justified. This involves comparing the status of reason in light of Naturalism and Christianity, and will complete our investigation of reason in a Christian context. What Is Reason?

Thinking clearly about reason is especially hard, since as a broad concept it covers several distinct meanings and applications. Awareness of these is important in conversation and study, since a subtle shift can lead to mistakes. To complicate matters, each aspect of reason has its different interpretations, problems, and associated debates. There are even a few popular abuses of the term “reason,” such as when it signifies skepticism about everything that hasn’t been empirically demonstrated. Despite these challenges, inspecting reason from various angles is a worthwhile pursuit. One might expect to traverse questions of how our reasoning is caused, reflections on the abstract laws or conventions of logic, methods such as induction, deduction and abduction, the perils of assumptions and fallacies, the limits of scientific inquiry, statistical data on the reliability of our reasoning skills, models for rational dialogue, and so on. These diverse areas and more await any student of this rich and satisfying subject. For our purposes, I will be mainly interested in a general definition, and later on, with questions about the nature and legitimacy of our reasoning.

Reason is fundamentally the act of engaging the mind—whether done intuitively or rigorously, poorly or flawlessly. It is a process of (ideally) careful thinking, always involving logic, often drawing upon evidence. Some of its operations include sifting truth from error in making sense of the world, weighing probabilities and practicalities in evaluating courses of action, comparing greater and lesser goods and ills in formulating moral judgments, conceptualizing plans and designs, and constructing objects of technology.

Reason and Rhetoric Reason is worthy of much celebration. However, it is ill-advised to wield reason as a moral trophy, in order to identify and shame supposed enemies. Some of reason’s more vocal champions—among them atheists and secular humanists—are increasingly doing just that, via pejorative labels such as “religious” and “faith.” But is it really, automatically rational to be nonreligious? Of course not. True reason is never so hasty and naïve. Conflating reason with any particular viewpoint, especially while wielding rhetorical or political force, means that the view can no longer be subjected to reason, as it should. Conflating reason with virtue seems equally harmful to the cause, considering that this is a textbook reasoning error. Wouldn’t it be far better to admit that reason and morality are both human proclivities, in various states of use and abuse? Rhetoric adds spice to any interaction, but when it is misused, it actually undermines reason.

Reason and Carelessness The problem of rhetoric is part of a wider concern with contemporary discourse, where terms like “faith” and “God” are being profoundly equivocated. Driven less by bigotry and more by intellectual laziness, such terminological carelessness is often used to erase important distinctions among belief systems. For instance, pluralists tell us that every “faith” is basically the same. The problem with this analysis is that “faith” without an object is a nonsensical concept. Like casting a vote for nobody, or placing your trust in no one in particular, it can’t actually be done. This is not to imply that the object of ones’ faith is necessarily tangible or actually exists: only that there is typically an objective truthclaim implicit in faith itself. Faith is always intended as faith in something. Therefore, it matters a great deal whether one’s faith is in Zeus or Jesus or Allah. These different faith claims can be confirmed or disconfirmed by reality itself, at least in principle. Each claim necessarily excludes the others. Pluralists seeking to fuse Hinduism’s polytheism with Judaism’s insistent monotheism must ignore the objective tension between the contradictory objects of each respective faith claim. Thus to look down on faith claims for being “exclusive” is to simply misunderstand their essential nature. The objective sense of faith claims is a distinctively rational quality. Those who profess rational belief should be eager to acknowledge this, and be troubled by the loss of clarity induced by carelessness concerning the meaning of “faith.”

Reason, Virtue, and Knowledge In seeking a more adequate frame, it is important to disentangle reason and virtue. This is potentially problematic due to different views of virtue, so an illustration will serve to establish the point. The experiments of the Nazi eugenicists were an abuse of an ethical standard, but not a violation of rationality per se. There are many morally good ways to apply reason, but in this case they were applying reason in service of unethical goals. So, it is clear enough that they are two different things. However, considered in the opposite direction, morality seems to require rational activity, since ethical situations must be analyzed in order to weigh a course of action. That is true even for those who think the Nazi program was a justifiable good, that it was morally neutral, or even that it was meaningless, since in all such cases people tend to arrive at an identifiably moral position via some rationale. The missing key is the concept of knowledge. Reason emerges as highly suited to the pursuit of knowledge, and the pursuit of the good (this exposes its normative character, to be considered later). If it is appropriate to rank them in order, the good would be highest, involving knowledge and reason, followed by knowledge as it is served by reason, followed by reason itself as the humble, invaluable tool.

What Is Christianity? Despite the confusion of multiple voices from within and without, an authentic expression of “the faith once and for all delivered” (Jude 3) may be retrieved from the Bible. From its pages we learn that Christianity is the belief system and way of living constituted by, and upon, Jesus of Nazareth. The significance of who Jesus is, of what he accomplished and also will complete, is too rich and profound to cover here. Suffice to say, Jesus is esteemed as the Creator and Redeemer; the preexistent Logos

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of God; the holy One above and behind all things.

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His authority is

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accepted; his teaching trusted: Jesus is the focal point of the Christian faith. He is himself God; thus the Christian outlook is all-encompassing. It gives rise to a comprehensive worldview (which can also function as a broad explanatory hypothesis).

Reason and Christianity in General Many aspects of Christianity sustain and require the use of reason. The doctrine of Creation, for instance, teaches us that all reality has been made by God, and that we are made for this cosmos. Together, these beliefs strengthen our motivation to investigate all that God has made for His glory and our benefit. As David Marshall discusses at greater length in this volume, it doesn’t seem possible to read the Bible without noticing how it incorporates things like evidence, reason, justification, explanation, proof, defense, knowledge, wisdom, and understanding. Peter admonishes fellow believers to provide their reasons for believing (1 Pet. 3:15). God invites the Israelites to “reason together” about justice (Is. 1:18). Jesus emphasizes loving God through the full faculties of the mind (Mt. 22:37). Paul instructs the church to renew their minds and “think soberly” (Rom. 12:2,3), to “test all things” (1 Thess. 5:21) and supplant childish thinking with mature reasoning (1 Cor. 13:11, 14:20).

Habitually he reasons in the temples and marketplace, and even with Stoic and Epicurean philosophers in Athens (Acts 17:22-31). “All the treasures of wisdom and knowledge ” come forth in a full revelation of Jesus Christ (Col. 2:2-3). Throughout the Bible, the theme is the same: precisely because God made us in His image, we are to seek after truth with all of the rational capacities we have been given.

Reason and Christian Faith in Particular In Christianity, faith is an active, justified trust in God. It is neither “blind” nor irrational, as the

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popular myths claim. Rather, it simply follows upon sufficient

evidence of trustworthiness:

Faith is commitment to action . . . based upon knowledge of God and God’s ways. The romantic talk of “leaping,” to which we in the Western world have become accustomed, actually amounts to “leaping” without [116] faith. (Emphasis in the original.) To clarify the biblical notion of faith, let’s explore the famous chapter on faith, Hebrews 11. I will be particularly interested in the first verse, which many people misunderstand, and the treatment of the story of Abraham and Isaac. In doing so, we will see that biblical faith is not believing apart from the evidence, but is actually a rational response to God’s initiating work in the life of the believer. Hebrews 11:1 reads “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not

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seen.” Many have taken this to mean that faith is an invisible substance that somehow responds to a lack of evidence. In context, however, what it is saying is that our trust in Jesus is the tangible experience we have in the present, and it functions (figuratively) as substantial assurance that God will act in the future. The “things” hoped for and not yet seen, should not be taken as prayer requests as many people assume. They originate with God, not us, and refer to the content of God’s promises. Is this a blind faith? Not at all. The rational grounding for this faith is revealed in the surrounding verses, where we learn that faith comes from a response to God’s revelation. The rest of Hebrews 11 provides dozens of examples of the reasonableness of trusting God for the present and the future. We are particularly reminded of God’s work in creating the universe and His faithful promise-keeping throughout the history of Israel. In our case, since others have trusted God, and God has worked on their behalf, it is a rational decision for us to trust God. Properly understood, Hebrews 11:1 is speaking of the scope of faith extending beyond present visible evidence. But it does not present faith and reason in tension with one another. But what about the account of Abraham and Isaac, mentioned in the middle of this chapter? Ironically, though the New Atheists have criticized his story as the glorification of a religious lunatic willing to

sacrifice his own son, this passage is actually representative of a reasonable response to God. Søren Kierkegaard famously anguished over the sheer terror Abraham must have felt at being asked to do

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the unthinkable. He concluded that under certain circumstances reason inevitably breaks down, so that faith must be cast over such a logical breach. This interpretation was later characterized as a

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blind “leap of faith,” a position which came to be known as fideism. This tendency to antagonize faith and reason, though historically rare in Christian thinking, is currently gaining

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popularity among lay Christians.

So let’s take a closer look at this story. Abraham had already experienced the incredible miracle of his wife delivering a son well after she had entered into menopause. Reading the story at face value, we understand that Abraham has repeatedly met with God in profound and personally transformative experiences, and seen abundant evidence of God’s tremendous goodness and love. Given this background of extraordinary personal revelation and miraculous experiences, the extreme test that God proposes, of sacrificing his only son, can actually be answered with Abraham’s rational trust in God’s goodness and provision. This, in fact, is what the biblical narrative showcases. Within the story itself, we are told that Abraham concluded, before he went up the mountain, that “God himself will supply the lamb” (Gen. 22:8). Later biblical reflection on this narrative intends to highlight this rational process. As we see in Hebrews 11, Abraham “had embraced the promises,” in that “God had said to him, ‘It is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned.’” So, “Abraham reasoned that God could even raise the dead.” The biblical pattern of coming to faith always begins with evidence. The first stage of evidence is the pervasive knowledge of God discernible in creation (Rom. 1:20). In addition, sometimes the evidence is the experience of personally encountering God. (To automatically dismiss this evidence as psychic malfunction is to beg the question.) Sometimes the evidence comes from observing the fulfillment of prophecy or witnessing a miracle. Following these profound experiences of God and his work, the believer rightly and reasonably continues to trust in God’s existence and good plan through other, more ambiguous, circumstances. There is always a moral, rational “step” to be taken in responding to God by trusting Him, but no absurd leap is ever implied. Reason and the Resurrection The paradigmatic case of a rational faith is the Resurrection of Jesus. Critics scoff, saying, “We have science; we know that dead men don’t rise! Only the superstitious ancients could believe a silly myth like that!” Of course, the natural irreversibility of death has been well known among pretty much every society, as it was for the first Christians. As the apostle Paul, one of history’s most radically converted skeptics, put it, “And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain . . . we are of all people most to be pitied.” no faith.”

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Paul is saying, “If there’s no reality to our claims, if they lack evidence, then there’s

What kind of evidence did Paul have for the bodily resurrection of Jesus? He and the early Christian community were galvanized by the shared conviction of multiple eyewitnesses, based upon “many convincing proofs.” For a period of forty days, their once-crucified leader lived, breathed, spoke, and ate among the group of people who knew him best: the once-cowardly Peter, then the twelve of the inner circle; afterward, “more than 500 brothers and sisters at once, most of whom are still living,” followed by his own half-brother James, then all the apostles, and finally the once-hostile

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Paul.

Although the strength of this evidence might seem to diminish for subsequent generations, this need not be the case. In the account of an appearance to Thomas given in John 20:24-29, Jesus implies that future generations won’t have the same privileged access. He doesn’t reprimand Thomas for seeking evidence per se—after all, he assists him—rather, for Thomas’s slowness to believe Jesus’ credentials and predictions of his resurrection (Mt. 16:21, 17:9, 20:19, 26:32). Jesus had promised that his resurrection would be a miraculous “sign,” and throughout his ministry made explicit appeals

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to the evidence of his miracles and fulfilled prophecies.

After the Resurrection, when subsequent generations did arise, they were blessed and encouraged by the testimonies of the large number of eyewitnesses (1 Cor. 15:3-7). Today we have direct access to the early written records of the accounts, including the prophetic evidence that Thomas ignored. The essential ingredients of an appropriately historical case remain firm, compelling one-time leading atheist philosopher Antony Flew to remark, “The evidence for the resurrection is better than for

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claimed miracles in any other religion. It's outstandingly different in quality and quantity. ” The appeals to eyewitness testimony for this critical event establish the early Christians’ very high regard for reason and objectively evaluated evidence.

Reason and Christian Practice The Christian message is about the coming kingdom of God and the need to be reconciled to God through this kingdom’s sovereign, Jesus Christ. That reconciliation was accomplished by Jesus on a Roman cross, with forgiveness of sins now extended to all as a free gift. Many people don’t realize there is also an outworking of this salvation in the Christian life, sometimes called sanctification. In light of the hope of eternal life, the Christian life now is considered a journey of preparation. The early church had a thoroughgoing view of the refining purpose of situational temptations, trials, and sufferings, opening up new vistas for the formation of virtues, like patience, courage, kindness, compassion, perseverance, self-control, and humility. The point of developing these traits is that holy character is essential for the age to come. According to Romans 12:1-2, that transformation involves the constant renewal of the mind. The disciplined moral and spiritual life requires the mind, since “by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable,” which occurs through “powers of discernment trained

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by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.” Discernment is presented as a trained skill, a sensibility for moral reasoning. God’s moral will amounts to whatever is good in a given situation:

if it were just a matter of being told what to do, we would not need to think, nor would we ever develop. The task is to think well, and to think on one’s feet about what constitutes the right thing to do. We draw on knowledge gained through general revelation (knowledge acquired by means of experience, observation, and conscience) and special revelation, the great resource of Scripture, with its every episode teaching us something of righteous character (including what not to do). Although absolute moral commands like the Ten Commandments form a clear ethical framework, Jesus taught that they can be more organically distilled into principles that pervade a person’s character. In particular, he taught, our moral duties can be summed up in loving God and loving our fellow human beings. These tasks still need to be unpacked, for they may involve complex ethical dilemmas, and the weighing of greater and lesser goods and evils. The way of love requires understanding, as it reaches deep, beyond appearances, into the area of real needs and truths. The practice of discernment, in light of its goals, makes moral reasoning productive in the here-and-now.

Reason and Justification Prior to this point we have not considered whether the use of reason is legitimate. Most people simply assume that it is, however there are numerous reasons to worry that it’s not. What kind of foundation or criterion is necessary for the existence and use of reason? This is a critical issue. Philosopher Jaegwon Kim notes that, “to identify the criteria by which we ought to regulate acceptance and rejection of beliefs . . . has been the agenda of Western epistemology to

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this day.” Kim alludes here to the “epistemic norms” by which we evaluate and conclude that we are justified in believing something. We need to be able to speak genuinely of things like “good reasons” and “adequate evidence.” Reason, like ethics, is a thoroughly normative project. As well, it is characteristically a truth-seeking activity, since it has always been aimed at deriving accurate beliefs. This has come to be called the “traditional view” of epistemology or justification. It involves the familiar use of logical argument, and a standard view of knowledge as justified, true belief (despite exceptional cases). Champions of reason in our day would require such a view of justification, and I would include myself among them. The difficulty seems to be that this is metaphysical terrain. We understand, however, that our reasoning takes place in the more physical location of the human brain. Accordingly, a project is underway to reduce or “naturalize” reason and justification, which “could be understood as the process of shifting emphasis from logical analysis of relations between propositions, to analysis

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concerned with cognitive processes of forming beliefs.” But as Campbell and Poller lament, “In doing naturalistic epistemology, we must reconcile ourselves to much weaker (indeed, profoundly indirect) ‘justification’ than traditional epistemology sought.”

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What are we to make of this? Where can we find an adequate justification for reason and knowledge?

Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga captures the main components as he defines external conditions necessary for knowledge:

A belief has [justification] if and only if it is produced by cognitive faculties functioning properly in a congenial epistemic environment according to a design [129] plan successfully aimed at the production of true belief. As we will see, everything hinges on the possibility of a brain that functions properly. Behind this question stand big-picture accounts of what the universe is like and how it developed. We will be interested here in contrasting Christianity with its primary rival account in Metaphysical Naturalism (or simply Naturalism).

The Problem of Reason Conceptually, Naturalism is the assumption of closed causal systems, principally in viewing the cosmos itself as closed to any outside influence. As such, a naturalistic explanation for the origin and growth in complexity of biological life must invoke mechanisms that are strictly “blind” with regard to goals or ends. Its account of biological evolution, therefore, cannot validly speak of foresight or goal-directedness. Naturalism is a monism. Under monism, all existence is part of a single continuum. This entails that distinct categories such as animal, vegetable, and mineral are illusory and arbitrary with respect to fundamental reality. It further entails that any particular parts, such as human beings, have no essential identity. If human beings are not essentially different from our material bodies, then the notion of a unique person or “self” evaporates. G. K. Chesterton marveled at the apparent absurdity of entertaining this: “You cannot call up any wilder vision than a city in which men ask themselves

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whether they have any selves.” Monistic relations are wholly internal and relativistic, which is why they lead inescapably to reductionism. Contemporary naturalism’s outlook on the cosmos actually has much in common with that of the ancient Epicureans. Fascinatingly, when the apostle Paul engaged Epicurean and Stoic philosophers (Acts 17:22-31), he appropriated some of their own concepts in order to convey his message. In so doing, he also weighed in on their ongoing debate, from the point of view of a Christian metaphysic. In his discourse, Paul was concerned that the divine Being not be reduced to the created order, and that human beings be understood to derive our existence from him (figuratively, God’s “offspring”). God is not part of the physical world, yet while humans in many ways are, we are not reducible to it. Nature’s causality is not closed: there is openness to a transcendent causal principle. The only serious candidate for such an active influence from outside the system would be a Creator. Paul’s scheme was entirely consistent, exposing his audience’s point of incoherence: their reduction of divinity to physical things. This clash of paradigms in the first century reverberates through the centuries down to the present day.

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Epicureanism was rediscovered in the early Renaissance and from there passed into the modern reductionist, materialist framework for describing nature—a program bent not only on denying anything beyond the material realm, but also on reducing everything to an ever smaller set of constituent parts and emphasizing these parts as ultimate reality. Epicureanism provided the prototype of the meaningless universe: [132] godless, governed by chance, purposeless. The mention of purpose here is noteworthy, as it relates to teleology as the most radical point of departure between rival explanatory schemes, Naturalism and Christianity. Teleology is the study of a contested feature of the universe: the assignment of purposes, goals, or ends to things. As a mode of explanation, teleology correlates purposes with functions; goals with strivings; ends with means. Following Aristotle, the purpose for which something is made is implicated in its cause. Christianity affirms the presence of telos everywhere, while Naturalism always excludes it (except from the realm

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of human artefacts).

What has this to do with reason? Recall that reasoning has been conceived as a normative project, aimed at the (teleological) goal of arriving at truth. But naturalism conflicts with the apparent reality of teleology, as James Barham explains:

Naturalism in its present form is indeed guilty [of] exclusion of inconvenient facts. The recalcitrant datum it is neglecting [is] normativity. This hole at the heart of science where normativity should be is a spectre haunting much of our contemporary intellectual life. It is, after all, one of the more obvious facts about the world that biological processes occur for a reason: namely, to achieve some goal or purpose. This teleological organization of living things establishes a norm according to which individual actions may be assigned a value, judged as good or bad, properly functioning or malfunctioning. These are perfectly objective facts about the world, in no way dependent on human observers. If human beings had never existed, countless billions of other living creatures would still have pursued their various goals in exactly the same way. Yet, metaphysical naturalism would have us believe that teleology is some sort of illusion. In other words, all of the life sciences, as well as the social sciences and the humanities, are making constant use of a principle that officially does not [134] exist! This is a deeply pathological situation that cannot go on forever. Barham here claims that normativity is everywhere evinced in real biological systems, on the basis that they are widely claimed in general to have some function. For instance, the function of a creature’s heart would be to circulate blood. “To circulate blood” is the purpose, or normative standard, which in turn defines whether the heart is functioning properly. As a standard or goal, it is blatantly teleological, which is strictly incompatible with the established form of Naturalism. In a

volume intended to tackle such issues, Patrick J. Ward is similarly frank. Speaking of the field of evolutionary biology, he writes:

There is at least one outstanding case where the widespread usage of a teleological concept seems motivated by a genuine belief in the objective reality of an end-directedness. The biological concept of adaption is teleological in attributing the responses of an organism to its surroundings to “functionality” for the organism itself. If the concept of “function” does not represent any objective reality, being a purely heuristic device of the human brain, then Darwin’s theory of adaption via natural selection likewise does not address any objective reality. It is therefore an outstanding problem in biology that without an accepted scientific theory of end-directedness as an objective property of biological processes and responses, a great deal of the current conceptual [135] foundation of biology is open to serious dispute. To state it succinctly, teleology must be rejected, but this comes at a severe price: the linchpin concept of “function” around which the paradigm of evolutionary adaption revolves is a phantom. Accordingly, the human brain is not “for” thinking reliable thoughts at all. As Plantinga observed, “Naturalism also lacks room for the notion of proper function for non-artifacts, and hence lacks room for the notion of proper function for our cognitive faculties. It therefore has no room for the notion of knowledge.”

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Attempts to naturalize reason serve to illustrate reductionism’s devastating payload: logical thought and argument has become redundant. The familiar proposal that all “design” in the biological world is only apparent, or illusory, turns on the naturalistic rejection of a Creator’s teleological hand in nature. The demonstrable fallout from such a proposal is this cascading reductive effect that eventually topples reason itself. As an account of reason, that is simply not satisfactory.

Conclusion I have emphasized Naturalism’s failure to justify reason, but I trust it has been clear all along that the flipside is the solution provided by Christianity. A Christian explanation succeeds precisely by establishing the notions of properly functioning cognitive equipment, and its normative goal of truthseeking. This means that when it exalts reason throughout its theological system, as we surveyed further above, it does so with complete legitimacy. In light of these discoveries, my hope is that readers of all stripes might acknowledge the Bible’s ideal of mature, virtuous thinking, patiently encourage negligent Christians to no longer “reason like a

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child,” and admonish critics to abandon their stereotypes. These responses will provide for a more fruitful—and reasonable—engagement.

Chapter Ten: The Marriage of Faith and Reason David Marshall Faith is often assumed to be an irrational act, a “leap” into the unknown over an empty chasm where evidence ought to lie. This assumption is deeply ingrained in Western thinking, even language. The “Age of Faith” is contrasted with the “Age of Reason.” We’re told to “take it on faith” when we have no reason to believe something at all. The difference between “science” and “religion” is supposed by many to parallel this alleged disconnect between faith and reason. Biologist Sheldon Gottlieb wrote, “In the world of the supernatural, anything goes, and the only limitation is the extent of one’s imagination. No evidence is required to substantiate any claims” (Commentary, September 1996). Similarly, in her history of American freethinkers, Susan Jacoby remarked, “The scientific method itself, with its demand to ‘Prove it,’ discourages the leaps of faith in the unverifiable that are the essence of any religion.” That faith conflicts with reason is the quintessence of conventional wisdom. This is also one of the foundational assumptions of the New Atheism. The works of such atheist “rock stars” as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, along with up-and-coming wannabes, is often explicitly founded on the what we might call the “blind faith meme,” the assumption that Christians view faith as the virtue of believing, as Dawkins put it, “not only in the absence of evidence, but in the teeth of the evidence.” Thus, Sam Harris entitled his first book The End of Faith. John Loftus subtitled one of his books Why Faith Fails. Victor Stenger titled chapter two of The New Atheism, in which he quoted me extensively, and misread me terribly, “The Folly of Faith.” This widespread understanding of faith and reason is deeply mistaken. Faith is not some peculiar, mystical path to belief in things probably unreal. In fact, faith is simply one of two faculties (along with its close cousin, reason) by which we know all that we know. Without faith, in the Christian sense of the word, it is not only impossible to please God, it is impossible to walk down the street, say “Good morning!” to your wife, fill in a map of the United States with the names of states, or say, “I believe in common descent and the brotherhood of primates.” The Christian view of faith sheds light on how human beings interact with the world around us. Christian epistemology offers a deeper understanding of what we know, and how we know it, than does a naïvely uncritical scientism, a worship of the “scientific method.” I intend, in this chapter, to describe how the Gospel of Jesus Christ brings about the “marriage of faith and reason.”

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When I originally wrote the material that constitutes the current chapter, I emailed it to a number of Christian thinkers I respect. Four kindly responded: Gary Habermas, historian and one of the world’s leading authorities on evidence for the resurrection; Ward Gasque, theologian and New Testament scholar; Ralph Winter, founder of the U.S. Center for World Missions; and Jason Pratt, philosopher and novelist. Two atheists (a scientist and a historian) also dialogued with me on this subject in the course of the original discussion. Habermas suggested that I add a “comprehensive

definition (of faith) from the New Testament,” along with a discussion of methodology. Winter also thought I needed to say something about what “faith” means in the New Testament. I mention this to support the fact that what I am writing here is not my own idiosyncratic view; it is what evangelical Christian scholars agree is true about faith. No doubt the New Testament is the place to start to obtain the true Christian view of what faith really means. But every reader can open the Bible and see for himself how the word is used. So I’ll compromise. After defining faith, I’ll give an overview of seven ways in which the New Testament intimately connects faith and reason—without doing a word study, which some readers might find tedious. After defining faith, looking at general patterns in the New Testament, I’ll try to clear up a common misperception about faith, one that is often grounded in the story of Doubting Thomas. (In chapter nine, Peter Grice has already cleared up a similar misperception about the great “faith” chapter, Hebrews 11.) In the Appendix, I cite Christian thinkers down through the ages, and show how faith and reason have been intimately, and fruitfully, joined in their thought. What Is Faith? By faith, I contend that Christians usually mean, “holding firmly to and acting on what you have good reason to think is true.” In Jesus and the Religions of Man (2000), I compared faith and reason to two chopsticks, with which the human mind feeds itself on the truth. Faith must be tested by reason. But reason relies on four levels of faith for all the facts that it holds dear: faith in the mind, senses, other people, and (the question at issue between theists and atheists) in God. An atheist with an interest in the history of science, “Hypatia,” told me she believed that the sun would rise tomorrow based not on faith, but on “an amassed preponderance of past physical evidence.” But how does one access that evidence? I asked. Even to say, “The sun rose this morning,” you have to trust your mind (its rationality and memory), your senses (visual and tactual), or (some days), people who affirm that despite morning fog, the sun shines in the fields of heaven above. And so to act on that belief, say by taking your camera out in the predawn to take pictures of the sunrise, “is an act of great faith.” Another atheist, “Dr. H,” who has worked in both philosophy and science, responded: I think the nuance you put on the term “faith” is incorrect. You are talking about something other than faith; something other than religious faith, at least . . . Most of the Christian apologetics that I have read reminds me of my faeries at the bottom of my garden. You will either believe in my faeries by faith, or you won’t, and if you don’t, there is very little point in arguing over whether they are wearing pink or purple sneakers. To support his point, he reminded me of “doubting Thomas”: “Thomas is gently rebuked, in fact, for requiring some kind of proof.” Dr. H continued:

If you elect to believe it, you do so on faith alone. And by faith I mean the actual, biblical kind of faith, where you get rebuked if you ask for proof other than circular logic . . . AND you get rewarded for checking your brain at the door. (Blessed are those who do not see, and yet believe.) All right, then. Let’s look at what the “actual, biblical kind of faith” looks like, including in the “doubting Thomas” passage from which Dr. H quoted twice, here. Faith and Reason in the New Testament Radical historian Richard Carrier boldly applied the “Blind Faith Meme” to the first Christians: You don’t need evidence, you just need faith . . . We find no evidence that any Christian converts did any fact-checking before converting . . . Indeed, every Christian who actually tells us what convinced him explicitly say she didn’t check any facts but merely believed upon hearing the story and reading the scriptures and just “feeling” it was right. In fact, Carrier claimed: Every early discussion we have from Christians regarding their methodology for testing claims either omits, rejects, or even denigrates rational, empirical methods and promotes instead faith-based methods of finding secrets hidden in scripture and relying on spiritual inspirations and revelations, and then verifying all this by whether their psychosomatic

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“miracles” worked and their beloved leaders were willing to suffer for the cause.

One wonders what version of the Bible Carrier is reading. In fact, the New Testament emphatically ties faith to reason in at least seven ways: historical investigation, rational argument, critical accounts of Jesus’ life, miraculous “signs” (which are not just psychosomatic—an anachronistic concept, anyway), prophecy, convincing depictions of Jesus’ character, and the resurrection. (a) Historical investigation. Luke begins his gospel by promising to tell about events he had checked, and had good reason to believe were true: It seemed fitting for me as well, since I investigated accurately everything from the beginning, to write it down in orderly fashion, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the instructions you have received (Lk. 1:3-4). The author of the Gospel of John likewise refers to his chief source as the “beloved apostle,” probably John himself, who had been at the thick of the action, noting: “This is the disciple who testifies to these facts and has written them, and we know that his testimony is true” (Jn. 21:24). If faith really meant, “believing in the teeth of the evidence,” why do authors of two gospels explain their motives for writing in tones reminiscent of a court deposition?

