Cold Case Christianity: J. Warner Wallace wants 3rd graders to draw conclusions about calculus problems

This is my reply to an article by J. Warner Wallace entitled

Cold Case Christianity: Is God Real? 

The Bacterial Flagellum and the Divine Design Inference

Posted: 27 Mar 2019 01:27 AM PDT

Of all the arguments related to the existence of God, the argument from the appearance of design is perhaps the most intuitive and visual. As we examine and observe the complexity (and inter-connectivity) of biological systems, we can’t help but come away with the impression these organisms and cellular micro-machines have been carefully crafted by a master artist. One such complex micro-machine has been heralded above all others in teleological arguments for the existence of God. Bacterial flagella remain a mystery to scientists who recognize them as a marvel of machine-like precision. Harvard biophysicist, Howard Berg, has publicly described the bacterial flagellum as “the most efficient machine in the universe.”  Is God real? The bacterial flagellum is best explained by God’s existence as the Intelligent Designer of biological systems.

 A point by point reply to such cheerleading is hardly necessary.  A few points will suffice:

• The vast majority of people do not have a college-level understanding of biology, so Wallace's integrity takes a hit as he tries to wow his predominantly and mostly scientifically apathetic audience with biological issues that require a college-level education to really appreciate.  One look at his book "Cold Case Christanity" and you can only guess what level of education his expected readership has.  Let's just say you don't attempt to teach algebra to those who are still struggling with bone-head math.
  
• Enhancing the anti-science sentiment of Wallace's article, is his failure to give any meaningful consideration to the counter-arguments offered by biologists equally if not more competent in the required fields than Behe.  Perhaps Wallace was aware that because he is writing to a non-scholarly audience, one-sided cheerleading will be preferable to scholarly interchange?
  
• Because the historical argument against the resurrection of Jesus is powerful, the rational person, convinced by irreducible complexity that some god exists, would likely exclude Christianity in their search for this god.  So ID ironically has a tendency to direct the unbeliever away from the "Christian" god, when its most vocal proponents are using it to direct people toward the Christian god.
  
• Under ID reasoning emerges a conclusion that most old-earth creationists reluctantly agree with:  The traits of certain animals that make them 'carnivores' (i.e., enough intelligence to kill other life forms, teeth intended to rip flesh, highly developed ability to see prey) are the result of ID, they are not what happens to some herbivores after sin came into the world.  In other words, baboons, hawks and lions often eat prey alive (or in the case of cats and whales, terrifying their prey in sadistic fashion before killing it) NOT because of sin degrading some herbivores into carnivores, but because god intended them to do this from eternity no less than than he intended for Adam and Eve to enjoy peace in the Garden of Eden. Unfortunately, God says in Genesis 1:31, after creating the world and all its creatures, that this is "very good".  We really have to wonder why many Christians have a problem seeing such sadistic misery as "very good"...is this because the god (who allegedly put his law into their hearts) is trying to tell them that the biblical portrait of God is inaccurate?  If not, then they are forced to be open to the possibility that their strong moral feelings might be entirely determined by genetics and environmental conditioning, and in that case, down the toilet goes Frank Turek's argument that our strong moral feelings usually come from God.
  
• Behe was soundly refuted in a court of law in the case of Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School Dist., 400 F. Supp. 2d 707 - Dist. Court, MD Pennsylvania 2005.  The court's entire ruling against ID is here, and the part that kicks Behe's ass all over hell and back begins with the phrase "ID proponents primarily argue for design through negative arguments".  Use ctrl + f to find that phrase.
  
• Behe was defeated again in a later court case:

Plaintiffs offer little admissible evidence to the contrary. Plaintiffs' Biology expert, Dr. Michael Behe, submitted a declaration concluding that the BJU text mentions standard scientific content. (Watters Decl. Ex. U.) However, Professor Behe "did not consider how much detail or depth" the texts gave to this standard content. (Watters Decl. Ex. U ¶ 4.) Therefore, Professor Behe fails to refute one of Professor Kennedy's primary concerns that the nature of science, the theory of evolution, and critical thinking are not taught adequately.

