Douglas Adams inserted a hilarious bit of theological satire into The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that I would have added to my last post if I had remembered it in time. Adams has just finished introducing a comically convenient plot device: the Babel Fish. This is a creature that feeds on sound waves and excretes brain waves – all you must do is place a Babel Fish in your ear, and then all languages are immediately translated into your native language.
Now it is such a bizarrely impossible coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the nonexistence of God. The argument goes something like this:
"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED."
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't though of that" and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
While at face value this is “the Design Argument Against the Existence of God,” don't miss the real point. It's not actually a rebuttal to the Design Argument or a positive argument for atheism. It's a satire of the “it's so we can have faith” defense for a lack of evidence for God or a particular religion.
Monday, May 11, 2009
Monday, May 4, 2009
Divine Hiddenness: The Other Fine-Tuning Argument
“... God our Savior ... desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” – I Timothy 2:3-4
Why is God hidden? While theists disagree with both me and each other on the level of clarity in the evidence, surely they would agree that if God did something like performing miracles on national TV, he would be obvious in a way that his is not right now. Why must apologetics consist of ancient history, philosophical arguments, and subjective feelings? But before I rebut apologists' explanations for why we even need apologists, I wish to further explain a few of the many ways that God hides himself.
The Bible could have had very specific prophecies about Jesus that he very specifically fulfilled. Pesher may be an acceptable excuse for why the prophetic evidence for Jesus cited in the Bible is nonexistent, but it is no excuse for God choosing to reveal Jesus in a culture that would lead to “fulfillments” like this. Micah could have said “One day, the Messiah will be born of a virgin in the town of Bethlehem, and yet still manage to come out of both Egypt and Nazareth.” Jonah could have said “just like me, the Messiah will be in the belly of the earth. Unlike me, it will be for one and a half days and two nights.” Isaiah could have told us plainly that the suffering servant of chapter 53 was the Messiah. He could have told us plainly that the Messiah would be literally “pierced” for our transgressions, but not literally “crushed” for our iniquities. He could have told us that “not opening his mouth” would be limited to the trial before Herod and the walk to the cross; this would not exclude a quite lengthy prayer the night before, this would not exclude dialogue with Pilate, and this would not exclude dialogue and a yell while on the cross. He could have told us that “like a lamb that is led to slaughter” is fairly close to the literal truth, while “like a sheep that is silent before its shearers” is not even close to the literal truth. But instead, God fined-tuned the prophecies in the Bible to make it look precisely like God played no role in inspiring the Bible.
The Bible could have had scientific information that was useful immediately. Starting whenever God decided to start inspiring books, we could have known:
“Diseases are caused by tiny things that you can't see. They live inside of you and pretty much everywhere else too, but they stop growing where it's really cold and they die where it's really hot. Cook meat well to kill them – when you don't, these tiny things go inside you and make you sick. With some of them, you can protect yourself by teaching your body how to fight them in advance. It's kind of complicated, but how it works is you need to grow a lot of these tiny things. Then heat up those tiny things to kill them. The shells of their bodies will be left behind – you won't be able to see them, but they're there. Inject these shells into your body and your body will automatically learn how to kill them. Now, if you come in contact with those tiny things in the future, your body will be prepared ahead of time. You might have to experiment a bit to get this to work, but knowing the general idea of what's going on should make it quite a bit easier than it would be if I uncaringly left you to figure all of it out yourself.”
The efficiency with which I have communicated should be contrasted with the wisdom of not eating pork or shellfish. I'd bet with more work and more knowledge of medicine, I could write something shorter, clearer, and more helpful, and that an omniscient deity could do better still. With this is mind, I have difficulty understanding why Jesus wasted his time with trifles like healing blind men one at a time or feeding people thousands at a time. He could have saved so many more people so much more easily, and in a way that authenticated his message for both his audience and for scientists who one day discovered just why his suggestions worked so well. It didn't have to be the case that science and the Bible were set on a collision course. Just think of how much stuff God could have packed into the Bible or Jesus could have shared. Thousands of paragraphs like the one above could have all been packed into a book of the Bible's size. But the ancient Jews were not given any of this information. He fine-tuned the scientific data in the Bible so we couldn't see that he had anything at all to do with it.
While I understand the position that God just worked through the historical process in writing the Bible, I'm not willing to just take it for granted that this is the only option he had. Making the Bible be a book that God literally dictated was one of God's options. There are all sorts of ways in which God could have inspired the Bible. And yet he chose an inspiration technique that is indistinguishable from doing nothing at all.
Not only was modern scientific information left out, but even after receiving the law, the Israelites didn't even have enough contemporary scientific knowledge to beat their rivals. Judges 1:19 “The LORD was with the men of Judah. They took possession of the hill country, but they were unable to drive the people from the plains, because they had iron chariots.” Science, it seems, has been Yahweh's Kryptonite for a long time.
This also leads to God's hiddenness in war. God could favor the strongest army to end the war quickly and minimize deaths, he could favor the underdog, or he could favor whoever is more moral. But instead, God favors big armies, iron chariots, and technologically advanced weapons. Atheism forces people to this conclusion ahead of time. Theism says that pretty much anything could be the result, but for some reason, God chose the one result that would be consistent with atheism. He fine-tunes his control of battles to make it look like he doesn't do anything.
Similarly with birth defects. If God exists, it could go in many ways. Maybe God gives all the defects to the children of people who aren't Christians. Maybe they are simply more likely to go to non-Christians. Or maybe it's the other way around, and God gives more birth defects to Christians than everyone else. In fact, any outcome is perfectly consistent with the possibility that God set it up that way. But with atheism, one is forced to make a very specific prediction. Faith will not matter, except to the extent that faith is correlated with circumstantial differences, as with missionaries who bring medicine. This very specific prediction is what we actually see in the real world. While any outcome could in principle be explicable in the context of theism, this is a surprising outcome. God fine-tunes the distribution of birth defects to make it look like he doesn't do anything at all.
Christianity has a number of answers to this. The weaknesses of these answers help illustrate the unanswerability of the problem of an invisible God when he's omnipresent, omnipotent, and wants to be known.
“God isn't hidden.”
In my opinion, this is the only chance. But a desire to give this answer is where the most easily disproven Christian positions come from. This gives us faith healers, extremes of Pentecostalism, and creationism (not merely that evolution is false, but also that the evidence overwhelmingly supports creation.) Except for maybe faith healers who think they can raise people from the dead, all of these, even if true, seem quite pathetic compared to the options available to an omnipotent deity.
“God's ways are not our ways.”
Translation: “Yes, I admit it makes absolutely no sense.” That's exactly what I'm saying. God's plans contradict human concepts of reason, which are in fact, the only concepts of reason that humans have. “Human reasoning” is not a term that describes a particular kind of thinking, it is a term that describes whether or not you are thinking. To realize something doesn't make sense and to continue to believe it is like looking at one's face in a mirror, observing it is unwashed, and then doing nothing about it. And yet Christians continue to disparage reason and then whine whenever insultingly described as opposing reason.
“It's so we can have faith.”
There are quite a few problems with this. First off, there are options other than all aspects of Christianity being proven and the dismal evidence apologists think we have. God could prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that he's powerful and intervenes in the world while making us believe purely by faith that he's good. God could prove that he's powerful while providing only a little bit of evidence that he's good. He could prove that he's powerful and good while making us believe by faith that salvation actually works. So even if God wants us to have faith, that is no excuse for his absence.
The next problem is that it supposes that something is good about having faith. Without this assumption, to say God is hidden so we can have faith is not an explanation, but merely a description of the particular sort of irrationality behind the plan. There is no basis for claiming that belief in God must necessarily involve faith – it's only necessary because God set it up this way, and he didn't have to set it up this way. While faith can have other meanings, in this context, faith is nothing more than an excuse for being illogical and an emotional shield that makes pointing out the obviousness of this cruel and offensive. But for some reason, God likes it when we don't try to be rational. One of the few systems that I can imagine where justice would be more arbitrary than this would be if God just chose some people and didn't choose others.
In fact, I have proof that the God of the Bible didn't have to set up the system to require faith because he doesn't always set it up that way. In the garden of Eden, Adam was provided with absolute proof that God exists, is powerful, and cares. And this didn't seem to interfere with his ability to have free will or a relationship with God. Furthermore, in heaven, the perfect existence will again not require people to have faith.
The final and most severe problem with this explanation is that even Christians don't believe it. If they did, Christians would doubt the crossing of the Red Sea because that would be too clear of evidence for God's existence and would take away the Israelites' ability to have faith. Christians would doubt that Jesus walked on water because that would take away the disciples' ability to have faith. Christians would conclude that a personal relationship with God couldn't be a valid reason for belief, because that would destroy the ability to have faith. But that's not how Christians think about miracles or proofs of his existence. When God gives proof, well did you see that? That was proof. When God doesn't give proof, it's because it would be against his nature to give us proof.
I only take the “it's so we can have faith” line seriously when it's coming from someone who consistently applies this reasoning. For the other 100%, it's a excuse that allows people to just make stuff up and pretend it's a worldview worthy of respect.
Imagine what it would be like if atheists thought this way. We'd have motivational speakers telling us things like:
“I know sometimes you might see crazy things like someone healed right in front of you, but just try not to see God in it. Sometimes, you might find yourself in a place where it’s just obvious God has done something. It just doesn’t make sense any other way. But don’t believe it! It doesn’t have to make sense. If you need one, find a support group to help you not believe even after you’ve seen a miracle. You aren’t the only one this has happened to! Lots of atheists in the past have seen miracles and still found a way to have faith in God's non-existence! You can do it too!”
Of course, if atheists talked like this, theists would be all over us saying that our words show that we don’t really disbelieve. Yes, I did just make a not-very-subtle remark about whether or not theists are atheists in rebellion against a reality that they don't like. (My apologies for sinking to the level of functional theism.)
“It wouldn't work anyway.”
Gideon disagreed. He didn't believe, so God allowed him to perform a fleece experiment to test his power. Gideon was so impressed by the efficacy of evidence in convincing people that you could have confused him with an atheist. [Or, to be fair, with a Christian evidentialist.]
Thomas disagreed. He didn't believe before Jesus showed him his wounds, and he believed afterward.
Even Jesus disagreed. “And you, Capernaum, will not be exalted to heaven, will you? You will descend to Hades; for if the miracles had occurred in Sodom which occurred in you, it would have remained to this day.” – Matthew 11:23
The question Jesus didn't answer is why he didn't perform those miracles in Sodom, because he sure seems to think it would have worked. I'd bet millions and billions of people are alive today who are even more open to the evidence of miracles than the Bible's epitome of evil. And yet God doesn't show them miracles. By contrast, I actually want people to stop damaging their lives with faith, and so I try to provide actual arguments against it. I show you my beliefs by my works. God claims that he wants all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth. I wish God would have shown us that he really wanted Sodom to be saved by his actions. The Sodomites aren't in hell because they refused to be with God and so God told them “thy will be done” and sent them off to the one place apart from himself. Sodom could have been saved. Unfortunately for them, God was in one of his smiting moods.
And again, Christians are unwilling to consistently think according to this rationalization. If they have a dramatic answer to prayer or observe a miracle, you'd better believe that they are going to tell people. It could be the case that they still don't believe this will have an effect on people who don't believe. But that's not the point. The point is that they realize it makes sense to try. But God doesn't try. He has instead fine-tuned war, scientific laws, birth defects, tragedies, and the Bible to make it look like he doesn't do anything at all.
The Kicker
All of these rebuttals completely and utterly fail to provide a coherent explanation for why God hides himself. There is no excuse for God not making himself known. But it's even worse than that. Suppose for the sake of argument that Christianity provides a completely plausible explanation for God's behavior, one is completely content with the possibility that we cannot have any idea why God doesn't do what he doesn't do, or I'm wrong on every single point when I talk about things God “should” want to do. Then the argument from hiddenness is still a powerful argument. If any or all of these are the case, this would merely explains how hiddenness was one of God's options.
Atheism forces people to make very specific predictions about how things will work, namely that no actions will be performed by God that are distinguishable from no action at all. But Christianity cannot predict in advance that God will fine-tune the outcome to look like he did nothing at all.
Suppose one person predicts that the sun will rise at 5:54 am tomorrow morning, while the second person says it could rise at any time between 4 am and 10 am and there is no way of knowing precisely what the sun will do in advance. And then the sun rises at 5:54 am. Technically, the second person hasn't been shown to be wrong. But this is powerful evidence that the first person knows something that the second person doesn't know.
Every single time that God could preform a miracle, could reveal himself, or could reveal useful knowledge to us but doesn't is a case where theists merely observe this to be one of many possible outcomes. But atheists knew the sun would rise at 5:54 am. How do atheists get these things right so often and so precisely? Personally, I do not find this question to be particularly difficult to answer.
Why is God hidden? While theists disagree with both me and each other on the level of clarity in the evidence, surely they would agree that if God did something like performing miracles on national TV, he would be obvious in a way that his is not right now. Why must apologetics consist of ancient history, philosophical arguments, and subjective feelings? But before I rebut apologists' explanations for why we even need apologists, I wish to further explain a few of the many ways that God hides himself.
The Bible could have had very specific prophecies about Jesus that he very specifically fulfilled. Pesher may be an acceptable excuse for why the prophetic evidence for Jesus cited in the Bible is nonexistent, but it is no excuse for God choosing to reveal Jesus in a culture that would lead to “fulfillments” like this. Micah could have said “One day, the Messiah will be born of a virgin in the town of Bethlehem, and yet still manage to come out of both Egypt and Nazareth.” Jonah could have said “just like me, the Messiah will be in the belly of the earth. Unlike me, it will be for one and a half days and two nights.” Isaiah could have told us plainly that the suffering servant of chapter 53 was the Messiah. He could have told us plainly that the Messiah would be literally “pierced” for our transgressions, but not literally “crushed” for our iniquities. He could have told us that “not opening his mouth” would be limited to the trial before Herod and the walk to the cross; this would not exclude a quite lengthy prayer the night before, this would not exclude dialogue with Pilate, and this would not exclude dialogue and a yell while on the cross. He could have told us that “like a lamb that is led to slaughter” is fairly close to the literal truth, while “like a sheep that is silent before its shearers” is not even close to the literal truth. But instead, God fined-tuned the prophecies in the Bible to make it look precisely like God played no role in inspiring the Bible.