(b) Rational argument. Acts, which Carrier focuses on, is in fact full of arguing and reasoning. Believers refute or “baffle” (συνέχυνεν, 9:22) opponents; “debate” (συνεζήτει, 9:29); “speak persuasively” (λαλῆσαι οὕτως ὥστε πιστεῦσαι, 14:1); and “convince” (διακατηλέγχετο, 18:28). These are verbal marks of pervasive, many-sided appeals to evidence (signs, natural theology, the resurrection) that we will talk about shortly. Why would all this rational argumentation be necessary if ancient audiences were so gullible, or if faith were meant to be unsupported? (c) Critical accounts of Jesus’ life. Indeed, read Acts or the Gospels carefully, and you find those to whom Jesus and his first followers preached were not all that “eager to believe,” despite the miracles (below). Jesus is often treated like a pincushion. As I wrote in Why the Jesus Seminar Can’t Find Jesus (2002): All four gospels contain nit-picking, suspicion, entrapment, barbed comments, and angry denunciations, directed by respectable citizens at Jesus. He is accused of being a commoner, a sinner, a ‘Samaritan and a demon,’ of breaking Jewish law, the Sabbath in particular, lack of education, blasphemy, insanity, and black magic. Modern skeptics make somewhat different accusations, of course. But Christianity obviously did not succeed because its first audiences were all gullible rubes who lapped up any supernatural claim. (d) Miraculous “signs.” The chief word for miracles in the New Testament is “sign” (σημειων) (along with “powerful deeds” and “wonders,” which carry similar implications). In modern English, a sign might be lettering on a sheet of metal along a road, or an impression in mud along a river, that points to (or signifies) some reality beyond itself, either because an intelligent agent is intentionally transmitting knowledge of geographical facts—“San Francisco 240 miles”—or an unintentional signal of past events is left behind—“Looks like the alpha male with the limp in its right hind leg was loping north along the bank here!” Miracles in the New Testament are more like street signs than animal tracks, because they imply purposeful communication. Unlike magic, Jesus’ miracles don’t make statues bleed, or people bark like dogs, or (like the Hindu “holy man,” Sai Baba) cough up sex organs. As C. S. Lewis pointed out, miracles follow a pattern that reflects the character of the One who made Nature itself rational. Jesus heals as the body heals, and multiplies fishes as the seas multiply fish. Even in the resurrection, he acts not in violation of Nature (David Hume falsely defined a miracle as “a violation of the laws of nature”), but as Master of Creation, fulfilling signs God gives us in nature, for example when life emerges from dead earth in spring. When skeptics demand miracles to prove God, as they did in Jesus’ time, and often today, that demonstrates that skeptics understand miracles as signs, too. What about Carrier’s claim that miracles in Acts are all just psychosomatic? Consider:

§ Tongues of fire descend from heaven and give the disciples the ability to preach in languages they have never studied. (Acts 2)

§ Peter and John tell a man who has never taken a step in his life to walk. He walks, praises God, and onlookers are understandably impressed. (Acts 3) § Ananias and Sapphira are struck dead without any human touch when they attempt to fool their fellow Christians. (Acts 5) § A murderer named Saul hears an audible voice, sees Jesus, is struck blind, and converts to Christianity. (Acts 9) § A Roman officer named Cornelius has a vision that causes him to send for Peter, while Peter has a vision that prepares him for Cornelius. (Acts 10) § Peter is in prison, wakes up with an angel shaking his shoulder, chains fall off his hands, and all the prison doors are found open. (Acts 12) § Another lame man who has never walked begins to, resulting in conversions, but also the stoning of Paul and Barnabas. (Acts 14) Apparently the word “psychosomatic“ covers a lot of territory, in Richard Carrier’s lexicon. ( e ) Prophecy. “Pascal’s Wager” is often misrepresented by atheists like Richard Dawkins, who appear not to have not read Pascal’s great Pensées as a whole. Pascal did not advise betting on God because one could clean up eternally on the off chance Christianity was true, even while admitting long odds against it, as Dawkins claims. In fact, Pascal believed there was excellent evidence for Christianity. One of his favorite proofs was the Old Testament prophecies that Jesus fulfilled. While admitting that some prophecies are clearer than others, Pascal wrote of: Jesus Christ, whom the two Testaments regard, the Old as its hope, the New as its model, and

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both as their center.

Of course Pascal might be wrong. I think he is right, but that is not the issue here. Clearly the argument from prophecy is rational. If Isaiah (or Lao Tzi, as one contemporary Chinese philosopher argues) tells us about Jesus before he comes, demonstration of prior knowledge makes the Gospel more likely to be true. If the greatest words humans have spoken point to Christ as their “center” and “hope,” it becomes more rational to stake the tent of our souls to this site. (f) Jesus’ personality. Again, Pascal wrote: Jesus said great things so simply that it seems as though He had not thought them great; and yet so clearly that we easily see what He thought of them. This clearness, joined to this simplicity, is wonderful

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.

Jesus makes the doctrine of “God become man” credible, as does no one else. No one would believe Gandhi, or Martin Luther King, if they claimed to forgive sins or be the unique Son of God. Maybe this is why John cites so many testimonies. It is as if the disciples are pinching one another—did you hear that? Did you see that? It is as if we had found, in the Gospels, the DNA of Jesus.

(g) Resurrection. Jesus’ resurrection is the ultimate sign that God has chosen to redeem humanity through him. Luke thus says, at the beginning of Acts, that Jesus has shown himself to be alive by “many infallible proofs.” Paul explicitly says that “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is in vain.” He has just done a systematic accounting of Christians, mostly still alive, who had met the resurrected Jesus. Whether effective or not (Christians and their opponents continue to debate), one cannot deny that such passages appeal to evidence to support Christian faith. So given these pervasive patterns of historical evidence, honest representation of difficult facts, and critical questioning, why did Jesus tell “doubting Thomas” that those who have not seen, yet believe, are blessed? First, notice that Jesus gave Thomas the evidence that he asked for. Three senses (sight, sound, and touch) provided independent witness to an event that he naturally found hard to believe, but that would change his life. (And, some say, send him to die as a martyr in India.) Second, by not trusting his close friends, Thomas became less reasonable, nor more so. He was retreating from the third level of faith to faith in mere senses and mind, taking a short step along the Unabomber’s path to a rabbit hutch in Montana. Jesus recognized that we are social creatures, and reasonably depend on one another for most of the facts by which we live. Third, John gives this and many other testimonies “that you may know.” What else could he do? He didn’t have a Sony video recorder, to record the stone rolling away. He couldn’t Carbon-14 test the shroud. Human testimony was the only way to establish the truth of historical claims. And whenever anyone tells you how weak it is, listen to her talk for ten more minutes, and she will contradict herself by appealing to human testimony in everything else she says that day: things she has learned in class, in books, on the Web, on the radio. Scientists, too, are blessed because “they have not seen, and yet believe.” Scientists incessantly appeal to human testimony: read Dawkins or Darwin and underline their citations of scientific work other people have done. Without faith in other people, it is impossible to do and advanced science. And even to reach and maintain conclusions from one’s own dabblings, one trusts one’s own memory, which is also human and therefore fallible. Fourth, miracles continued. Acts of the Apostles might be called The Acts of God—including miracles Luke seems to have witnessed first-hand. Augustine recounts ongoing miracles in the late 4th century. One reason I am a Christian is that, serving as a missionary in Asia, I found good reason to believe God continues to support the spread of the Gospel by giving people direct reasons to believe. The Bible talks a lot about idolatry because faith can be misplaced. But someone who only believes what he has seen must be content to remain a barbarian at best, at worst a madman. Trust in God is the ultimate act of rationality. Like faith in other people, it opens new horizons. We are blessed not because we believe blindly, but because by reason we ascend the steps of faith—from minds (memory, thought), to senses, to cautious trust in good human testimony—at each step expanding what we can know, and maturing as civilized human beings.

So from the beginning, Christianity emphatically affirmed the rationality of faith both implicitly and explicitly, in a great variety of ways. As the Gospel spread through Europe, then around the world, Christian thinkers have developed the implications of rational belief.

Chapter Eleven: Are Science and Christianity at Odds? Sean McDowell

Used by permission. Excerpt taken from Is God Just a Human Invention? And Seventeen Other Questions Raised by the New Atheists by Sean McDowell and Jonathan Morrow. © 2010 by Sean McDowell and Jonathan Morrow The conflict between religion and science is unavoidable. The success of science often comes at the expense of religious dogma; the maintenance of religious dogma always comes at the expense of science.—Sam Harris

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Science is at war with religion. The conflict can be traced back to the Dark Ages, a period in which the Church vigorously asserted its dogma and persecuted anyone who questioned its authority, including scientific pioneers such as Galileo, Copernicus, and Bruno. Fortunately the Enlightenment came along in the 18th century and validated methods of acquiring knowledge through evidence and testing. These methods freed scientists to pursue truth without fear of recrimination from the Church. Thus the scientific revolution was born. Yet the war between religion and science continues to this day. If you believe this rendition of history, there’s a good chance you’ve been reading a public school textbook or the New Atheists. The idea that science and religion are at odds is a popular myth in our culture, perpetuated by news headlines like “God vs. Science” in Time magazine. Of the perceived conflict, Christopher Hitchens writes, “All attempts to reconcile faith with science and reason are

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consigned to failure and ridicule.” Richard Dawkins writes, “I am hostile to fundamentalist religion because it actively debauches the scientific enterprise. . . . It subverts science and saps the intellect.”

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Although it is widely believed that science and Christianity are at odds, the opposite is actually true. There is no inherent conflict between Christianity and science. We don’t mean to suggest that religious antagonism to science has never existed. It has and does. But the history of science shows that such claims of antagonism are often exaggerated or unsubstantiated. “Once upon a time, back in the second half of the 19th century,” says Alister McGrath, “it was certainly possible to believe that science and religion were permanently at war. . . . This is now seen as a hopelessly outmoded historical stereotype that scholarship has totally discredited.”

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The scientific enterprise as a sustained and organized movement emerged in Christian Europe. During the 16th century, people from every culture studied the natural world, and yet modern science emerged in Europe, a civilization primarily shaped by the Judeo-Christian worldview. Why? Because Christianity provided the philosophical foundation as well as the spiritual and practical motivation for doing science. The Christian worldview—with its insistence on the orderliness of the universe, its emphasis on human reason, and its teaching that God is glorified as we seek to understand his creation—laid the foundation for the modern scientific revolution.

God’s Universe Most scientific pioneers were theists, including prominent figures such as Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), Robert Boyle (1627–1691), Isaac Newton (1642–1727), Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), Louis Pasteur (1822–1895), Francis Bacon (1561–1626), and Max Planck (1858–1947). Many of these pioneers intently pursued science because of their belief in the Christian God. Bacon believed the natural world was full of mysteries God meant for us to explore. Kepler wrote, “The chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order which has been imposed on it by God, and which he revealed to us in the language of

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mathematics.” Newton believed his scientific discoveries offered convincing evidence for the existence and creativity of God. His favorite argument for design related to the solar system: “This most beautiful system of sun, planets, and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being.”

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Christopher Hitchens discounts the religious convictions of these scientific pioneers, claiming that

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belief in God was the only option for a scientist of the time. But this puts Hitchens in a curious dilemma. If religious believers get no credit for their positive contributions to society (e.g., shaping modern science) because “everyone was religious,” then why should their mistakes, like atrocities committed in the name of God, discredit them? This is a double standard. One cannot deny religious believers credit on the basis of “everyone was religious” and also assign blame on the same foundation. To make the case that “religion poisons everything,” Hitchens has to ignore evidence to

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the contrary.

And he is more than willing to do so.

Dawkins accepts that some early scientific pioneers may have been Christians, but he believes Christian scientists are now a rarity: “Great scientists who profess religion become harder to find through the twentieth century.”

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However, in the same year that Dawkins published The God

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Delusion (2006), three leading scientists released books favorable to theism. Harvard astronomer Owen Gingrich released God’s Universe, arguing that an individual can be both a scientist and a believer in intelligent design. Internationally renowned physicist Paul Davies published Goldilocks Enigma, in which he argued that intelligent life is the reason our universe exists. Francis Collins, former head of the Human Genome Project, published The Language of God, in which he presents scientific and philosophical evidence for God. Incidentally, President Barack

Obama appointed Francis Collins as the director of the National Institutes for Health, one of the world’s foremost medical research centers. Naming scientists whose Christian worldview motivated their work doesn’t settle the issue of how science and religion relate. Entire books have been written on how science and religion

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intersect. But we do hope you see that many early scientific pioneers, as well as cutting-edge scientists today, derived their motivation for scientific research from the belief that God created the world for us to investigate and enjoy. These scientists did not view Christianity as incompatible with science.

What about Galileo? The idea that science and Christianity are at odds largely endures because of the reported cases of the Church persecuting scientists such as Copernicus and Galileo. Most people believe that the Catholic Church persecuted Galileo for demonstrating that Earth revolves around the sun, thereby undermining the unique and privileged status of our planet and threatening the intellectual security of the religious dictatorship of his time. The Church’s reaction to Galileo is viewed as routine: Sam Harris, for example, claims that the Christian tradition involved “torturing scholars to the point of madness for merely speculating about the nature of the stars.”

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The problem with this rendition of the story is that it’s not entirely true. Scientists before Copernicus

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and Galileo did not think of the center of the universe as the place of honor and privilege. Aristotle viewed the earth as a “cosmic sump” where air, water, fire, and matter mixed to cause decay and death. In the Divine Comedy, Dante placed Satan’s throne at the center of Earth. Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and other scientists saw the heliocentric model of the universe as exalting the status of Earth rather than denigrating it.

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Galileo’s problem was not simply that he challenged the authority of the Church. The issue was far more complex. Galileo also upset secular professors whose careers were dedicated to the older cosmology. Prior to the 16th century, most educated people (regardless of religious persuasion) accepted the primary cosmological model of the ancient Greeks, who believed Earth sat stationary while the sun revolved around it. When Galileo offered scientific evidence against this model, he “rattled the cages” of both the Church and academia. Galileo made three costly mistakes in his diplomacy (or lack thereof) that led to his reproof. First, he broke his promise not to teach that Copernicanism was true. Given that the evidence for heliocentrism was inconclusive at the time, Galileo agreed not to teach its truth. But he went back on his word with the release of Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems.

Second, Galileo openly mocked the pope in this same book through a fictitious dialogue between two people—himself and the pope. This was especially odd since Pope Urban VIII was both a friend and supporter. Galileo named the pope Simplicio, which means “simpleton” or “buffoon.” Galileo’s character was articulate and elegant as he responded to the foolish and simplistic remarks of Simplicio. Needless to say, the pope was not amused. Third, Galileo spoke authoritatively on the meaning of Scripture, which was clearly outside his area of expertise. He spoke with authority on issues that he was simply not qualified to address. Thus, his opponents criticized him not only on scientific grounds, but also because of his theological views and the arrogance with which he presented them.

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Galileo was neither executed nor persecuted by the Church for his diplomatic blunders. After his trial before the Inquisition, he was placed under the care of the archbishop of Siena, who housed him in his beautiful palace for five months. Galileo was then released to his home in Florence where he received a Church pension for the rest of his life. He was able to continue his scientific research in areas unrelated to heliocentrism. What can we conclude about the Galileo incident? The popular claim that the Church persecuted Galileo for advancing science is a caricature. As Dinesh D’Souza points out in What’s So Great About Christianity, the Galileo episode is a blip on the radar of an otherwise harmonious relationship between scientists and the Church. “Indeed,” says D’Souza, “there is no other example in

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history of the Catholic Church condemning a scientific theory.” This myth persists because it’s consistently presented as fact in textbooks, history programs, and, most recently, in the writings of the New Atheists. It’s time to put it to rest.

Naturalism Versus Theism Naturalism is a scientifically oriented worldview that denies the existence of God and the soul. Richard Dawkins put it this way: “An atheist in this sense of philosophical naturalist is somebody who believes there is nothing beyond the natural, physical world, no supernatural creative intelligence lurking behind the observable universe, no soul that outlasts the body and no miracles— except in the sense of natural phenomena that we don’t understand yet.”

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Theism holds that there is a personal creator and sustainer of the universe who is omnipotent, omniscient, essentially good, omnipresent, and eternal. Christianity believes that the Creator has revealed himself to humankind in the person of Jesus Christ, a member of the Trinity, who was

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resurrected from the dead in confirmation of his deity. Thus, Christians believe in the supernatural world, including God, the soul, angels, and miracles.

We return now to a point brought up earlier in the chapter: there is no inherent conflict between Christianity and science. Defining these two worldviews shows us the root problem: naturalism and theism are at odds, not science and Christianity. Naturalism is intrinsically atheistic because it sees nothing outside the natural or material world. Here is what’s interesting about the foundational beliefs of naturalists: naturalists place enormous trust in nature’s order and their powers of reason, but their worldview ultimately undermines any basis for such confidence. Science is only possible if the world is ordered and if we can trust our senses and reason. Let’s consider a basic question: Why does the natural world make any sense to begin with? Albert Einstein once remarked that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. Why should we be able to grasp the beauty, elegance, and complexity of our universe? Einstein understood a basic truth about science, namely, that it relies upon certain philosophical assumptions about the natural world. These assumptions include the existence of an external world that is orderly and rational, and the trustworthiness of our minds to grasp that world. Science cannot proceed apart from these assumptions, even though they cannot be independently proven. Oxford professor John C. Lennox asks a penetrating question, “At the heart of all science lies the conviction that the universe is orderly. Without this deep conviction science would not be possible. So we are entitled to ask: Where does the conviction come from?” our minds comprehend this order?

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Why is the world orderly? And why do

Toward the end of The God Delusion, Dawkins admits that since we are the product of natural

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selection, our senses cannot be fully trusted. After all, according to Darwinian evolution, our senses have been formed to aid survival, not necessarily to deliver true belief. Since a human being has been cobbled together through the blind process of natural selection acting on random mutation, says Dawkins, it’s unlikely that our views of the world are completely true. Outspoken philosopher of neuroscience Patricia Churchland agrees: The principal chore of nervous systems is to get the body parts where they should be in order that the organism may survive. . . . Improvements in sensorimotor control confer an evolutionary advantage: a fancier style of representing [the world] is advantageous so long as it . . . enhances the organism’s chances for survival. Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.

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Dawkins is on the right track to suggest that naturalism should lead people to be skeptical about trusting their senses. Dawkins just doesn’t take his skepticism far enough. I n Miracles, C. S. Lewis points out that knowledge depends upon the reliability of our mental

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faculties. If human reasoning is not trustworthy, then no scientific conclusions can be considered true or false. In fact, we couldn’t have any knowledge about the world, period. Our senses must be reliable to acquire knowledge of the world, and our reasoning faculties must be reliable to process the acquired knowledge. But this raises a particularly thorny dilemma for atheism. If the mind has developed through the blind, irrational, and material process of Darwinian evolution, then why should we trust it at all? Why should we believe that the human brain—the outcome of an accidental process—actually puts us in touch with reality? Science cannot be used as an answer to this question, because science itself relies upon these very assumptions. Even Charles Darwin was aware of this problem: “The horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust the conviction of a monkey’s mind, if there are any

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convictions in such a mind?” If Darwinian evolution is true, we should distrust the cognitive faculties that make science possible. I was speaking to an atheist student group at a prominent university in northern California. In response to my presentation of this argument, one of the students argued that scientific studies actually

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demonstrate that the mind cannot be fully trusted. He claimed science proves that we should distrust our cognitive faculties. While I commended him for a creative challenge, I pointed out that his comment suffered from a fatal flaw: the scientific studies that are meant to disprove the reliability of human reasoning depend on the reliability of human reasoning to come to that conclusion. In other words, the only way these scientists could come to the conclusion that we should doubt the human mind was by using their own minds! To quote C. S. Lewis, “If the value of reasoning is in doubt, you cannot try to establish it by reasoning.”

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According to Templeton Prize-winning physicist Paul Davies, the intelligibility of the universe points toward a rational grounding: Science is based on the assumption that the universe is thoroughly rational and logical at all levels. Atheists claim that the laws [of nature] exist reasonlessly and that the universe is ultimately absurd. As a scientist, I find this hard to accept. There must be an unchanging

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rational ground in which the logical, orderly nature of the universe is rooted.

Atheism provides no such rational ground, but undercuts it. Atheists can certainly do scientific research, but here’s the catch: they can do science only if they abandon their naturalistic worldview and borrow from theism because theism provides the necessary foundation for the logical, orderly nature of the universe and the powers of reason.

This point brings us full circle. It’s not Christianity that is at odds with science—it’s naturalism. Notre Dame philosopher Alvin Plantinga sets the record straight: People like Dawkins believe there is a conflict between science and religion because they think there is a conflict between evolution and theism; the truth of the matter, however, is that the conflict is between science and naturalism, not between science and belief in

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God.

It’s not simply that the order of the universe fits better with theism. The connection goes deeper. An ordered, rational universe is what we would expect from a God who created us in his image. Forming true beliefs about the world is one way we reflect the image of God imprinted in us by our Creator. Science depends on the assumption that the world is orderly and that our minds can access this reality. Even the most secular scientists presume that nature operates in a law like fashion. This conviction is best explained by the pioneers of the scientific revolution, who believed the cosmos is orderly because it was designed by the rational Creator of the universe who desires for us, as beings made in his image, to understand, enjoy, and explore his creation. For Further Engagement Collins, C. John. Science and Faith: Friends or Foes? Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2003. Lennox, John C. God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? Updated ed. Oxford: Lion, 2009.

Chapter Twelve: God and Science Do Mix Tom Gilson

Used by permission Adapted from work originally published at BreakPoint Online, August 21, 2009 As Sean McDowell wrote in the preceding chapter, Christianity (properly understood) takes a high view of science. There is yet one more objection, however, that some atheists (especially atheistic scientists) have made. Simply stated, it is that God and science don’t mix. That was in fact the title—

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and the strongly stated message—of a 2009 Wall Street Journal opinion piece by Arizona State University physicist/cosmologist Lawrence M. Krauss. His article centered on this quote from geneticist J.B.S. Haldane (1892-1964): My practice as a scientist is atheistic. That is to say, when I set up an experiment I assume that no god, angel or devil is going to interfere with its course; and this assumption has been justified by such success as I have achieved in my professional career. I should therefore be intellectually dishonest if I were not also atheistic in the affairs of the world. Echoing Haldane, Krauss’s point in this piece was that, Christianity is all about miracles and other such interfering-God nonsense. Science could never make sense under conditions like that.

He is right, of course, to take it that science depends on nature generally behaving itself. But he is wrong to think this is incompatible with Christianity. Far from being foreign to the Christian faith, nature’s predictable regularity is an essential aspect of God’s work in the world. There are at least three reasons for believing that to be true. The first reason, ironically, is one that can be explained more readily in scientific terms than theological. The God of the Bible seeks relationship with the humans he created, which requires communication. A central concept in scientific communication theory is signal-to-noise ratio. Simply stated, if there’s too much chaos (“noise”) in a transmission, the message (signal) can’t get through to be clearly understood. My example may reveal something about my age; or maybe there are younger persons who have experimented with AM radio after dark. AM radio after nightfall is noisy, with lots of static and with interference from far distant stations. To find a clear station, one whose words or music you can really understand and enjoy, can be difficult. Contrast that to a digital music file with almost no noise and you understand the difference. Now suppose that Haldane and Krauss’s picture of God were accurate: that if there were a God, he would necessarily be the kind of God who would frequently and arbitrarily interfere with nature’s regularity. Such a God could not be one who communicates with us, for constant interference in the

course of nature would amount to a huge amount of noise. We could never distinguish his message, the signal, from that noise. To reveal himself to humans—to communicate—he must break into nature sometimes, but he must do so infrequently. There must be an ordinary course of events, so that we can discern what is out of the ordinary. If miracles happened everywhere every day, they would not be miracles at all. They would communicate nothing, and thus they would not serve God’s relational purposes. Second, God intended for humans to be responsible moral agents. For that to be possible we must be able to judge in advance the likely results of our actions; but that would be quite impossible in a world of constant chaotic supernatural intervention. Suppose that on a few random days every year, every vegetable were poison. Could we be held accountable for poisoning our children on one of those days? What if on some days mixing vinegar with baking soda produced a mild “volcano” reaction with the release of carbon dioxide (entertaining and educational!) but some days it released enough deadly chlorine gas to kill all the students in the room? That would interfere with science, no doubt. It would also interfere with God’s core purposes for parents, teachers, and in fact everyone, for if we could not predict the effects of our actions, we could hardly be held morally responsible for those effects. This, too, would not serve God’s purposes. Third, God intends that humans be able to learn from experience—that if we drop a seed, it will fall; that if we cultivate it properly, it will grow; that if we eat good things, we will thrive; that if we eat poisons, we will get sick or die. This ties in with God’s intention that we be responsible moral agents. We need to learn that if we feed another person good foods, that will be good for them; but if we give them poison, they will quite predictably get sick or die. Again, chaos of the sort Krauss envisions would clearly work against God’s purposes. And what is science but systematized learning from experience? God made the world friendly for science, not for the sake of science alone, but to accomplish the whole scope of His purposes for us. Fourth, Krauss, following Haldane, says science could never move forward if spirits animated all of nature (a view typically called animism). Ironically again, Christians couldn’t agree with him more. The late Catholic physicist and philosopher of science Stanley Jaki said, “If science was to be born,

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nature had to be de-animized”; accomplishing that de-animization:

and, as Richard Dales explains, Christianity led the way in

During the twelfth century in Latin Europe those aspects of Judeo-Christian thought which emphasized the idea of creation out of nothing and the distance between God and the world, in certain contexts and with certain men, had the effect of eliminating all semi-divine entities from the realm of nature.

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Judeo-Christianity’s view of creation is unique among the world’s religions and philosophies. One large group of creation stories has the world beginning with an eternal dualism of mind (or spirit) and matter. The mind battles to contain and restrain unruly matter, with only partial success. Plato’s view was much like that. Another large group considers matter to be a kind of emanation from spirit, so that matter is actually spirit in another manifestation, sometimes even an illusory one. The first view leads to no confidence in the world’s rationality, since mind’s mastery over creation is weak. The second is the picture of animized nature. A third version or origins, that of modern secular science, removes mind from origins completely. But how would science have grown out of such a picture of reality? What early natural philosopher, looking at nature as such an essentially mindless thing and never having seen science succeeding, would have thought to look for a rational order in nature? Only in the first chapters of Genesis do we have an account of a creation that is fully ruled by its Creator’s mind, yet remains separate from it: rationally ordered, but not animized. It’s ironic, isn’t it, that this all-important basis on which science was planted comes from the same biblical passage that scientists today love so much to scorn? Finally it’s worth noting that all this is no ad hoc attempt to save Christianity from being rendered wrong or irrelevant by the success of science. God’s desire to have a relationship of communication with humans, to give humans moral responsibility, and to make a world in which we can learn and grow, can all be found in pages of Scripture that predate modern science by millennia. Of course the creation account of which I have been speaking is also thousands of years old. This is not Christianity’s reaction to science. This is Christianity’s conceptual compatibility with science (and vice-versa) since long before there was science to be compatible with. God and science do mix.

Chapter Thirteen: Historical Evidences for the Gospels Randall Hardman

I entered the world of New Testament studies skeptical toward the historicity of the New Testament. I have since come to find out that the facts do not support that skeptical bias. In this chapter I will not attempt to lay out an exhaustive case for the reliability of the Bible, specifically the New Testament

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(NT); I cannot take on that large of a purpose. Whole historical commentaries have been written on each book. Instead, I will focus on a few questions that I have found pertinent to the historical reliability of the NT gospels, and which serve as illustrations, examples of the kinds of reasons for rejecting a skeptical bias. I will proceed through three lines of thought. First, I will address the question of miracles, addressing the most significant reason why most people reject the NT: its claims about supernatural intervention. Second, I will address the question of oral tradition: Were the Gospel writers in a position to receive a trustworthy oral tradition about Jesus, or were they simply writing down myths and legends that had crept into the tradition? Finally, I will address the question of the Gospel writers’ care regarding historical accuracy. That is, were the evangelists interested in providing solid, reliable history in the midst of their theology? Or were they authors of myths, legends, and fairy-tales, as many New Atheists portray them?

Naturalism, Scholars, and Miracles The dominant working paradigm—perhaps the only academically respected paradigm—for historical Jesus scholarship has been naturalism. In one of my undergraduate NT classes, the premise was put forward like this: “We do history, not theology in here. Leave your faith at the door.” Over the years, I have heard a number of similar statements both from scholars and from their followers. Yet this view is not a given; it is a philosophical assumption concerning reality and history. In brief, philosophical naturalism is the commitment to a completely natural or material reality. It is the looming presence behind Carl Sagan's famous quote: “The Universe is all there was, is, and ever

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will be.” It presents for us a closed system in which everything that can be said to be decidedly true or known must function within the assumption that God does not exist or at least that he does not involve himself in the world. This presupposition is common in much scientific discourse, and it has also moved into the arena of historical scholarship. While it is not the focus of this essay to dismantle naturalism, the fact that much of NT scholarship has been practiced under the guise of such an assumption demands some response. I seek here to challenge this presupposition’s place as the one legitimate starting point for historical inquiry. Rudolf Bultmann, widely considered the greatest NT scholar of the 20th century, worked from the

naturalistic paradigm. In his view, science had shown it was impossible to give mental assent to the world of the Bible: “Man's knowledge and mastery of the world have advanced to such an extent through science and technology that it is no longer possible for anyone seriously to hold the New Testament view of the world.”

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The task set before the NT scholar was to dig through all the

mythology contained within the NT, a task he called “demythologizing.”

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Many scholars following after Bultmann have operated under this same paradigm. For them it is beyond question that the Jesus of history was and is very different from the Christ of faith. The Jesus Seminar, a highly influential group of scholars from the ’90s, brightly began their magnum opus, The Five Gospels, with the declaration, “The Christ of creed and dogma, who had been firmly in place in the Middle Ages, can no longer command the assent of those who have seen the heavens through Galileo's telescope.”

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For Robert Funk, the founder of the Seminar, “the notion that God

interferes with the order of nature from time to time to aid or punish is no longer credible.”

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The problem with this viewpoint is readily apparent though, perhaps not readily admitted. To deny the possibility of supernatural involvement is to blatantly deny the existence of God or, at best, suggest that he is incapable of entering into this world. It denies a priori an open system in which God might or might not intervene in human affairs and, therefore, unjustifiably presumes a closed

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system. Contrary to the views of many popular atheists, however, science has never made a case for the necessity of philosophical naturalism, nor is it within science’s competency to do so: it’s a question of metaphysics, not science. (It is unfortunate that so many individuals who have read Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris have never open-mindedly forayed into reading the challenges and responses by Alister McGrath, Alvin Plantinga, John Haught, Francis Collins, John Lennox, W.L.

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Craig, etc. To suppose that such responses are not worth a hearing is to take up the intellectual equivalent of ethnocentrism.) Admittedly not all skeptical NT scholars tackle the issue of miracles from such a philosophically unsupportable position. Rather than assuming that miracles are obviously false because “science says so,” some argue for a legitimate philosophical rejection of them. University of North Carolina professor Bart Ehrman states that the reason one cannot accept the miracles associated with Jesus and the NT world “has to do with the limits of historical knowledge. There cannot be historical evidence

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for a miracle.” Miracles are, by definition, improbable events, and, since history is the art of describing what probably happened, one can never definitively say that miracles did occur. In other words, for Bart Ehrman, the historian cannot say that Jesus probably was raised from the dead, since his very resurrection, being a miracle, was an improbable event. This recapitulation of David Hume's views has been dealt with so often I hardly consider it worth

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commenting on.