See here.  That ruling was upheld on appeal.  A webpage at USC contains more information and documents.  The page went defunct but can still be found through Wayback.  See here.

• The Christan "apologists" who have been attacking me through my prior court cases (so far, only one, James Patrick Holding and his increasingly vanishing brood of Corinthian juvenile delinquents who mistake their love of strife with spiritual maturity) are hypocrites:  They are positively certain that when a Court ruled against me in a previous case, it was completely obvious that my lawsuit was frivolous or that I was "abusing" the court system.  But when they read another Court decision indicating that Christianity was the loser, then suddenly, we need to recognize that judges aren't perfect and often get things wrong.   In other words, whether the Court's ruling is correct or incorrect depends on whether the ruling speaks favorably or unfavorably about Christians and Christianity.  How convenient.  The more apologists decry the Kitzmiller ruling, the more they assent to the obvious:  Court judges are not paragons of objectivity, despite how the people in steerage gasp for breath and bow down whenever somebody wearing a black robe enters the courtroom.  Anybody familiar with the social controversy of whom the President will appoint as a Supreme Court Justice, is quite aware that judges are human too, and they are not much better at overcoming their biases than the average person is.
  
• Plenty of scientists have criticized Behe's model.  See here and here.
  
• Behe was challenged in live debate by competent scientists.  See here.  You can find him doing more such debates by simply googling "Behe debates"

Anybody clever enough to Google "Behe" and "irreducible complexity" and are willing to acknowledge that creationist websites are not the only sites mentioning his name, can find more proof that biologists and chemists with legitimate scientific degrees are nowhere near as impressed by "irreducible complexity", as is the usually Christian and non-college graduate reader of J. Warner Wallace's populist cheerleading.

If Wallace would honestly acknowledge his article here would not be intended to impress an atheist who has a master's degree in biochemistry, then he is keeping the door open to the possibility that he is only trying to convince laypersons about complex matters because he knows their ignorance will predispose them to overlook his errors and be more quick to just draw the pro-Christian conclusion he was hoping for.

The better reasons to doubt the Joseph of Arimathea story

The fact that we are atheists can tempt us to try and find more holes in the bible than are really there.

For example, Michael Alter wrote a lengthy work against the resurrection of Jesus, and therein tried to justify skepticism against the historicity of the gospel assertion that Jesus was buried in Joseph of Arimathea's tomb.

V. J. Torley summarized that case in an online article.

Christian apologist Dr. Timothy McGrew criticized said skepticism, concluding it was illusory. See here.

I would encourage my fellow skeptics to put less effort into proving each and every statement in the bible to be a lie, and put more effort into strengthening the more weighty skeptical arguments.  Whenever you can argue "Even if the bible were telling the truth about this detail, that doesn't place unbelievers under any intellectual obligation to allow that Jesus rose from the dead", that's probably going to achieve the goals of counter-apologetics more efficiently.

Why is this important?  Because the more you trifle about biblical details being fiction, the more you run the risk that some Christian scholar or apologist will successfully rebut such attacks.  While such responses never actually do anything for the cause of truth, such a successful rebuttal does indeed cause the Christian reader to hastily conclude "the bible has been vindicated, once again".  They lack critical thinking skills.  That's why they think that unless the skeptic can demonstrate that belief in Jesus is equal to belief in the tooth-fairy, they will be forever immune to the efforts of others to steal their joy in the Lord. 

So are the Mormons.

If you don't want to allow Christians any relief from the pressure of good skeptical arguments, then stop giving them weak arguments.  I myself, of course, am guilty of trying to justify skepticism toward many biblical matters, but that doesn't require that I just barge ahead anyway and never consider different ways of doing things that might achieve my goals in a more efficient way.

The matter of Jesus' burial is a good case in point.

Because skepticism of Jesus' resurrection can strongly justified even without doubting the Joseph of Arimathea story (because Jesus' being buried counts as exactly nothing in terms of evidence that he rose from the dead) skeptics have to ask themselves whether the skeptical value of attacking the Arimathea story's historicity outweighs the risk of some apologist making a plausible defense of it.