The Bible could have had scientific information that was useful immediately. Starting whenever God decided to start inspiring books, we could have known:
“Diseases are caused by tiny things that you can't see. They live inside of you and pretty much everywhere else too, but they stop growing where it's really cold and they die where it's really hot. Cook meat well to kill them – when you don't, these tiny things go inside you and make you sick. With some of them, you can protect yourself by teaching your body how to fight them in advance. It's kind of complicated, but how it works is you need to grow a lot of these tiny things. Then heat up those tiny things to kill them. The shells of their bodies will be left behind – you won't be able to see them, but they're there. Inject these shells into your body and your body will automatically learn how to kill them. Now, if you come in contact with those tiny things in the future, your body will be prepared ahead of time. You might have to experiment a bit to get this to work, but knowing the general idea of what's going on should make it quite a bit easier than it would be if I uncaringly left you to figure all of it out yourself.”
The efficiency with which I have communicated should be contrasted with the wisdom of not eating pork or shellfish. I'd bet with more work and more knowledge of medicine, I could write something shorter, clearer, and more helpful, and that an omniscient deity could do better still. With this is mind, I have difficulty understanding why Jesus wasted his time with trifles like healing blind men one at a time or feeding people thousands at a time. He could have saved so many more people so much more easily, and in a way that authenticated his message for both his audience and for scientists who one day discovered just why his suggestions worked so well. It didn't have to be the case that science and the Bible were set on a collision course. Just think of how much stuff God could have packed into the Bible or Jesus could have shared. Thousands of paragraphs like the one above could have all been packed into a book of the Bible's size. But the ancient Jews were not given any of this information. He fine-tuned the scientific data in the Bible so we couldn't see that he had anything at all to do with it.
While I understand the position that God just worked through the historical process in writing the Bible, I'm not willing to just take it for granted that this is the only option he had. Making the Bible be a book that God literally dictated was one of God's options. There are all sorts of ways in which God could have inspired the Bible. And yet he chose an inspiration technique that is indistinguishable from doing nothing at all.
Not only was modern scientific information left out, but even after receiving the law, the Israelites didn't even have enough contemporary scientific knowledge to beat their rivals. Judges 1:19 “The LORD was with the men of Judah. They took possession of the hill country, but they were unable to drive the people from the plains, because they had iron chariots.” Science, it seems, has been Yahweh's Kryptonite for a long time.
This also leads to God's hiddenness in war. God could favor the strongest army to end the war quickly and minimize deaths, he could favor the underdog, or he could favor whoever is more moral. But instead, God favors big armies, iron chariots, and technologically advanced weapons. Atheism forces people to this conclusion ahead of time. Theism says that pretty much anything could be the result, but for some reason, God chose the one result that would be consistent with atheism. He fine-tunes his control of battles to make it look like he doesn't do anything.
Similarly with birth defects. If God exists, it could go in many ways. Maybe God gives all the defects to the children of people who aren't Christians. Maybe they are simply more likely to go to non-Christians. Or maybe it's the other way around, and God gives more birth defects to Christians than everyone else. In fact, any outcome is perfectly consistent with the possibility that God set it up that way. But with atheism, one is forced to make a very specific prediction. Faith will not matter, except to the extent that faith is correlated with circumstantial differences, as with missionaries who bring medicine. This very specific prediction is what we actually see in the real world. While any outcome could in principle be explicable in the context of theism, this is a surprising outcome. God fine-tunes the distribution of birth defects to make it look like he doesn't do anything at all.
Christianity has a number of answers to this. The weaknesses of these answers help illustrate the unanswerability of the problem of an invisible God when he's omnipresent, omnipotent, and wants to be known.
“God isn't hidden.”
In my opinion, this is the only chance. But a desire to give this answer is where the most easily disproven Christian positions come from. This gives us faith healers, extremes of Pentecostalism, and creationism (not merely that evolution is false, but also that the evidence overwhelmingly supports creation.) Except for maybe faith healers who think they can raise people from the dead, all of these, even if true, seem quite pathetic compared to the options available to an omnipotent deity.
“God's ways are not our ways.”
Translation: “Yes, I admit it makes absolutely no sense.” That's exactly what I'm saying. God's plans contradict human concepts of reason, which are in fact, the only concepts of reason that humans have. “Human reasoning” is not a term that describes a particular kind of thinking, it is a term that describes whether or not you are thinking. To realize something doesn't make sense and to continue to believe it is like looking at one's face in a mirror, observing it is unwashed, and then doing nothing about it. And yet Christians continue to disparage reason and then whine whenever insultingly described as opposing reason.
“It's so we can have faith.”
There are quite a few problems with this. First off, there are options other than all aspects of Christianity being proven and the dismal evidence apologists think we have. God could prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that he's powerful and intervenes in the world while making us believe purely by faith that he's good. God could prove that he's powerful while providing only a little bit of evidence that he's good. He could prove that he's powerful and good while making us believe by faith that salvation actually works. So even if God wants us to have faith, that is no excuse for his absence.
The next problem is that it supposes that something is good about having faith. Without this assumption, to say God is hidden so we can have faith is not an explanation, but merely a description of the particular sort of irrationality behind the plan. There is no basis for claiming that belief in God must necessarily involve faith – it's only necessary because God set it up this way, and he didn't have to set it up this way. While faith can have other meanings, in this context, faith is nothing more than an excuse for being illogical and an emotional shield that makes pointing out the obviousness of this cruel and offensive. But for some reason, God likes it when we don't try to be rational. One of the few systems that I can imagine where justice would be more arbitrary than this would be if God just chose some people and didn't choose others.
In fact, I have proof that the God of the Bible didn't have to set up the system to require faith because he doesn't always set it up that way. In the garden of Eden, Adam was provided with absolute proof that God exists, is powerful, and cares. And this didn't seem to interfere with his ability to have free will or a relationship with God. Furthermore, in heaven, the perfect existence will again not require people to have faith.
The final and most severe problem with this explanation is that even Christians don't believe it. If they did, Christians would doubt the crossing of the Red Sea because that would be too clear of evidence for God's existence and would take away the Israelites' ability to have faith. Christians would doubt that Jesus walked on water because that would take away the disciples' ability to have faith. Christians would conclude that a personal relationship with God couldn't be a valid reason for belief, because that would destroy the ability to have faith. But that's not how Christians think about miracles or proofs of his existence. When God gives proof, well did you see that? That was proof. When God doesn't give proof, it's because it would be against his nature to give us proof.
I only take the “it's so we can have faith” line seriously when it's coming from someone who consistently applies this reasoning. For the other 100%, it's a excuse that allows people to just make stuff up and pretend it's a worldview worthy of respect.
Imagine what it would be like if atheists thought this way. We'd have motivational speakers telling us things like:
“I know sometimes you might see crazy things like someone healed right in front of you, but just try not to see God in it. Sometimes, you might find yourself in a place where it’s just obvious God has done something. It just doesn’t make sense any other way. But don’t believe it! It doesn’t have to make sense. If you need one, find a support group to help you not believe even after you’ve seen a miracle. You aren’t the only one this has happened to! Lots of atheists in the past have seen miracles and still found a way to have faith in God's non-existence! You can do it too!”
Of course, if atheists talked like this, theists would be all over us saying that our words show that we don’t really disbelieve. Yes, I did just make a not-very-subtle remark about whether or not theists are atheists in rebellion against a reality that they don't like. (My apologies for sinking to the level of functional theism.)
“It wouldn't work anyway.”
Gideon disagreed. He didn't believe, so God allowed him to perform a fleece experiment to test his power. Gideon was so impressed by the efficacy of evidence in convincing people that you could have confused him with an atheist. [Or, to be fair, with a Christian evidentialist.]
Thomas disagreed. He didn't believe before Jesus showed him his wounds, and he believed afterward.
Even Jesus disagreed. “And you, Capernaum, will not be exalted to heaven, will you? You will descend to Hades; for if the miracles had occurred in Sodom which occurred in you, it would have remained to this day.” – Matthew 11:23
The question Jesus didn't answer is why he didn't perform those miracles in Sodom, because he sure seems to think it would have worked. I'd bet millions and billions of people are alive today who are even more open to the evidence of miracles than the Bible's epitome of evil. And yet God doesn't show them miracles. By contrast, I actually want people to stop damaging their lives with faith, and so I try to provide actual arguments against it. I show you my beliefs by my works. God claims that he wants all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth. I wish God would have shown us that he really wanted Sodom to be saved by his actions. The Sodomites aren't in hell because they refused to be with God and so God told them “thy will be done” and sent them off to the one place apart from himself. Sodom could have been saved. Unfortunately for them, God was in one of his smiting moods.
And again, Christians are unwilling to consistently think according to this rationalization. If they have a dramatic answer to prayer or observe a miracle, you'd better believe that they are going to tell people. It could be the case that they still don't believe this will have an effect on people who don't believe. But that's not the point. The point is that they realize it makes sense to try. But God doesn't try. He has instead fine-tuned war, scientific laws, birth defects, tragedies, and the Bible to make it look like he doesn't do anything at all.
The Kicker
All of these rebuttals completely and utterly fail to provide a coherent explanation for why God hides himself. There is no excuse for God not making himself known. But it's even worse than that. Suppose for the sake of argument that Christianity provides a completely plausible explanation for God's behavior, one is completely content with the possibility that we cannot have any idea why God doesn't do what he doesn't do, or I'm wrong on every single point when I talk about things God “should” want to do. Then the argument from hiddenness is still a powerful argument. If any or all of these are the case, this would merely explains how hiddenness was one of God's options.
Atheism forces people to make very specific predictions about how things will work, namely that no actions will be performed by God that are distinguishable from no action at all. But Christianity cannot predict in advance that God will fine-tune the outcome to look like he did nothing at all.
Suppose one person predicts that the sun will rise at 5:54 am tomorrow morning, while the second person says it could rise at any time between 4 am and 10 am and there is no way of knowing precisely what the sun will do in advance. And then the sun rises at 5:54 am. Technically, the second person hasn't been shown to be wrong. But this is powerful evidence that the first person knows something that the second person doesn't know.
Every single time that God could preform a miracle, could reveal himself, or could reveal useful knowledge to us but doesn't is a case where theists merely observe this to be one of many possible outcomes. But atheists knew the sun would rise at 5:54 am. How do atheists get these things right so often and so precisely? Personally, I do not find this question to be particularly difficult to answer.
Friday, April 17, 2009
The Role of Evolution in my Deconversion
Perhaps the most common reason people reject Christianity is evolution, and I am no exception. However, the way it influenced me was very different from the usual way that learning Genesis is not historically reliable leads to learning the rest is not historically reliable either. For me, the primary effect was sociological – it changed my social standing within [evangelical] Christianity and this caused me to see how Christians think about the rest of their faith as well.
It's hardly a revolutionary observation to notice that if Christians thought about Christianity with the same critical thinking they use when approaching the evidence for any other religion, then most of them would stop believing. But as a bare claim, this is something anyone could say about anything. An argument that can refute anything refutes nothing. (See Romans 1:22.)
The fact that Christians believe in Yahweh but not the other deities of antiquity is, in and of itself, no more reason to suspect Christians are wrong than the bare fact that scientifically minded people usually believe in the theory of relativity but not in UFOs. What is needed are the particulars of how the “problems” with and evidence for every other religion are similar to the “mysteries” inside one's own religion that are just accepted. It is only with these particulars that either side can justify the comparison.
Once I became a theistic evolutionist (TE), my Christianity became one of the positions to which young-earth creationists (YEC) apply critical thinking. And consequently, claims about the consistency of evolution and Christianity were both essential to my faith and rejected by most Christians. To understand their position was to view my faith as an outsider.
While the emotional fallout of this situation should not be dismissed, it was also a fundamentally intellectual struggle that could not be wished, tolerated, or loved away. First, a lot of the theological arguments against TE make sense. Second, most of these arguments have a twin argument which is against Christianity as a whole. Most seriously, the arguments against Christianity as a whole are equal to or stronger than the arguments against TE. But these claims are only as strong as my examples:
The Ten Commandments
While supposedly the entire Bible is God-breathed in some sense, with a few parts, more is claimed. Perhaps most dramatically, with the ten commandments, God didn't just work through the historical process of the recording of events. These words were written with by the finger of God. In the Exodus version, right after the specifics of the commandment about the Sabbath, God's finger wrote in 20:11, “For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day; therefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day and made it holy. ”
However, Deuteronomy 5 disagrees regard precisely what God's finger wrote. In that version, the fourth commandment is followed in verse 15 by “You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God brought you out of there by a mighty hand and by an outstretched arm; therefore the LORD your God commanded you to observe the sabbath day.”
Even ignoring the question of the degree of similarity and differences, which version did God's finger write? I don't typically hear the phrase “written by God in stone” and think of it as something quite so flexible. As is so often the case, there is an enormous difference between having actual reasons to think that God's finger wrote something, and having a book that claims God helped write it. To outsiders, it can be a bit strange that this isn't thought of more often, but we don't know that God really wrote the ten commandments just because the Bible tells us so. In fact, the Bible itself accidentally testifies that God's finger probably didn't write some or all of the ten commandments.
This is a sticky enough of a question that I was not willing to charge ahead and draw deep theological conclusions out of a trouble text. Another way of saying this is that what the Bible says is so unclear, that even if it is true, trusting what one thinks it says would be unwise.
Genealogies
Luke traces Jesus' genealogies all the way back to Adam. My half-answer was that I still believed in a literal Adam and a literal Fall about which all we know is myth. The reason this only halfway works is that I accepted science's dating of early civilizations that are older than the Bible suggests Adam to be by means of genealogies. However, before I was willing to trust the minute details of biblical genealogies, there were some major issues that had to be dealt with that are internal to the Bible.