Still, three points demand attention for the purpose of this chapter, so I will

briefly cover them. First, Hume argues for individuals’ “uniform experience” against miracles. The problem with this is simple: it's false. One merely needs to look beyond one’s own experiences to find a great number of miracle reports coming from both the Western and Majority World. They are by no means rare. Certainly they are rare-e r than everyday sorts of experiences, and they demand closer examination than everyday occurrences, but on a whole the reports of tens of millions— including this author—in support of miracles defeats Hume’s assertion of “uniform experience” against them.

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To deny reports of miracles (whether from today or from antiquity) simply because they run counter to one’s presuppositions represents confirmation bias at its worst. When faced with an improbable event or apparent miracle, there are three logical alternatives: 1) the event did not happen as reported, 2) the event happened and was caused by some natural but unknown precipitator, or (c) the event was caused by supernatural means. If one simply presupposes that (3) is not an alternative, then one-third of the potential explanations are eliminated a priori, without examination or discussion. A much more responsible approach is to take the evidence into account, and to judge miracle reports case by case, with all the options on the table. Second, as Boyd and Eddy point out, Hume associates “rational thinking with adding up evidence

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rather than weighing evidence.” One philosopher gives the example of a man being dealt a perfect Bridge hand. The odds against such an event can be calculated to 1,635,013,559,600:1. Yet, suppose that this did occur—indeed, in the off chance that you were the one holding the perfect hand —would it be justifiable to reject a priori such an event’s having occurred? Would you let your presuppositions force you to deny the existence of your own hand? A more proper approach would be to ask questions (e.g,. is someone cheating, was the deck poorly shuffled, was there some other non-

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random occurrence?) and analyze the evidence. To apply Hume's argument consistently would demand that any rare event in the course of history—including the Big Bang and the origin of life—be relegated to the dust of myth. Third, probabilities in closed and open systems will vary drastically depending on what actually exists. If God does not exist, the probability of supernatural intervention will be 0. However, if God does exist, then his existence must be entered into the equation and the probability of a miracle increases. If he is, by his nature, a personal God, the possibility of miracles having occurred arguably moves into probability. Thus, no historian speaking as such can say that God does not exist; if he does, he is moving beyond his field of history and into theology. He can make no statements a priori about the possibility or plausibility of miracles. He cannot reject them out of hand or determine them in advance to be irrational. And he certainly cannot play the game of ruling out all miracle claims as absurd and then proclaiming that there is no evidence for miracles. To do so is to bear the guilt of circular reasoning. So What about the New Testament?

New Testament scholar David DeSilva suggests that if we can get past an anti-miracle bias and leave open the possibility of such occurrences, the potential for engaging the Gospels and Acts on their own

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terms increases exponentially. That is, if one leaves open the question of the resurrection as historical possibility—and therefore the question of God's existence—one will be able to read the

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Bible with a fuller, more complete sense of options and voices. The historian is not committed to denying the miracles of scripture, while forcing data to fit explanatory paradigms too small to hold it. We can and should take the Gospels on their own accounts and inquire into whether there is a sufficient basis to judge their reliability and trustworthiness. Concerning this there are two relevant areas I want to explore: the strength of oral tradition as eyewitness testimony and the historical care the Gospel writers exercised in writing it down. The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony “Haven't you ever played 'Telephone'?” I've heard that question too many times to count, in relationship to how the Gospel traditions were passed on before being written. It's usually coated with sarcasm and suspicion as if, somehow, conservative NT scholars missed out on a fulfilling childhood of games and activities, or they have simply ignored the most obvious analogy to the oral history of the Gospels—perhaps for the sake of evangelical convenience. It's unfortunately not simply a popular notion. One of my undergraduate professors made this analogy before a classroom of fifty students. I was astounded that he would do this. The telephone analogy is nothing more than a straw man argument; it fails to account for what we actually know of how oral tradition worked. Form Criticism A number of years ago Rudolf Bultmann, Martin Dibelius, and Karl Ludwig Schmidt founded a

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school of thought called Form Criticism. The discipline sought to do two things: 1) It intended to classify the sayings and narratives of the gospels into “forms” and 2) It sought to give a history of those sayings or narratives and, therefore, be able to give us the purest form possible. Critical to this second focus was the notion of Sitz im Leben, German for “Setting in Life.” Form Criticism was based on a simple presupposition: “tradition served the needs and purposes of the

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church.” In other words, the traditions were not preserved and utilized for reasons of historical truth or accuracy, they were preserved and utilized only as the Church needed them. This meant that if a tradition had no significance for the Church, it likely was left behind, lost amid the dust of history. There are two axioms of Form Criticism on which I want to focus our attention. First, there is an

assumption of an entirely oral period. This assumed period lasted at least twenty years in the

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estimation of the critics, and was the consequence of an almost exclusively illiterate culture. This implies that the interval of time was long enough to result in significant changes in the form and meaning of the tradition. As time progressed, layers were placed upon layers so that eventually nothing reliable was left of the original. In essence, oral tradition had no means of maintaining authenticity. Second, there was an assumed lack of biographical interest in Christ himself. In the view of the form critics, the imminent end of the world eliminated for the Church any necessity of preserving the historical Jesus. As Dibelius noted, “They wanted nothing else than to win as many as possible to

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salvation in the last hour just before the end of the world.” If the facts of history stood in the way of this, good riddance to the history! Bultmann went so far as to say that the early Christians had

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“no historical-biographical interest.” The existence of sayings and narratives from the oral period then implies that somehow, on some level, the Church could invent sayings and attribute them to Jesus, yet (because of the purpose for which they employed the traditions) do this without going beyond the limits of their integrity. Christianity and its kerygma (“proclamation”) were not historically oriented and the community had little interest in the historical Jesus. Therefore Form Criticism does not get us so much back to the historical Jesus as it gets us back to the early Church. Form Criticism has been a useful tool in a number respects, especially in its ability to classify various forms of the tradition. NT scholars have found that it’s helpful to be able to group apothegms/paradigms together for analysis, or to collate miracle stories together for the sake of convenience. Form Criticism helps us in judging similarities, dissimilarities, and coherence. Further, there is something of value in being able to consider theological and social situations in which the Church might have used particular traditions and passed them on.[192] The more difficult position for classic Form Criticism to maintain is the ability to discover the origin of a particular saying or narrative and, especially, to be able to make reliable judgments concerning its historicity. The methods that purportedly make it possible to reconstruct a saying’s Sitz im Leben are simply “highly speculative because they are based on what other ancient cultures did in settings

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that are not always closely parallel to the rise of Christianity.” Indeed, the more we know about first century Palestinian orality, the more we can safely say that Bultmann's equating it with folklorist culture is a mistake. Richard Bauckham, in his seminal work Jesus and the Eyewitnesses states, “Virtually every element in this construction [Form Criticism] has been questioned and rejected by some or even most scholars. Many of these criticisms are rooted in the much better and fuller information that is now available about the way oral traditions operate in predominantly oral societies.”

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Contrary to the two assumptions of Form Criticism discussed above, I will demonstrate that there is, in fact, good reason to trust that we have a generally solid tradition preserved in the synoptic (first

three Gospels) record. An Entirely Oral Period? Many individuals interested in the discussion of first century orality mistakenly assume that we are working with an entirely oral period. Bultmann falls into this mistake. For him, the Jesus tradition existed entirely independent from writing for twenty to thirty years. The span of time between Jesus' death and the writing of the first Gospels provided a significant time period for oral traditions to become layered and mixed by the Church, as it managed its message to meet its communal needs. This view has been generally abandoned by more recent form critics. It has become clearer that while illiteracy was certainly dominant, there is no reason to assume that we are working with a near absolute oral period. Best estimates suggest that the literacy rate fluctuated somewhere between 5 and 20 percent, depending on the particular culture and subculture.

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literacy,

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This is still a marginal level of

but it is enough to debunk the axiom of an entirely oral system of tradition. It is, in fact,

likely that Jesus and several of the disciples could read and write.

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The living voice was definitely preferred over the written text in antiquity, as Papias tells us. There are at least two reasons for this: 1) The living voice could be consulted for correction or further questioning, and 2) The living voice was not as apt to fall into corruption as the written text. Once a tradition was written incorrectly, it could be difficult to correct it. A living voice, however, could easily be corrected by those who eyewitnesses or knew the authentic tradition. Thus, by giving importance to the living voice, we see the Gospels functioning not as primary sources but as secondary ones. One would give assent to the living voice of an eyewitness over a written text any

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day. With this in mind the better question to ask might not be why were the Gospels written so late, but why were they written at all? That said, while writing was generally seen as inferior to the living voice, it was never viewed negatively. It was viewed as complementary. Samuel Byrskog notes, “Writing was not avoided as such, but functioned mainly as a memorandum of what the person already should remember from oral

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communication.” Richard Bauckham agrees, “The world of the early Christian communities was not a purely oral one, but a predominantly oral society in which written texts had a place that

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was closely related to orality.” memory or preserving the traditions.

That is, writing merely served as a means of either aiding in

Writing early in the 2nd century, Papias tells us that Matthew collected the logia of the Lord. Here logia probably means the words or oracles of Jesus in the Hebrew language. Several scholars have suggested that this is evidence of note-taking, a process called hypomnemata, within early

Christianity. Such a view is supported within rabbinic circles, where disciples often took notes of the rabbinic teaching as aides for memorization. Birger Gerhardsson, a pioneer in the area of oral tradition, notes that teachers and pupils, practiced in the art of writing, were naturally unable to avoid enlisting the help of the pen in their efforts to master the rapidly expanding oral doctrinal material which was so important to them . . . There is a clear witness to the character and purpose of such notes: it is evidently a matter of private notes intended to facilitate learning and continued memorization, practice and future repetition. Books served as reminderbooks.

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As Robert Stein states, there is “no need to think that this material was simply memorized by the disciples. Some of Jesus' teaching could well have been written down in brief notebook-like memoranda for use during their mission.”

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Further, we know from Luke's preface (Lk. 1:1-4) that there were several written “accounts” of Jesus' life and ministry prior to his. More will be said about this later, but it is enough to say for the moment that many (Gk. polloi) implies more than two or three accounts. Scholars are in general agreement that Luke used Mark as a source along with Q (a hypothetical document containing information shared by both Matthew and Luke but not Mark) and L (material unique to Luke). The nature of these sources is debatable but one can quite imagine that if Luke had many sources within his access he would have used them. In other words, the Gospel writers (and especially Luke) were not content with hearsay. The point is this: we cannot assume an entirely oral period. We can only work with probabilities, of course, but to demand a “guilty until proven innocent” accusation of the oral period by default is overly biased. Further, to dismiss research out of hand which would disconfirm one's prior convictions is academically dishonest. We have more evidence now than in Bultmann's day that writing was complementary to the oral tradition. Further, writing was used as a tool to support what was already supposed to be learned. This, of course, implies that oral history was stronger than we otherwise have imagined. We turn to this next.

The Strength of Oral Tradition Scholars have postulated three general models of oral transmission. The first is that of the early form critics and, specifically, Rudolf Bultmann, concluded (as I have already discussed) that oral tradition without the written record was irreparably weak. A Scandinavian school of research pioneered by H. Riesenfeld and Gerhardsson challenged Bultmann's model. In the 1960s Gerhardsson's major publication Memory and Manuscript brought about a revolution in the scholarly worlds, as it argued for a significant degree of oral stability both

within rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity. Gerhardsson postulated a sort of Jerusalem Academy where “Jesus' twelve disciples formed an authoritative circle of leadership that carefully safeguarded the traditions and prevented them from inevitable distortion . . .”

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Gerhardsson's work filled in where Bultmann's model did not: it presented us with an historically contextualized model. Rabbis and disciples, for example, were known to have memorized the entire Torah and Old Testament. Likewise, as Jesus was a Jewish rabbi, the disciples would have been required to “memorize their master's teaching, and importance was attached to preserving the exact

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words.” They would have then passed on the traditions in a formal matter as we see, for example, in 1 Corinthians 15:3, where Paul uses the technical terms for receiving and passing along a tradition. Any changes made to the tradition were done with permission from the “authorized

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controllers of the tradition” and were not taken up by the community without that authorization. The community had little to no authority to alter the traditions themselves. While both Bultmann and Gerhardsson brought major studies to the forefront of scholarly research, both models have been seen lately as unfortunately not filling the bill. There are a number of problems with Bultmann's model. I want to focus on four. First, it presumes much more variety, freedom, and creativity than we actually find within the Synoptic Gospels. We obviously have a greater degree of stability within oral tradition than the form critics would like. Second, it assumes a layered law of oral tradition that simply cannot be substantiated. Bultmann imagined that the stories and sayings were built upon previous alterations. We can imagine this by way of mathematics as if each new retelling was the last retelling plus some more change. This was simply not how oral tradition operated. Bauckham writes, “We should think of each performance of an oral tradition as differing from others, but not in such a way that each builds on the earlier. With oral tradition there is no linear development, layer upon layer . . . the kind of tradition history that Bultmann thought could be reconstructed did not exist.”

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Third, it presumes too long of a time period between the origins of the tradition and the writing down of that tradition. Bauckham states, “One lasting effect of form criticism, with its model of anonymous community transmission, has been to give most Gospels scholars an unexamined impression of the period between the events of the Gospel story and the writing of the Gospels as much longer than it realistically was.”

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Finally, it fails to take seriously the role the disciples would have played in controlling the tradition. Vincent Taylor famously stated in 1933, “If the Form Critics are right, the disciples must have been translated to heaven immediately after the Resurrection. As Bultmann sees it, the primitive community

existed in vacuo, cut off from its founders by the walls of an inexplicable ignorance . . . Unable to turn to anyone for information, it must invent situations for the words of Jesus, and, put onto his lips sayings which personal memory cannot check. All this is absurd; but there is a reason for this

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unwillingness to take into account the existence of leaders and eyewitnesses . . . ” Martin Hengel went so far as to label the connection between the disciples and the oral tradition as “historically undeniable.”

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Like Bultmann, Gerhardsson fails to provide us with an explanation for the variety that we do

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see.There are a number of criticisms of Gerhardsson's work but most simply suggest that his research is anachronistic and provides an insufficient analogy to the rise of the Christian era: 1) The specific time period for appropriating such a model into the Jesus tradition appears too late; 2) Christianity quickly spread beyond Judaic bounds and, thus, a Jewish model quickly fails; 3) The nature of the traditions of Christianity were not seen as “sacred” on the same level as Jewish Torah; 4) There is no major evidence that suggests Jesus' formed a rabinnic school. In other words, Gerhardsson's model also suffers from being historically out of touch. Recently, a third approach has become extremely popular for its ability to take into account the information we have and form an explanation. Anthropologist and NT scholar Kenneth Bailey has

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postulated what he has called an informal, controlled model of orality. In this model, which was developed from his observations of oral communities in the Middle East, Bailey suggests that both Bultmann's models and Gerhardsson's models were developed in relationship to certain types of stories. On the one hand we certainly have stories that quickly become exaggerated and altered: “Tragedies and atrocity stories naturally slip into this category and when tragedy or civil strife occur, rumor

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transmission quickly takes over.” On the other hand we have reports that are much more in line with Gerhardsson's strict model of tradition. It is “most publicly visible in the memorization of the entire Qur'an . . . and in the memorization of various extensive liturgies in Eastern Orthodoxy.”

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Bailey puts forth a middle way, which he argues is much more analogous to what we find in the NT Gospels. This position he calls informal, controlled, since it presumes no formal authority figure to contain and oversee tradition, yet there is control, exercised by the community. This paradigm leaves room for a good deal of flexibility but not too much: The story can endure a hundred transmissions through a chain of a hundred and one different people and the inner core of the story remains intact. Within the structure, the story-teller has flexibility within limits to “tell it his own way.” But the basic story-line remains the same.

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Bailey's research has been well accepted among NT scholars, though some points need refining. Bauckham, for example, has suggested that Bailey, like Bultmann, has given insufficient attention to the role of eyewitnesses.

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He credits Bailey, yet with a caution, for showing that

informal control by a whole community can operate very efficiently in such a way as to preserve tradition with relative stability. But this is not the only sort of control exercised by predominantly oral societies . . .The importance of the eyewitnesses in the early Christian movement . . . suggests that they may have had an important role in the control of the traditions of the words and deeds of Jesus.

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This is, of course, what the biblical record claims and early Christian tradition attributes to the Gospels: Matthew was written by the disciple Matthew. Luke was written by the physician of Paul.

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Mark records the message according to Peter. And John gives his own eyewitness testimony.

Space precludes our looking into the matter adequately, but the clearest and most likely attributions go to the historical John-Mark and the physician Luke. On the former, a few points may be said regarding the tradition which associates Mark as writing down Peter's oral Gospel: 1) Mark reads as an oral document. For example, Mark's poor Greek and his over use of the word “and” (kai) are indicators of someone writing down an oral tradition, not creating a narrative; 2) There is an focused interest in Mark's Gospel on the character of Peter both as an individual and as a representative of the

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disciples ; 3) John-Mark would have been an unlikely figure for falsely attributing authorship to, since he was never one of Jesus' disciples (why not choose Andrew or, indeed, Peter himself!). We will deal with Luke in a moment when we wrestle with historical accuracy, but the points concerning Mark are important. Those who would suggest that Mark was not written by its ascribed author need to wrestle with the evidence that suggests that it was, and explain why the Church would have falsely associated John-Mark with that Gospel. Merely saying “We don't know since the text does not claim an author'” does not suffice. These points on Mark bring me to my final comment on the strength of oral tradition. As Taylor and Hengel said (noted above), the early form critics’ scenarios were devoid of eyewitness testimony. Unfortunately, this assumption remains popular, though it is unwarranted by the evidence. It is not uncommon to hear a scholar assert that none of our Gospels were written by individuals who knew Jesus. This goes too far! There are good reasons to consider Mark the originator of the Gospel that bears his name. I find this to be the same with the other Gospel writers, especially Luke. We now turn to his gospel. The Gospel Writers’ Concern for Historical Accuracy

There is good reason to think that Luke was also an eyewitness to some of the events he recorded, and, where he wasn't, he sought out eyewitness testimony. Luke's Gospel is generally dated to around A.D. 70-75.

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If we suppose that Luke was in his 20s at the death and resurrection of Jesus, he would have been in his 60s when writing his gospel. That is, he would still be within an entirely appropriate age for writing the accounts of Jesus' life and the early church. And, if the tradition is correct that Luke was Paul's companion throughout his ministry, we can certainly take it that he was in position to pick Paul's brain and to spend time with the disciples and other eyewitnesses. Indeed, Luke claims access to both. In the preface to his gospel, Luke writes: Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile an account of the things accomplished among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses (autopsai) and servants of the word, it seemed fitting for me as well, having investigated everything carefully from the beginning, to write it out for you in consecutive order, most excellent Theophilus; so that you may know the exact truth about the things you have been taught (Lk. 1:1-4). The preface is unique to Luke's gospel, and it sets the framework for what follows. Luke, unlike Mark and Matthew who are writing biographies, is intending to write historiography. His chief concern is relaying what has happened. As Aristotle noted, history is “the investigations of those who write

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about the deeds.” In ancient history-writing, the chief concern was not character development per se (that would have been biography) but explanations for events. Luke, writing not to a community but a single individual (perhaps the financial supporter of the work?) is not answering the question “Who is Jesus?, but rather “How did God use Jesus and his followers in the events that we know

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happened? It is on this question that Luke conducts his historical inquiry.

Before delving into the question of Luke's sources, we must ask, was Luke actually interested in the truth of history? We must rid ourselves of the notion that somehow we know history whereas the ancients did not. N.T. Wright writes, “In fact, the contemporary historians of the ancient world knew what history is as well as we do, and often a lot better. They were under no illusions about merely

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observing facts and recording them.” It is certainly true that sometimes events were recorded wrongly. It is also true that ancient historians’ intent was not merely to record facts and figures but to explain causal linkages (which sometimes included supernatural involvement). But it is false to suggest that history for the ancients was mere hearsay and that legends, fictions, and falsity could creep into the traditions just as easily as truth. The view that the ancient historians utilized little to no “filter” for distinguishing truth from fiction needs to be abandoned. If one doubts the historical scrutiny of ancient historians, take a brief moment and read through the ancient histories of Thucydides, Tacitus, or Polybius.

Lucian, writing in the 2nd century A.D., advises that The historian's sole task is to tell the tale as it happened . . . As to the facts themselves, he should not assemble them at random, but only after much laborious and painstaking investigation. He should . . . be an eyewitness, but, if not, listen to those who tell the more impartial story, those whom one would suppose least likely to subtract from the facts or add

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to them out of favor or malice.

While certainly not all historians wrote great history, most aspired toward the sort of model presented by Lucian and practiced by Thucydides and Polybius. Luke's own preface announces this intention: “ . . . having investigated everything carefully from the beginning, to write it out for you in consecutive order, most excellent Theophilus; so that you may know the exact truth about the things you have been taught.” In other words, Luke is intending to write an historically reliable account within the framework of Greek historiography.

Are Good Intentions Enough? We have already established reason to believe in at least the possibility of supernatural intervention. We have further established that there is good reason to count on there having been a strong oral tradition, aided somewhat by written sources. We have finally established that the author of LukeActs was writing within a time frame that would have allowed him to know and interview the eyewitnesses. The last question then, of course, is did he manage to write a reliable history? Did he exhibit appropriate and sufficient regard for historical accuracy? A recent revival in Lukan scholarship has replied with an adamant yes. The late Colin Hemer helped initiate such a Lukan revival, as he took up the initiative to explore the historical foundations for Luke. Hemer, writing as a classics scholar, saw the Acts of the Apostles as a major, historically substantiated document. Hemer's research has been thoroughly scrutinized and has been found difficult to dispense with, and it still stands as a pillar in Acts scholarship. Luke had deep and broad knowledge of both major and minor political struggles, theological distinctives, philosophical beliefs of particular schools, Palestinian geography, economic costs, local terminologies and titles, Greek poetry, seasonal sea currents, and more. He knew of the synagogue in Thessalonica (17:1), the bema (judgment seat) in Corinth, the permanent placement of a Roman cohort at Antonia during festivals (21:31), the specific port sailing to Italy (27:5-6), and much more. In fact, there are at least 84 historically and archaeologically confirmed references in the last half of Acts. This indicates that Luke was, indeed, being careful to provide a trustworthy history of Acts. It seems more than reasonable to conclude that the same is true of his Gospel. Some will undoubtedly retort, “Maybe Luke was a good historian, but his superstitious willingness to believe in miracles discredits him.” But this is the problem we addressed earlier: a strong presuming

bias toward atheism and an a priori rejection of available evidence. Why not be open-minded enough to ask, Could Luke actually be correct? If Luke was willing to go to so much trouble as to present such fine-tuned historical information in Luke-Acts, why think he would so blindly accept any miracle claims without investigation? Remember, Luke states that he has investigated everything! I would agree with William Ramsay when he states, “Luke is a historian of the first rank.”

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We have focused our attention here on Luke. Mark and Matthew are not proper historiographies (they are Greco-Roman biographies), yet it remains true they are lined up enough with Luke to suggest that

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they also preserve very solid historical information about Jesus. Each one had different purposes and points of emphasis in their work, but none thought it worth sacrificing truth. Christianity was a faith of history and as such that history needed to be told. Is It Reasonable to Assent to the New Testament’s Historicity? No doubt many readers will arrive at the end of this chapter holding the same opinion they started with. Changing one’s view on such a momentous topic can be difficult. My greatest hope, however, is that someone will open up further to this matter, and consider it on the same level that I first did as a senior in high school and on the deeper level I am considering it now. It has determined the course of my life and my entire academic career. After numerous seminars, hundreds of articles and books, and countless lectures on this topic, I can say I have never been so assured of the historical trustworthiness of the Gospels and their ability to inform us reliably about the past. Perhaps you might ask yourself the same question I did: What if, in fact, these things are true?

Chapter Fourteen: The Problem of Evil and Reasonable Christian Responses John M. DePoe One of the oldest and most persisting challenges to the rationality of the Christian worldview is the problem of reconciling the existence of evil with the existence of a wholly good, all-powerful, all-knowing God. The problem has been stated succinctly by the 18th-century Scottish philosopher, David Hume: Is [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is [227] evil? On its face, the problem of evil raises legitimate questions and challenges that Christians need to address if they proclaim the rationality of their worldview. However, the reasonable atheist who raises the problem of evil should not simply raise the problem of evil and abruptly check out from the marketplace of ideas. Those who earnestly raise the problem of evil should be willing to hear whether there are reasonable solutions to the problem. As George Horne once quipped, “Pertness and ignorance may ask a question in three lines, which it will cost learning and ingenuity thirty pages to answer. When this is done, the same question shall be triumphantly [228] asked again the next year, as if nothing had ever been written upon the subject.” He continues, “we must be content with those of our friends, who have honesty and [229] erudition, candour and patience, to study both sides of the question.” This piece is written for those who ask questions and also have the intellectual integrity to listen to the answers. In this essay, I will consider the argument from evil, and I will present some responses to the problem in a way that is accessible to a general audience. Since a thorough and comprehensive answer to every challenge raised under the banner of “the problem of evil” would take several lengthy books, this essay must remain somewhat limited in its scope, although I believe it constitutes a reasonable response to the popular challenges many of the so-called “New Atheists” and their followers [230] espouse. It is important to note that this essay is not intended to blunt the emotional, psychological, and personal impact that an individual may feel as a result of evil. The thesis of this piece is that it is not reasonable to conclude that God does

not exist because of the existence of evil. While it is easy to allow one’s emotions to sway one’s judgment when the problem of evil is raised, it is crucial to let reason— and not emotion—be the judge of what is rational to believe. The Argument from Evil The problem of evil has been presented as a formal argument against Christian theism. The basic idea behind the argument is captured in the quote given above from David Hume. If God is wholly good, then it seems God would want to eliminate all evil. If God is all-powerful, then it seems God would be able to eliminate all evil. Based on these reasons, the existence of any evil whatsoever appears inconsistent with an allpowerful, all-good God. The essence of the argument can be captured with these propositions: 1) If there is an all-powerful and wholly good God (e.g., a being who is able and willing to eliminate all evil), then no evil exists. 2) It is not the case that no evil exists. Therefore, 3) It is not the case that there is an all-powerful, wholly good God. The argument is deductively valid, which means that the conclusion follows from the premises. The question, then, is whether the premises are true. In my judgment proposition (2) is unimpeachable; clearly some evil exists. So, the soundness of the deductive argument from evil turns on the truth of the first premise. For a number of very good reasons (some of which will be given below), the consensus among philosophers who work in the field of philosophy of religion is that the deductive [231] version of the argument from evil is unsound because the first premise is false. One of the most glaring problems with the first premise is that it presumes that a wholly good Being would desire to eliminate all evil. This makes sense, however, on the dubious assumption that a wholly good Being would desire his creation not to experience any pain, suffering, and other challenges presented by the existence of evil at all other costs. While a wholly good Being would desire no unnecessary or gratuitous evil—that is, evil that does not have some morally sufficient justification— there are no rational grounds to think that a wholly good Being would desire the elimination of all evil at all costs. If there are sufficiently beneficial goods that can only be attained through the existence of evil, then it follows that a wholly good Being

would, in fact, desire the existence of evil in order to bring about those goods. But what kinds of goods require evil? While this list is not intended to be exhaustive, I’ll sketch two kinds of goods that could not exist without evil. First, there are the goods associated with the forming of one’s moral character. Second, the good of free will requires the possibility of evil. Morally Sufficient Reason #1: Evil is Necessary for Character Development One morally sufficient reason a wholly good Being may have for permitting the existence of evil is for the opportunity of character development. The goods of moral character have traditionally been called virtues, such as courage and patience. The trait of courage, for example, is the characteristic where a person is disposed to confront evil in the right way. All else being equal, people who are courageous are better people than those who lack courage. Likewise, patience is the trait that disposes a person to endure evil in the right way, and people who are patient are better than those who lack patience (all else being equal). Being virtuous cannot be achieved overnight. The acquisition of virtue takes time and practice. In order to become courageous, a person must practice courageous deeds; for a person to be patient, he must perform patient actions. Like exercising to be physically fit, practicing to master a musical instrument, or studying to gain expertise in a subject, a person becomes virtuous through practice and repetition. It is important to see, however, that virtues like courage and patience cannot exist without evil. In order to be courageous, one must practice courageous acts. In order to practice courageous acts, there must be some evil that a person confronts in the right way. And since people are on the whole better beings if they are courageous than not, it follows that a wholly good Being has a morally sufficient reason for allowing some evil to exist. And what is true about engendering courage is true of any virtues that require evil. Evil exists because it is necessary to produce virtuous people, and it is overall better for people to have virtuous characters than not. There are some responses to this line of reasoning that often are raised, but which fail to overturn the general point. First, some people claim that virtuous character is only an instrumental good. According to this line of criticism, having virtue is only something good for people to have in a world where evil exists. Since virtue is only valuable as a means of coping with evil, appealing to it as a justification for evil only makes sense if the existence of evil is unavoidable or necessary for other reasons. Ultimately, this first objection is committed to the proposition that a world with no evil and no virtuous people is morally better than a world with some evil and some