It might.  If you wish to dissuade Christians from their faith, you need to remember that they will seize upon anything that looks like it might remotely vindicate what they believe.  They love nothing more than to point out how skeptical attacks go wrong.  Every time they are able to plausibly claim such a thing, in their mind they automatically equate the failure of a skeptical argument with a vindication of biblical inerrancy/reliability.  My advice is that pressure on the Christian can be made more relentless and unforgiving if you skip the trifles and stick with the heavy artillery.

In this case, I know of several ways to attack the historicity of the Joseph of Arimathea story that are more convincing than the attempts of Ehrman and other skeptics to charge the story as wholesale fabrication.  Justifying skepticism toward the story does not require positive demonstration of the actual truth.  You can be reasonably skeptical of the testimony of an eyewitness already known for lying, even if you cannot positively disprove her specific testimony.

Dismissing Matthew's version as useless 
The excuse Matthew records the guards as ready to use (i.e., "the disciples stole the body while we were asleep", 28:13) is so unbelievable (they'd be risking death) that we are reasonable to question the entire burial story on that ground alone (not that it is a complete fabrication, but that, consistent with Matthew elsewhere, we cannot reasonably discern where history ends and fiction begins, so that trying to extract historical fact from him in this case is futile).

And don't even get me started on why I think Matthew's frightening angel, so part and parcel of the guard-bribery yarn (28:2), is equally the fictional apocalyptic imagery that Licona says the zombie-resurrection is (27:52). 

Dismissing the lateness of the Jewish 'concern' that the disciples would steal the body
Matthew 27:63, the Sanhedrin are testifying after the trial that "we remember" how Jesus went around saying he'd rise from the dead.  That means the Sanhedrin also knew this Christ-claim before the trial started.  It doesn't make sense to say that the Sanhedrin would delay being being concerned about the disciples stealing the body.  It makes more sense to say they'd be worried about such a deception before or at least during the trial.  Therefore, it does not make sense to say their concerns would be assauged merely by achieving the death of Jesus.  A dead man doesn't solve the potential problem of his disciples stealing the body and later falsely claiming he rose from the dead.  So it was likely at some point before or during trial, that this concern would present itself to the minds of the Sanhedrin. 

Since they'd not be fully satisfied with the death of Jesus, they would be most unlikely to allow the corpse to be removed from official custody.   They'd be worried about the disciple-deception immediately upon Jesus' death, they wouldn't delay worrying about it until after somebody removed the body from official custody.

If we are to take the Sanhedrin's disciple-deception concern to be historically accurate, then their insisting that Jesus either remain on the cross for at least 4 full days, or that his body remain under observation while it was thrown into a common pit as carrion, or that the body otherwise remain under the exclusive custodial watch of the Sanhedrin, represent historical options more consistent with their alleged fear of false resurrection claims, than does the gospel report that they allowed the corpse to go all the way out of their official custody for nearly a full day (27:62) merely to accommodate the wishes of a single Sanhedrin member who was secretly a follow of Jesus.  Another option is that since the OT required not mere removal from the hanging, but "burial" too, that as many members of the Sanhedrin as possible would have participated in any "burial". 

It is also curious that despite the biblical and historical warrant for saying "the Jews" loathed allowing bodies to remain hung after dark, all 4 gospels credit this concern in Jesus' case solely to Joseph of Arimathea.  So I am just a little suspicious that in actual history the only Jew that was intent in removing the body from official custody was a Christian.  The non-Christian Jews are never presented as having the least concern to remove the body from the cross.

Any of these scenarios more plausibly harmonize the known facts better that the gospel statements.

The Arimathea burial story's alleged multiple attestation is strongly suspect
Christians have a nasty habit of hastily concluding "inerrant!" merely upon a finding of "multiple attestation", as if this rule of historiography was to be applied mechanically, and where ancient author B tells roughly the same story as ancient author A, then presto, only mentally ill people would doubt the sources.