First off, Luke and Matthew's genealogies clash. Before giving a rehearsed answer of one being Mary's and the other being Joseph's, look them up. “Jacob the father of Joseph” is clear in Matthew 1:16, and everyone agrees with this. Luke 3:23-24 says “[Jesus] was the son, so it was thought, of Joseph, the son of Heli, the son of Matthat, ...” This communicates with great clarity that Heli was Joseph's father.
The best inerrantist answer I've seen to this is that the repetitions of “the son” are not present in the original – they are incorrectly added words in English to smooth out the grammar. The literal translation is then “[Jesus] was the son, so it was thought, of Joseph, of Heli, of Matthat ...” where the implication is “Jesus son of Heli, Jesus son of Matthat, ...” And then the way this is consistent with Matthew is that this is merely a list of Jesus' ancestors without implications of their relationships to each other, and thus Heli could be Mary's father.
This is quite strained, but I accepted the explanation for quite a while. However, notice that it means that Luke failed to communicate clearly. You must twist the text to even get to the point where Heli could be Mary's father. What we know with certainty is that Luke didn't tell us that Heli is Mary's father. Telling us that Heli is related to Jesus because he's Mary's father is, in fact, precisely the sort of thing that genealogies are supposed to communicate. If you just read Luke and trust it to be reliable, you will conclude that Heli is Joseph's father. Perhaps the genealogies in Genesis are the same, and they need to be viewed with a grain of salt – meaning science.
Also, in several places Matthew's genealogy skips generations that appear in the OT. He doesn't tell us why, but presumably, his reason for doing this is to turn it into a clever 14-14-14 pattern. He also fails to make to 14-14-14 pattern work by only coming up with 14+14+13=41 names. If you double-count one name it works out. But there is a commonly accepted term for counting something twice: a mistake. I just don't see why I should take the OT genealogies more seriously than the NT writers took them.
Furthermore, the Bible is consistently quite bad at getting numbers right. Jesus died on Friday and rose on Sunday, and yet Matthew 12:40 says Jesus was dead for three days and three nights. I'm very curious about which three nights these might have been. While I'm sure Matthew knew how to count, the point is that to think the numbers in the Bible are mathematically accurate is, at best, to misunderstand the Bible. To argue against evolution based on the genealogies is to assume their mathematical accuracy.
Evolution leads to the Holocaust
Suppose for the sake of argument that it does. God told Moses to slaughter the Midianites, including the male children. (The soldiers were commanded to save the girls “for themselves.”) What would become of society if everyone believed in a ideology that condones genocide?
The ease with which Christians see the depravity of the Holocaust is the ease with which I see the depravity of the Bible.
Problem of Pain
Not accepting YEC certainly makes the problem of pain more difficult. Instead of physical death being something that followed the curse of sin, it's present as part of the original creation. But if you believe in hell as I did, this objection is bizarre. The majority of humanity is supposedly going to be tortured for eternity because God didn't call them. And yet if God's plan involves animals living finite and painful lives this is supposed to be something that indicts God as cruel and unloving.
What's going on is very simple. When God's the sadistic keeper of a medieval torture chamber filled with heretics and it's part of my theology, it's just something that I'm supposed to struggle with until I can train myself to realize that it's what justice really means – if I don't accept the answer, then my sin is causing me to have a warped understanding of what a loving God is really like. But think of the bunnies! Look at them! A loving God wouldn't design a system where mean coyotes eat cute little bunny rabbits. If your theology says that God created lots of bunnies to die for no reason better than lunch, that means you are calling God evil. Is seems as though the YEC God is one of the founding members of PETA.
Of course, that's not to say the problem of animal pain is trivial. But it seems more like a concern for a universalist, an annihilationist, or at least someone who thinks God was genuinely surprised by Adam's rebellion and the necessity for hell. Otherwise, it's like a vegan wanting to venerate Stalin for being so loving but first stopping to ponder the moral implications of his occasional steak.
There is actually is a way that an evolutionary story of life can fit with the YEC doctrine of the physical death of animals being due to sin. Maybe God created the first bacterium to live forever. But before he had a chance to split, it rebelled and ate of the forbidden lactose. And then animals inherited its sin, for which they are personally (animally?) responsible, and that's why animals deserved to die for billions of years. I may not have evidence showing it actually happened, but you don't have evidence saying it didn't happen. It also may not make a lot of sense to one's mind, but maybe it's just the kind of thing that should be accepted by faith and believed in one's heart. (By the way, Pascal's wager calls for the baptizing of your pets.)
Why did God take so long?
This is a really good question. It doesn't make much sense for God to create billions of years of existence for the cosmos when the center of his attention is alive for only thousands of years. But similarly, why did God created billions of light years and billions of stars most of which no person will ever see? As a theistic evolution, I thought it was weird that creationists ask only the first. While I appreciate the consistency of asking neither, I now ask both.
Similarly, why did God wait so long after the Fall to send Jesus? Why make so many animals die as pointless sacrifices? Why spent so much time between Abraham and Jesus with only the Jews and a scattering of Gentiles having a real chance to know him? Christians' reaction to this is fairly predictable. God has a plan. We don't always understand it, but it's quite presumptuous for us to think we could have done better than him. This is precisely how I hope creationist readers react to these questions. Here's the kicker: why not give theistic evolutionists/old earth creationists the same leniency? Maybe God made the universe old for a similar “reason” – it's part of his plan that we can't understand.
Paul's use of Genesis
When talking about the Fall, Paul says that death entered the world through one man's sin. While this isn't clear at all, especially because Adam didn't physically die on the day he ate the fruit, I'll suppose for the sake of argument that we know that Paul is talking about not just spiritual death and not just about human death, but physical death and animal death as well.
But since when have the NT authors been a valid source concerning what the OT actually says? When God makes a promise to Abraham's seed, is seed singular or plural? If singular, I would like to know the verse of Genesis that helped you reach this conclusion. If plural, then Paul was not only wrong about what the OT says, but this faulty understanding was his basis for a theological argument about the promise to the Jews being transferred to Christians.
So maybe Paul was a young-earth creationist, Paul was wrong, and Paul tangentially communicated these false ideas in the process of communicating true theological ideas about Jesus' death. And we're still supposed to believe these theological truths even after learning the debunking of the argument for these theological truths. The ease with which YECists see the weakness in this position is the ease with which I look at Galatians 3 and see that it is false.
Blurring the Line Between Man and Animals
Another problem is that evolution blurs the line between man and animals. And it certainly does. This means “human” is not a yes/no question, but rather a question of degree. There are ways around this like believing that in a certain moment in time, God gave an animal that looked like an ape-man a soul, but this isn't as clean of an answer as the one provided by creationism.
Consider embryonic development. The same problem appears. We have a smooth transition between non-human sperm and egg to a fully human baby. This cannot be evaded by just “believing” God creates a soul at conception. Theistic evolutionists believe that God created the first human soul at some point in the evolution process, and YECists don't let them get away with this equally evidence-free claim. Here, the problem is even worse. At least with evolution, you could go back 40,000 years and look at a child and say it is human while the parents were animals – while the line may be arbitrary, at least the line can't be blurred further by looking at the generation between the child and the parents. But with embryonic development, it's a fully smooth transition. YECists easily see that a mostly smooth transition from animal to human suggests that talk of a soul or being created in the image of God doesn't make sense. With the same ease, I see that embryonic development shows the concept of a soul to be nonsensical.
Randomness
In Wayne Grudem's Systematic Theology, on page 276 he writes “The fundamental difference between a biblical view of creation and theistic evolution lies here: the driving force … is randomness.” This is tangential, but this is a common misconception about evolution. Evolution is like the weather – it's a process involving randomness. Due to the randomness of weather I can only guess within ten or twenty degrees what the temperature will be in a week. But I could guess the average temperature for 2010 within a degree or two (and without knowing about global warming.) Due to random effects averaging out, a process that looks chaotic on a small scale is often one that behaves predictably on a larger scale. Evolution says that changes are the predictable long-term result.
But theologically speaking, the misunderstanding doesn't change the implications. In theistic evolution, God's guidance of evolution looks precisely the way it would look if it looked like he stopped caring billions of years ago.
However, the same issue of randomness appears when thinking through the implications of actuarial science. If you know the rate at which heart attacks occur, and you know the size of the population, you can make a very good guess about how many people in the population will have heart attacks. For a more precise prediction, you don't pray to learn the will of God. You learn more about the population, like their age distribution. Actuarial science requires thinking about death in terms of the naturalistic cause and effect that comes from supposing death is left up to chance. And it works. This means that the way in which God takes away life looks precisely the way it would look if it looked like God doesn't care. There are less fatalist ways of saying this, but it's no different than the spin creationists universally give to evolution. Personally, I find the threat actuarial science and statistics pose to believing God still cares about death to be far more severe than the threat evolution poses to believing God cared while creating.
YECists show the proper approach to theistic evolution – skepticism toward the meaningfulness of talking about a creator who is indistinguishable from no creator at all. With the same ease, I apply this same skepticism to Christianity and see that the reasoning behind actuarial science supports the conclusion that God doesn't exist or doesn't care.
Problems in the Local Flood
Most old earth creationists and theistic evolutionists believe that Noah's flood was a local flood (a myth is the alternative.) The Bible talks about the whole world as a hyperbole in many places, so perhaps here as well. To this position, YECists have an excellent response. Why didn't Noah just migrate several hundred miles? Why not just have the birds fly a few hundred miles away? Noah had a hundred years to kill, so I don't suppose finding the time to pack would have been too burdensome.
I really like this objection. It's an excellent reason to not believe in the local flood. What I like so much about it is the underlying assumption that if a plan is completely illogical, then an omniscient God probably didn't come up with it. This assumption comes as naturally as the basic rules of logic – unless one's own beliefs are under the microscope.
So here's my question: Why didn't God just smite everyone and skip the whole flood thing entirely? This would have saved so much trouble for everyone. Noah could have preached about coming judgment for years and he could have shown he believed his own message by making provisions for surviving on his own. I would be interested in hearing if there are any reasons to send a flood at all that don't also defend the idea of having Noah build an ark for a local flood. Maybe there are reasons, but I could throw in an extra miracle or two if they are needed for the practicality of my smiting proposal.
With the local flood, YECists show the proper way of thinking about dramatic claims about what God did. If the story has God commanding a lot of pointless milling about, this should count strongly against its chance of being true. By applying the same skepticism to the global flood that creationists apply to the local flood, I reject the story of Noah even without the scientific and biblical cases against it.
Reconciling the Bible with evolution is really quite easy compared to reconciling the Bible with the Bible and other realities in the here and now. Creationists' ability to see the problems in my answers to comparably easy questions helped me see how contrived both our answers were to the hard questions.
Failing The Insider Test
Small step at a time, I moved my theology a bit while staying inside what I thought was inside. I would wait a bit, and my idea of “inside” would be stretched with me. After moving a moderate distance, I thought that where I came from was inside while the painful truth is that where I came from thought I was outside. This placed me in a curious position: YEC was still inside to me, YEC viewed me as an outsider, I was seeking to fully understand different positions within my idea of orthodoxy, and therefore the logically inevitable result was viewing my faith as an outsider.
I don't remember if anyone ever told me that I would reject Christianity if I used the same skepticism toward it that I use toward every other religion. If so, I don't remember it because it made no impact on my thinking. But eventually, I found myself looking at creationists and seeing that if they were to apply the same critical thinking to their own beliefs that they apply to mine, they would stop being Christians. Conversely, if I thought about my own faith the way other Christians thought about my faith, I would stop being a Christian.
While I thought my way out of many aspects of faith, here I simply got lucky. The desire and ability to think critically about my own beliefs was a very small part of the final step out. Thinking critically about my own beliefs was forced upon me as an unintended consequence of other decisions that were much easier to make. Perhaps this is the difference between me and Christians smarter than I am.
While many of the arguments against Christianity work just fine as academic arguments, I doubt this can be written so that readers will feel the weight of the argument as I did. It took the grind of over two years of not only trying to fit evolution in with Christianity, but trying to fit evolution in with the Christian community to see the blatant inconsistencies on both sides. It's not a matter of people being dogmatic or whatever negative adjective you want to throw in. It's simply the predictable clash of incompatible beliefs – or rather, different Christianities.
My YEC and inerrantist Christianity failed the insider test because the arguments against it are so solid that any perspective save for closing one's eyes is sufficient to see it. My TE Christianity failed the insider test because even the very idea of an insider test failed the insider test. To define “inside” as bigger than “me” was to include people who don't agree on everything. To be willing to have candid conversations with other Christians who believed a bit differently and to honestly seek to understand where they were coming from was to look at many of my own beliefs and critically think through if I had reasons for believing them or not. Sociological circumstances turned this into looking at all of my beliefs with skepticism.
Few faiths, if any, can survive under the scrutiny that everyone applies to everyone else's faith. Truth has nothing to fear from inspection and Christianity should be terrified. My mortally wounded faith staggered on for a while, but my fate had been sealed. I had escaped.
It's hardly a revolutionary observation to notice that if Christians thought about Christianity with the same critical thinking they use when approaching the evidence for any other religion, then most of them would stop believing. But as a bare claim, this is something anyone could say about anything. An argument that can refute anything refutes nothing. (See Romans 1:22.)
The fact that Christians believe in Yahweh but not the other deities of antiquity is, in and of itself, no more reason to suspect Christians are wrong than the bare fact that scientifically minded people usually believe in the theory of relativity but not in UFOs. What is needed are the particulars of how the “problems” with and evidence for every other religion are similar to the “mysteries” inside one's own religion that are just accepted. It is only with these particulars that either side can justify the comparison.
Once I became a theistic evolutionist (TE), my Christianity became one of the positions to which young-earth creationists (YEC) apply critical thinking. And consequently, claims about the consistency of evolution and Christianity were both essential to my faith and rejected by most Christians. To understand their position was to view my faith as an outsider.