virtuous people. The problem with the first objection is that it fails to see the intrinsic value of virtuous character. To claim that no evil whatsoever can be justified on the grounds that it provides the opportunity for people to mature and develop virtuous character puts an inordinate amount of stock in the negative value of evil over the positive value of virtuous character. Indeed, it assumes that a wholly good Being would value human comfort over human goodness. John Hick has explained poignantly the misstep in reason that is at the heart of the first objection: Antitheistic writers almost invariably assume a conception of the divine purpose which is contrary to the Christian conception. They assume that the purpose of a loving God must be to create a hedonistic paradise; and therefore to the extent that the world is other than this, it proves to them that God is either not loving enough or not powerful enough to create such a world. They think of God’s relation to the earth on the model of a human being building a cage for a pet animal to dwell in. If he is humane he will naturally make his pet’s quarters as pleasant and healthful as he can. Any respect in which the cage falls short of the veterinarian’s ideal, and contains possibilities of accident or disease, is evidence of either limited benevolence or limited means, or both. Those who use the problem of evil as an argument against belief in God almost invariably think of [232] the world in this kind of way. Hick goes on to claim that the right analogy is to think of God’s relationship to His creation as more like the relationship between parents and children. Good parents do not try to shelter their children from all painful experiences. Rather, they try to expose their children to circumstances that will help them mature and develop characteristics that make them better people, even if they involve confrontations with pain, suffering, and evil. Hick explains it this way: I think it is clear that a parent who loves his children, and wants them to become the best human beings that they are capable of becoming, does not treat pleasure as the sole and supreme value. . . . we do not desire for them unalloyed pleasure at the expense of their growth in such even greater values as moral integrity, unselfishness, compassion, courage, humour, reverence for the truth, [233] and perhaps above all the capacity for love. Parents who raise their children on the chief principle that their children should avoid

any encounters with pain, suffering, and evil would likely raise children who never mature ethically or develop into people capable of great happiness or depth of character. While their children may be protected from the dangers of evil, they also lack the requisite experience and practice to have characteristics that are of great moral worth. For this reason, a wholly good Being could have morally sufficient reasons for permitting the existence of some evil. A second objection could be raised on the grounds that God should have created people such that they are already completely virtuous. Since God is all-powerful, and having people who have virtuous character is a valuable good, it seems like God could have created people who already possess virtuous characteristics without the existence of evil. Given this possibility, it appears as if some evil is not necessary in order to bring about the goods associated with character development. This second objection misses the mark as well, for it fails to see the distinction between a person’s being virtuous and a person’s behaving as if he is virtuous. Being virtuous and behaving as if one is virtuous are different things. In order to be virtuous, a person must have acted in such a way in the past such that he is now the author of his virtuous character. A person can act as if he is virtuous, although he is not actually virtuous, when an outside force compels or manipulates a person to behave as if he has formed his virtuous character when in fact he has not. For example, a child may wait patiently in line as a result of the virtuous character he has developed through his past choices. Although another child may also act as if he is patient because he knows he will be severely punished if he acts any other way. In the first case, the child is virtuous; his actions flow naturally from his character, which he has formed through his past experiences. He has authorship of his patient character, and he is rightly credited with being a patient child. In the second example, the child is not virtuous; he is only acting as if he is virtuous. If he really were allowed to have things his way, then he would not wait patiently in line. It would be a mistake to credit the second child with being a patient person just because he acted as if he were patient. In this way, being virtuous is different from merely acting as if one is virtuous. It should also be apparent that being virtuous is more valuable than acting as if one is virtuous. Given this distinction, we can now see that the second objection essentially implies that it would be better for God to make everyone act as if he is virtuous, rather than letting anyone actually be virtuous. Since God would force everyone to have a formed character that is not the product of each person’s past choices, no person could be virtuous. No person would be the author of his own formed character if God were to

create people who are pre-programmed to behave as if they are virtuous. But since part of what it means for someone to have virtue is that the person is the author of these characteristics, it follows that God cannot create people who are already virtuous. If developing virtuous character is a valuable good that a wholly good Being is justified in bringing about, then a wholly good Being would not create people who are predisposed to act merely as if they have a virtuous character. Doing so would compromise the possibility of the existence of any real virtuous character development. Since being virtuous is far more valuable than acting as if one is virtuous, it follows that this objection does nothing to undermine the proposition that a wholly good Being is justified in permitting evil that is a necessary part of bringing about persons with developed character. Perhaps the problem with the second objection can be amended. Instead of God creating people who already are predisposed to act virtuously, why doesn’t God create people who only make free choices that result in a virtuous character? Objections of this sort are related to the second morally sufficient reason a wholly good Being may have for allowing evil to exist, namely the existence of free will. Let’s examine the reasons why free will constitutes a morally sufficient reason for the existence of evil, and objections of this nature will be addressed along the way. Morally Sufficient Reason #2: Evil Is Necessary for Free Will A second morally sufficient reason a wholly good Being has for sanctioning the existence of evil is for the purpose of granting free will. To make this point, there are two propositions that I will support. First, I will contend that free will is an intrinsic good that is outstandingly valuable. Second, I will argue that the existence of evil is necessary for the existence of free will. Taken together, these two claims provide the rational grounds for believing that a wholly good Being has a morally sufficient justification for permitting some evil to exist. Whenever someone brings up free will in the context of the problem of evil, I’m reminded of a scene from Terry Gilliam’s movie, The Time Bandits, where God is asked, “why does there have to be evil?” to which God replies (after a lengthy pause), “I think it has something to do with free will.” I think a lot of atheists have encountered Christians who invoke free will to resolve the problem of evil, but who fail to articulate why free will is valuable or why the existence of evil is necessary for free will. Needless to say, these vague gestures at free will to justify the existence of evil can be unsatisfying as the scene from The Time Bandits portrays. In what follows, I am going to present deeper reasons that explain why free will is valuable and why evil is necessary for the existence of free will.

The first task is to explain why free will is intrinsically valuable. Perhaps the most important reason free will is valuable is because free will is what makes it possible for people to be morally good or evil. To see this point, imagine creatures that behave without free will. Their actions are nothing more than pre-programmed deterministic responses to their environment. Such creatures cannot be credited with being morally good or evil since they bear no control or responsibility for their choices. Likewise, we do not hold a tree morally culpable for its actions when it falls on a parked car as a result of a windstorm. If a thief is stopped by a stray comet that fortuitously falls from the sky at just the right moment, the comet is not credited with being a morally good agent. A robot that has been programmed to vandalize private property is not a morally evil agent; in this case, the evil agent is the person who made the free choice to program the robot to commit acts of vandalism. Trees, comets, and robots cannot be moral agents because they lack free will. They are objects whose actions are entirely determined by prior conditions. In order for something to be a moral agent it is necessary for it to have the capacity to act in a free and responsible way. Without free will, everything has the moral status of trees, comets, and robots. Without free will nothing is capable of free and responsible choices. It is only with free will that anything is capable of being morally good or evil. Since creating people with free will is necessary for making people who are capable of moral agency, this is one important reason to accept that free will is intrinsically valuable. All other moral value derives its moral worth from the intrinsic value of a [234] person’s ability to exercise free will. For example, it is generally recognized that having wealth is in itself neither morally good nor evil. However, whether one’s use of wealth is morally good or evil is derived from a person’s ability to make free choices about the actions he will make with that wealth. For instance, if a person freely chooses to donate his wealth to a good charity, then it is appropriate to say that he used his wealth in a morally good way. However, if he was forced to give that money to a charity, it would not be correct to credit the man as being a morally good agent. The same goes for the virtues of a person’s character or mind. Courage, patience, intelligence, and the like are only morally good insofar as the person who makes use of them has a free will that chooses to do good with them. Nothing is more treacherous than a person who chooses to use his intelligence, patience, and courage for the purpose of bringing about horrific evils. Indeed, the most horrible of villains in fiction are those who have strong virtues of character and mind, but who choose to employ them for evil ends. Thus, all moral good and evil are attributed to people on the basis that they can make free and responsible choices.

The overall point, then, is that the capacity for moral agency is an intrinsic good of enormous value. In order for the intrinsic good of moral agency to exist, creatures must be endowed with the capacity for free will. All else being equal, it is better for creatures to be endowed with moral agency than not. Most people recognize that it is better to be autonomous agents that freely control their own choices rather than automata with no ability to freely govern their own actions. This general point about the necessity of free will for moral agency has been made by Saint Augustine in his book, On Free Choice of the Will, If human beings are good things, and they cannot do right unless they so will, then they ought to have a free will, without which they cannot do right. . . . The fact that human beings could not live rightly without it was sufficient reason for [235] God to give it. The next issue to consider is whether the existence of evil is necessary for creatures to have free will. While many people find it obvious that free will can only exist if evil exists, others find it entirely plausible to believe that free will could exist without any evil. This challenge has been stated by the atheist philosopher, John L. Mackie: If God has made men such that in their free choices they sometimes prefer what is good and sometimes what is evil, why could he not have made men such that they always freely choose the good? If there is no logical impossibility in a man's freely choosing the good on one, or on several, occasions, there cannot be a logical impossibility in his freely choosing the good on every occasion. God was not, then, faced with a choice between making innocent automata and making beings who, in acting freely, would sometimes go wrong: there was open to him the obviously better possibility of making beings who would act freely but always go right. Clearly, his failure to avail himself of this possibility is [236] inconsistent with his being both omnipotent and wholly good. The challenge proposed by Mackie boils down to this: if God could make people with free will who choose to do good once, why can’t God make it so that people always freely choose to do what is morally good? The rationale appears to accept the following line of reasoning. If God can create the conditions whereby a person freely makes a morally good choice one time, then it should follow that God should be able to create those conditions to obtain for every choice a free agent makes. Consequently, if those same conditions are always implemented, then the person

should always freely choose to do what is good. Mackie’s reasoning contains an assumption, and once it is revealed, it is easy to see what is wrong with his reasoning. Notice in the first sentence from the quotation above that Mackie begins by stating, “if God has made men such that in their free choices they sometimes prefer what is good and sometimes what is evil . . .” The assumption here is that all that is required to choose freely to do good is to have a preference to do what is good. Now if free will was only a matter of following one’s strongest preference, then Mackie would be correct. God could have created all people with the strongest preference to do good, rather than evil. However, I think it is a serious mistake to think that a person is free by acting according to one’s strongest preference. In fact, if it is true that people always act according to their strongest preferences—and people are not free to choose what they prefer most strongly—it follows that people would not act freely by following their strongest preferences. Moreover, there are circumstances, like moral temptations, where we seem capable of [237] making free choices contrary to our strongest desires. So, objections like Mackie’s ultimately fail. God couldn’t make free people that always choose what is morally good just by making them prefer good over evil. From the last example, it should be evident that whatever it means to have free will entails that whenever a free agent exercises his free will, the choice is not wholly determined by any conditions that an external agent (like God) controls. If one’s will could be controlled this way, it wouldn’t be free. Of course, giving a complete and [238] satisfactory account of free will is beyond the scope of an essay like this one, but some basic tenets of free will can be briefly outlined. The exercise of free will involves the ability to act in a way that is not causally determined by any conditions outside of the person’s own volition. When a person is free, the person is the ultimate cause of his own actions. If an omnipotent Being brought free agents into existence, he could control whether these agents exist, whether the agents have free will, and the circumstances in which they will exercise their free will. But if these creatures are truly free, then not even God can causally determine the outcome of their free choices. Therefore, an omnipotent being cannot create free agents and causally determine them to choose to do good all the time. On this matter, C. S. Lewis reflects the mainstream Christian tradition: [God’s] omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. . . .This is not limit to His power. If you choose to

say “God can give a creature free will and at the same time withhold free will from it,” you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words “God can.” . . . It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of His creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; not because His power meets an obstacle, but because [239] nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God. Whether an agent freely chooses to do good or evil is ultimately up to the undetermined will of that agent. While it may be broadly logically possible for free agents to choose freely to do good all the time, it is unfathomable to believe that free [240] agents would actually freely choose to do good all the time. At least, whether they use their free will to bring about good or evil is up to them, not God. The implication, then, is that if God is going to create free agents who make a large number of free choices about moral matters, then some evil is going to happen. So, the second morally sufficient reason God has for not eliminating all evil is because evil is going to exist as a result of free will. Free will is necessary for any moral agency, which makes free will a crucial, intrinsic good. Furthermore, since genuine free will entails that God cannot causally control the agents’ free choices, it follows that God cannot make it so that genuinely free moral choices may exist in the absence of evil. Given that free will is an important fundamental good and that free will requires the existence of evil, it follows that an all-powerful, wholly good Being would have a morally sufficient reason for tolerating the existence of some evil. What about Natural Evil? Thus far, the two morally sufficient reasons for God not to eliminate all evil only seem to justify the kind of evil that follows from the activity of free and moral agents. However, these reasons do not appear to address the kind of evil that seems to occur irrespective of free and moral agency. For example, God would be justified in permitting evil that occurs as a necessary part of making people who have free will (e.g., theft and murder), but what about the existence of non-moral or natural evil (e.g., diseases and natural disasters)? Surely an all-powerful and wholly good Being would eliminate these evils since they seem unnecessary for the existence of free and moral agency. Contrary to initial appearances, a closer inspection of natural evils shows that we cannot rule out the possibility that they are intimately connected with free agency.

There are two reasons for this. First, the mechanistic workings of the natural world are essential to exercising free will. If the natural world was not governed by stable laws, we could not make meaningful free choices. For example, if I wanted to choose to help someone, the way in which I would try to help would depend on whether I had good reason to believe my actions would result in helping, rather than harming, that individual. My ability to make meaningful, moral choices depends on the world being a place where I can reasonably predict the effects of my actions. After all, if there were no laws of nature (in other words, the natural world was chaotic with no patterns of regularity), how could I reasonably expect my actions to result in good or evil? Without laws of nature, I wouldn’t be able to will to harm or help anyone since I wouldn’t know whether my actions would result in good or ill toward anyone. [241] Consider the analogy with playing a game like chess. Moving my bishop, for instance, with the plan of pinning my opponent’s knight to his king is only possible if there are rules to the game that apply uniformly. However, if throughout the game, the rules changed arbitrarily after each move, no player could reasonably expect any of his moves to help him with the tactics or strategy of his position. My bishop can pin the knight to my opponent’s king only on the assumption that certain rules apply, and if there is no reasonable expectation that the rules will apply next move, then my move cannot be counted as a strategic or meaningful part of implementing the tactics of the game. The intelligibility of playing the game at all only makes sense given a reasonable expectation that the rules will apply throughout the game. Likewise, in order to exercise free will in a morally significant way, the world would have to be governed by certain regularities and patterns. Although these laws are necessary for the meaningful exercise of moral agency, they are also the cause of [242] various phenomena, like hurricanes, tornadoes, and diseases. Consequently, the abolition of the underlying causes and conditions that bring about natural disasters would simultaneously eliminate a prerequisite for moral agency. There is a second way in which natural evil is connected to free will. Natural evils, like hurricanes, tornadoes, and viruses, are not intrinsically evil. For instance, if a tornado touches down in the middle of a desert and harms no living thing, it is not an evil event. Likewise, it is not evil for a deadly virus to exist, if it does not ever make contact with living creatures. What makes these natural events evil is when their existence intersects with moral agents. A tornado that touches down in a trailer park and results in the loss of human life, for example, is an evil event. But if no humans were there, the tornado would be viewed as a morally benign event. The implication

of this insight is that what is often called natural evil is ultimately due to the exercise of free agency. If people had not chosen to settle in an area prone to tornado activity or on a fault line, there would be no associated evil event such as tornadoes or earthquakes. Thus, even these natural evils are a result of exercising free will. It is important to notice that the claim is not that people who have chosen to live in proximity to potentially dangerous natural events necessarily deserve the natural evil that befalls them. The point is that natural evil is a consequence of free agency. If God were to prevent all natural evils from occurring all the time, it would eliminate one aspect of being responsible for one’s choices, including unforeseen and unintended consequences of one’s choices. If God prevents natural evils, it negates the responsibility and consequences that follow from the exercise of free will. Just as God may be justified in permitting moral evil that has unforeseen and unintended consequences on the lives of others because of the overall good of free will (e.g., a pregnant mother who chooses to use dangerous recreational drugs may bring permanent harm to her child), God may also permit natural evils in order to preserve the responsibility that comes with free agency. For these two reasons, then, it is possible that natural evil is closely connected with free agency. First, natural evils are a consequence of stable natural laws, which constitute a necessary condition for moral agency. Second, natural evil occurs as a consequence of exercising free agency. If either of these two reasons are right, then it follows that natural evil is justified on the same grounds as moral evil—it is necessary to preserve free will. But This Much Evil Seems Unjustifiable In this final section, I’ll try to address one last objection to the case I have been making in defense of the compatibility of God and evil. Often the complaint that atheists raise against the theism is not that the existence of God and evil are strictly logically contradictory. Rather, the problem is that this much evil—as in, the amount of evil we see in the world—cannot be justified. They may admit that it is logically possible for God and evil to co-exist. However, they still insist that the amount of evil that actually exists in the world counts as strong evidence against the existence of God. At this point, it is important to assess whether this objection stems from reason or emotion. As I stated earlier, this essay is not intended to assuage the personal and emotional impact of evil. Rather, its aim is to assess whether there are sound reasons for believing that evil shows God does not exist. If one rejects the existence of God as a visceral reaction to evil, it is not my intention to offer emotional support through

these arguments. If one maintains that the amount of evil we see in the world constitutes rational grounds for believing that God does not exist, I think the argument fails. In order to make a judgment about how much of something is too much or too little, there must be some idea about how much is enough. Suppose I order gazpacho at a restaurant. After receiving the soup, I am asked whether it has been served properly. In order to make that assessment, I would have to know about the proper way to prepare gazpacho. If I know nothing about gazpacho, I might object to the way it has been prepared (“this is way too cold”) even though it has been prepared properly (gazpacho is supposed to be served cold). Likewise, in order to make a judgment about how much evil is inconsistent with the existence of God, one would have to have some idea about how much evil one should expect to find given that God exists. Unlike tasting soup, the judgment as to how much evil is inconsistent with God is too complex for any human to get a reasonable grip on. Someone cannot make a reasonable judgment about how much evil is too much to be consistent with the existence of God unless he has some idea about how much evil we should reasonably expect to find given that God exists. It is also important to keep in mind that the amount of suffering that can exist is [243] limited to the maximum amount of suffering a single person can bear. While we do have a reasonable understanding of the kinds of suffering an individual person may endure, it does not seem like any individual experiences suffering that is inconsistent with the morally sufficient reasons provided above. The kind of individual suffering that is incompatible with God having these morally sufficient reasons would have to be enormous. As Oxford Professor Emeritus Richard Swinburne observes, “Unending unchosen suffering would indeed to my mind provide a very strong argument against the existence of God. But that is not the human [244] situation.” The limits to human suffering are marked out by the capacity of an individual to experience pain, which have physiological and temporal boundaries. These limits to human suffering seem consistent with the kinds of morally sufficient reasons that God would have for not eliminating evil. Additionally, Christianity teaches that Jesus suffered greatly, perhaps as greatly as is humanly possible, when he died for the sins of the world. If this is right, then God has not asked any person to suffer beyond what he was willing to endure. Concluding Thoughts The existence of evil is not incompatible with the existence of God, a being who is

wholly good and all-powerful. This essay has explained why God would have at least two morally sufficient reasons for not eliminating evil. The first is that the existence of evil is necessary for the development of valuable characteristics. The second is that the existence of evil is necessary for the exercise of free will, which is an invaluable good since it makes possible all other moral goodness. Indeed, given the importance of these goods and their intimate connection to evil, it seems like God would have positively good reasons for not eliminating all evil in order to provide the right environment where there is ample opportunity for these goods to flourish. In closing, I would like to draw our attention to one last reason why God would not eliminate all evil. If Christianity is true, then the greatest good for any person is to know God personally. It would be reasonable to assume that if God exists, it would be his desire, then, to have the people he created to be in a position to know him personally. Of course, given that he has created people with free will, God would not force personal knowledge of himself upon them. Rather, he would create the kind of world where people can come to know him in a way that does not violate the free will he has good reasons for giving them. Evil is one way in which God is able to draw people’s attention from the mundane routine of daily life and provide the opportunity for them to see their need for God’s love and forgiveness. “God whispers to us in our pleasures,” writes C. S. Lewis, “speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is [245] His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” In a comfortable existence, people are prone to forget that they need God or even that they are missing out on the greatest good that they can have. Encountering evil presents the opportunity for a person to see that they have this deeper need to be reconciled to God and to know him personally. Indeed, if the greatest good is to know God personally, then it is not surprising to think God would permit the existence of evil in order to draw people’s minds to matters of greater and deeper significance. Thus, evil is not only compatible with the existence of God, evil may be part of the way God works to remind people of what is ultimately good and valuable.

Chapter Fifteen: Christianity and Slavery Glenn Sunshine

The trouble with people is . . . that they know so much that ain't so.—Josh Billings Christianity has been charged with many crimes through history, from sexism to racism to war mongering. In one sense none of this ought to come as any surprise: the Bible makes it clear throughout that religious people can do bad things. It was religious people who had Jesus crucified. Still it’s true that Christianity comes with promises and expectations, one of which is that those who follow Jesus Christ will do good. Biblically, then, we would expect that some who claim the name “Christian” would do evil, but that many would do good, and that on the whole the influence of Christ on civilization would be positive. Has this expectation been realized? In this volume we cannot examine Christianity’s influence on every current of history. One paradigmatic case may be enough, though, to show that some people “know so much that ain’t so.” I will tackle one of the most challenging of such topics: slavery. Many atheists have attacked the Bible for supporting slavery. They claim that the Bible says that it is

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perfectly acceptable to treat people as property—“farm equipment” as Sam Harris puts it —and point to both biblical texts and to American Southerners who appealed to the Bible in their defense of their “peculiar institution” as evidence. In view of that, they ask, why should we look to an ancient, primitive, and by modern standards immoral document to guide our lives? On the surface, the argument seems to have some merit: the Old Testament Law has provisions for slavery, and the New Testament includes instructions for how masters and slaves are to interact. This suggests a de facto acceptance of the institution. The details and the history of the church’s dealings with slavery, however, tell a different story. What the Bible Says about Slavery Slavery was ubiquitous in the ancient world. People could become slaves as a result of war, criminal penalties, kidnapping, or poverty. The last is particularly important: when faced with severe poverty parents would sell children or even the entire family as slaves to pay off debts and to get food, since as slaves they would be fed by their owners. In a world with no social safety net, this was sometimes the only option to avoid starvation. Whatever the reasons for being enslaved, throughout the ancient world slaves were legally property, not persons, and their status was permanent unless for some reason the master chose to set the slave free. The sole exception to this was Israel. First, Israel had alternatives to slavery to help the poor. The Law of Gleaning (Dt. 24:19-24) required that fields and fruit trees not be stripped bare during harvest, but that some produce be left for the poor to collect to feed themselves. The Israelites were also commanded to lend to the poor without interest and without taking necessities as collateral for the loan (Dt. 15:7-8; Lev. 25:36-37;

Ex. 22:36). Debts were to be cancelled every seven years (Dt. 15:1). If all these efforts to protect the poor failed, Israelites did have the option to sell themselves or their family members into slavery, though it was slavery of a very different sort than what we see in the surrounding nations. First, it was not permanent: the “slave” was to work for six years and be set free without condition on

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the seventh year (Ex. 25:2). The “slavery” was thus closer to indentured servitude than to the slavery of the other nations or of the American South. J. A. Motyer even argues that “Hebrew has no

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vocabulary of slavery, only servanthood.” In essence, this institution functioned as a neighborhood social welfare program, in which the master paid the servant ahead of time for the number of years of work he would perform and provided the servant’s room and board. By doing so, the master allowed his neighbor time and resources to clear his debts and get a fresh start. In fact, the master was instructed to give generously to the released servant to help him reestablish himself (Dt. 15:13-14). Another critical difference between Israelite servants and the slaves in the surrounding areas is that the Israelite servant was recognized as a person, not as property, and was given rights accordingly that were unknown elsewhere. Servants who had been injured by their masters were immediately set free (Ex. 21:26-27), and if a servant died soon after being struck by a master, the master was considered guilty of murder (Ex. 21:20). In other countries in the Ancient Near East, by contrast, slaves were commonly mutilated as legal punishment for disobedience, and in the event someone else injured the slave, the master (not the slave) was compensated for it. The Law of Moses also commanded Israelites to protect runaway slaves from foreign countries (Dt. 23:15-16). This was unheard of elsewhere, where treaties mandated the return of slaves (typically to be mutilated or branded), and where hiding a fugitive slave was punishable by fines or even death. Kidnapping someone to sell as a slave was a capital offense in the Mosaic Law (Ex. 21:16), again unlike what we find in the law codes of other countries. In these ways even foreigners and foreign slaves were protected under the Law of Moses, even if they did not have all of the protections that native Israelites did. It must be noted that all of these provisions were systematically violated by the very people in the American South that appealed to the Bible to defend their version of slavery. What about the New Testament? Once again, it is true that there were instructions for dealing with slavery as a fact of life in the Roman Empire, but the actual significance of the New Testament teaching on slavery and its impact on the early church is rarely appreciated. First, although a number of Pauline epistles and 1 Peter instruct slaves to be obedient to their masters, they also tell masters to treat their slaves with dignity and respect, in essence recognizing their humanity. This was a radical idea in the Roman world, more than we in the 21st century Western world can easily appreciate. Even more radical was Paul’s insistence on the spiritual and moral equality of all people when he says that in Christ, there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female (Gal. 3:28). Paul tells people to remain in whatever condition they were in when they became Christians, with the exception that should an opportunity to become free arise, slaves should take advantage of it (1 Cor. 7:21). And although Paul did return Onesimus, a runaway slave, to Philemon, he also strongly hinted that he expected Philemon to set him free (Philemon 21). Tradition says this happened, and in the early 2nd century there was a bishop named Onesimus in Ephesus, though it is unclear if it was the same person. These elements are frequently cited in discussions of slavery; what is less often noted is

that the New Testament states clearly and unambiguously that slave trading was evil: Paul lists slave traders among those who are “lawless and rebellious” (1 Tim. 1:9-10), and trading in “the bodies and souls of men” is included in the list of activities of “Babylon the Great” (a symbol for Rome) that would lead to its destruction (Rev. 18:13). The New Testament authors have been condemned for not calling for an end to slavery, but their not doing so in no way implies approval of the practice. Paul also instructed Christians to obey the pagan government, but that does not mean he approved of that government. Further, the question no one seems to address is what the effect would have been, had the New Testament authors sounded a clear and immediate call for abolition. The Roman government would likely have interpreted it as a call to insurrection. Slaves might have taken it the same way. Either way it would have resulted in no good, but rather in a bloody crackdown and slaughter. Further, given that the entire economy was built on slavery, it is not clear what could have or would have replaced it. Slavery was so deeply woven into the fabric of Roman society that abolition would have led to a total social and economic breakdown. In practical terms, it would have been far more effective to move toward a gradual abolition of slavery, which is precisely what happened in the Christian world over the next centuries. Slavery in the Early Church The early church did include some outright abolitionists, though most of the major early Christian writers rejected that position because of the real possibility of social upheaval. At the same time, although the institution of slavery was generally tolerated, Christians saw manumission of slaves as an act of charity. Individual Christians purchased slaves in the market for the express purpose of setting them free, and congregational funds were sometimes used for this purpose as well. The thinking seems to have been that Jesus came to set us free from our slavery to sin and the devil, so in

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imitation of him we should set people free from bondage as well. As was the case with the Old and New Testaments, early Christians also opposed the slave trade. Augustine of Hippo Regius in North Africa recounted an incident involving slave traders from Galatia in his Letter 10 to Alypius: Even the examples of this outrage that I have personally encountered are too many for me to list, if I wished to do so. Let me give you just one example, and you can estimate from it the total extent of their activity throughout Africa and along its coasts. About four months before I wrote this letter, a crowd of people collected from different regions, but particularly from Numidia, were brought here by Galatian merchants to be transported from the shores of Hippo (It is only, or at least mainly, the Galatians who are so eager to engage in this form of commerce). However, a faithful Christian was at hand, who was aware of our practice of performing acts of mercy in such cases; and he brought the news to the church. Immediately, about 120 people were set free by us (though I was absent at the time), some from the ship which they had to board, others from a place where they had been hidden before being put on board. We discovered that barely five or six of these had been sold by their parents. On hearing about the misfortunes that had led the rest of them to the Galatians, via their abductors and kidnappers, hardly one of us could restrain their tears.

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Slaves also had high status in the early church. For example, the name “Onesimus,” which means “useful,” was typically a slave name, yet as we have seen there was a bishop in Ephesus by that name

in the early 2nd century. At least two bishops of Rome (Pius I and Callistus) had been slaves. It is very difficult to reconcile these historical facts with Harris’s idea that early Christians saw slaves as “farm equipment.” Rather, the fact that slaves could become bishops demonstrates that early Christians saw them as human beings made in the image of God, spiritually and morally equal to every other person, and deserving of the same respect as free individuals. This is the foundation for the law of love (“love your neighbor as yourself”), which is itself ultimately incompatible with slavery. At the same time, given that the early church existed within a world in which slavery was the norm, it should come as no surprise that the church fathers would find it impossible to envision a world in which slavery did not exist, and that it would take some time for these foundational ideas of New Testament ethics to be thought through to the point where the evils of slavery were fully recognized. Slavery in the Middle Ages With the collapse of Roman authority in the Western half of the Empire (the so-called “fall of Rome”), slavery began a slow decline in Europe due to the influence of Christianity. The first laws against slavery in history were promulgated under the Frankish king Clovis II (635-655/658) due to the influence of his wife, Bathilda. A former slave herself, Bathilda convinced Clovis to ban the slave trade. Specifically, the law prohibited the importation of any new slaves into Frankish territory, and ordered the manumission of any that did enter the kingdom. Although slavery continued within the Frankish territories, Bathilda saw this as a first step toward the abolition of slavery altogether. By the 11th century, given that the practice of baptism demonstrated that slaves had souls, a number of kings and bishops outlawed the enslavement of Christians. As Rodney Stark explains, “Since, except for small settlements of Jews, and the Vikings in the north, everyone was at least nominally a Christian, that [prohibition of enslaving Christians] effectively abolished slavery in medieval Europe, except at the southern and eastern interfaces with Islam where both sides enslaved one another’s prisoners.”