That is, the average fundamenalist Christian you get on the internet is perfectly certain that the Battle of Troy was a real event, and their ignorance of historiographical method makes them smarter than the legitimately credentialed historians who admit this multiply attested story's sources often exaggerate what happened.  So it doesn't matter if Joseph of Arimathea is "multiply attested", this does precisely nothing to refute the skeptical arguments that the sources are inventing details.

The 'Synoptic Problem' is another illustration of how multiple attestation is useless for overcoming skeptical charges of embellishment and fiction. Most Christian scholars answer the Synoptic problem by positing some type of literarary interdependence on the Synoptic authors.  The majority consensus is the Matthew and Luke borrowed extensively from Mark, the earliest gospel.  How would the multiple attestation of Joseph of Arimathea be impacted if we found out Matthew's and Luke's versions of it were nothing more than their sprucing up the Markan story with their own fictional modifications?  If we can allow an apostle like Matthew to borrow much text from non-apostle Mark (when in fact we wouldn't normally expect an eyewitness to exhibit such heavy dependency upon a hearsay account), what is the problem in saying Matthew derived Joseph of Arimathea from Mark's traditions?

 Fundies will say the differences between the gospels on Joseph of Arimathea are precisely the reason to view them as independently corroborative. But the devil is in the details.  Differences of emphasis do NOT always require that the differences speak to historically real matters.  It is not difficult to show that those differences are also more likely a case of fictional embellishment, so that the differences can support the skeptical position equally as powerfully as apologists think they support independence.

Fundies will say Matthew's account is longer than Mark's therefore Matthew's is not dependent upon Mark.  But what is the problem in accounting for Matthew describing Joseph slightly differently than Mark, as a case of Matthew borrowing the basic template from Mark, then inventing extra details?  After all, Matthew is the only author to mention the absurdly unlikely "bribed the guards to lie" story (28:13).  And if even conservatives like Licona and Blomberg refuse to insist on the historicity of Matthew's zombie-resurrection story in 27:52, and if we can already know that Matthew doesn't tip off the reader as to where the history ends and fable begins in that part of his gospel, then is the skeptic's crediting Matthew with a tendency to borrow and invent, in the area of Jesus' death and resurrection, seriously "unreasonable"?

So Matthew's unique version of the Joseph of Arimathea story does not count as an independent attestation.  And since Luke admits he was only reporting what other unidentified people told him (Luke 1:2), Luke's report about Joseph of Arimathea, coming as it does from Mark and otherwise unidentifiable sources, does not make skeptics unreasonable to label Luke's version as dependent, so that Matthew's and Luke's "multiple attestation" of the story becomes a hindrance rather than a help toward historicity.

Gee, how hard would it be to reasonably question the historical reliability of John's gospel, you know, that gospel that since ancient times was known to exhibit more concern for theology than history?  John obviously invents Christ-sayings.  It's not likely the Synoptic authors would knowingly exclude "Before Abraham was, I am" type statements from their gospels (John 8:58), since Jesus' deity, being essential doctrine and also the most unbelievable aspect of his teaching, would naturally motivate any cheerleader for Jesus to set forth his deity in clear unmistakable fashion, so it's reasonable to conclude the Synoptic authors don't quote the Christ-sayings now confined to John because Christ didn't really talk like that, most such statements in John are merely invented by him.  This is not too different from Jesus' parables, where on the surface, Jesus was referring to real people, but upon closer study, it becomes clear that he is only couching the story in what sounds like historical truth not because it is historical truth, but because he wants to teach a theological lesson.  Even Licona agrees with Craig Evans that if we could go back in time and follow Jesus around, we wouldn't find him speaking exactly as recorded in John.  There is an intense debate within Christian scholarly circles whether the gospels are giving us straight up verbatim reports of Jesus' actual words (ipsissima verba, what the vast majority of "inerrantist" fundamentalists believe), or whether they are giving us merely the "gist" of what was said (ipsissima vox, what most Christian scholars believe).  See one fundamentalist scholar's complaint here.  See Licona's different opinion here.