While the emotional fallout of this situation should not be dismissed, it was also a fundamentally intellectual struggle that could not be wished, tolerated, or loved away. First, a lot of the theological arguments against TE make sense. Second, most of these arguments have a twin argument which is against Christianity as a whole. Most seriously, the arguments against Christianity as a whole are equal to or stronger than the arguments against TE. But these claims are only as strong as my examples:
The Ten Commandments
While supposedly the entire Bible is God-breathed in some sense, with a few parts, more is claimed. Perhaps most dramatically, with the ten commandments, God didn't just work through the historical process of the recording of events. These words were written with by the finger of God. In the Exodus version, right after the specifics of the commandment about the Sabbath, God's finger wrote in 20:11, “For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day; therefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day and made it holy. ”
However, Deuteronomy 5 disagrees regard precisely what God's finger wrote. In that version, the fourth commandment is followed in verse 15 by “You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God brought you out of there by a mighty hand and by an outstretched arm; therefore the LORD your God commanded you to observe the sabbath day.”
Even ignoring the question of the degree of similarity and differences, which version did God's finger write? I don't typically hear the phrase “written by God in stone” and think of it as something quite so flexible. As is so often the case, there is an enormous difference between having actual reasons to think that God's finger wrote something, and having a book that claims God helped write it. To outsiders, it can be a bit strange that this isn't thought of more often, but we don't know that God really wrote the ten commandments just because the Bible tells us so. In fact, the Bible itself accidentally testifies that God's finger probably didn't write some or all of the ten commandments.
This is a sticky enough of a question that I was not willing to charge ahead and draw deep theological conclusions out of a trouble text. Another way of saying this is that what the Bible says is so unclear, that even if it is true, trusting what one thinks it says would be unwise.
Genealogies
Luke traces Jesus' genealogies all the way back to Adam. My half-answer was that I still believed in a literal Adam and a literal Fall about which all we know is myth. The reason this only halfway works is that I accepted science's dating of early civilizations that are older than the Bible suggests Adam to be by means of genealogies. However, before I was willing to trust the minute details of biblical genealogies, there were some major issues that had to be dealt with that are internal to the Bible.
First off, Luke and Matthew's genealogies clash. Before giving a rehearsed answer of one being Mary's and the other being Joseph's, look them up. “Jacob the father of Joseph” is clear in Matthew 1:16, and everyone agrees with this. Luke 3:23-24 says “[Jesus] was the son, so it was thought, of Joseph, the son of Heli, the son of Matthat, ...” This communicates with great clarity that Heli was Joseph's father.
The best inerrantist answer I've seen to this is that the repetitions of “the son” are not present in the original – they are incorrectly added words in English to smooth out the grammar. The literal translation is then “[Jesus] was the son, so it was thought, of Joseph, of Heli, of Matthat ...” where the implication is “Jesus son of Heli, Jesus son of Matthat, ...” And then the way this is consistent with Matthew is that this is merely a list of Jesus' ancestors without implications of their relationships to each other, and thus Heli could be Mary's father.
This is quite strained, but I accepted the explanation for quite a while. However, notice that it means that Luke failed to communicate clearly. You must twist the text to even get to the point where Heli could be Mary's father. What we know with certainty is that Luke didn't tell us that Heli is Mary's father. Telling us that Heli is related to Jesus because he's Mary's father is, in fact, precisely the sort of thing that genealogies are supposed to communicate. If you just read Luke and trust it to be reliable, you will conclude that Heli is Joseph's father. Perhaps the genealogies in Genesis are the same, and they need to be viewed with a grain of salt – meaning science.
Also, in several places Matthew's genealogy skips generations that appear in the OT. He doesn't tell us why, but presumably, his reason for doing this is to turn it into a clever 14-14-14 pattern. He also fails to make to 14-14-14 pattern work by only coming up with 14+14+13=41 names. If you double-count one name it works out. But there is a commonly accepted term for counting something twice: a mistake. I just don't see why I should take the OT genealogies more seriously than the NT writers took them.
Furthermore, the Bible is consistently quite bad at getting numbers right. Jesus died on Friday and rose on Sunday, and yet Matthew 12:40 says Jesus was dead for three days and three nights. I'm very curious about which three nights these might have been. While I'm sure Matthew knew how to count, the point is that to think the numbers in the Bible are mathematically accurate is, at best, to misunderstand the Bible. To argue against evolution based on the genealogies is to assume their mathematical accuracy.
Evolution leads to the Holocaust
Suppose for the sake of argument that it does. God told Moses to slaughter the Midianites, including the male children. (The soldiers were commanded to save the girls “for themselves.”) What would become of society if everyone believed in a ideology that condones genocide?
The ease with which Christians see the depravity of the Holocaust is the ease with which I see the depravity of the Bible.
Problem of Pain
Not accepting YEC certainly makes the problem of pain more difficult. Instead of physical death being something that followed the curse of sin, it's present as part of the original creation. But if you believe in hell as I did, this objection is bizarre. The majority of humanity is supposedly going to be tortured for eternity because God didn't call them. And yet if God's plan involves animals living finite and painful lives this is supposed to be something that indicts God as cruel and unloving.
What's going on is very simple. When God's the sadistic keeper of a medieval torture chamber filled with heretics and it's part of my theology, it's just something that I'm supposed to struggle with until I can train myself to realize that it's what justice really means – if I don't accept the answer, then my sin is causing me to have a warped understanding of what a loving God is really like. But think of the bunnies! Look at them! A loving God wouldn't design a system where mean coyotes eat cute little bunny rabbits. If your theology says that God created lots of bunnies to die for no reason better than lunch, that means you are calling God evil. Is seems as though the YEC God is one of the founding members of PETA.
Of course, that's not to say the problem of animal pain is trivial. But it seems more like a concern for a universalist, an annihilationist, or at least someone who thinks God was genuinely surprised by Adam's rebellion and the necessity for hell. Otherwise, it's like a vegan wanting to venerate Stalin for being so loving but first stopping to ponder the moral implications of his occasional steak.
There is actually is a way that an evolutionary story of life can fit with the YEC doctrine of the physical death of animals being due to sin. Maybe God created the first bacterium to live forever. But before he had a chance to split, it rebelled and ate of the forbidden lactose. And then animals inherited its sin, for which they are personally (animally?) responsible, and that's why animals deserved to die for billions of years. I may not have evidence showing it actually happened, but you don't have evidence saying it didn't happen. It also may not make a lot of sense to one's mind, but maybe it's just the kind of thing that should be accepted by faith and believed in one's heart. (By the way, Pascal's wager calls for the baptizing of your pets.)
Why did God take so long?
This is a really good question. It doesn't make much sense for God to create billions of years of existence for the cosmos when the center of his attention is alive for only thousands of years. But similarly, why did God created billions of light years and billions of stars most of which no person will ever see? As a theistic evolution, I thought it was weird that creationists ask only the first. While I appreciate the consistency of asking neither, I now ask both.
Similarly, why did God wait so long after the Fall to send Jesus? Why make so many animals die as pointless sacrifices? Why spent so much time between Abraham and Jesus with only the Jews and a scattering of Gentiles having a real chance to know him? Christians' reaction to this is fairly predictable. God has a plan. We don't always understand it, but it's quite presumptuous for us to think we could have done better than him. This is precisely how I hope creationist readers react to these questions. Here's the kicker: why not give theistic evolutionists/old earth creationists the same leniency? Maybe God made the universe old for a similar “reason” – it's part of his plan that we can't understand.
Paul's use of Genesis
When talking about the Fall, Paul says that death entered the world through one man's sin. While this isn't clear at all, especially because Adam didn't physically die on the day he ate the fruit, I'll suppose for the sake of argument that we know that Paul is talking about not just spiritual death and not just about human death, but physical death and animal death as well.
But since when have the NT authors been a valid source concerning what the OT actually says? When God makes a promise to Abraham's seed, is seed singular or plural? If singular, I would like to know the verse of Genesis that helped you reach this conclusion. If plural, then Paul was not only wrong about what the OT says, but this faulty understanding was his basis for a theological argument about the promise to the Jews being transferred to Christians.
So maybe Paul was a young-earth creationist, Paul was wrong, and Paul tangentially communicated these false ideas in the process of communicating true theological ideas about Jesus' death. And we're still supposed to believe these theological truths even after learning the debunking of the argument for these theological truths. The ease with which YECists see the weakness in this position is the ease with which I look at Galatians 3 and see that it is false.
Blurring the Line Between Man and Animals
Another problem is that evolution blurs the line between man and animals. And it certainly does. This means “human” is not a yes/no question, but rather a question of degree. There are ways around this like believing that in a certain moment in time, God gave an animal that looked like an ape-man a soul, but this isn't as clean of an answer as the one provided by creationism.
Consider embryonic development. The same problem appears. We have a smooth transition between non-human sperm and egg to a fully human baby. This cannot be evaded by just “believing” God creates a soul at conception. Theistic evolutionists believe that God created the first human soul at some point in the evolution process, and YECists don't let them get away with this equally evidence-free claim. Here, the problem is even worse. At least with evolution, you could go back 40,000 years and look at a child and say it is human while the parents were animals – while the line may be arbitrary, at least the line can't be blurred further by looking at the generation between the child and the parents. But with embryonic development, it's a fully smooth transition. YECists easily see that a mostly smooth transition from animal to human suggests that talk of a soul or being created in the image of God doesn't make sense. With the same ease, I see that embryonic development shows the concept of a soul to be nonsensical.
Randomness
In Wayne Grudem's Systematic Theology, on page 276 he writes “The fundamental difference between a biblical view of creation and theistic evolution lies here: the driving force … is randomness.” This is tangential, but this is a common misconception about evolution. Evolution is like the weather – it's a process involving randomness. Due to the randomness of weather I can only guess within ten or twenty degrees what the temperature will be in a week. But I could guess the average temperature for 2010 within a degree or two (and without knowing about global warming.) Due to random effects averaging out, a process that looks chaotic on a small scale is often one that behaves predictably on a larger scale. Evolution says that changes are the predictable long-term result.
But theologically speaking, the misunderstanding doesn't change the implications. In theistic evolution, God's guidance of evolution looks precisely the way it would look if it looked like he stopped caring billions of years ago.
However, the same issue of randomness appears when thinking through the implications of actuarial science. If you know the rate at which heart attacks occur, and you know the size of the population, you can make a very good guess about how many people in the population will have heart attacks. For a more precise prediction, you don't pray to learn the will of God. You learn more about the population, like their age distribution. Actuarial science requires thinking about death in terms of the naturalistic cause and effect that comes from supposing death is left up to chance. And it works. This means that the way in which God takes away life looks precisely the way it would look if it looked like God doesn't care. There are less fatalist ways of saying this, but it's no different than the spin creationists universally give to evolution. Personally, I find the threat actuarial science and statistics pose to believing God still cares about death to be far more severe than the threat evolution poses to believing God cared while creating.
YECists show the proper approach to theistic evolution – skepticism toward the meaningfulness of talking about a creator who is indistinguishable from no creator at all. With the same ease, I apply this same skepticism to Christianity and see that the reasoning behind actuarial science supports the conclusion that God doesn't exist or doesn't care.
Problems in the Local Flood
Most old earth creationists and theistic evolutionists believe that Noah's flood was a local flood (a myth is the alternative.) The Bible talks about the whole world as a hyperbole in many places, so perhaps here as well. To this position, YECists have an excellent response. Why didn't Noah just migrate several hundred miles? Why not just have the birds fly a few hundred miles away? Noah had a hundred years to kill, so I don't suppose finding the time to pack would have been too burdensome.
I really like this objection. It's an excellent reason to not believe in the local flood. What I like so much about it is the underlying assumption that if a plan is completely illogical, then an omniscient God probably didn't come up with it. This assumption comes as naturally as the basic rules of logic – unless one's own beliefs are under the microscope.
So here's my question: Why didn't God just smite everyone and skip the whole flood thing entirely? This would have saved so much trouble for everyone. Noah could have preached about coming judgment for years and he could have shown he believed his own message by making provisions for surviving on his own. I would be interested in hearing if there are any reasons to send a flood at all that don't also defend the idea of having Noah build an ark for a local flood. Maybe there are reasons, but I could throw in an extra miracle or two if they are needed for the practicality of my smiting proposal.
With the local flood, YECists show the proper way of thinking about dramatic claims about what God did. If the story has God commanding a lot of pointless milling about, this should count strongly against its chance of being true. By applying the same skepticism to the global flood that creationists apply to the local flood, I reject the story of Noah even without the scientific and biblical cases against it.
Reconciling the Bible with evolution is really quite easy compared to reconciling the Bible with the Bible and other realities in the here and now. Creationists' ability to see the problems in my answers to comparably easy questions helped me see how contrived both our answers were to the hard questions.
Failing The Insider Test
Small step at a time, I moved my theology a bit while staying inside what I thought was inside. I would wait a bit, and my idea of “inside” would be stretched with me. After moving a moderate distance, I thought that where I came from was inside while the painful truth is that where I came from thought I was outside. This placed me in a curious position: YEC was still inside to me, YEC viewed me as an outsider, I was seeking to fully understand different positions within my idea of orthodoxy, and therefore the logically inevitable result was viewing my faith as an outsider.
I don't remember if anyone ever told me that I would reject Christianity if I used the same skepticism toward it that I use toward every other religion. If so, I don't remember it because it made no impact on my thinking. But eventually, I found myself looking at creationists and seeing that if they were to apply the same critical thinking to their own beliefs that they apply to mine, they would stop being Christians. Conversely, if I thought about my own faith the way other Christians thought about my faith, I would stop being a Christian.
While I thought my way out of many aspects of faith, here I simply got lucky. The desire and ability to think critically about my own beliefs was a very small part of the final step out. Thinking critically about my own beliefs was forced upon me as an unintended consequence of other decisions that were much easier to make. Perhaps this is the difference between me and Christians smarter than I am.