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The usual response to this line of argument is that slavery was replaced by serfdom, which was nothing but slavery under another name. While it is true that many slaves did become serfs in the early middle ages, to say that they were the same thing is simply not true. Serfs could not be bought and sold. They may not have been not permitted to leave their land, but they could not be evicted either. Further, they had far more rights than slaves did. As Rodney Stark points out, As [famous medieval historian] Marc Bloch noted, “the life of medieval serfs had nothing in common with slavery.” Serfs were not chattels; they had rights and a substantial degree of discretion. They married whom they wished, and their families were not subject to sale or dispersal. They paid rent and thus controlled their own time and the pace of their work, “which was generally slow and . . . individualistic.” If, as in some places, serfs owed their lords a number of days of labor each year, the obligation was limited and more closely resembled “hired” labor than it did slavery. As Bloch put it, “The slave had been an ox in the stable, always under his master’s orders; the . . . serf was a worker who came on certain days and who left as soon as the job was finished.” Consequently, although serfs were bound to a lord by extensive obligations, so, too, was their lord bound by obligations to higher authority, and so on up the line, and all of these were sets of mutual obligations—that was the

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fundamental nature of feudalism.

The argument that serfdom is just slavery by a different name thus represents a misunderstanding of either serfdom or slavery or both. But the story does not end there. Even the practice of enslaving Muslim prisoners of war came under attack. We see this as early as the 10th century in Venice, and by the 13th century, theologians such as

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Thomas Aquinas argued that slavery was sin and that even serfdom was “repugnant.” This would become the position of the Catholic Church moving into the period of the Renaissance and the beginnings of the Atlantic slave trade. Early Modern Slavery and Abolitionism Portuguese exploration into the Atlantic led to their discovery of the Canary Islands, Madeira, the Azores, and the Cape Verde Islands. Although these islands were used primarily as supply and trading posts on the way to Africa, the Portuguese also began to grow sugar cane and wheat on all them using a model derived from the ancient Roman latifundiae, that is, large plantations worked with slave labor. In the 1430s, the inhabitants of the Canary Islands were enslaved and made to work on the plantations. More slaves were needed, however, so convicts were used on some of the islands until Portuguese explorers travelled far enough down the African coast and established contacts with the coastal kingdoms there. The African economy was built around controlling population rather than resources, which meant in practice that it was built around slavery. This gave the Portuguese an opening. Starting in the 1470s, the Portuguese began buying slaves in the African slave markets and exporting them to their colonies. In short order Africa became the major source for slaves, first on the islands, and later in the Portuguese colonies in Brazil and in the Spanish colonies in the Caribbean. After Spain annexed Portugal in 1580, it gained control of the African slave trade, which it held until the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) ceded exclusive rights to the slave trade to England. What was the reaction of the Catholic Church to these developments? When the Portuguese began enslaving the Canary islanders, Pope Eugenius IV (1431-37) issued the bull Sicut dudum, which included the following provision: 4. And no less do We order and command all and each of the faithful of each sex, within the space of fifteen days of the publication of these letters in the place where they live, that they restore to their earlier liberty all and each person of either sex who were once residents of said Canary Islands, and made captives since the time of their capture, and who have been made subject to slavery. These people are to be totally and perpetually free, and are to be let go without the exaction or reception of money. If this is not done when the fifteen days have passed, they incur the sentence of excommunication by the act itself, from which they cannot be absolved, except at the point of death, even by the Holy See, or by any Spanish bishop, or by the aforementioned Ferdinand, unless they have first given freedom to these captive persons and restored their goods. We will that like sentence of excommunication be incurred by one and all who attempt to capture, sell, or subject to slavery, baptized residents of the Canary Islands, or those who are freely seeking Baptism, from which excommunication

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cannot be absolved except as was stated above.

This bull was followed by others by the Popes Pius II (1458-1464), Sixtus IV (1471-1484), and Paul III (1534-1549) condemning the slave trade in no uncertain terms. In fact, Paul III issued three separate bulls condemning the African slave trade, and with it, the enslavement of any people. The church’s opposition to slavery was reaffirmed a century later by Pope Urban VIII (1623-1644). So how is it that Catholic countries like Portugal and Spain engaged in a practice that the church condemned? Simple. They ignored the church’s teachings on slavery. (They were not alone: Pope Innocent VIII—who was anything but—accepted a gift of a hundred Muslim slaves in 1488. But just as popes with mistresses and children did not change the church’s teaching on celibacy, so Innocent accepting the slaves did not change the church’s stand on slavery.) This raises an important question: is it fair to judge a religion on the basis of people who do not live consistently with its teaching? As the African slave trade grew, opposition grew with it, and not only among Catholics. After the English took over the slave trade, Christians (especially Dissenters from the Church of England) began to speak out and to work against the slave trade and slavery itself. The Quakers were the first to take up the cause. In 1688, four German Quakers protested slavery in Pennsylvania, and over the next century Quakers such as John Woolman worked tirelessly to bring slavery to an end. Woolman was so successful in his efforts that many Philadelphians, regardless of denomination, set their slaves free. In 1775, the Pennsylvania Abolition Society was founded, again primarily by Quakers, though some free thinkers such as Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin were also involved. The Quakers were also heavily involved in the Underground Railroad. In England, the abolitionist movement was again spearheaded by Quakers, who were later joined by British Evangelicals from the so-called Clapham Sect, named after the village outside of London where many of the Evangelical leaders had houses. The story of the Clapham Sect and its leaders has been told many times and so does not need an

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extensive discussion here. The tireless work of Olaudah Equiano (a former slave himself), Thomas Clarkson, Granville Sharp, James Ramsey, Hannah More, and a host of others, together with Josiah Wedgewood’s cameo of an African kneeling, in chains, with the words, “Am I not a man and a brother?”, combined to create a groundswell of support that enabled William Wilberforce to lead a long but eventually successful campaign in Parliament to end the slave trade. Shortly before Wilberforce’s death, slavery itself was abolished throughout the British Empire and the slave owners compensated by the government for the loss of their “property.” The Quakers and the Evangelicals fought slavery for the same reasons the Catholic Church did: they were committed to the biblical ideas that humanity was made in the image of God, that we are all descended from the same parent and so are equal, and that we all have equal rights given by God that no one can arbitrarily take away. Thus Africans have as much right to freedom as Europeans. Some secular Enlightenment thinkers, such as the atheist Diderot, also argued for the equality and right to

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freedom of all individuals. Nonetheless, it was the Quakers and the Evangelicals who led the fight against abolition, who created the awareness of the horrors of slavery among the general

population, who led the boycott and the publicity campaign against the slave trade, and who worked persistently for years to see the fight through to the end. Slavery in the British Empire was abolished because of religious conviction, not Enlightenment rationalism. Slavery in America This brings us to the issue of slavery and Christianity in America. Critics of Christianity gleefully point out Southerners’ use of the Bible to justify the practice, though they conveniently ignore the many northern Christians who used the Bible against slavery, and the fact that the leading abolitionists were people of faith who based their opposition to slavery on their Christian convictions. For example, Harriet Beecher Stowe was the daughter of Lyman Beecher—a Presbyterian minister—and a very devout woman named Roxana Foxe Beecher; she had seven brothers who became ministers as well. Her Christian commitments are beyond question. Or take Frederick Douglas, the escaped slave whose oratorical skills and writing did so much to advance the cause of abolition. Though some anti-theists will cite Douglas’s Narrative as proof that he was a “freethinker” and not a Christian, the appendix makes it clear that they are very much mistaken: I find, since reading over the foregoing Narrative, that I have, in several instances, spoken in such a tone and manner, respecting religion, as my possibly lead those unacquainted with my religious views to suppose me an opponent of all religion. To remove the liability of such misapprehension, I deem it proper to append the following brief explanation. What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity. I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels.

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The passage continues on in the same vein, but the point is clear: for Douglas, the Christianity of the south was not true Christianity, and any attempt to pretend otherwise is simply wrong. Douglas has a point: not everything done in the name of Christianity is a legitimate expression of the Christian faith, any more than Nazis’ use of Darwin to support their eugenics campaign means Darwinism is inextricably tied to the Third Reich. While some early Christian writers supported slavery as an unfortunate necessity, they did so out of a failure of imagination: they simply could not conceive of a world without it. But as the ethical teachings of the New Testament worked their way through the culture, what had previously been unimaginable became very possible, with the result that Christianity is ultimately responsible for abolition and for our current belief in the evil of

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slavery. No other culture, no other religion, tried to end slavery, and even those freethinkers of the Enlightenment who did oppose slavery did so coming from a culture that had been shaped by Christian values and by the idea of the dignity of each human based on their creation in the image of

God and on the incarnation of Jesus Christ. Far from being the problem, Christianity was the solution. I began here by posing the possibility that some of us know some things that “ain’t so.” Christianity’s relationship with slavery has not been what many have thought. I could have written this chapter on Christianity and sexism and demonstrated the same general conclusion. I could have done the same on many topics, actually. I haven’t done that, for space has not allowed, so I cannot expect everyone just to take my word for it. I can do this much, though. I can ask you to consider whether your understanding of Christianity and slavery was well informed and entirely correct before you read this chapter. Then I can also ask you to consider this: if you think Christianity’s impact on civilization has been negative in other ways, are you still confident that your opinions are historically well-informed and accurate?

Chapter Sixteen: Did God Command the Genocide of the Canaanites? Matthew Flannagan

Used by permission Excerpt taken from Come Let Us Reason Edited by Paul Copan and William Lane Craig © 2011 B&H Publishing Group.

One of the most perplexing issues facing Christian believers is a series of jarring texts in the Old Testament. After their liberation from slavery in Egypt, the Israelites arrived on the edge of the Promised Land. In Deuteronomy, God commanded Israel to “destroy totally” the people occupying these regions (the Canaanites); the Israelites were to “not leave alive anything that breathes” (Dt. 20:16 NIV). The book of Joshua records the carrying out of this command at Jericho: “they devoted the city to the Lord and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it—men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys” (Josh. 6:21 NIV). Several chapters later, we read that throughout the region Joshua “left no survivors. He totally destroyed all who breathed, just as the Lord, the God of Israel, had commanded” (Josh. 10:40; cf. 11:14). The text mentions city after city where Joshua, at God’s command, puts every inhabitant “to the sword,” “totally destroyed everyone,” and “left no survivors” (Josh. 10:28, 30, 33, 37, 39-40, 11:8). If one takes these passages literally, one must conclude this is a record of divinely authorized commission of genocide. Critics of Christian theism often ask a rhetorical question: How could a good and loving God command the extermination of the Canaanites?

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One response, which goes back to the patristic era, is to suggest that the strict, literal reading on which this rhetorical question is based is mistaken. Recently, several Protestant scholars have

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suggested a hyperbolic reading of the relevant passages. They suggest language such as “destroy totally,” “do not leave alive anything that breathes,” destroy “men and women, young and old,” and so on, should be understood more like how we understand what a person means who yells, in the context of watching Lennox Lewis in a boxing match: “Knock his block off! Hand him his head! Take him out!” or hopes that the All Blacks will “annihilate the Springboks” or “totally slaughter the Wallabies.” Now, the sports fan does not actually want Lennox Lewis to decapitate his opponent or for the All Blacks to become mass murderers. The same could be true here: understood in a nonliteral sense, the phrases probably were hyperbolic ways of telling the Israelites to defeat and drive out the Canaanites and “were not used and are not intended literally.”

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Nicholas Wolterstorff suggests: The Book of Joshua has to be read as a theologically oriented narration, stylized and hyperbolic at important points, of Israel’s early skirmishes in the Promised Land, with the story of these battles being framed by descriptions of two great ritualized events. The story as a whole celebrates Joshua as the great leader of his people, faithful to Yahweh, worthy successor of Moses. If we strip the word “hagiography” of its negative connotations we can call it a hagiographic account of Joshua’s events.

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In this essay I will defend Wolterstorff’s position. In Part 1, I will sketch, adapt, and defend Wolterstorff’s argument. In Part 2, I will argue that external evidence from comparative studies in ancient Near Eastern conquest accounts gives considerable support to Wolterstorff’s position. Finally, in part 3, I will look at two implications of this position. Wolterstorff’s Argument Wolterstorff’s contention is that “a careful reading of the text in its literary context makes it implausible to interpret it as claiming that Yahweh ordered extermination.” It is important to understand what he means by context. Here, it is clear that Wolterstorff is advocating a canonical approach. He notes that Joshua as we have it today was intended as a component in the larger sequence consisting of Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, and 1 and 2 Kings. . . . I propose that we interpret the Book of Joshua as a component within this larger sequence—in particular, that we interpret it as preceded by Deuteronomy and succeeded by Judges.

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Joshua comes after Deuteronomy and before Judges. These books should be read as a single narrative —a connected literary unit. For example, Joshua 24:28–31 mentions Joshua’s death and burial place at Timnathserah “in the hill country of Ephraim” (NIV). This is deliberately connected to Judges 2:6– 9, which mentions Joshua’s death and burial place at Timnath-heres “in the hill country of Ephraim” (NIV). The first and last consonants are switched (from serah to heres)—a Hebrew literary device. Not only this, Judges connects to 1 (and 2) Samuel (the next book in the Hebrew canon) with its reference to “the hill country of Ephraim.”

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When one does read these books as a connected literary unit, several issues are apparent. Joshua 6– 11 summarizes several battles and concludes, “So Joshua took the entire land, just as the Lord had directed Moses, and he gave it as an inheritance to Israel according to their tribal divisions. Then the land had rest from war” (Josh. 11:23 NIV). after Joshua’s death; it states,

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Judges, however, opens with a battle that occurs

After the death of Joshua, the Israelites inquired of the Lord, “Who shall go up first for us against the Canaanites, to fight against them?” The Lord said, “Judah shall go up. I hereby give the land into his hand.” Judah said to his brother Simeon, “Come up with me into the territory allotted to me, that we may fight against the Canaanites; then I too will go with you into the territory allotted to you.” So Simeon went with him. Then Judah went up and the Lord gave the Canaanites and the Perizzites into their hand; and they defeated ten thousand of them at Bezek (Judg. 1:1–4). Taken literally, the book of Joshua states that Joshua conquered the whole land and yet Judges states that much of the land was unconquered. Similarly, Joshua affirms that he exterminated all the Canaanites in this region; repeatedly the text states that Joshua left “no survivors” and “destroyed everything that breathed” in “the entire land” and “put all the inhabitants to the sword.” Alongside these general claims, the text identifies several specific places and cities where Joshua exterminated everyone and left no survivors. These include Hebron, Debir, the hill country, the Negev, and the western foothills (Josh. 10:38, 40). Yet in the first chapter of Judges we are told that the Canaanites lived in the Negev, the hill country, the western foothills, Hebron, and Debir (1:9–11). Moreover, they did so in such numbers and strength that they had to be driven out by force. These are the same

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cities that Joshua 10 tells us Joshua had annihilated, leaving no survivors.

Likewise, Joshua 11:23 states that “Joshua took the entire land” and then “gave it as an inheritance to Israel according to their tribal divisions” (NIV). Note: the conquered region is the same land that is later divided among the Israelite tribes. Only a chapter later, when the text turns to giving an account of these tribal divisions, the allotments begin with God telling Joshua, “You are very old, and there are still very large areas of land to be taken over” (13:1 NIV). Moreover, when one examines the allotment given to Judah, we see Caleb asking permission to drive the Anakites from the hill countries (14:11), and we also hear how Caleb has to defeat Anakites living in Hebron and, after this, marches against the people “living in Debir” (15:13–19). Similarly, it is evident with several of the other allotments that the people were yet to drive out Canaanites entrenched in the area and that the Israelites were not always successful in doing so. We read, for example, that the Ephraimites and Manassites “did not dislodge the Canaanites living in Gezer; to this day the Canaanites live among the people of Ephraim” (Josh. 16:10 NIV). Similarly, in chapter 17 it states, “Yet the Manassites were not able to occupy these towns, for the Canaanites were determined to live in that region. However, when the Israelites grew stronger, they subjected the Canaanites to forced labor but did not drive them out completely” (17:12–13 NIV). We hear that “Danites had difficulty taking possession of their territory, so they went up and attacked Leshem, took it, put it to the sword and occupied it. They settled in Leshem and named it Dan after their forefather” (19:47). Here, we see the same land said to be subdued and conquered by Joshua in battles where he exterminated and left alive nothing that breathed. This land was yet to be occupied by the tribes of Israel and is occupied by Canaanites, often heavily armed and deeply entrenched (17:17–18).

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Finally, the account of what God commanded differs in the two narratives. Joshua asserts: “He left no survivors. He totally destroyed all who breathed, just as the Lord, the God of Israel, had commanded” (Josh. 10:40, my italics) and “exterminating them without mercy, as t he Lord had commanded Moses” (Josh. 11:20b, my italics). However, when this command is retroactively referred to in Judges 2:1, there is no mention of genocide or annihilation. Instead we hear of how God had promised to drive them out as well as His command to the Israelites not to make treaties with the Canaanites and to destroy their shrines. This silence is significant in the context. If God had commanded genocide, then it is odd that only instructions concerning treaties and shrines were mentioned. Therefore, taken as a single narrative and taken literally, Joshua 1–11 gives a seemingly different account of events to that narrated by Judges and also to that narrated by the later chapters of Joshua

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itself.

Wolterstorff makes a further point, Those whose occupation it is to try to determine the origins of these writings will suggest that the editors had contradictory records, oral traditions, and so forth to work with. No doubt this is correct. But those who edited the final version of these writings into one sequence were not mindless; they could see, as well as you and I can see, the tensions and

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contradictions— surface or real—that I have pointed to. So what is going on?

Wolterstorff’s point is that, regardless of what sources or strata of tradition are alleged behind the final form of Joshua, the editors who put these books into a single narrative would have been well aware of the obvious tensions in the passages mentioned above. Moreover, they were not mindless or stupid. They would not want to affirm that both accounts were a literal description of what occurred. Yet they chose to put in the canon, next to Joshua, a book that began with a narration at odds with a literal reading of the early chapters of Joshua. Moreover, the author of Joshua chose to juxtapose the picture of Joshua 1–11 with the later chapters I mentioned above. They cannot, therefore, be asserting that both accounts are literally true. I think Wolterstorff is right on this. However, his position could be strengthened on theological grounds. In Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim that God Speaks, Wolterstorff provides an interesting and rigorous analysis of the notion that Scripture is the Word of God. Central to his analysis is that “an eminently plausible construal of the process whereby these books found their way into a single canonical text, would be that by way of that process of canonization, God was authorizing these books as together constituting a single volume of divine discourse.”

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This understanding of Scripture provides the theological justification for reading the text as a single series. By examining what was affirmed in Judges and in later passages of Joshua, one can determine

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what the author of the early chapters of Joshua intended. Moreover, if the primary author of Scripture is God, then obviously the primary author of the final canonical text is unlikely to have deliberately (or accidentally) authored an obviously contradictory narrative. Hence, even if the contradictions were not obvious to the authors (and I think Wolterstorff correctly infers that these

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apparent contradictions would have been), they would be evident to God. Given that the process whereby these books were incorporated into a “single canonical text” constitutes God authorizing them, this process cannot have involved the authorization of a text that affirms, as literally true, two contradictory accounts. It may be contended that an appeal to divine authorship in this way begs the question, but I think this is mistaken. As I understand the objection, the skeptic who claims that God commanded genocide is offering a reductio ad absurdum; he starts by assuming that whatever God commands is right and that Scripture is the Word of God and then derives from these assumptions the absurd conclusion that genocide is not wrong. The question then is whether, granting these assumptions, such a conclusion does, in fact, follow. If Scripture is a unified divine discourse, the skeptic’s conclusion need not follow, because another assumption of the skeptic—namely, that all accounts were intended to be taken as literal—is not evidently true. At this point Wolterstorff raises a further issue about the type of literature Joshua appears to be. He notes that the early chapters of Judges, by and large, read like “down-to-earth history.” However, he continues, anyone carefully reading the book of Joshua will recognize in it certain stylistic renderings —“formulaic phrasings” and “formulaic convention[s]” character of some of the major events described.”

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as well as “the highly ritualized

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The book is framed by its opening narration of the ritualized crossing of the Jordan and by its closing narration of the equally-ritualized ceremony of blessing and cursing that took place at Shechem; and the conquest narrative begins with the ritualized destruction of Jericho.

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A related ritualistic feature is “the mysterious sacral category of being devoted to

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destruction.”

Most significant is the use of formulaic language:

Anyone who reads the Book of Joshua in one sitting cannot fail to be struck by the prominent employment of formulaic phrasings. . . . Far more important is the formulaic clause, “struck down all the inhabitants with the edge of the sword.”

The first time one reads that Joshua struck down all the inhabitants of a city with the edge of the sword, namely, in the story of the conquest of Jericho (6:21), one makes nothing of it. But the phrasing—or close variants thereon—gets repeated, seven times in close succession in chapter 10, two more times in chapter 11, and several times in other chapters. The repetition

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makes it unmistakable that we are dealing here with a formulaic literary convention.

Thus Joshua itself appears to be full of ritualistic, stylized, formulaic language. It therefore looks like something other than a mere literal description of what occurred. In light of these facts Wolterstorff argues that Judges should be taken literally whereas Joshua is hagiographic history, a highly stylized, exaggerated account of the events designed to teach theological and moral points rather than to describe in detail what literally happened. Wolterstorff provides the example of North American morality tales of the noble Puritan or Washington crossing the Delaware. These are idealized, exaggerated accounts of the past designed to teach a moral lesson; they are not intended to be taken as accurate accounts of what actually occurred. Ancient Near Eastern Conquest Accounts Wolterstorff’s argument has, I think, considerable force. Judges and Joshua cannot both be taken literally as their accounts are at odds; given the internal evidence Wolterstorff cites, it is reasonable to contend that Joshua is the one that is nonliteral. Wolterstorff, however, limits his case to what I call internal evidence, evidence from within the text itself. I think there is some interesting external evidence, evidence of how particular terms and language were used in other ancient Near Eastern histories of conquests and battles, which could be added to Wolterstorff’s argument. Here I will cite three such lines of evidence. The first is that comparisons between the book of Joshua and other ancient Near Eastern conquest accounts from the same period demonstrate some important stylistic parallels. Various studies have documented these similarities. Commenting on the structure of the campaigns mentioned in Joshua 9– 12, Kenneth Kitchen reminds us: This kind of report profile is familiar to readers of ancient Near Eastern military reports, not least in the second millennium. Most striking is the example of the campaign annals of Tuthmosis III of Egypt in his years 22–42 (ca. 1458– 1438). . . . [T]he pharaoh there gives a very full account of his initial victory at Megiddo, by contrast with the far more summary and stylized reports of the ensuing sixteen subsequent campaigns. Just like Joshua against up to seven kings in south Canaan and four-plus up north. Kitchen adds,

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The Ten Year Annals of the Hittite king Mursil II (later fourteenth century) are also instructive. Exactly like the “prefaces” in the two Joshua war reports (10:1–4; 11:1–5), detailing hostility by a number of foreign rulers against Joshua and Israel as the reason for the wars, so in his annals Mursil II gives us a long “preface” on the hostility of neighbouring

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rulers and people groups that lead to his campaigns.

Kitchen offers other examples. He observes that the same formulaic style found in Joshua is also used in the Amarna letters EA 185 and EA 186.

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Similarly, before his major campaigns,

Joshua is commissioned by YHWH not to fear (cf. 5:13–15; 10:8; 11:6). So also by Ptah and Amun were Merenptah in Egypt, and Tuthmosis IV long before him; and likewise Mursil II of the Hittites by his gods (Ten-Year Annals, etc.), all in the second millennium, besides such

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kings as Assurbanipal of Assyria down to the seventh century.

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Similar studies have been done by John Van Seters and James Hoffmeier. However, the most comprehensive is that done by K. Lawson Younger. Younger notes similarities in the preface, structure, and even the way the treaty with the Gibeonites is recorded between Joshua and various ancient Near Eastern accounts.

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Joshua follows this convention in describing numerous battles

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occurring in a single day or within a single campaign.

Ancient Near Eastern accounts also, like

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Joshua, repeatedly make reference to the enemy “melting with fear.” Even the way post-battle pursuits are set out and described shows similarities with pursuits in ancient Near Eastern literature.

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I could mention more examples. The point is that “when the composition and rhetoric of the Joshua narratives in chaps. 9–12 are compared to the conventions of writing about conquests in Egyptian, Hittite, Akkadian, Moabite, and Aramaic texts, they are revealed to be very similar.”

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Second, Younger notes such accounts are “highly figurative” and narrate military events via a common transmission code. The literary motif of divine intervention is an example. Both The 10 Year Annals of Mursilli and Sargon’s Letter to the God record a divine intervention where the god sends

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hailstones on the enemy. Tuthmosis III has a similar story regarding a meteor. Younger observes that these accounts are very similar to parallel accounts in Joshua 10. Similarly, Younger points out that in many ancient Near Eastern texts “one can discern a literary technique in which a deity is implored to maintain daylight long enough for there to be a victory,”

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which has obvious

parallels to Josh 10:13-14. Similarly, Richard Hess points to Hittite conquest accounts that describe the gods knocking down the walls of an enemy city in a manner similar to that described in the battle

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of Jericho.

The fact that similar events are narrated in multiple different accounts suggests they

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are “a notable ingredient of the transmission code for conquest accounts” —that is, part of the common hyperbolic rhetoric of warfare rather than descriptions of what actually occurred. Third, part of this “transmission code” is that victories are narrated in an exaggerated hyperbolic fashion in terms of total conquest, complete annihilation and destruction of the enemy, killing everyone, leaving no survivors, and so on. Kitchen offers illuminating examples: The type of rhetoric in question was a regular feature of military reports in the second and first millennia, as others have made very clear. . . . In the later fifteenth century Tuthmosis III could boast “the numerous army of Mitanni, was overthrown within the hour, annihilated totally, like those (now) non-existent”—whereas, in fact, the forces of Mitanni lived to fight many another day, in the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries. Some centuries later, about 840/830, Mesha king of Moab could boast that “Israel has utterly perished for always”—a rather premature judgment at that date, by over a century! And so on, ad libitum. It is in this

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frame of reference that the Joshua rhetoric must also be understood.

Younger offers numerous other examples. Merenptah’s Stele describes a skirmish with Israel as

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follows, “Yanoam is nonexistent; Israel is wasted, his seed is not.” Here a skirmish in which Egypt prevailed is described hyperbolically in terms of the total annihilation of Israel. Sennacherib uses similar hyperbole, “The soldiers of Hirimme, dangerous enemies, I cut down with the sword; and not one escaped.”

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Mursilli II records making “Mt. Asharpaya empty (of humanity)” and the

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“mountains of Tarikarimu empty (of humanity).” Mesha (whom Kitchen cited as stating “Israel has utterly perished for always”) describes victories in terms of him fighting against a town, taking it,

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and then killing all the inhabitants of the town. Similarly, The Bulletin of Ramses II, a historical narrative of Egyptian military campaigns into Syria, narrates Egypt’s considerably lessthan-decisive victory at the battle of Kadesh with the following rhetoric: His majesty slew the entire force of the wretched foe from Hatti, together with his great chiefs and all his brothers, as well as all the chiefs of all the countries that had come with him, their infantry and their chariotry falling on their faces one upon the other. His majesty slaughtered and slew them in their places. . . . He took no note of the millions of foreigners; he regarded them as chaff.

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Numerous other examples could be provided. The hyperbolic use of language similar to that in Joshua

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is strikingly evident.

It is equally evident that histories of this sort are highly stylized and often use this exaggeration for what could be called hagiographic purposes to commend the kings as faithful servants of the gods, rather than for giving literal descriptions of what occurred. hyperbole.”

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They constitute “monumental

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Three things become evident about the book of Joshua as we study the evidence. First, taken as a single narrative and taken literally, Joshua 1–11 gives an account of events at odds with that narrated by Judges and also with that narrated by the later chapters of Joshua itself. Second is that, as Wolterstorff commented, “those who edited the final version of these writings into one sequence were not mindless,” particularly if God speaks through them. Third, while Judges reads as “down to earth history,” a careful reading of Joshua reveals it to be full of ritualistic, stylized, and formulaic language. This third point is supported by research into ancient Near Eastern conquest accounts. Such studies show 1) such accounts are highly hyperbolic, hagiographic, and figurative, and follow a common transmission code; 2) comparisons between these accounts and the early chapters of Joshua suggest Joshua is written according to the same literary conventions and transmission code; and 3) part of this transmission code is to portray a victory hyperbolically in absolute terms of totally destroying the enemy or in terms of miraculous divine intervention: “such statements are rhetoric indicative of military victory,”

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not literal descriptions of what occurred.

I think these three points, taken together, provide compelling reasons for thinking that one should interpret the text as a highly figurative and hyperbolic account of what occurred. In light of these factors, it seems sensible to conclude that the accounts of battles in Joshua 6–11 are not meant to be taken literally. Implications We can draw two important implications in light of what we have seen so far. First, as Wolterstorff asserts, on the assumption that Deuteronomy and Joshua are both literarily and linguistically connected and canonically sequenced, this interpretation of Joshua forces a back-interpretation of Deuteronomy. If “struck down all the inhabitants with the edge of the sword” is a literary convention when used to describe Joshua’s exploits, then it is likewise a literary convention when similar words are used by Moses in his instructions to Israel in general and to Joshua in particular.