John's tendency to favor theology over historical accuracy is clear from what he says immediately prior to his story about Joseph of Arimathea.  He quotes Psalm 34:20 and Zech. 12:10 as predictions in the OT that were fulfilled at Jesus' crucifixion (no bones broken, people looking upon a pierced messiah).  Yet, as I document extensively in my up-coming book, Christian scholars are quite aware that the way the NT uses the OT is no simple matter (and is fertile breeding ground for accusations of error in the NT), and they often feel forced to concede that such passages were not true "predictions", therefore, what John presents as "fulfillment" is more accurately labeled a mere similarity or "typology", see here.

So the Joseph of Arimathea story can be deemed sufficiently problematic and lacking in multiple attestation that skepticism of this obvious apologetic material can be reasonably, even if not infallibly, warranted.

I think this manner of justifying skepticism of the Joseph of Arimathea story, a manner that does not necessarily insist it is a complete fiction, has greater persuasiveness than the manner of Alter and Torely.

Cold Case Christianity: Is God Real? No.

This is my reply to an article by J. Warner Wallace entitled

Cold Case Christianity: Is God Real?

The Argument for God’s Existence from the Appearance of Design in Biology

Posted: 22 Mar 2019 01:29 AM PDT

There are several lines of evidence related to the existence of God,

Which is unfortunate given that the traditional religious concept of "god" is incoherent.

but perhaps the most intuitive argument comes from our observations of biology.

Sooo...what yer really saying is the David Hume was correct, and we should depend upon our personal pool of life-experience.  If we have never seen order arise from disorder by purely naturalistic causes, we should conclude it never does...amen?  Sort of like, if we never see dead bodies come back to life, we should conclude they never do...amen?

  As we examine the complexity and inter-connectivity of biological systems, we can’t help but come away with the impression these organisms and cellular micro-machines have been carefully crafted by a master artist.

Yup, you sure were saying we should consider our personal pool of life-experience to be exhaustive, in direct contradiction to all Christian apologetics, which warns atheists to avoid assuming their experience of reality dictates what's possible for things outside their experience.

Even committed atheist, Richard Dawkins, (in his seminal work, The Blind Watchmaker), concedes the appearance of design: “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.”  Biologist Robert Dorit puts it this way: “…the apparent fit between organisms seems to suggest some higher intelligence at work, some supervisory gardener bringing harmony and color to the garden.” Is God real? The appearance of design in biology provides yet another piece of evidence.

Even Christians agree Occam's Razor is a valid general rule of thumb.  Well then, given that 'god' is, by your own classical theism, infinitely complex, the 'god' explanation for the order we see in the natural world will necessarily always be sliced away, because any purely naturalistic explanation will necessarily always be somewhat simpler.  And if the universe has existed for all eternity (i.e., if the Big Bang is total bullshit), then the complexity we see on earth had an entire past eternity to materialize.   You likely won't win the lottery by playing it once, but what if you play it every day for 10 billion years?  

Sure, you can overcome that rule of thumb with good evidence that the more complex solution is more likely, but with how bad the arguments for god already are, you will never make the case for god so strong that it will deserve the benefit of the doubt, or survive the Razor.  Atheism would remain thus reasonable even if technically it was wrong.  Reasonableness doesn't mandate accuracy, only informed investigation.

The argument for God’s existence from the appearance of design is known as the “Teleological Argument” (the Greek word, “telos,” means “design”). The argument was first developed by William Paley (1743 – 1805), who argued the intricate, complex, detailed nature of a watch begs intuitively for the existence of a “watch maker”. If we see similar evidence of design in biological systems, doesn’t this also beg for the existence of a biological designer sufficient for the task?

 Once again, "god" is an incoherent concept on its own.  That's quite sufficient to justify waiting for a naturalistic explanation for complexity, even if one doesn't appear at present.  If the atheist among the Vikings in 800 a.d. couldn't provide a completely naturalistic explanation for thunder, what would be more reasonable for him to do?  Wait for science to find one (i.e., what atheists typically do), or conclude "Thor has hit the other side of the sky with his hammer" (i.e., immediately jump to the supernatural explanation)?