While many of the arguments against Christianity work just fine as academic arguments, I doubt this can be written so that readers will feel the weight of the argument as I did. It took the grind of over two years of not only trying to fit evolution in with Christianity, but trying to fit evolution in with the Christian community to see the blatant inconsistencies on both sides. It's not a matter of people being dogmatic or whatever negative adjective you want to throw in. It's simply the predictable clash of incompatible beliefs – or rather, different Christianities.
My YEC and inerrantist Christianity failed the insider test because the arguments against it are so solid that any perspective save for closing one's eyes is sufficient to see it. My TE Christianity failed the insider test because even the very idea of an insider test failed the insider test. To define “inside” as bigger than “me” was to include people who don't agree on everything. To be willing to have candid conversations with other Christians who believed a bit differently and to honestly seek to understand where they were coming from was to look at many of my own beliefs and critically think through if I had reasons for believing them or not. Sociological circumstances turned this into looking at all of my beliefs with skepticism.
Few faiths, if any, can survive under the scrutiny that everyone applies to everyone else's faith. Truth has nothing to fear from inspection and Christianity should be terrified. My mortally wounded faith staggered on for a while, but my fate had been sealed. I had escaped.
Sunday, April 12, 2009
The New Testament's Most Dramatic Miracle
According to Matthew 27:52-53, right after Jesus died, “The tombs were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised; and coming out of the tombs after His resurrection they entered the holy city and appeared to many.” I know poking fun at this story is like dissing Paris Hilton. It's just so easy that it's almost dishonorable. Almost.
Besides that fact that people are being raised from the dead, this is a very strange story. Why did they come out of the tombs after Jesus' resurrection? Did they find little scrolls in their coffins with messages like “Hey, I apologize if this sounds a bit contrived, but when Jesus yelled, I just felt like someone needed to rise from the dead. I don't actually want you seen in public until Sunday. I apologize for the inconvenience. Signed, Yahweh.”
While I don't understand the motivation behind the newly raised saints' behavior, I'm sure Jesus appreciated the way they didn't steal his thunder by showing up first. If they had rushed the whole process of, you know, trying out their legs again, exploring the countryside anew, telling people they aren't dead, they could have really screwed things up. Imagine what would have happened had they not hung out in their graves for three (meaning two) days. With so many resurrected people running around appearing to many people, by the time we get to Easter morning Jesus would appear to people and they'd be like “Yeah, you used to be dead and now you're not. We know. You aren't the first and if you ask me, I really don't think you'll be the last.” I can just imagine ten of the disciples insisting that Jesus is dead, while Thomas is like “Until I see his corpse with my own eyes, and smell his rotting flesh with my own nose, I will believe that he has been raised from the dead just like everyone else!”
It could have been especially bothersome if only one of the newly raised saints, call him Brian, didn't quite understand what was going on. Suppose Brian came into the Jerusalem on Good Friday. People would naturally conclude that he was the first. They might even assume that because he's first, he must have been the one responsible for all the other resurrections. In reply, someone might still claim that it was really Jesus who raised Brian. “Jesus? Jesus couldn't have done it. He was dead!” You got to admit, as far as the soundness of air-tight alibis go, this one is pretty near the top. Before you knew it, there would be a whole new sect of Judaism venerating the life of Brian and all because of a hapless resurrectees misunderstanding of what a newly raised corpse is supposed to do with oneself.
In a little closer to all seriousness, I'd bet Matthew wanted to write “and coming out of the tombs they entered the holy city.” But the more he thought about it, the more it took away from Jesus' Resurrection, so he just had to add some sort of qualifier to keep Jesus at the head of the story. These do not look like the words of someone accurately recording what actually happened. It can be astounding just how much easier it is to explain how it is that we have a story about a miraculous event than it is to explain the miraculous event itself.
But true or not, I'm rather disappointed that these two little verses are all we get to hear about this amazing event. As Thomas Paine wrote:
“Had it been true, it would have filled up whole chapters of those books, and been the chosen theme and general chorus of all the writers; but instead of this, little and trivial things, and mere prattling conversations of, he said this, and he said that, are often tediously detailed, while this, most important of all, had it been true, is passed off in a slovenly manner by a single dash of the pen, and that by one writer only, and not so much as hinted at by the rest.
“It is an easy thing to tell a lie, but it is difficult to support the lie after it is told. The writer of the book of Matthew should have told us who the saints were that came to life again, and went into the city, and what became of them afterward, and who it was that saw them – for he is not hardy enough to say he saw them himself; whether they came out naked, and all in natural buff, he-saints and she-saints; or whether they came full dressed, and where they got their dresses; whether they went to their former habitations, and reclaimed their wives, their husbands, and their property, and how they were received; whether they entered ejectments for the recovery of their possessions, or brought actions of crim. con. against the rival interlopers; whether they remained on earth, and followed their former occupation of preaching or working; or whether they died again, or went back to their graves alive, and buried themselves.
“Strange, indeed, that an army of saints should return to life, and nobody know who they were, nor who it was that saw them, and that not a word more should be said upon the subject, nor these saints have anything to tell us! Had it been the prophets who (as we are told) had formerly prophesied of these things, they must have had a great deal to say. They could have told us everything and we should have had posthumous prophecies, with notes and commentaries upon the first, a little better at least than we have now. Had it been Moses and Aaron and Joshua and Samuel and David, not an unconverted Jew had remained in all Jerusalem. Had it been John the Baptist, and the saints of the time then present, everybody would have known them, and they would have out-preached and out-famed all the other apostles. But, instead of this, these saints were made to pop up, like Jonah's gourd in the night, for no purpose at all but to wither in the morning.”
Even if you think that miracles happen all the time, this story still fails to maintain a shred of reasonableness. Left unexplained are why the risen saints waited until Sunday, why Matthew tells us so little about them, why no other Gospel writer mentions it, and why we have no secular record of them. It doesn't explain why Peter didn't point out one of the newly Resurrected saints on Pentecost or use the resurrections many of them had seen as evidence for the resurrection that they didn't see. I would have thought that he would have understood the audience appeal of a dead guy walking around.
But there is an extraordinarily simple theory that explains all of this. It didn't happen. Things like this should be taken into consideration when deciding if Matthew's more famous tale of a resurrection deserves to be taken seriously.
Besides that fact that people are being raised from the dead, this is a very strange story. Why did they come out of the tombs after Jesus' resurrection? Did they find little scrolls in their coffins with messages like “Hey, I apologize if this sounds a bit contrived, but when Jesus yelled, I just felt like someone needed to rise from the dead. I don't actually want you seen in public until Sunday. I apologize for the inconvenience. Signed, Yahweh.”
While I don't understand the motivation behind the newly raised saints' behavior, I'm sure Jesus appreciated the way they didn't steal his thunder by showing up first. If they had rushed the whole process of, you know, trying out their legs again, exploring the countryside anew, telling people they aren't dead, they could have really screwed things up. Imagine what would have happened had they not hung out in their graves for three (meaning two) days. With so many resurrected people running around appearing to many people, by the time we get to Easter morning Jesus would appear to people and they'd be like “Yeah, you used to be dead and now you're not. We know. You aren't the first and if you ask me, I really don't think you'll be the last.” I can just imagine ten of the disciples insisting that Jesus is dead, while Thomas is like “Until I see his corpse with my own eyes, and smell his rotting flesh with my own nose, I will believe that he has been raised from the dead just like everyone else!”
It could have been especially bothersome if only one of the newly raised saints, call him Brian, didn't quite understand what was going on. Suppose Brian came into the Jerusalem on Good Friday. People would naturally conclude that he was the first. They might even assume that because he's first, he must have been the one responsible for all the other resurrections. In reply, someone might still claim that it was really Jesus who raised Brian. “Jesus? Jesus couldn't have done it. He was dead!” You got to admit, as far as the soundness of air-tight alibis go, this one is pretty near the top. Before you knew it, there would be a whole new sect of Judaism venerating the life of Brian and all because of a hapless resurrectees misunderstanding of what a newly raised corpse is supposed to do with oneself.
In a little closer to all seriousness, I'd bet Matthew wanted to write “and coming out of the tombs they entered the holy city.” But the more he thought about it, the more it took away from Jesus' Resurrection, so he just had to add some sort of qualifier to keep Jesus at the head of the story. These do not look like the words of someone accurately recording what actually happened. It can be astounding just how much easier it is to explain how it is that we have a story about a miraculous event than it is to explain the miraculous event itself.
But true or not, I'm rather disappointed that these two little verses are all we get to hear about this amazing event. As Thomas Paine wrote:
“Had it been true, it would have filled up whole chapters of those books, and been the chosen theme and general chorus of all the writers; but instead of this, little and trivial things, and mere prattling conversations of, he said this, and he said that, are often tediously detailed, while this, most important of all, had it been true, is passed off in a slovenly manner by a single dash of the pen, and that by one writer only, and not so much as hinted at by the rest.
“It is an easy thing to tell a lie, but it is difficult to support the lie after it is told. The writer of the book of Matthew should have told us who the saints were that came to life again, and went into the city, and what became of them afterward, and who it was that saw them – for he is not hardy enough to say he saw them himself; whether they came out naked, and all in natural buff, he-saints and she-saints; or whether they came full dressed, and where they got their dresses; whether they went to their former habitations, and reclaimed their wives, their husbands, and their property, and how they were received; whether they entered ejectments for the recovery of their possessions, or brought actions of crim. con. against the rival interlopers; whether they remained on earth, and followed their former occupation of preaching or working; or whether they died again, or went back to their graves alive, and buried themselves.
“Strange, indeed, that an army of saints should return to life, and nobody know who they were, nor who it was that saw them, and that not a word more should be said upon the subject, nor these saints have anything to tell us! Had it been the prophets who (as we are told) had formerly prophesied of these things, they must have had a great deal to say. They could have told us everything and we should have had posthumous prophecies, with notes and commentaries upon the first, a little better at least than we have now. Had it been Moses and Aaron and Joshua and Samuel and David, not an unconverted Jew had remained in all Jerusalem. Had it been John the Baptist, and the saints of the time then present, everybody would have known them, and they would have out-preached and out-famed all the other apostles. But, instead of this, these saints were made to pop up, like Jonah's gourd in the night, for no purpose at all but to wither in the morning.”
Even if you think that miracles happen all the time, this story still fails to maintain a shred of reasonableness. Left unexplained are why the risen saints waited until Sunday, why Matthew tells us so little about them, why no other Gospel writer mentions it, and why we have no secular record of them. It doesn't explain why Peter didn't point out one of the newly Resurrected saints on Pentecost or use the resurrections many of them had seen as evidence for the resurrection that they didn't see. I would have thought that he would have understood the audience appeal of a dead guy walking around.
But there is an extraordinarily simple theory that explains all of this. It didn't happen. Things like this should be taken into consideration when deciding if Matthew's more famous tale of a resurrection deserves to be taken seriously.
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Human Irrationality
The theology blog Parchment and Pen had a recent post about human irrationality. It begins with one of Paul's most quoted lines: "For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of people who suppress the truth by their unrighteousness, because what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them."
My slightly edited reply follows:
Here's what you are saying about nontheists: you know you will suffer for eternity for choosing wrong, and yet you do so anyway, because you are just that retarded. While truth and offensiveness can coincide, it shuts off chances for dialogue.
This is vastly more extreme than an atheist who responds to any anecdotal evidence with "you are superstitious and deluded" and to any rational argument with "you are simply justifying your delusions." While I think there is some merit to the truth value of these claims, it's completely patronizing and the extent to which I'm forced to fall back on argumentative tactics like these is the extent to which I don't have anything worth saying. And which is more insulting: you're so dumb that you think your imaginary friend is real, or you're so wicked that you deserve eternal torment and so dumb that you know it's coming and yet do nothing to try to stop it?
Two Hitchens don't make a right, but this perspective is needed when deciding just how fiercely the new atheists' tone should be denounced, and if at all. And this isn't even an objection to the people in the church, but only to the words in the Bible itself.
---
I find it to be strange just how often Christians make arguments that either our reason cannot be trusted, or that people aren't nearly as reasonable as we think. It's not that these claims are false. The problem is that even if true, I don't see how it helps the case for Christianity at all. This is an argument that belongs on the agnostic side of either an agnostic v. atheist or an agnostic v. theist debate. If agnostics are "right", then either God exists and has not revealed himself, or atheists hold the right position for bad reasons.
Just as it debunks the foundation under any argument against Christianity, it debunks the foundation under any reason to believe. If people are a lot dumber than we think, that makes it easier for a relationship with God to be something that's just in your head. It makes it easier for answers to prayer to simply be bad estimations of probability and selective memory of the "hits." It becomes even easier to understand the birth and growth of Christianity - if people are just that irrational, skeptics don't even need a theory to explain the sincere belief of the Gospel writers and Paul.
My slightly edited reply follows:
Here's what you are saying about nontheists: you know you will suffer for eternity for choosing wrong, and yet you do so anyway, because you are just that retarded. While truth and offensiveness can coincide, it shuts off chances for dialogue.
This is vastly more extreme than an atheist who responds to any anecdotal evidence with "you are superstitious and deluded" and to any rational argument with "you are simply justifying your delusions." While I think there is some merit to the truth value of these claims, it's completely patronizing and the extent to which I'm forced to fall back on argumentative tactics like these is the extent to which I don't have anything worth saying. And which is more insulting: you're so dumb that you think your imaginary friend is real, or you're so wicked that you deserve eternal torment and so dumb that you know it's coming and yet do nothing to try to stop it?
Two Hitchens don't make a right, but this perspective is needed when deciding just how fiercely the new atheists' tone should be denounced, and if at all. And this isn't even an objection to the people in the church, but only to the words in the Bible itself.
---
I find it to be strange just how often Christians make arguments that either our reason cannot be trusted, or that people aren't nearly as reasonable as we think. It's not that these claims are false. The problem is that even if true, I don't see how it helps the case for Christianity at all. This is an argument that belongs on the agnostic side of either an agnostic v. atheist or an agnostic v. theist debate. If agnostics are "right", then either God exists and has not revealed himself, or atheists hold the right position for bad reasons.