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I think Wolterstorff is correct here: this interpretation of Joshua does force a back-interpretation of Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy 7:2 states “when the Lord your God has given them up before you and you have struck them, you shall utterly destroy them.” Similarly, Deuteronomy 20:16-17 commands: “do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them” (NIV). In Joshua 10 one sees the formulaic language of “and the Lord gave [the city]” and he/they “struck it and its king with the edge of the sword” until “there was no one remaining” (NRSV). The chapter is summarized with the phrase, “So Joshua defeated the whole land . . . ; he left no one remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed” (v. 40 NRSV). The similar phraseology is evident. Moreover, the book of Joshua clearly, explicitly, and repeatedly identifies what Joshua did in these chapters with the command that Moses had given regarding the Canaanites in Deuteronomy: “He left no survivors. He totally destroyed all who breathed, just as the Lord, the God of Israel, had commanded” (Josh. 10:40 NIV, emphasis added). So, if the language of “striking all the people by the sword,” “leaving no survivors,” “totally destroying,” “striking all the inhabitants with the edge of the sword,” and so on is hyperbolic (as the evidence suggests it is), then the command cannot have been intended to be taken literally. This understanding of Deuteronomy’s commands also solves some other interpretative problems. Here I will mention briefly three. 1) What God commanded regarding the Canaanites differs in various canonical books. As noted above, in Judges 2 when the Angel of the Lord refers back to the original command, it is stated in terms of not making treaties with them, destroying their shrines, and driving them out; it is not stated in terms of literally exterminating them. Similarly, in the earlier book of Exodus the command is given in terms of not allowing the Canaanites to live in the land, again, not in terms of extermination. This is significant. “Deuteronomy” in Greek means “second law,” and throughout Deuteronomy, Moses repeats laws already laid down in the book of Exodus, sometimes expanding on them. The Decalogue, for example, which was delivered on Sinai in Exodus 20, is repeated in Deuteronomy 5. The laws about releasing an ebed (an indentured servant) in Exodus 21:1 are repeated and expanded in Deuteronomy 15:12–18. Similarly, Deuteronomy 22:28–29 is a repetition of a law spelled out in

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Exodus 22:15. The same occurs with the law under discussion. Deuteronomy 7 repeats the same promises and commands laid down in Exodus 23:20– 32; however, in Deuteronomy, the language of “destroy them” replaces the “do not let them live in your land” in Exodus. Wolterstorff’s interpretation explains this. 2) The word herem, which is translated “destroy” in Deuteronomy 7:2, has the primary meaning of the irrevocable giving over or devotion of something to Yahweh and hence implies renunciation. The

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term has also developed a secondary secular meaning of “to destroy,” but a literal reading of “destroy” here does not fit the context well. The command to “destroy” the Canaanites occurs alongside several other commands, “Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy. Do not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons”

(Deut. 7:2–3 NIV). However, this seems odd: killing is not an obvious antithesis to marrying or making a covenant; moreover, the text goes on to elaborate the command in terms of smashing idols and driving them out—in a similar vein as Judges. For this reason Christopher Wright argues herem

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should be translated as “renounce,” and is a command to shun the idolatrous Canaanites. This reading clashes with the parallel verse in Deuteronomy 20:17, where “herem is used epexegetically to verse 16, ‘you shall not leave alive anything that breathes.’”

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“destroy” and understanding it hyperbolically makes sense of this.

However, taking the word as

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3) The hyperbolic reading addresses another apparent contradiction in the text noted by many readers of the Pentateuch. While Deuteronomy 7:2 and 20:16–17 command Israel to “utterly destroy” the Canaanites and to “not leave alive anything that breathes,” numerous other texts claim the Canaanites are to be “driven out,” “dispossessed,” “thrust out,” and so on. In fact, often the “drive out” language is juxtaposed with the language of “destroy.” Taken literally, these pictures are inconsistent. If I stated that I had driven an intruder from my house, one would not assume the intruder was dead in my lounge. Similarly, if I said I had killed an intruder, one would not normally think this meant the intruder had fled. The Hebrew confirms this; the language of driving out and casting out is used elsewhere to refer to Adam and Eve being driven from Eden (Gen. 3:24), Cain being driven into the wilderness (Gen. 4:14), and David being driven out by Saul (1 Sam. 26:19). All are cases where the meaning precludes something being literally destroyed.

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Moreover, when the “drive out” language is used of Canaan, it often is used in a context where it does not literally mean destroyed, but rather dispossessed. In Leviticus 18:26-28, in the same way the

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Canaanites would be driven out, so Israel would be for violating the covenant. This ultimately happened during the Babylonian exile—which was obviously not an annihilation of ethnic Jews. Furthermore, the language of destroying whole nations in several places in Deuteronomy is used in a rhetorical or hyperbolic sense, alongside references to “driving out” the nation in question or dispossessing them; it does not mean exterminating them. Hence, Wolterstorff’s suggestion has ample precedent from within the text itself.

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A second implication of Wolterstorff’s position is that Joshua does not assert that Israel engaged in divinely authorized genocide: . . . when a high-school basketball player says his team slaughtered the other team last night, what is he asserting? Not easy to tell. That they scored a decisive victory? Maybe. But suppose they just barely eked out a win? Was he lying? Maybe not. Maybe he was speaking with a wink-of-the-eye hyperbole.

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In the same way, when one realizes that Joshua is hagiographic and highly hyperbolic in its narration of what occurred, the best one can conclude from the accounts of killing everyone that breathed is this: Israel scored a decisive victory and once you recognize the presence of hyperbole it is not even clear how decisive the victories were. Joshua did not conquer all the cities in the land nor did he slaughter all the inhabitants in the cities he did conquer. The book of Joshua does not say that he did.

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Canonical factors force the same conclusion. I noted above that in Judges and Exodus the command is expressed in terms of avoiding treaties and driving the Canaanites out. In Joshua and Deuteronomy the command is expressed in the language of “utterly destroying them.” The conclusion we have reached is that the latter is figurative language and the former is literal. If this is the case, then the command was to drive them out and it was not to literally exterminate them. Conclusion I contend that the widely held view that the book of Joshua teaches that God commanded the genocide of the Canaanites is questionable. Joshua is accepted as part of a canon. Read in this context, taking the account of total annihilation of the Canaanite populations as a literal description of what occurred contradicts what is affirmed to have literally occurred in Judges. Moreover, it conflicts with how the command is described elsewhere in Judges and Exodus. The writers would have known this and, not being mindless, could not have meant both accounts to be taken literally. This means one must be nonliteral. The literary conventions Joshua uses are highly stylized, figurative, and contain hyperbolic, hagiographic accounts of what occurred. The conventions in Judges are less so. Consequently, the so-called genocide in Joshua and the command to “utterly destroy” the Canaanites should not be taken literally. Appendix: The Case of the Midianites Wolterstorff’s approach may also shed light on some other troubling texts such as the apparent genocide of the Midianites in Numbers 31. After the Israelites “fought against Midian, as the Lord commanded Moses, and killed every man” (Num. 31:7 NIV), Moses commanded them to “kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man” (vv. 17–18 NIV). Taken in isolation, this text affirms that every Midianite was killed and only female virgins survived so they could be assimilated into the Israelite community. However, read in its literary context, as part of a single narrative—a connected literary unit—similar issues are apparent. First, Numbers 31 is one part of a broader context; it is both part of the Pentateuch and also part of a larger canonical sequence. The Pentateuch contains the Torah or Law. Normally in the Torah when

Moses utters a command on God’s behalf the passage begins with “The Lord commanded Moses”; this preface is absent from the commands in Numbers 31. The passages merely state that God commanded them to make war on Midian; verse 7 states, “They fought against Midian, as the Lord commanded Moses, and killed every man.” This suggests the Israelites fulfilled this command. Moses’ command to kill women and children occurs after this and appears to be on his own

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authority. If one reads the laws of war that are elaborated in the book of Deuteronomy, which follows Numbers, God commanded Israel not to kill noncombatants, such as women and children. He condemns the kind of conduct Moses commands here.

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In Judges 6 and 7, the Midianites invade Israel in numbers said to be “like swarms of locusts. It was impossible to count the men and their camels” (Judg. 6:5 NIV). Israel was so overrun with Midianites that they fled to “mountain clefts, caves and strongholds” (Judg. 6:2 NIV). Unable to win in open battle, Gideon was forced to use deception to defeat them. This is not congruous with the Midianites having been “utterly destroyed.” Second, these tensions in the text are fairly obvious. As with Joshua, whoever “edited the final

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version of these writings into one sequence” juxtaposed several accounts, which, if taken literally, describe Israel, at Moses’ command, annihilating the entire population of Midian (including noncombatants); yet several other accounts affirm that God prohibits the killing of noncombatants and that the Midianites were not annihilated. Assuming this person was not “mindless,” he cannot have intended to affirm both as literally true. Third, the genre and style of the accounts suggests Numbers 31 is the nonliteral account. Numbers 31

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appears highly hyperbolic; it contains obvious rhetorical exaggeration. The Israelite army is said to have killed every Midianite man in battle without a single Israelite fatality (Num 31:50).

[320]

Moreover, the spoil from the battle is said to be 32,000 maidens and 675,000 sheep

and goats—this is astronomically and absurdly large.

[321]

Daniel Fouts notes that exaggerated

numbers are common forms of hyperbole in ancient Near Eastern battle accounts. suggests, “These are all hyperbolic descriptions of battles that took place.”

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Wolterstorff

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So, if we read the text in the literary context of the broader canon, we again see the author juxtaposing two accounts. One claims that God prohibits killing noncombatants and that the Midianites continued to live in the land as a serious military threat; another account, using rhetoric known to be used hyperbolically in military contexts, states that Israel, at Moses’ command, wiped them all out. Assuming the author was an intelligent person,

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we are at least owed an argument as to why one

should read these texts as literally claiming that God commanded genocide.

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A similar phenomenon occurs with the case of the Amalekites,

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[326]

the Babylonian invasions,

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and the sacking of the Jebusite city of Jerusalem. In each case a battle is narrated in totalistic terms of complete destruction of all the people, yet later narration goes on to assume matter-of-factly that it did not literally occur. The fact that this happens on multiple occasions in different books rapidly diminishes the probability that these features are coincidental or careless errors. Why is it that almost every time a narration of “genocide” occurs, it is followed by an account that presupposes it did not happen? These facts significantly raise the probability that this is a deliberate literary construction by the authors.

Epilogue Carson Weitnauer We’ve looked at two tantalizing questions throughout this book: are the New Atheists reasonable? Do they reason well? And what about Christians and Christianity? Do they manage any better? To be clear, we haven’t been writing about all atheists everywhere, but about the New Atheist leadership. We have also provided a critique of the atheistic worldview in general. But we recognize that there’s a difference between the most prominent New Atheists and the rest of us. I am reminded every week, as I interact with a variety of skeptical friends who are open-minded, accepting, and quite intelligent, that the ability to reason is widely distributed among Christians and non-Christians alike. If you have come to this book with an open mind and a friendly disposition, we’re glad to be in dialogue with you. The search for truth with good-hearted people can involve a lot of laughter, and can be a way of developing strong friendships. Nevertheless, on the basis of the evidence and arguments of this book, we conclude that New Atheist leaders often represent reason quite poorly, both in their irrational habits and because of their angry, demeaning outbursts about religion. By contrast, we find that the leading Christian respondents, while offering a firm disagreement, generally seek to integrate both respect and reason as they join the conversation. We expect pushback from others for that: “What arrogance! What hubris! How judgmental and hateful!” Haven’t we just illustrated again that Christians are annoying, belligerent, cocky, defensive, exclusive, and so on, until we’ve exhausted the thesaurus? Doesn’t any claim by Christians that we have a more reasonable claim to truth just further establish our dogmatic, irrational fanaticism? Our culture often operates by a double standard. When Christopher Hitchens asks, as in the title for a chapter in God Is Not Great “Is Religion Child Abuse?” what happens? Yes, his book was rhetorically effective. But did the press pillory him for being judgmental? On the contrary, the Boston Globe proclaims, “his indictments are trenchant and witty,” and The New York Times Book Review lauds the book as “impressive . . . entertaining . . . a serious and deeply felt book.” What happens on the other hand when Christians strongly but gracefully disagree with the extreme idea that atheists and only atheists are reasonable? One response on the internet, to a pre-publication announcement of this initiative, was to ask, “Or perhaps when you DO NOT take a naturalistic worldview you become silly and irrational and no one wants to hear you constantly make a fool of yourself?!” Seriously. To take a more public example, here’s how Richard Dawkins responded, in an op-ed for The Guardian, to an invitation from the Oxford University Christian Union to a reasoned debate with Dr. William Lane Craig: Don’t feel embarrassed if you’ve never heard of William Lane Craig. He parades himself as a philosopher, but none of the professors of philosophy whom I consulted had heard his name

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either. Perhaps he is a “theologian.”

Dawkins ends this deeply misleading piece with a bit of nasty name-calling, mis-identifying Craig as a “deplorable apologist for genocide.” At the same time, Dawkins has yet to respond to any of Craig’s highly regarded and repeatedly published analyses of Dawkins’ numerous logical errors. Notice the pattern: Christians offer a respectful, reasoned argument for a thesis. Critics side step the logic and attack our character. This is unreasonable in all senses of the word. At some point, in light of the innumerable Reason Rallies and Project Reasons the New Atheists like to put together, they will have to answer the question: where are the logical arguments with premises that support their conclusions? For instance, where are the peer-reviewed sociological studies that demonstrate, “Religious faith, on

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the other hand, erodes compassion,” as Sam Harris told CNN The truth is that

after the 2011 tsunami in Japan?

Individuals who reported attending religious services once a week or more were more likely to volunteer for school and youth groups than those who reported attending religious services less than a few times a year.

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If anything, attacks on the character of Christians offers us an opportunity to inform those listening that religious dedication distinctly improves life outcomes on a wide variety of measures. As a recent Gallup poll concluded: An analysis of more than 676,000 Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index interviews conducted in 2011 and 2010 finds that Americans who are the most religious have the highest levels of wellbeing.

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To draw people’s attention to the scientific research on these questions is not the same as claiming that we have it all together. None of the contributors to this book would suggest we are perfect persons with bulletproof arguments and total certainty. As Christians, we readily admit to our limits and to our sin. Our hope is not in our strength but in God’s greatness. As the prophet Jeremiah says, This is what the LORD says: “Let not the wise man boast of his wisdom or the strong man boast of his strength or the rich man boast of his riches, but let him who boasts boast about this: that he understands and knows me, that I am the LORD, who exercises kindness, justice and righteousness on earth, for in these I delight,” declares the LORD (Jer. 9:23). Where is the center of reason to be found? Is it in smug self-certainty, whether religious or a-religious

in nature? No; for arrogance of any kind, from any source, tends to keep us from investigating, learning, and seeking to know more than we currently do. Jeremiah’s words, offensive as they were to a status-driven, power-hungry, knowledge-loving city like ancient Jerusalem, and perhaps to us as well, knock us off our pedestals. In doing so, they raise our eyes to one who can justly represent not just wisdom but righteousness, and not just for himself, but for our redemption and transformation as well. The Christian hope is that God, in his great wisdom, created everything good. We have taken the building blocks of creation, including our own humanness in the image of God, and misused them in largely selfish ways. In doing so, we have turned from honoring God, who gave us our minds, to honoring ourselves, who take what we received for granted. What will fix this problem? More education? From the scholarship of monasteries to the founding of many European and American universities, Christians have long been dedicated to the importance of education. But education is insufficient in itself. Berlin under the Weimar Republic, before the government takeover by Adolf Hitler, was a leading intellectual center of the world. In architecture, literature, film, painting, music, psychology, and other fields, Berlin was at the vanguard of scientific research and knowledge development. This educated and advanced workforce became the engine of German power for the horrors of the Holocaust and the carnage of World War II. Moral reform? But by what standard? Only in Christ do we find both the completion of wisdom and the standard of righteousness for which our souls were made. Far from crushing us with his superiority, Jesus has entered into the world as one of us. As another New Testament letter tells us, though Jesus was without sin, he was tempted to do wrong in every way that we are, so he is readily able to sympathize with us in our weaknesses. The pattern of God’s saving work across the millennia was one of working to provide an alternative arrangement to executing the proper judgment against sinful and rebellious people. But the lambs and oxen of the Old Testament system were only symbolic of what was desperately needed, a true substitute for human sin. In Christ’s willing offering of himself before God, giving himself in our place, he paid the price for our mutiny. Jesus’ perfect life made him a fit sacrifice for us on the cross. Therefore he is the means for our own rescue and restoration. This is only the briefest of sketches for why we are so enthralled with Jesus. It comes down to love. Yes, we think the Christian story is historically defensible and theologically coherent and rationally justifiable. Having considered those issues deeply, we who have collaborated to create this book have personally experienced the living God, and his love has changed our lives. Though imperfectly, we write for his glory and not our own. So we don’t want to end this book by reviewing how brilliant each chapter has been and proclaiming that, Q.E.D., we have answered all questions and solved all problems and given all reasons. Far from it. Instead, we want to point you to Jesus Christ. If we were to boast, we would only wish to boast

about the greatness of Christ. Where then does this leave you? We hope our book has left you with more questions than answers. For instance:

· How and why do the New Atheists get away with claiming the brand of reason? · If Christians give solid reasons for our beliefs, and treat others with respect, are they not rational and reasonable people? · What else have I not been told about the rationality of the Christian faith? · Is it possible that Jesus Christ really is God? · Considering for a moment that this might even be possible, what kind of evidence is there for such a unique claim? For some readers, this book will mark the first time you have encountered reasons to question atheism and to consider Christianity. We sincerely hope it isn’t the last. For others, this material is quite familiar. We invite you to take courage. Be active, speak up, and change the conversation. Reason needs advocates in every generation. For another group, you still aren’t convinced, and you’re feeling a bit insulted. We apologize for where we might have spoken too strongly, but we are hopeful about the possibility of continued dialogue. May it lead to true friendship and new insights for all of us. Wherever you are in your search for truth, we hope you have enjoyed our book. We invite you to gather some friends to discuss it together. If you can, make it a diverse group. Include atheists, followers of Jesus, Buddhists, the genuinely uncertain, and whoever else might be around. We hope you will find the same life and truth that we have found in Jesus Christ. No matter what you end up deciding, we think your life will be the richer for the conversation.

About the Authors William Lane Craig “Dawkins Delusion” William Lane Craig is Research Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology in La Mirada, California. He and his wife Jan have two grown children. He holds dual M.A.s from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, a Ph.D. from the University of Birmingham (England), and a D.Theol. from the University of Munich. From 1980-86 he taught Philosophy of Religion at Trinity, during which time he and Jan started their family. In 1987 they moved to Brussels, Belgium, where Dr. Craig pursued research at the University of Louvain until assuming his position at Talbot in 1994. He has authored or edited over thirty books, including The Kalam Cosmological Argument; Assessing the New Testament Evidence for the Historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus; Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom ; Theism, Atheism and Big Bang Cosmology; and God, Time and Eternity, as well as over a hundred articles in professional journals of philosophy and theology, including The Journal of Philosophy, New Testament Studies, Journal for the Study of the New Testament , American Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophical Studies, Philosophy, and British Journal for Philosophy of Science. John M. DePoe “The Problem of Evil and Reasonable Christian Responses” John M. DePoe (Ph.D. Philosophy, University of Iowa) is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Marywood University. His work in epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of religion has been published in journals such as Acta Analytica, Philosophical Studies, Philosophia Christi, Southwest Philosophical Studies, and others. Chuck Edwards “Richard Dawkins: Long on Rhetoric, Short on Reason” Chuck Edwards has an M.A. in Biblical Studies from Dallas Theological Seminary and has worked in Christian ministry most of his adult life. After spending eight years on campus staff with Campus Crusade for Christ, he taught on the university level as

well as worked as Minister of Education of a large church. For the past twenty years, Chuck has made an intensive study of worldview issues. For twelve years he was a featured conference speaker and writer for Summit Ministries (summit.org), traveling across the U.S. and internationally coaching students (high school and college level), teachers (both public and private), and adults to understand the times in which we live and to pro-actively be “salt and light” Christians in every area of life, from the classroom to the boardroom to the halls of congress. Chuck is currently developing the Ratio Christi apologetics club at Davidson College, Davidson, NC while pursuing a Doctor of Ministry degree in Philosophy and Culture from Talbot School of Theology (Biola University). Chuck has written articles for several national media publications and co-authored with David Noebel the Worldviews in Focus Bible study curriculum, comprised of two 12-week studies; Thinking Like A Christian: Understanding and Living a Biblical Worldview and Countering Culture: Arming Yourself to Confront Non-Biblical Worldviews. He also wrote a six-week course titled Responding to Relativism. Chuck and his wife, Pat, live in North Carolina and have two grown daughters. Matthew Flannagan “Did God Command the Genocide of the Canaanites?” Dr. Matthew Flannagan is an Auckland-based theologian, philosopher, and ethicist. He currently works as a teaching elder at Takanini Community Church, in south Auckland, New Zealand. He is the author of several articles and has contributed to several books. He and his wife Madeleine run the popular blog at http://www.mandm.org.nz/. Tom Gilson General Editor “The Party of Reason” “Unreason at the Head of Project Reason” “God and Science Do Mix” Tom Gilson is a ministry strategist and author on staff with Campus Crusade for Christ, currently assigned (on loan) to BreakPoint/The Colson Center for Christian Worldview, where he works as a writer and in developing strategy for worldview

ministries. He and his wife, Sara, live in historic Yorktown, Virginia, with their college student son, Jonathan, and their teenage daughter, Lisa. Tom is the monthly Worldview and You columnist at www.breakpoint.org. His articles have appeared in Discipleship Journal, Touchstone Magazine, and Salvo. He runs the Thinking Christian blog, www.thinkingchristian.net, and is a member of the group blogs at First Things: Evangel (www.firstthings.com/blogs/evangel) and The Point (www.thepointradio.org). He enjoys hiking, canoeing, and the long-term project (still unsuccessful after many years) of trying to convince Jonathan and Lisa that “daddies are never silly.” Peter Grice “Reason in a Christian Context” Peter Grice is President of Think Christianity, which promotes Christian thought in contemporary life. He also serves as Director of the TELOS Program™ , a unique Christian worldview development program for teenagers and young adults. Peter speaks on a variety of topics related to science, culture, and worldviews. He lives in Brisbane, Australia with his wife Anchalee and son Lewis. Randy Hardman “Historical Evidences for the Gospels” Randy Hardman (B.A. Philosophy and Religion, Appalachian State University; M.A. Biblical Studies, Asbury Theological Seminary) is a writer, speaker, and the founder o f Ratio Christi: Student Apologetics Alliance. He directed the organization for the first three years of its existence before moving into some other areas of ministry. He currently serves as the Producer of The Bara Initiative (www.thebarainitiative.com), an online media ministry geared toward tackling worldview topics in an informed, relational, and creative way. He has worked for Summit Ministries since 2007 as their Director of Classroom and a student counselor. Randy has been published in t h e American Theological Inquiry and is a regular contributor to ThePointRadio.org. He also serves as a college pastor in Wilmore, KY where he lives with his wife and son. He enjoys playing guitar, spending time outdoors, and drinking an exceptional amount of coffee. David Marshall “John Loftus and the “Outsider-Insider Test for Faith”

“The Marriage of Faith and Reason” David Marshall is founder of Kuai Mu Institute for Christianity and World Cultures. He has written several groundbreaking books, including The Truth Behind the New Atheism, Jesus and the Religions of Man, and Why the Jesus Seminar Can't find Jesus, and Grandma Marshall Could. Having lived in Asia for much of his life, David is presently completing a dissertation describing how Christianity relates to other religions, especially Chinese religions. He now lives with his wife and two sons in a small town east of Seattle, where he enjoys cross-country skiing with his boys, and the slow ripening of succulent fruit. He blogs on many topics at http://www.christthetaoblogspot.com. Sean McDowell “Are Science and Christianity at Odds?” Sean McDowell is the Head of the Bible Department at Capistrano Valley Christian Schools where he teaches Philosophy, Theology, and Apologetics. In 2008 he received the Educator of the Year award for San Juan Capistrano, California. He graduated summa cum laude from Talbot Theological Seminary with a double Master’s degree in Theology and Philosophy. He is pursuing a Ph.D. in Apologetics and Worldview Studies from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Traveling throughout the United States and abroad, Sean speaks at camps, churches, schools, universities, and conferences. Sean is the co-author of Is God Just a Human Invention?, Understanding Intelligent Design along with William A. Dembski, The Unshakable Truth: How You Can Experience the Twelve Essentials of a Relevant Faith, Evidence for the Resurrection and More Than A Carpenter with his father, Josh McDowell. He is the General Editor for Apologetics for a New Generation and The Apologetics Study Bible for Students. He has also written Ethix: Being Bold in a Whatever World, and has contributed to YouthWorker Journal, Decision Magazine, and the Christian Research Journal. Follow the dialogue with Sean as he blogs regularly at www.conversantlife.com. In April 2000, Sean married his high school sweetheart, Stephanie. They have two children and live in San Juan Capistrano, California. Sean played college basketball at Biola University, and he likes to brag about his ping-pong skills. He can be found online at www.seanmcdowell.org.

Glenn Sunshine “Christianity and Slavery” Glenn Sunshine received his Ph.D. in Renaissance and Reformation History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is Professor of Early Modern European History at Central Connecticut State University and a Research Fellow of the Acton Institute. Glenn is the author of Reforming French Protestantism , The Reformation for Armchair Theologians, and Why You Think the Way You Do , along with numerous scholarly and popular articles, and has appeared on the Acton Institute’s documentary, The Birth of Freedom, and Doing the Right Thing, an ethics curriculum produced by the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. Glenn and his wife Lynn have been married since 1980. They have two children. Carson Weitnauer Co-Editor “The Irony of Atheism” “Epilogue” Carson Weitnauer (M.Div., Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary) blogs regularly at www.ReasonsForGod.org. Since 2003, he has been engaged in reasoned dialogue with students as a campus minister at Emory University, Rhodes College, Harvard University, Boston College Law School, and other universities. He also currently facilitates the National Apologetics and Biblical Worldview Network for the Mission America Coalition. Carson lives in Boston with his wife and daughter. David Wood “The Explanatory Emptiness of Naturalism” David Wood is a Teaching Fellow in Philosophy. A former atheist, David converted to Christianity after examining the evidence for God’s existence and the historical evidence for Jesus’ resurrection. He has degrees in biology and philosophy and is a member of the Society of Christian Philosophers and the Evangelical Philosophical Society. David lives in the Bronx, NY, with his wife Marie and his three sons— Lucian, Blaise, and Reid. He maintains an active online presence at www.answeringmuslims.com/ and www.acts17.net/.

Samuel Youngs “By It We See Everything Else—The Explanatory Value of Christianity for Meaning and Ethics” Samuel Youngs is an instructor in Religion at Chattanooga State Community College and in Christian Thought at Bryan College in Dayton, Tennessee. He took his A.A. in Film from Manatee Community College, his B.A. from the University of South Florida where he majored in Religious Studies and Literature, and his M.A. in Religion from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts. He has published reviews and journal articles on religious and philosophical topics in American Theological Inquiry (atijournal.org) and The Journal of Comparative Theology (comparativetheology.org). He and his wife Anna, who works in family and youth ministry, share deep interests in literature, the arts, cultural studies, religion, philosophy, and building edifying relationships with colleagues and students. They live in Dayton, Tennessee.

Acknowledgments The authors wish to express their deep appreciation to the Christian Apologetics Alliance Facebook Group (https://www.facebook.com/pages/Christian-ApologeticsAlliance/170164429711140) to whom this project was originally proposed, and whose enthusiastic support nurtured it from dream into reality. It was from the beginning an unlikely project. The occasion for its writing was the atheist/secularist Reason Rally on March 24, 2012; but the idea for this book was conceived only some ninety days prior to that, on Christmas Eve 2011. Without the CAA’s encouragement it never could have happened. The authors also wish to thank Ratio Christi (www.ratiochristi.org) and especially its leaders Rick Schenker, Blake Anderson, and Adam Tucker for their encouragement and for their leadership in providing a reasonable Christian presence at the Reason Rally. Tim McGrew read the manuscript and offered excellent suggestions and corrections— thank you, Tim. Thanks also go to Campus Crusade for Christ and BreakPoint (The Colson Center for Christian Worldview) for allowing me time to work on this project for several weeks in early 2012; to Joe Carter, Alex McFarland, John Stonestreet, and Frank Turek for their encouragement and support; and to Jonathan Gilson for excellent work in website development. I wish to express special thanks to my wife, Sara, and our two children, Jonathan and Lisa, for their love, their encouragement, and their patience while walking through this intense but exciting project with me. Tom Gilson Yorktown, Virginia February 2012

I wish to thank Tom Gilson for inviting me into this project as an author and coeditor. The entire process has been a wonderful learning experience. I am also grateful for the dozens of atheist, agnostic, and seeking students who have strengthened my thinking and extended warm friendships with me as we’ve shared thousands of cups

of tea and coffee. I look forward to continuing the dialogue. My home church, Church of the Cross, and donors around the country, have offered invaluable support for my work with Telos Ministries at Harvard, Boston College Law School, and other campuses across Boston. Your prayers, encouragement, and support make all of this possible. Thank you. Most of all, I thank my wife, Mo, for her encouragement, wisdom, and love. You are the love of my life. Carson Weitnauer Boston, Massachusetts February 2012

Endnotes

[1]

Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, & Naturalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 41 (page number from NOOK version). [2]

Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Hachette Book Group, 2007), 114. [3]

Ibid., 111.

[4]

Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2004), 55. [5] [6] [7]

Ibid., 209. Ibid., 226. Hitchens, God Is Not Great, 5.

[8]

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Enemies_of_Reason, accessed March 1,

2012. [9]

Aristophanes, The Eleven Comedies of Aristophanes (No City, CreateSpace, 2011),

3. [10]

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, edited by Bernard Williams. http://www.holybooks.com/wp-content/uploads/The-Gay-Science-by-FriedrichNietzsche.pdf, 179. [11] 81.

Charles A. Fecher, Mencken: A Study of His Thought (New York: Knopf, 1978),

[12]

Harris, The End of Faith, 223.

[13]

Richard Dawkins, “Religion’s Real Child Abuse,” accessed March 1, 2012, http://richarddawkins.net/articles/118-religion-39-s-real-child-abuse. [14]

“Hitchens’ Letter to the AA Convention,” accessed March 1, 2012, http://midohioatheists.org/?m=201104. [15]

Madalyn Murray O’Hair, “History of Atheism,” 1962, accessed March 1, 2012, http://www.atheists.org/atheism/history_of_atheism. [16]

Hitchens, God Is Not Great, 64.

[17]

Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means: An inquiry into the Nature of Ideals and into the Methods Employed for Their Realization (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1937), 273. [18]

Thomas Nagel, The Last Word (New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 1997), 130-131. [19]

Michael Shermer speaking in Nine Conversations: The Question of God, PBS documentary, transcript accessed March 1, 2012 at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/questionofgod/nineconv/transcend.html. [20]

Richard Lewontin, "Billions and Billions of Demons," New York Times Book Review, January 9, 1997, 31. [21]

Sam Harris, “You Do Not Choose What You Choose,” accessed March 1, 2012, http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/1273777-you-do-not-choose-whatyou-choose. [22] [23]

Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 368.

Elizabeth Landau, “Anger at God common, even among atheists,” accessed March 1, 2012, http://thechart.blogs.cnn.com/2011/01/01/anger-at-god-common-even-among-

atheists/. [24] [25]

Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 51. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 5.