Here is one possible formation of the argument:

(1) Human artifacts (like watches) are products of intelligent design.

(2) Biological systems and cellular micro-machines resemble human artifacts

(3) It is reasonable to conclude, therefore, biological systems and cellular micro-machines are the product of intelligent design

(4) But, biological systems and cellular micro-machines are vastly more complex and sophisticated than human artifacts

(5) It is reasonable to conclude, then, the designer responsible for such biological systems and cellular micro-machines must be vastly more intelligent and sophisticated than any human designer

(6) God is vastly more intelligent and sophisticated than any human designer

Such infinite sophistication naturally implies this god is more complex too...in which case the more complex 'god' is, the more you are required, by your own logic, to insist he was created by a prior god...that is, your own logic inevitably requires you to believe in concepts you think are forbidden by your bible.

(7) God is, therefore, the most reasonable candidate for the Intelligent Designer responsible for biological systems and cellular micro-machines

Nope, see above.  I'll give up atheism the day you give up the doctrine of god's uncaused nature.  Deal?

It all comes down to this: can natural forces alone (i.e. the laws of physics and chemistry, unguided chance mutation, and the creative power of natural selection) account for the complexity and “appearance” of design cited by so many atheist biologists?

Suppose a similar question was asked of the atheist accompanying some Vikings in 800 a.d.. 

Vikings:  "can natural forces alone (i.e. the laws of physics and chemistry, unguided chance mutation, and the creative power of natural selection) account for thunder?"
Atheist:  No, not in the present state of scientific knowledge.
Vikings:  then the best explanation for thunder is Thor.  Your unwillingness to believe in Thor and instead just wait around for science to provide a purely naturalistic explanation for this weather phenomena merely indicates you just don't want to believe, and that you have an unfair bias against Thor.  The evidence is there, you just don't want to believe!

Yeah right.

The problems with the bible and Christianity also moot any success the ID argument would have.  So what if god exists?  It isn't like the evidence about what he is like permits drawing even remotely confident conclusions.

The complexity we see in cellular organisms must be attributed to one of three mechanisms (or some combination thereof):

Unguided chance

Physical Law

Intelligent Agency

All of us, regardless of worldview, must account for the appearance of design from one of these three causal factors, and the “burden of explanation” is equally shared. As a theist, it’s not enough for me to point to the insufficiency of naturalism and then default to intelligent agency. I must demonstrate the deficiency of chance and natural law and the positive evidence for intelligent agency (one chapter of my next book is dedicated to this cumulative case for design).

Then let's hope your next book does what you didn't do previously, and explain why god's own undeniable complexity doesn't imply god himself was created.  If god is infinite in knowledge (generously assuming the truth of the biblically false doctrine of classical theism) then his complexity is infinite, so under your own logic, its more sure that your god was himself created, than it is that physical life was created.  The more complex it is, the more it must have been made by an intelligent designer, right?

You can trifle that God's own complexity is where the buck stops, but you won't have any compelling reason to assert this.  Though it probably wouldn't be conincidence that every alleged attribute of god not supported by the bible, you automatically condemn. 

The atheist must, however, provide an account for the appearance of design from chance and natural law alone, and the burden of proof is as real for the naturalist as it is for the theist.

That burden has already been successfully shouldered by atheist scholars.  Start here.

Purposeful, intentional designs are always the creative product of purposeful intelligent designers.

You are assuming the design we see in nature was purposeful.  It wasn't.  The design the pennies take as I drop them on the floor wasn't purposeful, it was nothing but the results of the laws of physics, which are themselves axiomatic and thus properly exempt from the question of why they exist.

If we find such design features in biology, God is the most reasonable explanation.

No, the objection to god from the incoherence of religious language is strong.  You cannot even provide an empirically testable model of god, yet you run around acting like his existence is as obvious as the existence of trees.  In how many other instances do you pretend like something that has no empirically testable model, is completely obvious? Methinks your religious commitment has enticed you to overstate how good your case for theism really is. That and a desire to make money by selling Jesus.