Just as it debunks the foundation under any argument against Christianity, it debunks the foundation under any reason to believe. If people are a lot dumber than we think, that makes it easier for a relationship with God to be something that's just in your head. It makes it easier for answers to prayer to simply be bad estimations of probability and selective memory of the "hits." It becomes even easier to understand the birth and growth of Christianity - if people are just that irrational, skeptics don't even need a theory to explain the sincere belief of the Gospel writers and Paul.
Monday, March 2, 2009
The Two Flood Stories
Sometimes surprises are hiding in plain sight. One of my biggest biblical shocks was when I first heard someone make a passing reference to the two flood stories. What? How could I not know about the second story if this is one of the many repeated stories in the Bible? How could someone mistakenly think there are two stories? This would lead to an enormous shift in the way I viewed the history of the writing of the Bible.
The Contradiction
I couldn't count how the dozens of times I've read the flood story straight out of the Bible. I was even told several times that Genesis contradicts itself by saying says seven of each kind in one place and two of each kind in another. But the reconciliation is easy: it was two of every unclean kind and seven pairs of every clean kind – right? No. In one place, it's two of every kind, and in the other, it's two of every unclean kind and seven pairs of every clean kind and bird.
Genesis 6:19-20 “And of every living thing of all flesh, you shall bring two of every kind into the ark, to keep them alive with you; they shall be male and female. Of the birds after their kind, and of the animals after their kind, of every creeping thing of the ground after its kind, two of every kind will come to you to keep them alive.”
Genesis 7:2-3 “You shall take with you of every clean animal by sevens, a male and his female; and of the animals that are not clean two, a male and his female; also of the birds of the sky, by sevens, male and female, to keep offspring alive on the face of all the earth.”
It's not a matter of the “two of every kind” instruction being less detailed. Two of every bird is explicit in the first instruction, and seven pairs of every bird is explicit in the second version, just as it is with the clean animals. I find it to be incredible just how long it took me to notice this after having been trained by creation scientists to not see it.
(Fellow skeptics and liberal Christians, take note: I would have noticed this one a lot sooner if I had been told that the Bible says two of each kind in one place, and two of unclean animals and seven pairs of clean animals and birds in another. If you screw this one up by saying two in one place and seven in another, Christians will remember 7:2-3 and know you are wrong.)
But there is an odd objection to this contradiction. What sense does it make to for this mistake to have been made? Jacob's mistaken view of genetics makes sense – the author didn't know about modern science and hence contradicted a truth that he had no way of knowing. But how could an author get this wrong? With something so blatant, is not the explanation that we misunderstanding the author more plausible than to call this a mistake? This discrepancy is not alone enough to support the conclusion I'm moving toward, so before stating it, I wish to first point out several other weirdnesses in the story.
Premeditated Lambslaughter
Bible contradictions are often dismissed by non-inerrantists is as trivial details that do not matter to the story. I wouldn't hold a newspaper up to a standard of perfection. Surely a report getting the number of sheep in a zoo wrong doesn't compromise the truth of a story about a zoo's existence. But once we get to the ending of the story in 8:20-22, the apparently trivial detail of the number of animals on the ark shows itself to be critically important.
If you plan on making sacrifices of the clean animals at the end, having extras of specifically the clean animals is a very good idea. If you only bring two of every kind like Genesis 6:19-20 says, and then sacrifice one of them when you get off the ark ... um ... that's quite the sacrifice. The pair could have had a baby in the year on the ark, but I wouldn't stretch my luck. (Also, mating in the ark lines up poorly with creationists' speculation that the animals on the ark hibernated.) So back at the beginning of the story, one of the sets of instructions quite specifically prepares for the sacrifices, while for the other set, a sacrifice would make for a comical blunder. Interestingly enough, the bit about the sacrifices isn't repeated like nearly everything else.
(And why is Noah sacrificing only clean animals centuries before The Law? This is like Marco Polo stopping to celebrate Thanksgiving. Now, I know that the laws of God are written on mens' hearts, but an example of a particular law that I have not found written upon my heart is: “You may eat any animal that has a split hoof completely divided and that chews the cud. There are some that only chew the cud or only have a split hoof, but you must not eat them.” Maybe Noah was wired differently than I am, but without the Bible, I certainly wouldn't have figured this one out.)
Choppy Narration
Genesis 6:5-8 starts out with a coherent narrative. The earth is wicked and God decides to destroy mankind, except for Noah because he is righteous. But then all of a sudden, Genesis 6:9 begins the story all over again. Starting at verse 9 makes a great opener – Noah is righteous, the rest of the earth is corrupt, so God decides to destroy all mankind except for Noah and his family. In the 6:9-22 segment, God gives Noah detailed instruction about what to build, how many animals to bring on the ark, and Noah does everything he has been commanded to do.
So now we should be ready to get on with the story. Next up should be actually entering the ark and the rain starting. But no, Genesis 7:1-4 takes us back a step and repeats some earlier information. Just like in 6:19-20 (well, not just like), Noah is told how many animals to bring in 7:2-3. It is important to notice that I'm not just pointing out the mere fact of repetition, but the fact that this part of the story is different under a retelling.
7:13 starts out with “On the very same day.” One would expect this to mean that the previous verse was something that happened on a particular day. “The final version of the Declaration of Independence was completed on July 4. On the very same day it was announced” makes sense. “The Declaration of Independence was written in June and July. On the very same day it was announced” does not make sense. 7:12's “The rain fell upon the earth for forty days and forty nights” leads into the grammar of 7:13 very poorly.
Two Calendars
In 8:3-4, the days line up differently than might be expected. In 7:11, the flood starts on month 2, day 17. In 7:24, the water floods the earth for 150 days until 8:3's month 7, day 17. What's worth noting is that the forty days of rain are not in there. I'm not suggesting that the idea that the forty days of rain are the first forty of the 150 days is impossible – what I am saying is that the chronology in the form of months lines up seamlessly if you just ignore the forty days.
8:6 tells us that “it came about at the end of forty days, that Noah opened the window.” From a purely literal perspective, there is nothing wrong with this. But from a literary perspective, it's out of place. In 8:4 and 8:5, time is marked in absolute terms – the month and day. Now it switches back to talking in time intervals. But this alone would not be that significant of an observation. In 8:3, “at the end of one hundred and fifty days” isn't a new number – it refers back the 150 days the waters prevailed in 7:24. Similarly, 8:6 seems to be referring back to some previously mentioned forty days that are now over. Flood story. Forty days. What could this possibly be referring to? Why the forty days of rain in 7:4, 7:12, and 7:17. I don't mean to oversell the significance of these new forty days. Noah waits seven days before sending out the dove again, and no one suggests it is the same seven days from 7:4. However, it is worth noting that if you ignore the chronology in the form of months, 7:4, 7:12, 7:17, and 8:6 all fit together very nicely: “I will send rain on the earth forty days and forty nights … The rain fell upon the earth for forty days and forty nights … the flood came upon the earth for forty days … it came about at the end of forty days that Noah opened the window.” But if you insert 150 days between the third and fourth mention of forty days, the continuity is disrupted.
Two Birds
In 8:7, a raven is sent out and flies around until “the water had dried up from the earth.” One bird later in 8:9, “there was water all over the surface of the earth.” I understand that “dry” and “water all over” are very relative terms, and in this story, the ground goes from being under miles of water, to under several feet of water, to being covered in pools of water, to horribly muddy, to “dry ground” in the sense of drier than a marsh, and finally to truly dry ground. But surely, the shades of meaning behind “there was water all over the surface of the earth” imply vastly more moisture than “the water had dried up from the earth.” It sounds like the raven wasn't sent out first, assuming these stories go together at all.
What was the point of the second bird? If you have a raven that flies around until the earth dries up, why send a dove? If you have a dove that you can send out until it doesn't return, why send a raven? It's not that I think these problems are completely irreconcilable. What I'm saying is that sending either the raven or the dove is a much more natural story than sending both.
The Two Flood Stories
So here's a recap: Noah is introduced twice. There are two conflicting versions of the instructions about the animals. Verse 7:13 looks like it was written to come after something other than 7:12. The time is marked while switching between seven and forty day intervals and month-based time. Viewed together, the two systems are in tension. Viewed individually, the two systems make as much sense as should be expected from a narrative that coherently keeps track of time. After the ground dries up, water is all over the earth again. Noah redundantly sends out two birds. And after only one of the two sets of instructions prepared for a sacrifice, and the repetition of nearly every detail, we have but one account of a sacrifice.
Suppose someone tried to harmonize Luke and John by cutting up each Gospel and putting them together in what they thought was the best order, added little or no extra-biblical text to smooth over the transitions, and just left the surface contradictions in place. If you only read the final product, you may or may not be able figure out which story went with which author – but you certainly would notice things like Jesus saying “it is finished” and dying followed by saying “into your hands I commit my spirit” and then dying a second time. You also might notice switches between two different writing styles. If you could fully split it up into the two sources this would greatly add to the case for two authors, but it wouldn't be essential to an argument that there are two authors. That's what the Documentary Hypothesis says the Torah is – the splicing together of primarily four sources. In the case of the flood story, there are two different authors.
Start with 6:5-8 and call this story A. 6:9-22 is a continuous piece and it's not A, so call it story B. 7:1-5 is a continuous piece and it isn't B, so it's part of A. (My A and B are usually called J and P, but I'm setting up my argument as step one in making the case for a JEPD source theory, not an argument in support of an existing theory. I'm using my own letters so I can't subliminally cheat and take advantage of what people know about J and P through other means.)
In what we have so far of A, the deity is called the LORD (Yahweh) all six times. In B, the deity is called God (Elohim) all five times. In A, there are sevens of some kinds and pairs of others, while in B there is a single pair of each kind. These differences are even more striking because they show up together in the rest of the flood story. In 7:8-9 and 7:14-16a, there are two of each kind and they come as Elohim commanded (both B.) In 8:20-22, Noah utilizes the extra clean animals and sacrifices to Yahweh (both A.)
From this point on, most my arguments are that this particular way of splitting the text in two is the correct split. They are not meant to be arguments that a split is correct, only that if a split is correct, this is the correct one.
Based on the names of God used, to A we can add 7:16b, and to B we can add 8:1 and 8:15-19.
Because the first mention of the seven days until forty days of rain is in 7:4 which is A, we can place the month-based verses in B and the other time interval verses in A. To A we can add 7:10, 7:12, 7:17, and 8:6. To B we can add 7:11, 7:24, 8:3-5, 8:13a, and 8:14.
One of the most obvious seams in the story is between 7:12 and 7:13. 7:12 is A already and so 7:13 is B. This fits nicely with 7:14-16a already being labeled B. 7:13's “On the very same day” now makes sense because it directly follows 7:11's “on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth.”
In A, the floods come because it starts raining in 7:4 and 7:12. But in B, the floods come because the windows of heaven and fountains of the deep are opened in 7:11. And hence 8:2a is B, while 8:2b is A.
The dove account marks time not only in time intervals but also in seven days like A, rather than speaking in months like B. So 8:8-12 is A and the raven in 8:7 is B.
This leaves 7:6-7, 7:18-23, 8:13b without a clear story. I didn't leave them out because they don't fit, but because at my low level of OT scholarship, it works either way. There is no reason to open myself to criticism by guessing poorly, or doing “too well” and cleverly splitting them so as to create coherence in two accounts of my construction rather than discovering coherence in two accounts as they actually exist.
If you look at the accounts side-by-side, you can see two complete stories. Of course, I haven't completely argued for this splitting, but I have no disagreements with it, and it's certainly easier to see than pulling out a Bible and trying to read 7:1-5, 7, 9-10, 12, etc.
Dissenting Opinions
One criticism is especially important for me to point out because I held Josh McDowell's feet to the fire for a very similar problem. Of course, if I thought my case was even close to equally open to criticism, I wouldn't have written this post at all – but it's open enough that I feel the need to point it out.
The problem is that googling “two flood stories” brings up pages with slightly to significantly different ideas about what verses go in which story. The top 3 agree on how to split 6:1-7:5 and 8:8-22, but for the middle third of the story, two are similar while the third is in a world by itself. The cheap defense is that I'm right and he's wrong – while this is not necessarily false, I didn't throw McDowell this line, so I won't depend on it myself. The key difference between the two situations is that McDowell needs every single detail in his argument for it to work at all. If someone disagrees with his starting event, his ending event, or the time between them by a single day, then their entire arguments are contradictory.
If two people disagree on the authors of only a few verses, then the remaining points of agreement do support each other. Furthermore, details of the unweaving are not even required to argue for two authors. My arguments about the conflicting concepts like one pair/seven pairs, raven/dove, forty days/months, Yahweh/Elohim all stand without figuring out what goes together. People getting different answers is evidence that the stories cannot be fully and definitively separated (or at least not easily.) Contradictory opinions on even significant details is not a rebuttal to the evidence that there are two authors in the first place.
To present a broad theory and only then look back and see if the evidence supports it is a form of reasoning that easily admits poor arguments. He writes “But, what really proves beyond any doubt that there were two authors—not one--is the wealth of unique correspondences found in disconnected passages.” This is quite inconvenient for me because with several of the correspondences (seven/seventh/seventeen, six hundred years, and probably sons), I think the correspondences don't really exist in the correct splitting.
The way scholarship is supposed to work is to begin with evidence and show how the evidence itself points toward the theory. Every single piece of the theory must be individually supported. One cannot bind up related claims into one package and use truth by association. When this is done, five good ideas get mixed with five bad ideas and yet the overall theory has real evidence in support of it due to the parts of it that are true. For instance, he's not completely wrong about one author caring about the number seven, so some of the correlation he's finding isn't just a coincidence. The problem is that lots of authors of the Bible liked the number seven, so you can't just go by that. He writes “Not once does the [Elohim] author use the numbers seven, seventh, seventeen.” Yes, but only in 7:1-5 is seven associated with Yahweh, so that's not saying very much. This is the problem with just presenting a split – it's not clear when you have found a characteristic of one author and when you have simply moved similar verses to one side.