[26]

Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 157. Indeed, he fancies himself to have offered a “devastating” and “unrebuttable refutation” of God’s existence. [27]

Otherwise known as the fine-tuning of the universe for life. The optimism expressed in step (6) of Dawkins’ argument with respect to finding a physical explanation for the cosmic fine-tuning is really quite baseless and represents little more than the faith of a naturalist. For discussion of the design argument from the fine-tuning of nature’s constants and quantities, see William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith, 3rd ed. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2008), 157-79. [28]

His confusion is evident when he complains, “A God capable of continuously monitoring and controlling the individual status of every particle in the universe cannot be simple. . . . Worse (from the point of view of simplicity), other corners of God’s giant consciousness are simultaneously preoccupied with the doings and emotions and prayers of every single human being—and whatever intelligent aliens there might be on other planets in this and 100 billion other galaxies” (God Delusion, 149). This conflates God with what God is thinking about. To say that God, as an immaterial entity, is extraordinarily simple is not to endorse Aquinas’ doctrine that God is logically simple (rejected by Dawkins on 150). God may have diverse properties without having the sort of complexity Dawkins is talking about, namely “heterogeneity of parts” (ibid., 150). [29]

Quentin Smith, “The Wave Function of a Godless Universe,” in Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 322. [30]

The contents for much of this chapter were originally published in the Truth & Consequences online series under the following titles: “Dawkins’ Delusional Arguments against God,” April, 2007, http://www.summit.org/resources/tc/archive/0407/; “Dawkins’ Impossible Mountain:

Falling Down Mount Improbable,” May, 2007, http://www.summit.org/resources/tc/archive/0507/; and “Richard Dawkins’ ‘Sheer Luck’ Scenario: The Failure of a Naturalistic Explanation for Life’s Origin,” June, 2007, http://www.summit.org/resources/tc/archive/0607/. These original articles have been edited and are used by permission of the author. [31]

Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 5.

[32]

Cited in the article on The http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_delusion. [33]

God

Delusion on

Wikipedia,

See the “Resources” section at the end of the article for suggested books.

[34]

Excessively talkative in a rambling, roundabout manner, esp. about trivial matters. (http://dictionary.reference.com). [35]

“An Exercise in Contempt,” by Richard Kirk, The American Spectator, 12/8/2006, accessed April 13, 2007. Retrieved April 13, 2007, from URL = . [36] [37]

Dawkins, op. cit., 31. Ibid., 241.

[38]

David Marshall, The Truth Behind the New Atheism (Harvest House Publishers, Eugene, OR, 2007), 97. [39] [40] [41] [42]

Judges 21:25, NIV. Marshall, The Truth Behind the New Atheism, 99. See Chapter 6 in The Truth Behind the New Atheism, by David Marshall. Dawkins, op. cit., 77.

[43]

Alvin Plantinga, “The Dawkins Confusion,” Books and Culture, March/April, 2007. http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2007/002/1.21.html. [44]

Michael Ruse, Review of: The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, Isis, Vol. 98, No. 4 (December 2007), 814-816. [45]

William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith (Crossway Books, 1984, Revised 1994),

92. [46]

My purpose here is not to go into a detailed explanation and defense of the kalam cosmological argument, but simply to point out that Dawkins offers no rational disproof of the issues. For an in-depth analysis of this argument, see Craig’s Reasonable Faith cited in footnote 12, or go to his website, http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billcraig/. For a somewhat simpler and more popular treatment of the kalam cosmological argument, see Chapter 2 of Scaling the Secular City, by J. P. Moreland, or there is an excellent online article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy at Reichenbach, Bruce, "Cosmological Argument", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2010/entries/cosmological-argument/. [47]

On p. 31 of The God Delusion, Dawkins defines the “God Hypothesis” as “there exists a super-human, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us.” [48] [49] [50] [51] [52]

Dawkins,op. cit., 140. Ibid., 140-141. Ibid., 137. Ibid., 140.

Guillermo Gonzales and Jay Richards, The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery (Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2004). Guillermo Gonzalez is an Assistant Professor of Astronomy at Iowa State University and has

published over sixty articles in refereed astronomy and astrophysical journals including the October 2001 cover story of Scientific American. [53] [54] [55]

Dawkins, op. cit., 137. Ibid., 138. Dawkins, The God Delusion, 136.

[56]

John Lennox, God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God (Revised Edition, Lion Hudson, Oxford, Eng., 2009), 73. [57] [58]

Lennox, God’s Undertaker, 73. Dawkins, The God Delusion, 140.

[59]

See chapter 2 of Jonathan Wells, Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth? Why Much of What We Teach About Evolution is Wrong (Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2002), or Stephen C. Meyer’s online article, “The Origin of Life and the Death of Materialism,” reprinted from The Intercollegiate Review 31, no. 2 (Spring 1996), at http://www.arn.org/docs/meyer/sm_origins.htm. [60]

For a full explanation of the roadblocks to emerging life in “primordial soup” experiments, see Charles B. Thaxton, Walter L. Bradley, and Roger L. Olsen. The Mystery of Life's Origin: Reassessing Current Theories (1984). For additional difficulties with origin of life experiments, see Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design (2010), and Signature of Controversy: Responses to Critics of Signature in the Cell,by David Klinghoffer (2011). [61]

The follow section, slightly edited, was originally written by Tom Gilson, “Child's Play from Dawkins: Religion Isn't Bad for Kids,” Breakpoint, February 28, 2007, at http://www.breakpoint.org/component/content/article/71-features/1490-childs-playfrom-dawkins; and is used by permission of the author. [62]

H. Allen Orr, “A Mission to Convert,” The New York Review of Books,

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2007/jan/11/a-mission-to-convert/. [63]

Sam Harris, “The Fireplace Delusion,” accessed February 6, 2012, http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-fireplace-delusion. [64]

Amazon.com lists a volume published the year prior to this book, but it had no publisher and no ISBN. [65]

Quotes from the debate transcript are drawn from http://www.mandm.org.nz/2011/05/transcript-sam-harris-v-william-lane-craigdebate-“is-good-from-god”.html (accessed January 25, 2012). Debate video is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rq1QjXe3IYQ (January 25, 2012). [66]

James Hannam, “The Mysterious Fate of the Great Library of Alexandria,” accessed February 6, 2012, http://www.bede.org.uk/library.htm. [67]

Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (New York: Free Press, 2010). [68]

Sam Harris, “The Illusion of Free Will,” accessed March 6, 2012, http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-illusion-of-free-will. [69] [70]

Harris, Free Will (New York: Free Press, 2012), 29. Harris, Free Will (New York: Free Press, 2012), 38.

[71]

There are other puzzles associated with his hard deterministic position, but for present purposes it is sufficient to point out Harris’s flagrant contradiction here. John DePoe addresses free will at length in chapter fourteen. [72]

John W. Loftus, “The Outsider Test for Faith Revisited,” in The Christian Delusion, ed. John W. Loftus (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2010), 82. [73]

Gilbert Keith Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (1925; reprint, Blacksberg [sic], VA: Unabridged Books, 2011), 65.

[74]

This survey is described in more than one of Shermer’s writings, including Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design (New York: Holt Paperbacks, 2006), 37. Some skeptics reply that Shermer only showed that people see themselves as believing for rational reasons, while perceiving others as believing for irrational reasons. But of course, we know ourselves better than we know others: we might testify about our own beliefs directly, and only guess about why others believe. [75]

John W. Loftus, “The Outsider Test for Faith Revisited,” in The Christian Delusion, John W. Loftus, ed., (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2010), 97. [76]

John Loftus, “Where David Marshall Goes Wrong, Part 1, Debunking Christianity, accessed March 1, 2012, http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2011/01/where-david-marshall-goes-wrongpart-1.html. [77]

John Loftus, “The Outsider Test…..” Debunking Christianity, accessed March 1, 2012, http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2006/02/outsider-test.html/. [78]

The relevant point here is that the Inquisition is not usually how Christianity spread—except, perhaps, in Goa. [79]

Rodney Stark and Roger Finke: Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 119. [80]

Mohandas K. Gandhi, Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments With Truth (New York: Dover Publications, 1983), 30. [81]

Richard Carrier, Sense and Goodness Without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism (No City, AuthorHouse, 2005), 264. [82]

As first pointed out by Andrew Lang in Making of Religion. More recently, see Don Richardson, Eternity in Their Hearts, and David Marshall, Jesus and the Religions of Man. Loftus also repeats a “just-so” story about the evolution of religion that readers of

Daniel Dennett or Pascal Boyer will find familiar: Our brains evolved from the lower species of animals and so we have a built in agency detector inherited from them. Animals who survived were the ones that saw faces in the leaves and the grass and the trees. Precisely because they saw faces in random objects in the woods they also had the time to escape from any predators lurking in the woods before they struck, even if this meant a lot of false alarms. It’s this same agency detection that caused the ancients to see divine agents behind strange events their world, like lightning, or thunderstorms, or disasters like fires. And this same agency detection was at work when they had a good crop, or the birth of a boy, or when they had a dream.

Loftus here shifts from asking us to step out of our culture, to asking us to read fairy tales that spin the fact that theism passes the OTF in flying colors. These fairy tales are ad hoc: St. Paul and Augustine predicted that theism would be widely found outside of Judeo-Christian cultures, while skeptics like David Hume and Richard Dawkins wrongly predicted, as James does, only animism in “primitive” cultures. [83]

John Farquhar, The Crown of Hinduism, Modern Religious Movements in India (Nabu Press, 2010). Also see the many writings of Vishal Mangalwadi on this subject. [84]

Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (Chevy Chase: Adler & Adler), 1986, p. 334. [85]

Letter to William Graham, 3 July 1881. The letter can be accessed online: http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/entry-13230. [86]

For some exploration of this notion in Tillich, see, D. Mackenzie Brown, “Ultimate Concern - Tillich in Dialogue,” accessed January 27, 2012, http://www.religion-online.org/showchapter.asp?title=538&C=598. [87]

“God’s Utility Function,” Scientific American, Nov. 1995, 85.

[88]

Russell, “A Free Man’s Worship,” in Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays (BiblioLife; General Books, 2010), 47-48. [89]

See his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, (London, 1779), esp. 111.

[90]

Friedrich Nietzsche, “Parable of the Madman,” accessed March 6, 2012, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/nietzsche-madman.asp. [91]

Russell, History of Western Philosophy (Routledge, 2004), 687-691.

[92]

Huxley, Ends and Means: An Enquiry into the Nature of Ideals and into the Methods employed for their Realization (London: Chatto and Windus Publishing, 1941), 272. [93]

Charles Sanders Peirce, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” Popular Science Monthly 12 (January 1878). See further, Herbert Schneider, A History of American Philosophy (Motilal Banarsidass Publishing, 1969), 441-442. [94]

C.S. Lewis, The Case for Christianity (Nashville: Broadman and Holman, 1996),

3-4. [95]

Ibid., 7.

[96]

A term that gained its currency with the publication of E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975). [97]

A Bryn Mawr student has written a tidy paper on some aspects of this: Shah Aashna Hossain, "‘Scientific Racism in Enlightened Europe:Linnaeus, Darwin, and Galton,” accessed Feb 12th, 2012, http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/1852. It’s worth noting that some trends mentioned in this article can also be found in more mainstream Enlightenment thinkers than Linnaeus and Galton—in Herbert Spencer and Thomas Hobbes, for instance. [98] [99]

Lewis, The Case for Christianity, 7-8. Ibid., 8.

[100]

See e.g. Michael Shermer, The Science of Good and Evil (New York: Times Book, 2004).

[101]

See this piece by New York Times correspondent Nicholas Wade, “Scientist Finds the Beginning of Morality in Primate Behavior.” New York Times , Online, accessed February 11, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/20/science/20moral.html? _r=1&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin. [102]

E.g. “Why chimpanzees attack and kill each other,” PhysOrg, Accessed February 11, 2012, http://www.physorg.com/news196342222.html. [103]

Lewis, The Case for Christianity, 11.

[104]

In Constructing a Life Philosophy, edited by Mary E. Williams (Farmington Hills, MI: Greenhaven Press, 2005), 59-65. [105] [106] [107] [108] [109] [110]

Ibid., 60. Ibid., 61. Ibid., 65. Ibid., 62. Ibid., 65. Philip Yancey, “Nietzsche Was Right,” Books and Culture, Jan/Feb 2008.

[111]

C.S. Lewis, “Is Theology Poetry?” in The Weight of Glory (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 140. [112]

John 1:1 and 1:14 present Jesus as Logos, meaning (intelligent) word or speech, discourse or reasoning. Given the allusion to the creative speech of Genesis 1:3, 6, 9, etc., the meaning of “Logos” seems to be close to “rational creative agent or principle.”

[113]

See John 1:1-18; Colossians 1:15-20; Hebrews 1:1-3.

[114]

It is beyond this essay to provide a treatment of the charge of contradiction leveled at the Christian notion of one God in three Persons. The interested reader is directed to the outstanding survey by James Anderson: Paradox In Christian Theology: An Analysis of Its Presence, Character, and Epistemic Status (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2007). [115]

The adequacy of evidence removes any grounds for outright disbelief (Rom. 1:20), establishing that “whatever is not from faith is sin.” (Rom. 14:23). Comprehensive, indubitable evidence would depersonalize the transaction, replacing the notion of trust with coercion. For a nuanced discussion of the limited nature of revelation, see Paul K. Moser, The Elusive God: Reorienting Religious Epistemology (Cambridge University Press: 2009). [116] [117]

Dallas Willard, Knowing Christ Today, 20. Hebrews 11:1.

[118]

Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Originally published 1843. [119]

The instances of genuine fideism among Christian leaders is considered scant, and even then, almost always over-stated. Even Tertullian, one of the few candidates to rise to the top of the heap, was nothing of the sort. He wrote, “Obviously reason is something that belongs to God, because there is nothing which God, the creator of all things, did not foresee, arrange and determine by reason. Nor is there anything he does not want to be investigated and understood by reason.” – Tertullian, De Poenitenia 1.2, Patrologia Latina 1:1227. [120]

If a positive outcome seems assured, wouldn’t that cheapen the virtue of faith? On the contrary, Abraham still had to place himself in utter reliance upon God. Though he had every reason to trust God, he could have faltered, trusting instead in lesser reasons not to. From this dynamic, the choice between faith, on the one hand, and distrust on the other, emerges as one that is rationally weighed.

[121]

1 Corinthians 15:14, 18.

[122]

Acts 1:3, 2:32; 2 Peter 1:16; 1 Corinthians 15:3-7 (the appearance to Saul-Paul is described here and in Acts 9:1-25 as categorically different, with Jesus appearing in a quasi-objective vision. The reason this was not in bodily form is that it took place after the Ascension event.) [123]

Matthew 12:39,40; John 10:38, 14:11; also see Acts 2:22.

[124]

Gary Habermas, My Pilgrimage from Atheism to Theism: An Exclusive Interview with Former British Atheist Professor Antony Flew, accessed February 12, 2012, http://www.biola.edu/antonyflew/flew-interview.pdf. For a comprehensive investigation of the Resurrection claims, see: Michael R. Licona, The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2010). [125] [126]

Romans 12:2; Hebrews 5:15.

Jaegwon Kim, What is "Naturalized Perspectives, 2, Epistemology, 1988.

Epistemology?"

Philosophical

[127]

Barbara Trybulec, Is Naturalism Normative - The Function of Epistemic Norms Within Naturalized Epistemology, Percipi 2 (2008), 23. [128]

Donald T. Campbell and Bonnie T. Paller, Extending Evolutionary Epistemology, in Issues in Evolutionary Epistemology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 249. [129]

Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 498. [130]

G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1908; reprint, Nashville: Sam Torode Book Arts, no date), 32. [131]

Of particular note are the proto-evolutionary speculations of epicurean poet

Lucretius, which contained ideas such as spontaneous generation, mutational change, and environmental selection of the most fit to survive. Benjamin Wiker traces the influence of this ancient school upon present day Darwinian materialism, in Moral Darwinism: How We Became Hedonists (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2002). [132]

A Meaningful World: How the Arts and Sciences Reveal the Genius of Nature , Benjamin Wiker & Jonathan Witt (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006), 16. [133]

However, this exception is arguably inconsistent with naturalism, a position taken by C. Brian Cragg in Evolution of the Steam Engine in Issues in Evolutionary Epistemology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989). [134]

James A. Barham, Back to the Stoics: Dynamical Monism as the Foundation for a Reformed Naturalism (Calvin College, 2001). Available at http://philosophy.nd.edu/people/graduate-students/profiles/barhamjames/documents/BarhamBibliography.doc. [135]

Patrick J. Ward, A Model of End-Directedness, in Issues in Evolutionary Epistemology (New York: State University of New York Press, 1989), 359. [136]

James F. Sennett (ed.), The Analytic Theist: An Alvin Plantinga Reader (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Press, 1998), 356. [137]

1 Corinthians 13:11, 14:20.

[138]

That original paper also included a long series of quotes from Christian thinkers throughout history, supporting the place of reason in Christian life and thinking. [139]

Richard Carrier, “Christianity’s Success Was Not Incredible,” chapter in John W. Loftus (ed.), The End of Christianity (New York: Prometheus Books, 2011), 63. [140]

Blaise Pascal, Pensées fr. 740, translated by W.F. Trotter (New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1909-14), http://www.bartleby.com/48/1/12.html. [141]

Pascal, fr. 797.

[142]

Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation (New York: Knopf, 2007), 63.

[143]

Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Hachette Book Group, 2007), 55. [144]

David Van Biema, “God vs. Science,” Time, November 5, 2006; Hitchens, God Is Not Great, 64–65; Dawkins, The God Delusion, 321. [145]

Alister McGrath and Joanna Collicutt McGrath, The Dawkins Delusion? Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2007), 46. [146]

Johannes Kepler, quoted in John C. Lennox, God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? (Oxford: Lion Hudson, 2007), 20. [147]

Isaac Newton, The General Scholium, quoted in Nancy Pearcey and Charles Thaxton, The Soul of Science (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1994), 91. Newton also believed the ear and eye indicated intelligent design.

[148]

“The Jewish God, the Christian God, or No God?” debate between Christopher Hitchens, Dennis Prager, and Dinesh D’Souza, May 1, 2008, at Temple Baht Yam in Newport Beach, CA. [149]

“Religion poisons everything” is found in the subtitle of Hitchens’s book Is Not Great. [150]

God

Dawkins, The God Delusion, 125.

[151]

Alister McGrath and Joanna Collicut McGrath make this point in The Dawkins Delusion? Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2007), 42.

[152]

See, e.g., Pearcey and Thaxton, Soul of Science; and Ian Barbour, When Science Meets Religion: Enemies, Strangers, or Partners (New York: HarperOne, 2000).

[153]

Harris, The End of Faith, 105.

[154]

Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay W. Richards, The Privileged Planet DC: Regnery, 2004), 222–28. [155]

(Washington,

Ibid.

[156]

There are two official online sources for the trial of Galileo that substantiate this discussion. The Scripture references that were in the Galileo trial are at http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/ galileo/scripture.html. The prosecutors accused him of misusing Scripture. Second, the papal condemnation, which includes their renunciation of his use of Scripture is at http://www.law.umkc.edu/ faculty/projects/ftrials/galileo/condemnation.html. These Web sites are from the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law. [157] [158] [159] [160] [161]

Dinesh D’Souza, What’s So Great About Christianity (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2007), 110.

Dawkins, The God Delusion, 35 (emphasis in original). Romans 1:4. Lennox, God’s Undertaker, 19.

Dawkins, The God Delusion, 411–17.

[162]

Patricia Churchland, “Epistemology in the Age of Neuroscience,” Journal of Philosophy, October 1987, 548. [163]

C. S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study, Macmillan Paperbacks Edition (New York: Macmillan, 1978), 12–24.

[164]

From a letter to W. Graham (July 3, 1881), quoted in the Autobiography of Charles Darwin and Selected Letters (1892; reprint, New York: Dover, 1958).

[165]

An evolved mind gives no foundation for trusting reason. Theism gives a foundation for that

trust, but also tells us that our reason, like everything else, has been affected by humanity’s fall in the Garden of Eden.

[166]

Lewis, Miracles, 21.

[167]

Paul Davies, “What Happened Before the Big Bang?” in God for the Russell Stannard (Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation Press, 2000), 12.

21st Century, ed.

[168]

Alvin Plantinga, “The Dawkins Confusion,” review of The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins, Books and Culture, March/April 2007, http://www.booksandculture.com/articles/2007/marapr/1.21.html (accessed April 17, 2009). [169]

“God and Science Don’t Mix,” Lawrence Krauss, Wall Street Journal, June 26, 2009, accessed February 28, 2012, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124597314928257169.html. [170]

See Thomas E. Woods, How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 2005), 93. [171]

Ibid.

[172]

Those interested in the Old Testament might want to investigate K.A. Kitchen's On the Reliability of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), or Iain Provan, V.P. Long, Tremper Longman III, A Biblical History of Israel (Louisville: WJK, 2003). [173]

Carl Sagan, Cosmos (New York: Random House, 1980), 4.

[174]

“Demythologizing the Gospel”, quoted in H.T. Kerr, Readings in Christian Thought (Nashville: Abingdon, 1966), p 332. [175]

Ultimately, however, such an attempt was futile. He famously wrote, “I do indeed think that we can now know almost nothing concerning the life and personality of Jesus,” Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus and the Word (New York: Scribner's, 1934), 14. It is to be noted, against many of the New Atheists, that even Bultmann thought the idea of Jesus never existing was “absurd.” In his view, Jesus' life and death were two historically established facts beyond doubt.

[176]

The Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Jesus (New York: Harper Collins, 1993), 2. [177]

Robert Funk, “Twenty-one Theses”, The Fourth R (4, July/August, 1998), 8.

[178]

See, J. Houston,Reported Miracles: A Critique of Hume (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 162. [179]

I also contend that it is equally unfortunate that many religious individuals never step outside of their own worldview to read or discuss opposing arguments. We should allow ourselves to be challenged by opposing views as much as possible. [180]

Bart Ehrman, Jesus Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don’t Know About Them) , (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 173. Ehrman does conclude that Jesus was known as an exorcist and a healer but suggests the actuality of whether that was true or not cannot be known from historical methodology [181]

See, Francis Beckwith, David Hume's Argument Against Miracles: A Critical Analysis (Lanham: University Press of America, 1989). [182]

For an extensive and thorough survey of present day miracles, see Craig Keener, Miracles, 2 Vols, (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011). [183]

P. Eddy and G. Boyd, The Jesus Legend: A Case for the Historical Reliability of the Synoptic Jesus Tradition (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), 61. [184]

Ibid.

[185]

David DeSilva, “The Meaning of the New Testament and the Skandalon of World Constructions,” Evangelical Quarterly, 64 (1, Jan, 1992), 4. [186]

One of my professors remarked to me that during a debate with a highly renowned NT scholar he once asked him why his scholarship almost completely lacked any contributions from Christian scholars. His remark was telling: “I don't consider it scholarship.” C. Keener, Miracles, in quoting DeSilva, makes the point clear: “Is there not something inconsistent about (in some academic circles) stifling dissent by refusing to give alternative positions a hearing, all the while claiming to uphold academic “objectivity,” 101.

[187]

For a brief but generally solid introduction on the history and components of form criticism see, Edgar McKnight, What is Form Criticism? (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1969). [188]

[189]

See McKnight, 18. Martin Dibelius, From Tradition to Gospel (New York: Scribners, 1965), 9.

[190]

Dibelius, Gospel Criticism and Christology (London: Nicholson and Watson, 1935), 16. [191]

Bultmann, History of the Synoptic Tradition (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, rev. 1994), 372. [192]

For example, Jesus' command to his disciples in Matthew 7:3-5 to avoid hypocrisy certainly would serve to soften tensions within the Church. It would have been preserved, utilized, and passed on for this reason in particular. That is, the command has pragmatic value for the survival and government of the Church. [193]

C.L. Blomberg, “Form Criticism” in Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1992), 245. [194]

Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 246. [195]

Ben Witherington, New Testament Rhetoric: An Introductory Guide to the Art of Persuasion in and of the New Testament (Eugene: Cascade, 2009), 1. [196]

Cf. T.C. Mournet, Oral Tradition and Literary Dependency: Variability and Stability in the Synoptic Tradition and Q (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), 113-14. [197]

Paul Eddy Rhodes and Gregory Boyd, The Jesus Legend: A Case for the Historical Reliability of the Synoptic Jesus Tradition (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), 239-268. [198]

[199]

Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 3.39-34

We see this, for example, in Luke's preface where he notes that while there were other accounts written of Jesus' life, he saw it important enough to go investigate

everything that was reported. If Luke did have the chance to be a 'sometime companion of Paul' as many scholars believe and he himself states, then there are only a few instances where Luke would have not been able to consult the living voice and eyewitness testimony. [200]

[201]

Quoted in Bauckham, Eyewitnesses, 288. Bauckham, Eyewitnesses, 248, italics mine.

[202]

Birger Gerhardsson, Memory and Manuscript: Oral Tradition and Written Transmission in Rabbinic Judaism and Early Christianity (Copenhagen: Gleerup, 1961), 160-61. [203]

Robert Stein, The Synoptic Problem: An Introduction (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 1987). [204]

C.L. Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2007), 55. [205]

Bauckham, Eyewitnesses, 249.

[206]

Ibid., 250

[207]

Ibid., 248

[208]

Ibid., 7

[209]

V. Taylor, The Formation of the Gospel Tradition: Eight Lectures (London:Macmillan & Co. Ltd, 1933, 1935Second ed.), 41. [210]

M. Hengel, The Four Gospels and the One Gospel of Jesus Christ (tr. J. Bowden; London: SCM, 2000), 143. [211]

[212]

See, Mournet, Oral Tradition, 64-66.

K.E. Bailey, “Informal Controlled Oral Tradition and the Synoptic Gospels,” Asia Journal of Theology 5:1 (1991): 34-54; reprinted in Themelios 20 (1995) 4-11. The latter, which I am using, can be accessed at http://www.biblicalstudies.org.uk/article_tradition_bailey.html.

[213]

Ibid., 5.

[214]

Ibid.

[215]

Ibid, 8

[216]

Bauckham argues that Bailey contradicts himself within the article on the question of eyewitness testimony and actually gives him the benefit of the doubt: “We must presume that something has gone wrong in this passage, probably as a result of an abbreviation”, 261. Still, Bauckham critiques Bailey's lack of distinguishing between major eyewitnesses and minor eyewitnesses. See, Bauckham, Eyewitnesses, 262. [217]

[218]

Ibid., 259 Eusebius, Eccl. Hist. 3.39.15

[219]

“Mark's Gospel...claims Peter as its main eyewitness source; it also tells the story predominantly...from Peter's perspective. This Petrine perspective is deliberately, carefully, and subtly constructed. Mark's Gospel is no mere transcript of Peter's teaching, nor is the Petrine perspective merely an undesigned survival of the way Peter told his stories...Mark has deliberately designed the Gospel in such a way that it incorporates and conveys this Petrine perspective.” Bauckham, Eyewitnesses, 179. [220]

Against some scholars who wish to date the gospel to the early 60s, I find the consensus on the dating to be the most likely scenario, given both Luke's geographical climax in Rome and the fact that while he ends his gospel with Paul's imprisonment he apparently knows how long it lasted (Acts 28.30), thus presuming an end to the imprisonment. See, B. Witherington III, Acts of the Apostles: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 60-63. [221]

Aristotle, Rhetoric 1.1360A.35

[222]

John Squires, “The Plan of God in the Acts of the Apostles”, Witness to the Gospel, ed. I.H. Marshall and David Peterson (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 19-39. [223]

N.T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), 84. [224]

Lucian, “How To Write History”, 38, 42, 50.

[225]

William Ramsay, Bearing a Recent Discovery (Hodder and Stoughton, 1915), 222

[226]

We have focused our time extensively on the Synoptic Gospels for the purpose of space. John, by its nature, demands a whole separate approach and one which is complicated by a higher degree of theological and metaphorical language. For an introduction to this debate, I suggest Craig Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of John's Gospel: Issues and Commentary (Grand Rapids: IVP Academic, 2011). [227]

David Hume, Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 100.

[228]

George Horne, “Letter VIII,” in The Works of George Horne , Vol. 4 (London: J. Johnson, 1818), 425.

[229]

Ibid., 426.

[230]

For those with an interest in the more rigorous scholarly responses to the problem of evil, I would strongly recommend starting with the following resources: Alvin Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil (New York: Harper and Row, 1974); John Hick, Evil and the Love of God, rev. ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1978); Stephen Wykstra, “The Humean Obstacle to Evidential Arguments from Evil: On Avoiding the ‘Evils of Appearance’,” International Journal of Philosophy of Religion 16 (1984): 73-93; Daniel Howard-Snyder (ed.), The Evidential Argument from Evil (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996); Richard Swinburne, Providence and the Problem of Evil (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Michael Bergmann, “Skeptical Theism and Rowe’s New Evidential Argument,” Nous 35 (2001): 278-296; Stewart Goetz, “The Argument from Evil,” in William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2009), 449-497.

[231]

Here are a few examples. William Rowe, an atheist who is perhaps the most well-known defender of the evidential problem of evil, has unequivocally stated in “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism,” American Philosophical Quarterly 16, no. 4 (1979), 335: “Some philosophers have contended that the existence of evil is logically inconsistent with the existence of the theistic God. No one, I think, has succeeded in establishing such an extravagant claim.” Michael Peterson, “The Problem of Evil,” in Philip L. Quinn and Charles Taliaferro (eds.) A Companion to Philosophy of Religion (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999), 395: “The outcome of these and other debates has been so favorable to theists that it is reasonable to say that the logical problem [of evil] has been laid to rest.” Robert M. Adams, “Plantinga and the Problem of Evil,” in James Tomberlin and Peter van Inwagen (eds.), Alvin Plantinga (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1984), p. 226: “I think it is fair to say that Plantinga has solved this problem [referring to the deductive problem of evil].”

[232] [233]

Hick, Evil and the God of Love, 256-7. Ibid., 258.