In future ColdCaseChristianity.com articles, we’ll examine a few common evidences for design in biological systems as we make the case for God’s existence known as the Teleological Argument. Is God real? Purposeful, intentional designs are always the creative product of purposeful intelligent designers. If we find such design features in biology, God is the most reasonable explanation. Learn more about the scientific and philosophical evidence pointing to a Divine Creator in God’s Crime Scene: A Cold-Case Detective Examines the Evidence for a Divinely Created Universe.

 If your god was half as real as anything in the real world, you'd no more write articles asking "Is God real?", than you'd write articles asking "Is the Statue of Liberty real?"

Nice Try, Glenn: God's creation of carnivores makes him bi-polar, at least

I've decided to do a series of blog responses to Glenn M. Miller, a Christian apologist who, IMO, has far more justification to believe his Christianity than probably any 1000 Christians combined.  His website is here.

Miller's comments are often appealed to by lesser apologists in their effort to show that the Christian or biblical viewpoint on a matter is reasonable and the atheist or skeptical perspective is irrational.

The purpose of the series (all articles will begin with "Nice try, Glenn..." is to demonstrate that even the more "scholarly" apologists fail to demonstrate the unreasonableness or irrationality of atheist bible critics.  Our basic problems with the bible-god and miracles continue standing as more than sufficient rational warrants for rejecting theism in general and Christianity in particular.

In this first article, I respond to Miller's article wherein he tries to reconcile the sadistic suffering inflicted by carnivores, with the idea that the god who created them is somehow still "loving" to create such beasts.

This is my reply to an article by Glenn Miller entitled

Good question...

...does the savagery of predation in nature show that God either isn't, or at least isn't good-hearted?

 [original piece: July 6, 1999  updated: July 18/1999]

 Introduction and Table of Contents

The biotic food-chain of the natural world, with its savage predation and suffering is often given as evidence against the God of the bible.

Perhaps only by lesser informed skeptics.  The truly smart skeptics, like me, recognize that how cruel somebody is, doesn't help inform questions of whether they exist.  However, because the bible teaches both an apathetically cruel deity AND a compassionate loving deity, we are reasonable to insist that if the bible-god exists, he is, without a doubt, bi-polar.  He can immediately turn from being compassionate to being heartlessly sadistic very quickly, and for reasons that cause even today's Christians a certain bit of unease.

The problem Miller doesn't deal with is that skeptics who bemoan the divine atrocities of the bible are indeed legitimately refuting the idiot-fundie notion that God "cares" about living things.  That might not be enough to justify saying such god doesn't exist, but the contention that this god is bi-polar is well founded.

For now, point by point analysis of these types of articles witten by "apologists" is hardly "necessary" for the atheist to be "reasonable" in their rejection of the bible and theism, as there are very powerful atheist arguments that aren't disturbed by trifles about whether god can be loving to create carnivores:

1 - God is an incoherent concept.
2 - Some gospel data, which has better claim to historical truth than most other data, justify saying Jesus died and never came back to life.
3 - Bible inerrancy is false doctrine, thus, I do not use it as a hermeneutic.  I will not give up a contextually and grammatically justified interpretation of a bible verse merely beause it would contradict reality or some other part of the bible.
4 - There are powerful biblical arguements against classical theism, hence, Miller's controlling presupposition (i.e., forever looking for just anything anywhere that might possibly protect bible inerrancy from falsification) is not anything remotely obligatory on the skeptic.
5 - Contrary to popular opinion, reasonableness isn't dependent upon actual accuracy.  Therefore, even if somebody finds Miller's trifles more convincing than my rebuttals, that hardly demonstrates that I'm "unreasonable".   Which then means the atheist can still be reasonable, within normative definitions of the word, to reject theism and Christianity.

I'm fair and consistent in this too:  I believe Christianity is "false", but I don't say the vast majority of Christians are "unreasonable", because reasonableness doesn't necessarily hinge upon accuracy.  I usually reserve the accusation of unreasonableness for special cases where certain Christians act in shocking defiance of common sense.  For example, James Patrick Holding is unreasonable, with his intentionally committing the sins of slander and gossip for more than 20 years, as abundantly documented at this blog. 