But still, the only reason he can find two stories at all is because there really are two stories which provide an abundance of repetition that makes it very easy to divide Genesis 6-8 into two complete stories. But that is not to say it is easy to correctly divide Genesis 6-8 into the real two stories from which it came.
There are drawbacks to arguing from the evidence instead of starting with the theory and showing it has evidence in support of it. It's much, much more work and when you get done, it might not be the answer you wanted. But that is the price of knowledge.
What it Means for Christianity
While this alone need not undermine Christianity, it can and should very greatly change how the Bible is viewed. It seriously undermines inerrancy by the mere idea that the “surface” discrepancies are actual discrepancies that come from different authors. But it also makes perfect sense for more liberal Christians to use this to make the case that the problems conservatives have come not from the Bible itself, but from misunderstanding what sort of a book it is. Historically speaking, these arguments did originate from within Christianity. (And this is not just because they were “liberal Christians.” These are the reasons many are liberal in the first place.)
But there are two features in particular that are especially difficult to reconcile with Christianity. The first is that this means Moses didn't write Genesis 6-8, or at least not in the way conservatives think he did. Even if Moses wrote the original flood story, which split into two different traditions and were later merged, the Genesis version isn't Moses' version. Or maybe Moses was the compiler of earlier and contradictory sources, but this is vastly different from the idea that God quite nearly dictated the Law to Moses on Mount Sinai. And yet Jesus talks about the Law as if Moses wrote it. Of course, we could be misunderstanding Jesus and he might have meant the Law as the legal code rather than the Torah, but the hope that Moses at least wrote the legal code does not survive the remainder of the Documentary Hypothesis. The possibility that Jesus as a man was ignorant of the real authors is possible, but saying that something Jesus said that is directly relevant to core doctrine was wrong is a very dangerous direction to move in for conservative Christianity.
The second problem is that it makes belief in the inspiration of the autograph of the Bible look completely arbitrary. Why not look to the two flood stories pre-combination for the inspired version? If the two stories have a common literary source, why not look to that as the inspired version? Why look to the combination in Genesis? Why not go a step further and say that the Septuagint or the King James Version is inspired? Even under the assumption that something Bible-related is inspired by God, to say it is the original Hebrew of Genesis and not the true original seems just as arbitrary as randomly pointing to an English translation and assuming it to be inspired.
When you come to Genesis 6-8 with the Documentary Hypothesis in mind, the text makes sense. But that's not point. You don't have to come to Genesis 6-8 with the Documentary Hypothesis to come away with it. This is what it means for evidence to support a position. Countering with how it might be a single story isn't an argument. The consistency of evidence with a position is not enough – real evidence for a position is evidence that has the ability to point someone to a conclusion they don't already accept or even know about.
Of course, I have only provided evidence to get as far as two authors of Genesis 6-8 – that isn't the Documentary Hypothesis yet, but it's a start.
(Kudos to Richard Elliott Friedman's Who Wrote the Bible. My argument is set up very differently than his and hence any errors are mine, but his book and a private email greatly enhanced my partial understanding of this topic.)
The Contradiction
I couldn't count how the dozens of times I've read the flood story straight out of the Bible. I was even told several times that Genesis contradicts itself by saying says seven of each kind in one place and two of each kind in another. But the reconciliation is easy: it was two of every unclean kind and seven pairs of every clean kind – right? No. In one place, it's two of every kind, and in the other, it's two of every unclean kind and seven pairs of every clean kind and bird.
Genesis 6:19-20 “And of every living thing of all flesh, you shall bring two of every kind into the ark, to keep them alive with you; they shall be male and female. Of the birds after their kind, and of the animals after their kind, of every creeping thing of the ground after its kind, two of every kind will come to you to keep them alive.”
Genesis 7:2-3 “You shall take with you of every clean animal by sevens, a male and his female; and of the animals that are not clean two, a male and his female; also of the birds of the sky, by sevens, male and female, to keep offspring alive on the face of all the earth.”
It's not a matter of the “two of every kind” instruction being less detailed. Two of every bird is explicit in the first instruction, and seven pairs of every bird is explicit in the second version, just as it is with the clean animals. I find it to be incredible just how long it took me to notice this after having been trained by creation scientists to not see it.
(Fellow skeptics and liberal Christians, take note: I would have noticed this one a lot sooner if I had been told that the Bible says two of each kind in one place, and two of unclean animals and seven pairs of clean animals and birds in another. If you screw this one up by saying two in one place and seven in another, Christians will remember 7:2-3 and know you are wrong.)
But there is an odd objection to this contradiction. What sense does it make to for this mistake to have been made? Jacob's mistaken view of genetics makes sense – the author didn't know about modern science and hence contradicted a truth that he had no way of knowing. But how could an author get this wrong? With something so blatant, is not the explanation that we misunderstanding the author more plausible than to call this a mistake? This discrepancy is not alone enough to support the conclusion I'm moving toward, so before stating it, I wish to first point out several other weirdnesses in the story.
Premeditated Lambslaughter
Bible contradictions are often dismissed by non-inerrantists is as trivial details that do not matter to the story. I wouldn't hold a newspaper up to a standard of perfection. Surely a report getting the number of sheep in a zoo wrong doesn't compromise the truth of a story about a zoo's existence. But once we get to the ending of the story in 8:20-22, the apparently trivial detail of the number of animals on the ark shows itself to be critically important.
If you plan on making sacrifices of the clean animals at the end, having extras of specifically the clean animals is a very good idea. If you only bring two of every kind like Genesis 6:19-20 says, and then sacrifice one of them when you get off the ark ... um ... that's quite the sacrifice. The pair could have had a baby in the year on the ark, but I wouldn't stretch my luck. (Also, mating in the ark lines up poorly with creationists' speculation that the animals on the ark hibernated.) So back at the beginning of the story, one of the sets of instructions quite specifically prepares for the sacrifices, while for the other set, a sacrifice would make for a comical blunder. Interestingly enough, the bit about the sacrifices isn't repeated like nearly everything else.
(And why is Noah sacrificing only clean animals centuries before The Law? This is like Marco Polo stopping to celebrate Thanksgiving. Now, I know that the laws of God are written on mens' hearts, but an example of a particular law that I have not found written upon my heart is: “You may eat any animal that has a split hoof completely divided and that chews the cud. There are some that only chew the cud or only have a split hoof, but you must not eat them.” Maybe Noah was wired differently than I am, but without the Bible, I certainly wouldn't have figured this one out.)
Choppy Narration
Genesis 6:5-8 starts out with a coherent narrative. The earth is wicked and God decides to destroy mankind, except for Noah because he is righteous. But then all of a sudden, Genesis 6:9 begins the story all over again. Starting at verse 9 makes a great opener – Noah is righteous, the rest of the earth is corrupt, so God decides to destroy all mankind except for Noah and his family. In the 6:9-22 segment, God gives Noah detailed instruction about what to build, how many animals to bring on the ark, and Noah does everything he has been commanded to do.
So now we should be ready to get on with the story. Next up should be actually entering the ark and the rain starting. But no, Genesis 7:1-4 takes us back a step and repeats some earlier information. Just like in 6:19-20 (well, not just like), Noah is told how many animals to bring in 7:2-3. It is important to notice that I'm not just pointing out the mere fact of repetition, but the fact that this part of the story is different under a retelling.
7:13 starts out with “On the very same day.” One would expect this to mean that the previous verse was something that happened on a particular day. “The final version of the Declaration of Independence was completed on July 4. On the very same day it was announced” makes sense. “The Declaration of Independence was written in June and July. On the very same day it was announced” does not make sense. 7:12's “The rain fell upon the earth for forty days and forty nights” leads into the grammar of 7:13 very poorly.
Two Calendars
In 8:3-4, the days line up differently than might be expected. In 7:11, the flood starts on month 2, day 17. In 7:24, the water floods the earth for 150 days until 8:3's month 7, day 17. What's worth noting is that the forty days of rain are not in there. I'm not suggesting that the idea that the forty days of rain are the first forty of the 150 days is impossible – what I am saying is that the chronology in the form of months lines up seamlessly if you just ignore the forty days.
8:6 tells us that “it came about at the end of forty days, that Noah opened the window.” From a purely literal perspective, there is nothing wrong with this. But from a literary perspective, it's out of place. In 8:4 and 8:5, time is marked in absolute terms – the month and day. Now it switches back to talking in time intervals. But this alone would not be that significant of an observation. In 8:3, “at the end of one hundred and fifty days” isn't a new number – it refers back the 150 days the waters prevailed in 7:24. Similarly, 8:6 seems to be referring back to some previously mentioned forty days that are now over. Flood story. Forty days. What could this possibly be referring to? Why the forty days of rain in 7:4, 7:12, and 7:17. I don't mean to oversell the significance of these new forty days. Noah waits seven days before sending out the dove again, and no one suggests it is the same seven days from 7:4. However, it is worth noting that if you ignore the chronology in the form of months, 7:4, 7:12, 7:17, and 8:6 all fit together very nicely: “I will send rain on the earth forty days and forty nights … The rain fell upon the earth for forty days and forty nights … the flood came upon the earth for forty days … it came about at the end of forty days that Noah opened the window.” But if you insert 150 days between the third and fourth mention of forty days, the continuity is disrupted.
Two Birds
In 8:7, a raven is sent out and flies around until “the water had dried up from the earth.” One bird later in 8:9, “there was water all over the surface of the earth.” I understand that “dry” and “water all over” are very relative terms, and in this story, the ground goes from being under miles of water, to under several feet of water, to being covered in pools of water, to horribly muddy, to “dry ground” in the sense of drier than a marsh, and finally to truly dry ground. But surely, the shades of meaning behind “there was water all over the surface of the earth” imply vastly more moisture than “the water had dried up from the earth.” It sounds like the raven wasn't sent out first, assuming these stories go together at all.
What was the point of the second bird? If you have a raven that flies around until the earth dries up, why send a dove? If you have a dove that you can send out until it doesn't return, why send a raven? It's not that I think these problems are completely irreconcilable. What I'm saying is that sending either the raven or the dove is a much more natural story than sending both.
The Two Flood Stories
So here's a recap: Noah is introduced twice. There are two conflicting versions of the instructions about the animals. Verse 7:13 looks like it was written to come after something other than 7:12. The time is marked while switching between seven and forty day intervals and month-based time. Viewed together, the two systems are in tension. Viewed individually, the two systems make as much sense as should be expected from a narrative that coherently keeps track of time. After the ground dries up, water is all over the earth again. Noah redundantly sends out two birds. And after only one of the two sets of instructions prepared for a sacrifice, and the repetition of nearly every detail, we have but one account of a sacrifice.
Suppose someone tried to harmonize Luke and John by cutting up each Gospel and putting them together in what they thought was the best order, added little or no extra-biblical text to smooth over the transitions, and just left the surface contradictions in place. If you only read the final product, you may or may not be able figure out which story went with which author – but you certainly would notice things like Jesus saying “it is finished” and dying followed by saying “into your hands I commit my spirit” and then dying a second time. You also might notice switches between two different writing styles. If you could fully split it up into the two sources this would greatly add to the case for two authors, but it wouldn't be essential to an argument that there are two authors. That's what the Documentary Hypothesis says the Torah is – the splicing together of primarily four sources. In the case of the flood story, there are two different authors.
Start with 6:5-8 and call this story A. 6:9-22 is a continuous piece and it's not A, so call it story B. 7:1-5 is a continuous piece and it isn't B, so it's part of A. (My A and B are usually called J and P, but I'm setting up my argument as step one in making the case for a JEPD source theory, not an argument in support of an existing theory. I'm using my own letters so I can't subliminally cheat and take advantage of what people know about J and P through other means.)
In what we have so far of A, the deity is called the LORD (Yahweh) all six times. In B, the deity is called God (Elohim) all five times. In A, there are sevens of some kinds and pairs of others, while in B there is a single pair of each kind. These differences are even more striking because they show up together in the rest of the flood story. In 7:8-9 and 7:14-16a, there are two of each kind and they come as Elohim commanded (both B.) In 8:20-22, Noah utilizes the extra clean animals and sacrifices to Yahweh (both A.)
From this point on, most my arguments are that this particular way of splitting the text in two is the correct split. They are not meant to be arguments that a split is correct, only that if a split is correct, this is the correct one.
Based on the names of God used, to A we can add 7:16b, and to B we can add 8:1 and 8:15-19.
Because the first mention of the seven days until forty days of rain is in 7:4 which is A, we can place the month-based verses in B and the other time interval verses in A. To A we can add 7:10, 7:12, 7:17, and 8:6. To B we can add 7:11, 7:24, 8:3-5, 8:13a, and 8:14.
One of the most obvious seams in the story is between 7:12 and 7:13. 7:12 is A already and so 7:13 is B. This fits nicely with 7:14-16a already being labeled B. 7:13's “On the very same day” now makes sense because it directly follows 7:11's “on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth.”
In A, the floods come because it starts raining in 7:4 and 7:12. But in B, the floods come because the windows of heaven and fountains of the deep are opened in 7:11. And hence 8:2a is B, while 8:2b is A.
The dove account marks time not only in time intervals but also in seven days like A, rather than speaking in months like B. So 8:8-12 is A and the raven in 8:7 is B.
This leaves 7:6-7, 7:18-23, 8:13b without a clear story. I didn't leave them out because they don't fit, but because at my low level of OT scholarship, it works either way. There is no reason to open myself to criticism by guessing poorly, or doing “too well” and cleverly splitting them so as to create coherence in two accounts of my construction rather than discovering coherence in two accounts as they actually exist.
If you look at the accounts side-by-side, you can see two complete stories. Of course, I haven't completely argued for this splitting, but I have no disagreements with it, and it's certainly easier to see than pulling out a Bible and trying to read 7:1-5, 7, 9-10, 12, etc.
Dissenting Opinions
One criticism is especially important for me to point out because I held Josh McDowell's feet to the fire for a very similar problem. Of course, if I thought my case was even close to equally open to criticism, I wouldn't have written this post at all – but it's open enough that I feel the need to point it out.