[234]

I was tempted to include a lengthy discussion from the great German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, who famously claimed, “Nothing can possibly be conceived in the world, or even out of it, which can be called good, without qualification, except a good will. Intelligence, wit, judgement, and the other talents of the mind, however they may be named, or courage, resolution, perseverance, as qualities of temperament, are undoubtedly good and desirable in many respects; but these gifts of nature may also become extremely bad and mischievous if the will which is to make use of them, and which, therefore, constitutes what is called character, is not good. . . . The sight of a being who is not adorned with a single feature of a pure and good will, enjoying unbroken prosperity, can never give pleasure to an impartial rational spectator. Thus a good will appears to constitute the indispensable condition even of being worthy of happiness.” See Immanuel Kant’s, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, part I (there are many editions and translations of this work, including several accessible online for free). I have reduced my discussion to one paragraph, which I hope is sufficient for the tone and scope of this essay.

[235]

Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will, trans. Thomas Williams (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), p. 30. Bk II, sec. 1.

[236]

Mackie, “Evil and Omnipotence,” Mind 64, no. 254 (1955): 209.

[237]

For a defense of free will based on the phenomena of making choices contrary to one’s strongest desire in cases like moral temptation, see C. A. Campbell’s essay, “In Defence of Free Will,” in In Defence of Free Will: With Other Essays (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1967), 3555.

[238]

For longer treatments on the nature of free will, I recommend Robert Kane’s the Significance of Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) and Timothy O’Connor’s Persons and Causes: The Metaphysics of Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

[239]

C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, reprint ed. (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 25.

[240]

A defense of this point takes us very quickly into deep metaphysical arguments. For a defense of this point, see Alvin Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil, especially 45-55.

[241]

For this example, I am indebted to Lewis, The Problem of Pain, 30.

[242]

For those who may complain that God should have created better laws of nature—laws of nature that ensured the stability necessary for moral agency but excluded natural disasters—I believe they aren’t aware of the complexities of their request. The burden, at least, rests on them to show that what they are asking is possible.

[243] [244] [245] [246]

For more on this line of reasoning, see Lewis, Problem of Pain, 103. Richard Swinburne, Is there a God? rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 93. Lewis, Problem of Pain, 83.

Harris, The End of Faith, 18.

[247]

The rules for daughters sold into indenture were different, because it was assumed that they would be purchased as concubines. The additional provisions were intended to protect her from being kicked out of the house, which would have left her destitute and without any serious prospects of marriage. [248]

J. A. Motyer, The Message of Exodus (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity, 2005), 239. [249]

Similarly, Jesus healed people physically as well as healing their souls, so early Christians tended the sick during epidemics when even physicians would flee, as no less an authority than the Roman physician Galen acknowledged. [250]

Augustine: Political Writings, ed. E. M. Atkins and R. J. Dodaro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 46. Although Augustine is frequently portrayed as a supporter of slavery, he considered it a result of sin and part of the fallen world. Like government, he saw it at best as a necessary evil. [251]

For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witchhunts, and the End of Slavery (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003), 329. [252]

For the Glory of God, 300.

[253]

Ibid., 329-330. Note the similarity between Aquinas’s views of serfdom and views of slavery in the early church: it was not ideal but was unfortunately so embedded in society that it could not be abolished outright. [254]

http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Eugene04/eugene04sicut.htm. The reference to baptism is explained earlier in the bull. The natives were lured by promises of baptism and then forcibly enslaved, and so some were turning away from baptism out of fear of being taken as slaves. The manumission applied to all slaves, but Eugenius wanted to make the point that using baptism as a cover for enslavement was totally unacceptable. [255]

See, for example, Eric Metaxas, Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery (New York: HarperOne, 2007). [256]

This was not by any means the only view held by Enlightenment philosophes. For example, in a strange echo of Augustine, Voltaire argued that slavery was unjust, but unfortunately necessary in an imperfect world. John Locke also supported slavery as a matter of property rights, though there is some evidence that he may have backed away from his support of slavery later in life. [257]

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, Project Gutenberg E-book, 2006, 46.

[258]

Even more broadly, the entire idea of universal human rights is a product of the Christian tradition, a fact recognized even by prominent atheist thinkers such as Jurgen Habermas. Habermas argues that we can find a secular foundation for human rights now that we have the idea, but says that it is a simple fact that the idea grew out of the Christian tradition. [259]

Raymond Bradley develops this objection in “A Moral Argument for Atheism,” in The Impossibility of God, ed. Michael Martin and Ricki Monnier (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003), 144–45. Similar arguments to Bradley’s have been made by Wes Moriston, “Did God Command Genocide? A Challenge to the Biblical Inerrantist,” Philosophia Christi 11/1 (2009): 8– 26; Randal Rauser, “Let Nothing that Breathes Remain Alive: On the Problem of Divinely Commanded Genocide,” Philosophia Christi 11/1 (2009): 27–41; Michael Tooley, “Does God Exist?” in Michael Tooley and Alvin Plantinga, The Knowledge of God (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2008), 73–77; Edwin Curley, “The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” and Evan Fales,

“Satanic Verses: Moral Chaos in Holy Writ,” in Divine Evil? The Moral Character of the God of Abraham, ed. Michael Bergmann, Michael J. Murray, and Michael C. Rea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 58–78, 91–108; Louise Antony, “Atheism as Perfect Piety,” and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, “Why Traditional Theism Cannot Provide an Adequate Foundation for Morality,” in Is Goodness without God Good Enough? A Debate on Faith, Secularism, and Ethics, ed. Robert K. Garcia and Nathan L. King (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2009), 67–84, 101– 16.

[260]

Alvin Plantinga, “Comments on ‘Satanic Verses: Moral Chaos in Holy Writ,’” in Bergmann, Murray, and Rea, Divine Evil? 110–11; Paul Copan, “Yahweh Wars and the Canaanites: Divinely Mandated Genocide or Corporate Capital Punishment,” Philosophia Christi n.s. 11/1 (2009): 73–90; idem, Is God a Moral Monster? Making Sense of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2011), 158–97; Christopher Wright, The God I Don’t Understand: Reflections on Tough Questions of Faith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2008), 87–88. In his latest discussion on the issue, William Lane Craig states, “I’ve come to appreciate that the object of God’s command to the Israelis was not the slaughter of the Canaanites, as is often imagined. The command rather was primarily to drive them out of the land. The judgment upon these Canaanite kingdoms was to dispossess them of their land and thus destroy them as kingdoms.” See “Question 147: Divine Command Morality and Voluntarism,” accessed October 29, 2010, http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/News2? page=NewsArticle&id=7911. [261]

Plantinga, “Comments,” 111.

[262]

Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Reading Joshua,” in Divine Evil? The Moral Character of the God of Abraham, ed. Michael Bergmann, Michael J. Murray, and Michael C. Rea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 252–53. [263]

Ibid., 249.

[264]

Note this phrase “the hill country of Ephraim” in Joshua (17:15; 19:50; 20:7; 24:30,33), then in Judges (2:9; 3:27; 4:5; 7:24; 10:1; 17:1,8; 18:2,13; 19:1,16,18), and then in 1 Samuel (1:1; 9:4). The linkage of Judges 17:1 and 19:1 with 1 Samuel 1:1 is connected by the general threefold pattern of (1) “There was a (certain) man . . . ”; (2) “from the hill country of Ephraim”; (3) “and his name was _______.” As mentioned in the text, Joshua 24:28–31 mentions Joshua’s death and burial place at Timnath-serah “in the hill country of Ephraim,” and then Judges 2:6–9 refers to Joshua’s death and burial place at

Timnath-heres “in the hill country of Ephraim.” That is, Joshua and Judges are literarily connected in their mention of Joshua’s (1) death and (2) burial. (1) Both books state that “Joshua son of Nun, the servant of the Lord, died” at the age of “a hundred and ten” (Josh. 24:29; Judg. 2:8). (2) Then a deliberate literary connection is made on the burial place of Joshua, using the Hebrew lettersubstitution cipher known as atbash, in this case reversing the first and last consonants of the burial place from “-serah” to “-heres.” Compare “they buried him in the territory of his inheritance in Timnath-serah, which is in the hill country of Ephraim, on the north of Mount Gaash” (Josh 24:30, NASB, my emphasis) with “they buried him in the territory of his inheritance in Timnath-heres, in the hill country of Ephraim, north of Mount Gaash (Judg. 2:9, NASB, my emphasis). I owe these examples to Paul Copan.

[265]

All Scripture quotations are from the NIV unless otherwise stated.

[266]

In addition to these general claims about exterminating populations, Joshua 11:21–22 states, “Joshua went and destroyed the Anakites from the hill country: from Hebron, Debir and Anab, from all the hill country of Judah” (NIV). This happened after Joshua is already said to have killed the inhabitants in these areas in Joshua 10:30–40. Joshua 11:21 states that no Anakites were left living in Israeli territory after this campaign. In Judges 1:21 the text explicitly states that Anakites are in Hebron. [267]

Kenneth A. Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003). Kitchen notes that a careful reading of the earlier chapters makes it clear that Israel did not actually conquer the areas mentioned at all. Kitchen notes that, according to Josh 4:19, after crossing the Jordan the Israelites set up camp in Gilgal on the eastern border of Jericho (161). Rather, after every battle in the next six chapters the text explicitly states that they returned to Gilgal: The conflict with Canaanite city-state rulers in the south part of Canaan is worth close observation. After the battle for Gibeon, we see the Hebrews advance upon six towns in order, attacking and capturing them, killing their local kings and such of the inhabitants as had not gotten clear, and moving on, not holding on to these places. Twice over (10:15, 43), it is clearly stated that their strike force returned to base camp at Gilgal. So there was no sweeping takeover and occupation of this region at this point. And no total destruction of the towns attacked (162). Kitchen goes on to comment: What happened in the south was repeated up north. Hazor was both leader and famed center for the north Canaanite kinglets. Thus as in the south, the Hebrew strike force defeated the opposition; they captured their towns, killed rulers and less mobile inhabitants, and symbolically burned Hazor, and Hazor only, to emphasize the end of its local supremacy. Again Israel did not attempt to immediately hold on to Galilee; they remained based at Gilgal (cf. 14:6) (ibid.).

Kitchen points out that “the first indication of a real move in occupation outward beyond Gilgal comes in 18:4” (162). This is after the first allotment of “lands-to-be-occupied had been made,” and as we saw above, the Israelites did not find occupying these allotments easy. He concludes: “these campaigns were essentially disabling raids: they were not territorial conquests with instant Hebrew occupation. The text is very clear about this” (ibid.).

[268]

In this section I am arguing that the record of Joshua fulfilling the command is hyperbolic. Even many evangelical scholars who believe the command was literal accept this. For example, David M. Howard Jr. argues that, on the one hand, statements claiming Joshua subdued “the whole region” (10:40) are hyperbolic assertions emphasizing that “there was indeed a sweeping victory” and that “no significant opposition remained.” Such was intended “to reiterate the theological point made many times in the book that God was indeed giving Israel the entire land.” On the other hand, “the author acknowledged elsewhere that the conquest was indeed not complete” and that “there was still much work to do” (Joshua, New American Commentary [Nashville: B&H, 1998], 259). See also Richard Hess, Joshua: An Introduction and Commentary, Tyndale Old Testament Commentary (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1996), 284–86. Where I differ from them is over the implications of this conclusion. I argue below that if fulfillment is hyperbolic, then a plausible implication is that the command itself was hyperbolic. [269]

Wolterstorff, “Reading Joshua,” in Bergmann et al., Divine Evil? 251.

[270]

Nicholas Wolterstorff, Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim that God Speaks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 295. See also “Unity behind the Canon,” in One Scripture or Many? The Canon from Biblical, Theological and Philosophical Perspectives, ed. Christine Helmer and Christof Landmesser (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 217–32. [271]

Alvin Plantinga argues in Warranted Christian Belief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 385: [A]n assumption of the enterprise is that the principal author of the Bible—the entire Bible—is God himself (according to Calvin, God the Holy Spirit). Of course each of the books of the Bible has a human author or authors as well; still, the principal author is God. This impels us to treat the whole more like a unified communication than a miscellany of ancient books. Scripture isn’t so much a library of independent books as itself a book with many subdivisions but a central theme: the message of the gospel. By virtue of this unity, furthermore (by virtue of the fact that there is just one principal author), it is possible to “interpret Scripture with Scripture.” If a given passage

from one of Paul’s epistles is puzzling, it is perfectly proper to try to come to clarity as to what God’s teaching is in this passage by appealing not only to what Paul himself says elsewhere in other epistles but also to what is taught elsewhere in Scripture (for example, the Gospel of John).

[272]

Nicholas Wolterstorff in the question-and-answers session following presentation of his paper “Reading Joshua” (presented at the “My Ways Are Not Your Ways: The Character of the God of the Hebrew Bible” conference at the Center for Philosophy of Religion, University of Notre Dame, 12 September 2009, accessed Dec. 19, 2009, http://www.nd.edu/~cprelig/ conferences/documents/HBprogram_006.pdf , stated that the phrase “he killed all the inhabitants with the edge of the sword” occurs at least 15 times in Joshua 6–11 in close succession. This is “hammered home with emphasis.” This is then followed in the next chapter by the claim that Joshua had not conquered the whole land. In the next five chapters it is stressed repeatedly that the land is not yet conquered. This is followed by the opening chapters of Judges, which affirms eight times in a single chapter that the Israelites had failed to conquer the land or the cities, finishing with the Angel of the Lord at Bokim rebuking them for failing to do so (Judg 2:1–5). These are not subtle contrasts. They are, in Wolterstorff’s words, “flamboyant”; it is unlikely that an intelligent author or editor would have missed this.

[273] [274]

Wolterstorff, “Reading Joshua,” Bergmann et al. in Divine Evil? 251. Ibid., 252.

[275]

Ibid. The ritualized nature of the narration is also stressed by Duane L Christensen, Deuteronomy 1:1–21:9 (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2001).

[276]

Wolterstorff, “Reading Joshua,” in Bergmann et al., Divine Evil? 252. That the word herem, translated as “devoted to destruction,” often serves a figurative or rhetorical function is also noted by Christopher Wright in The God I Don’t Understand: Reflections on Tough Questions of Faith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2008), 87–88: Now we need to know that Israel’s practice of herem was not in itself unique. Texts from other nations at the time show that such total destruction in war was practiced, or at any rate proudly claimed, elsewhere. But we must also recognize that the language of warfare had a conventional rhetoric that liked to make absolute and universal claims about total victory and completely wiping out the enemy. Such rhetoric often exceeded reality on the ground. At the other end of the spectrum, minimalist scholar Thomas L. Thompson, writing on the use of herem in the Mesha Stele, notes that the “use of the ban at both Ataroth and Nebo are clearly part of the totalitarian rhetoric of holy war rather than historical considerations” (“Mesha and Questions of Historicity,” Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament 22/2 [2007]: 249).

[277] [278] [279] [280] [281]

Wolterstorff, “Reading Joshua,” in Bergmann et al., Divine Evil? 251. Kitchen, Historical Reliability, 170 (emphasis added). Ibid. (emphasis added). Ibid., 172. Ibid., 174–75.

[282]

John Van Seters, “Joshua’s Campaign of Canaan and Near Eastern Historiography,” Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament 2 (1990): 1–12.

[283]

James K. Hoffmeier, “The Structure of Joshua 1–11 and the Annals of Thutmose III,” in Faith, Tradition, and History: Old Testament Historiography and Its Ancient Near Eastern Context, ed. A. R. Millard, James K. Hoffmeier, and David W. Baker (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1994), 165–81.

[284]

K. Lawson Younger Jr., Ancient Conquest Accounts: A Study in Ancient Near Eastern and Biblical History Writing (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1990), 200–204. [285] [286] [287]

Ibid., 216. Ibid., 258–60. Ibid., 220–25.

[288]

Ziony Zevit, The Religions of Ancient Israel: A Synthesis of Parallactic Approaches (London and New York: Continuum, 2001), 114. [289]

Younger states: “As the ancient historian (whether Near Eastern, biblical, or otherwise) reconstructed “historical” referents into a coherent description, he produced a figurative account, a ‘re-presenting representation.’” K. Lawson Younger Jr., “Judges 1 in Its Near Eastern Literary Context,” in Millard et al., Faith, Tradition,

and History, 207. He also suggests such a historian functions as “a literary artist.” He adds: “Ancient Near Eastern conquest accounts are figurative in three ways: (1) the structural and ideological codes that are the apparatus for the text’s production; (2) the themes or motifs that the text utilizes; and (3) the usage of rhetorical figures in the accounts” (ibid.). [290] [291]

Younger, Ancient Conquest Accounts, 208–11. Ibid., 217.

[292]

Ibid., 219. For further discussion of the relationship between Joshua’s long day and other ancient Near Eastern texts, see John Walton, “Joshua 10:12–15 and Mesopotamian Celestial Omen Texts,” in Millard et al., Faith, Tradition, and History, 181–90.

[293]

Richard Hess, “West Semitic Texts and the Book of Joshua,” Bulletin for Biblical Research 7 (1997): 68. [294] [295] [296] [297] [298] [299] [300] [301]

Younger, Ancient Conquest Accounts, 211.

Kitchen, Reliability of the Old Testament, 174. Younger, Ancient Conquest Accounts, 227. Ibid., 228. Ibid. Ibid., 227. Ibid., 245 (emphasis added).

In addition, both Kitchen and Younger observe that such hyperbolic language is used in several places within the book of Joshua itself. Joshua 10:20, for example, states that Joshua and the sons of Israel had “finished destroying” and “completely destroyed” their enemies. Immediately, however, the text affirms that the “survivors

went to fortified cities.” In this context, the language of total destruction is clearly hyperbolic. Similarly, the account of the battle of Ai is clearly hyperbolic. After Joshua’s troops feign a retreat, the text states that “all the men of Ai” are pressed to chase them. “Not a man remained in Ai or Bethel who did not go after Israel. They left the city open and went in pursuit of Israel” (8:17 NIV). Joshua lures the pursuers into a trap “so that they were caught in the middle, with Israelites on both sides. Israel cut them down, leaving them neither survivors nor fugitives” (8:22 NIV). Then the text immediately following states: “When Israel had finished killing all the men of Ai in the fields and in the desert where they had chased them, and when every one of them had been put to the sword” (8:24 NIV), they went to the city of Ai and killed all the men in it. [302]

Thomas Thompson examines several different ancient Near Eastern conquest accounts of this type and notes they have a hagiographic function. See his “A Testimony of the Good King: Reading the Mesha Stele,” in Ahab Agonistes: The Rise and Fall of the Omri Dynasty, ed. Lester L. Grabbe (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2007), 236–92. [303]

John Goldingay goes on to give yet another example from within the Bible itself: “While Joshua does speak of Israel’s utterly destroying the Canaanites, even these accounts can give a misleading impression: peoples that have been annihilated have no trouble reappearing later in the story; after Judah puts Jerusalem to the sword, its occupants are still living there ‘to this day’ (Judg. 1:8, 21).” See his “City and Nation,” in Old Testament Theology, vol. 3 (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2009), 570. [304] K.LawsonYoungerJr.,“Joshua,”inTheIVPBibleBackgroundCommentary:OldTestament, ed. John H. Walton, Victor H. Matthews, and Mark W. Chavalas (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000), 227. [305]

Wolterstorff, “Reading Joshua,” in Bergmann et al., Divine Evil? 252.

[306]

Gordon Wenham, “Bethulah: A Girl of Marriageable Age,” Vetus Testamentum 22 (1972): 326–48. [307]

J. P. U. Lilley, “Understanding the Herem,” Tyndale Bulletin 44 (1993): 170–73.

[308]

Christopher J. H. Wright, Deuteronomy, New International Biblical Commentary (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1996), 109. [309]

Lilley, “Understanding the Herem,” 174.

[310]

Other commentators such as Duane L. Christensen and J. Gordon McConville suggest “destroy” is being used in a figurative sense. McConville, for example, states “the concept of complete annihilation of the nations is always a kind of ideal, symbolizing the need for radical loyalty to Yahweh on the part of Israel.” J. Gordon McConville, Deuteronomy, Apollos Old Testament Commentary (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2002), 161. Some object that a hyperbolic interpretation does not fit the context, which draws a contrast between sparing “the women, the children, the livestock” (v. 14) and totally destroying them (v. 16: “do not leave alive anything that breathes”). This is mistaken. First, the emphasis in v. 14 is not on sparing noncombatants but rather on the permissibility of marrying the women of conquered enemies, adopting their children, and using their cattle. Second, the contrast is not between vv. 14 and 16, but between v. 16 and the whole set of instructions regarding nations that are far away (vv. 10–15). These verses command Israel to seek to make peace treaties first and if they go to war and kill combatants they can marry the women, adopt children, and keep the livestock. In other words, as much as possible they are to seek peaceful coexistence with these nations. A command to go to war and drive them out expressed hyperbolically as “totally destroy them” and “leave nothing alive that breathes” would stand in contrast with this. A final point on this is that the crucial issue is whether the hyperbolic interpretation is more plausible than a literal one, even if a literal interpretation fits Deuteronomy 20 better. Above, I have argued that a literal interpretation puts Joshua 6–11 at odds with Judges 1–2 and the later chapters of Joshua. It would be odd to reject a hyperbolic interpretation because one passage in Deuteronomy 20 does not cohere with it and instead embrace a literal interpretation, which creates an even greater incoherence in the text.

[311]

I owe this point to conversations with Paul Copan. See his comments on this in Is God a Moral Monster? 181–82. [312]

“But you must keep my decrees and my laws. The native-born and the aliens living among you must not do any of these detestable things, for all these things were done by the people who lived in the land before you, and the land became defiled. And if you defile the land, it will vomit you out as it vomited out the nations that were before you” (NIV). [313]

Deuteronomy 2:10–12,20–22; 4:26–30; 28:63.

[314]

Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Reply to Antony,” in Bergmann et al., Divine Evil? 263.

[315]

Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Reading Joshua,” presented at the “My Ways Are Not Your Ways: The Character of the God of the Hebrew Bible” conference; this paragraph was in the paper presented at the conference but was omitted from the published version in Divine Evil? [316]

Alvin Plantinga, “Comments on Satanic Verses in Holy Writ,” in Bergmann et al., Divine Evil? 110. Plantinga is responding to Evan Fales, who based his reading on the mistaken reading of the verse “kill all the women but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man” as commanding rape—a reading he also ascribes to Deuteronomy 21. In fact, a glance at the immediate context shows that the reference to a woman not sleeping with a man in the former passage was mentioned to distinguish the women in question from those who had seduced Israelite men into idolatry; it is not there to emphasize their availability for sex. Deuteronomy 21, in fact, protects female captives from being raped or sold as concubines. See Copan, Is God a Moral Monster? 118–21, 180. [317]

Some might object that God did command the killing of men, women, and children in 1 Samuel 15, where God commanded Saul to “utterly destroy [haram]” and “not spare” the Amalekites. God used the sweeping language of “put to death both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey” (15:3 NASB). It is important to note that Saul carried this command out, see 1 Sam 15:7–9: Saul attacked the Amalekites all the way from Havilah to Shur, to the east of Egypt. He took Agag king of the Amalekites alive, and all his people he totally destroyed with the sword. But Saul and the army spared Agag and the best of the sheep and cattle, the fat calves and lambs —everything that was good. These they were unwilling to destroy completely, but everything that was despised and weak they totally destroyed. (NIV) The language of “utterly destroy” (haram, and its noun cognate herem), the reference to cattle and sheep, and the reference to “sparing” all parallel the language of the command. So it would be difficult to justify interpreting the command as literal and the fulfillment as hyperbolic; the command and fulfillment need to be read in the same sense. Agag, the sole survivor, was executed a few verses later (15:33). So taken in isolation and read literally, this passage records a divinely commanded genocide that was carried out. However, if when one reads this passage as part of a single narrative—a connected literary unit— then several issues are apparent. First, the narrative states quite emphatically that the Amalekites were not, in fact, literally wiped out. In 1 Sam 27:8–9 David invaded a territory full of Amalekites:

Now David and his men went up and raided the Geshurites, the Girzites and the Amalekites. (From ancient times these peoples had lived in the land extending to Shur and Egypt.) Whenever David attacked an area, he did not leave a man or woman alive, but took sheep and cattle, donkeys and camels, and clothes. Then he returned to Achish.

Not only does this text affirm the Amalekites still exist, but the reference to Egypt and Shur states they exist in the same area that Saul attacked in the previous passages. Moreover, David killed Amalekite men and women living in his area and took sheep and cattle as plunder. However, these are the very things Saul was said in 1 Samuel 15 to have eradicated. As we showed above, Saul was said to have killed all the Amalekites, men and women from “Havilah to Shur, to the east border of Egypt” and all the livestock had either been destroyed or taken as plunder. Further, in 1 Samuel 30, a sizeable Amalekite army attacked Ziklag (1 Sam. 30:1). David pursued this army and fought a long battle with them and 400 Amalekites fled on horseback (1 Sam. 30:7–17). In 2 Samuel 1:8, an Amalekite took credit for killing Saul, and 1 Chron 4:43 tells us Amalekites were still around during the reign of Hezekiah. So, if you view 1 Samuel and its canonical context as a single literary unit the text cannot be sensibly claiming that 1 Samuel 15 and 27 are both literally true accounts of battles with the Amalekites. Third, the genre and style of the accounts suggest 1 Samuel 15 is the nonliteral; it appears highly hyperbolic and contains obvious rhetorical exaggeration. Saul’s army was said to be 210,000 men, and thus larger than any army known at this time in antiquity. Moreover, Saul struck the Amalekites from Havila to Shur. Shur is on the edge of Egypt; Havila is in Saudi Arabia. This is an absurdly large battlefield. The text used standard hyperbolic rhetoric of exaggerated numbers and geography. Similarly, 1 Samuel 15’s use of the language of “utterly destroying [haram]” populations “with the sword,” is the same as that used hyperbolically in Joshua. Further, the language of “do not spare” the Amalekites but “put to death both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey” appears to be stereotypical language; it is very similar to the hyperbolic description of military defeat in 1 Chron 36:16–1, where Jewish defeat and exile to Babylon were described in similar language. There are also obvious parallels between 1 Samuel 15 and the hyperbolic rhetoric of the Mesha Stele. I discuss the issue of the Amalekites in more detail in Paul Copan and Matthew Flannagan, “Some Reflections on the Ethics of Yahweh Wars,” in Old Testament ‘Holy War’ and Christian Morality: Perspectives and Prospects, ed. Jeremy Evans, Heath Thomas, and Paul Copan (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press Academic, 2012).

[318]

Wolterstorff, “Reading Joshua,” 251.

[319]

Jacob Milgrom, Numbers: The Traditional Hebrew Text with the New JPS Translation (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1990), 490–91.

[320]

Ibid., 490.

[321]

Ibid.

[322]

Daniel M. Fouts, “A Defense of the Hyperbolic Interpretation of Numbers in the Old Testament,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 40/3 (1997): 377–87.

[323]

Personal correspondence between Nicholas Wolterstorff and Paul Copan (May 2, 2011). [324]

One again needs to remember the dialectical context here. The skeptic who claims that God commanded genocide is offering a reductio ad absurdum; she starts by assuming that whatever God commands is right and that Scripture is the Word of God, she then derives from these assumptions the absurd conclusion that genocide is not wrong. The question then is whether, granting these assumptions, such a conclusion does, in fact, follow; hence, one is quite entitled, in this context, to assume the author was an intelligent person. [325]

In Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim That God Speaks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), Wolterstorff defends an account of how the Bible constitutes God’s Word in terms of appropriation. On page 54 he writes, “All that is necessary for the whole [Bible] to be God’s book is that the human discourse it contains have been appropriated by God, as one single book, for God’s discourse.” An implication of Wolterstorff’s position is that when one reads the Bible as the Word of God one must read the canon as appropriated discourse. Citing as an example an imaginary case where he appropriates the writings of another person, Wolterstorff elucidates the principles of interpreting appropriated discourse on page 205: The fundamental principle, I submit, is this: the interpreter takes the stance and content of my appropriating discourse to be that of your appropriated discourse, unless there is good reason to do otherwise—such “good reason to do otherwise” consisting, at bottom, of its being improbable, on the evidence available, that by my appropriation in this situation, I would have wanted to say that and only that. At those points where the interpreter does have good reason to do otherwise, he proceeds by selecting the illocutionary stance and content which have the highest probability of being what I intended to say in this way. If the most probable of those is nonetheless improbable, then he adopts some such fall-back option as that I didn’t really appropriate the discourse but only appeared to do so, that in appropriating it I said something I never intended to say, that I misunderstood the discourse I appropriated—or that he has misunderstood the appropriated discourse.

Wolterstorff suggests the same principle applies when God appropriates the “discourse by inscription” of another human being except that some of the fall-back

options are excluded. “God does not unwittingly say things God never intended to say, nor does God misunderstand the discourse God appropriates!” The upshot of this is that one cannot just offer a literal reading of the relevant passages and conclude from this that the Bible is not the Word of a just and loving God. To conclude God did not appropriate the text the critic needs to contend that, given the evidence available, the most probable of all alternative interpretations is that God is literally affirming that He commanded genocide and all other alternatives are improbable so that the only other alternative is the fall-back option that God did not really appropriate the text. Hence the critic needs to argue that the literal reading is the most plausible of all available readings and also that it is more plausible than claiming that the critic has misunderstood the appropriated discourse. [326] [327] [328]

See n315. Compare 2 Chronicles 36:17 with 36:20 and also 36:18 with 36:19. See n300.

[329]

Richard Dawkins, “Why I refuse to debate William Lane Craig,” The Guardian, October 20, 2011, accessed March 6, 2012, http:www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/20/richard-dawkins-william-lanecraig. [330]

Jessica Ravitz, “Finding faith amid disaster,” CNN Belief Blog, March 201, 2011, accessed March 6, 2012, http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/03/20/finding-faith-amiddisaster/?hpt=C2. [331]

Arthur C. Brooks, “Religious Faith and Charitable Giving,” Policy Review Vol. 121, 2003, emphasis added. [332]

Frank Newport, Dan Witters, and Sangeeta Agrawal, "Religious Americans Enjoy Higher Wellbeing," accessed March 6, 2012, http://www.gallup.com/poll/152723/Religious-Americans-Enjoy-HigherWellbeing.aspx.

Table of Contents [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] [29] [30] [31] [32] [33] [34] [35] [36] [37] [38] [39] [40] [41] [42]

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