The problem is that googling “two flood stories” brings up pages with slightly to significantly different ideas about what verses go in which story. The top 3 agree on how to split 6:1-7:5 and 8:8-22, but for the middle third of the story, two are similar while the third is in a world by itself. The cheap defense is that I'm right and he's wrong – while this is not necessarily false, I didn't throw McDowell this line, so I won't depend on it myself. The key difference between the two situations is that McDowell needs every single detail in his argument for it to work at all. If someone disagrees with his starting event, his ending event, or the time between them by a single day, then their entire arguments are contradictory.
If two people disagree on the authors of only a few verses, then the remaining points of agreement do support each other. Furthermore, details of the unweaving are not even required to argue for two authors. My arguments about the conflicting concepts like one pair/seven pairs, raven/dove, forty days/months, Yahweh/Elohim all stand without figuring out what goes together. People getting different answers is evidence that the stories cannot be fully and definitively separated (or at least not easily.) Contradictory opinions on even significant details is not a rebuttal to the evidence that there are two authors in the first place.
To present a broad theory and only then look back and see if the evidence supports it is a form of reasoning that easily admits poor arguments. He writes “But, what really proves beyond any doubt that there were two authors—not one--is the wealth of unique correspondences found in disconnected passages.” This is quite inconvenient for me because with several of the correspondences (seven/seventh/seventeen, six hundred years, and probably sons), I think the correspondences don't really exist in the correct splitting.
The way scholarship is supposed to work is to begin with evidence and show how the evidence itself points toward the theory. Every single piece of the theory must be individually supported. One cannot bind up related claims into one package and use truth by association. When this is done, five good ideas get mixed with five bad ideas and yet the overall theory has real evidence in support of it due to the parts of it that are true. For instance, he's not completely wrong about one author caring about the number seven, so some of the correlation he's finding isn't just a coincidence. The problem is that lots of authors of the Bible liked the number seven, so you can't just go by that. He writes “Not once does the [Elohim] author use the numbers seven, seventh, seventeen.” Yes, but only in 7:1-5 is seven associated with Yahweh, so that's not saying very much. This is the problem with just presenting a split – it's not clear when you have found a characteristic of one author and when you have simply moved similar verses to one side.
But still, the only reason he can find two stories at all is because there really are two stories which provide an abundance of repetition that makes it very easy to divide Genesis 6-8 into two complete stories. But that is not to say it is easy to correctly divide Genesis 6-8 into the real two stories from which it came.
There are drawbacks to arguing from the evidence instead of starting with the theory and showing it has evidence in support of it. It's much, much more work and when you get done, it might not be the answer you wanted. But that is the price of knowledge.
What it Means for Christianity
While this alone need not undermine Christianity, it can and should very greatly change how the Bible is viewed. It seriously undermines inerrancy by the mere idea that the “surface” discrepancies are actual discrepancies that come from different authors. But it also makes perfect sense for more liberal Christians to use this to make the case that the problems conservatives have come not from the Bible itself, but from misunderstanding what sort of a book it is. Historically speaking, these arguments did originate from within Christianity. (And this is not just because they were “liberal Christians.” These are the reasons many are liberal in the first place.)
But there are two features in particular that are especially difficult to reconcile with Christianity. The first is that this means Moses didn't write Genesis 6-8, or at least not in the way conservatives think he did. Even if Moses wrote the original flood story, which split into two different traditions and were later merged, the Genesis version isn't Moses' version. Or maybe Moses was the compiler of earlier and contradictory sources, but this is vastly different from the idea that God quite nearly dictated the Law to Moses on Mount Sinai. And yet Jesus talks about the Law as if Moses wrote it. Of course, we could be misunderstanding Jesus and he might have meant the Law as the legal code rather than the Torah, but the hope that Moses at least wrote the legal code does not survive the remainder of the Documentary Hypothesis. The possibility that Jesus as a man was ignorant of the real authors is possible, but saying that something Jesus said that is directly relevant to core doctrine was wrong is a very dangerous direction to move in for conservative Christianity.
The second problem is that it makes belief in the inspiration of the autograph of the Bible look completely arbitrary. Why not look to the two flood stories pre-combination for the inspired version? If the two stories have a common literary source, why not look to that as the inspired version? Why look to the combination in Genesis? Why not go a step further and say that the Septuagint or the King James Version is inspired? Even under the assumption that something Bible-related is inspired by God, to say it is the original Hebrew of Genesis and not the true original seems just as arbitrary as randomly pointing to an English translation and assuming it to be inspired.
When you come to Genesis 6-8 with the Documentary Hypothesis in mind, the text makes sense. But that's not point. You don't have to come to Genesis 6-8 with the Documentary Hypothesis to come away with it. This is what it means for evidence to support a position. Countering with how it might be a single story isn't an argument. The consistency of evidence with a position is not enough – real evidence for a position is evidence that has the ability to point someone to a conclusion they don't already accept or even know about.
Of course, I have only provided evidence to get as far as two authors of Genesis 6-8 – that isn't the Documentary Hypothesis yet, but it's a start.
(Kudos to Richard Elliott Friedman's Who Wrote the Bible. My argument is set up very differently than his and hence any errors are mine, but his book and a private email greatly enhanced my partial understanding of this topic.)
Monday, February 9, 2009
Evolution and the Holocaust
One argument against evolution that comes up exasperating often is that evolution taken to its logical conclusion resulted in the Holocaust. This is rather like a gay person deciding to reject electromagnetic theory because they dislike the cultural impact of laws like “opposite charges attract.” It's only funny until millions of people believe it and vote accordingly.
This is such an inflammatory argument that it is rarely is given a passionless rebuttal. Shouting back at it is an enormous rhetorical mistake. All you have to blow on it a bit and the whole thing collapses marvelously.
To justify the Holocaust with evolution requires four different conclusions. First, it is logically possible that some races are better or more fit than other races. Second, Aryans are in fact superior and Jews are in fact inferior. Third, eugenics could effectively be used to advance evolution. Fourth, doing so is morally right. The Theory of Evolution fails to be at fault in all four steps.
Are Some Races Inferior?
The first issue is whether or not evolution creates a basis for racism by providing a basis for the possibility of one race being better than another. And it certainly does. It is logically possible that one race is more fit than another due to evolution.
However, different races are all part of the same species. So we're talking about microevolution. Creationists accept microevolution, so it makes absolutely no difference which view of origins you accept. Poodles and wolves are part of the same species and differ only due to microevolution – one certainty need not believe in their equality. Similarly, it might be the case that one race has better genes than another regardless of your theory of origins.
Which Races Are Inferior?
Evolutionary theory does not tell us which race is superior, or even if a superior race exists at all. If someone wants to argue that evolution led to the Holocaust, the least they could do is explain how evolution leads to a negative view of Jews or any of the other races that were targeted.
The hatred of the Jews had nothing to do with Darwin. It goes back to at least the Middle Ages and is due in large part to religious differences and anti-Jewish propaganda spread by the church. This component of the case for the Holocaust comes not from a distortion of evolution, but a distortion of Christianity.
Is Eugenics Effective?
How do you get rid of Jews? You kill them, or otherwise prevent them from reproducing. Any view of science sufficiently advanced to realize that Jewish children typically come from Jewish parents will reach this conclusion. Of course, I'm not talking about ethics, I'm only asking if a worldwide Holocaust would have accomplished Hitler's goal. The answer is yes. This hardly shows us the evils of believing that children usually look like their parents.
A harder question is if killing the weak and disabled would have a noticeable effect upon improving the human race's gene pool. Would it take three generations to see a difference? One thousand? Would it never help at all? But notice that the question here is about the effectiveness of a particular means of reducing the frequency of particular alleles so that a less fit homo sapiens population can become a more fit homo sapiens population. Or in other words, eugenics deals with microevolution, which is kind of funny, because creationists accept microevolution. Thus, it is not defenders of macroevolution who are inadvertently making the case for eugenics – we explicitly argue that evolution doesn't imply eugenics. The people whose rhetoric makes the case for eugenics are creationists.
Is Eugenics Morally Acceptable?
The alleged reason that evolution defends the morality of eugenics is that in evolution, life progresses through struggle and death. While there are some awkward moral issues if you believe that a loving God set it up to work this way, evolution itself does not say anything about the morality of the process. Evolution is a description of how the process works.
To argue that the efficacy of survival of the fittest somehow implies that a Darwinian society should be our goal is the “is-ought” fallacy. This is rather like telling the child of a rape victim that because their existence is good, they must believe rape to be morally acceptable. Or rather, it is like the child concluding that he wasn't conceived by means of rape because the moral implications of this would just be too terrible to be true. Evolution is merely a theory about the manner in which it happened – this isn't a moral claim, and only the barest amount of common sense is needed to see this.
Conclusion
I don't reject Christianity because Hitler also used religious language to defend hatred of the Jews. I don't even fault religion for Hitler's use of religious language – this would only be relevant if the Bible actually taught people to hate the Jews. The question is if Hitler's evolutionary case for the Holocaust was valid.
It is difficult to overstate just how bad the case for evolution leading to the Holocaust is, or just how badly it reflects on creationists' integrity. Ignorance is no excuse for falsely accusing others of harboring mass murderers. All you have to know to see through the argument is that different races are part of the same species, and thus the origin and extent of racial differences are questions for microevolution. I can more easily forgive the good-faith mistake of accepting many of creationists' other arguments, as they at least require some level of scientific knowledge to be refuted. But this takes next to nothing to be refuted and still it is a mainstream creationist argument. Just how gullible do creationists have to be for their leaders to be able to get away with this kind of thing for decades on end without an enormous backlash from within? Well, there actually is a backlash from within. We, the former creationists, are vilified for “trusting the reasoning of man.” When a group has catchphrases that antagonize people for the sin of thinking, there is no limit to what they will believe.
This is such an inflammatory argument that it is rarely is given a passionless rebuttal. Shouting back at it is an enormous rhetorical mistake. All you have to blow on it a bit and the whole thing collapses marvelously.
To justify the Holocaust with evolution requires four different conclusions. First, it is logically possible that some races are better or more fit than other races. Second, Aryans are in fact superior and Jews are in fact inferior. Third, eugenics could effectively be used to advance evolution. Fourth, doing so is morally right. The Theory of Evolution fails to be at fault in all four steps.
Are Some Races Inferior?
The first issue is whether or not evolution creates a basis for racism by providing a basis for the possibility of one race being better than another. And it certainly does. It is logically possible that one race is more fit than another due to evolution.
However, different races are all part of the same species. So we're talking about microevolution. Creationists accept microevolution, so it makes absolutely no difference which view of origins you accept. Poodles and wolves are part of the same species and differ only due to microevolution – one certainty need not believe in their equality. Similarly, it might be the case that one race has better genes than another regardless of your theory of origins.
Which Races Are Inferior?
Evolutionary theory does not tell us which race is superior, or even if a superior race exists at all. If someone wants to argue that evolution led to the Holocaust, the least they could do is explain how evolution leads to a negative view of Jews or any of the other races that were targeted.
The hatred of the Jews had nothing to do with Darwin. It goes back to at least the Middle Ages and is due in large part to religious differences and anti-Jewish propaganda spread by the church. This component of the case for the Holocaust comes not from a distortion of evolution, but a distortion of Christianity.
Is Eugenics Effective?
How do you get rid of Jews? You kill them, or otherwise prevent them from reproducing. Any view of science sufficiently advanced to realize that Jewish children typically come from Jewish parents will reach this conclusion. Of course, I'm not talking about ethics, I'm only asking if a worldwide Holocaust would have accomplished Hitler's goal. The answer is yes. This hardly shows us the evils of believing that children usually look like their parents.
A harder question is if killing the weak and disabled would have a noticeable effect upon improving the human race's gene pool. Would it take three generations to see a difference? One thousand? Would it never help at all? But notice that the question here is about the effectiveness of a particular means of reducing the frequency of particular alleles so that a less fit homo sapiens population can become a more fit homo sapiens population. Or in other words, eugenics deals with microevolution, which is kind of funny, because creationists accept microevolution. Thus, it is not defenders of macroevolution who are inadvertently making the case for eugenics – we explicitly argue that evolution doesn't imply eugenics. The people whose rhetoric makes the case for eugenics are creationists.
Is Eugenics Morally Acceptable?
The alleged reason that evolution defends the morality of eugenics is that in evolution, life progresses through struggle and death. While there are some awkward moral issues if you believe that a loving God set it up to work this way, evolution itself does not say anything about the morality of the process. Evolution is a description of how the process works.
To argue that the efficacy of survival of the fittest somehow implies that a Darwinian society should be our goal is the “is-ought” fallacy. This is rather like telling the child of a rape victim that because their existence is good, they must believe rape to be morally acceptable. Or rather, it is like the child concluding that he wasn't conceived by means of rape because the moral implications of this would just be too terrible to be true. Evolution is merely a theory about the manner in which it happened – this isn't a moral claim, and only the barest amount of common sense is needed to see this.
Conclusion
I don't reject Christianity because Hitler also used religious language to defend hatred of the Jews. I don't even fault religion for Hitler's use of religious language – this would only be relevant if the Bible actually taught people to hate the Jews. The question is if Hitler's evolutionary case for the Holocaust was valid.
It is difficult to overstate just how bad the case for evolution leading to the Holocaust is, or just how badly it reflects on creationists' integrity. Ignorance is no excuse for falsely accusing others of harboring mass murderers. All you have to know to see through the argument is that different races are part of the same species, and thus the origin and extent of racial differences are questions for microevolution. I can more easily forgive the good-faith mistake of accepting many of creationists' other arguments, as they at least require some level of scientific knowledge to be refuted. But this takes next to nothing to be refuted and still it is a mainstream creationist argument. Just how gullible do creationists have to be for their leaders to be able to get away with this kind of thing for decades on end without an enormous backlash from within? Well, there actually is a backlash from within. We, the former creationists, are vilified for “trusting the reasoning of man.” When a group has catchphrases that antagonize people for the sin of thinking, there is no limit to what they will believe.
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