So this precise question of whether god is evil for creating carnivores, might be fun to toss around on a boring rainy day, but is ultimately about as relevant as whether somebody's interpretation of a passage in the Book of Mormon was "correct".  It isn't like a person's giving the "incorrect" answer to such a question puts them in any danger.  The vast bulk of Miller's arguments in his numerous articles are, like the bast bulk of all apologetics arguments produced by Christians, nothing more than trifles, or what court judges refer to as "purely academic" questions (i.e., questions whose correct resolution changes precisely nothing in the real world).

Miller continues:

Let me start the analysis of this by citing some different wordings/aspects of this problem (not all with theological conclusions in them):

    First, a juicy one from John Stuart Mill:

"If there are any marks of all special design in creation, one of the things most evidently designed is that a large proportion of all animals should pass their existence in tormenting and devouring other animals" (J.S. Mill, 1874).

And as we'll see, since the old-earth creationists have more biblical justification than young-earth creationism, that ends up requiring that God positively willed from eternity that some animals inflict horrific suffering on others.  The popular fundie Christian notion that the molars of the vegetarian tigers in the Garden of Eden suddenly morphed into fangs after sin entered the world, and degraded their brain cells sufficiently so that they started seeing other animals as food, is not biblical.  Hence, carnivores did not start existing after sin entered the world, the bible teaches they existed by God's positive decree from the beginning.

Hence, causing this god to be reasonably categorized as on the level of a 4 year old toddler who like to inflict cruelty on small animals.  If God is omnipotent, he could have achieved the goal the carnivores ostensibly fulfill, in other ways.  Just like if you are short of rent money, you can probably come up with the money in ways other than by robbing a bank.

    Then, a quote from a popular book on predation:

"Most animals are either eaten or eat other animals. Plants, too, are often consumed by animals. Consequently the chances of being devoured, or of eating some other organism in order to survive, are exceedingly high." [NS:PAP:3]

    Then, a quote from a deep-thinking, good-hearted seeker friend of mine:

"Let's face it: our life cannot exist without the *agonising* death of another breathing, feeling entity. The second law of thermodynamics is just another one, *demonstrating* (as the theories of self-organising energy fail to do) that deterioration is inherent in this universe.

"Charles Darwin wrote about the Ichneumon spider and the nightmarish sort of manner in which its very existence depends on the impregnation of its paralysed victims with its eggs so the hatchlings can have fresh, *live* meat when they hatch (kinda like the Aliens movie). Dawkins, Pinker, and pretty much the ridiculously vast majority of the scientific community keep offering demonstrable evidence of how God cannot fit in a universe where an ichneumon may be so "designed."

And if the source-book for this deity sometimes says he has compassion and other times expresses his sadism toward others, we are perfectly reasonable to say such contradictory properties mean this particular type of god doesn't exist, or is at least bi-polar.

    Lastly, a heartfelt question from a Christian:

"I think some people, Christians or not, will think this question is a little on the soft side. Never the less, in my attempt to reconcile myself to the concept of a merciful loving God in the face of tragedy and pain, I am left with some very unanswered questions. So, here goes

"How should we deal with animal suffering? Not just the idea of, for example, willful human torture of an animal. I am thinking of the whole animal kingdom suffering. Perhaps it is ruefully ironic that only a conscious mind could truly appreciate the suffering of an animal. I pray that animals are not conscious of their pain. They certainly respond to what looks like pain. Am I empathizing with the animal's pain because part of my fallen nature is in a way, animal?

"In the past I tried to take a very mechanistic approach. Animals were beautifully created machines. A pain impulse would simply go to the brain as any other external signal. The brain would route the signal to provide the appropriate response, etc.

"I cannot make myself believe this. I have a dog now, which has changed things. I do not have children, but I imagine the experience would further change my views. I feel a horror for the future death of my dog.

Nature is often called "red in tooth and claw" and the quotes above point out the emotional difficulty this creates for humans. We seen the vivid cases of a lion biting the neck of a Thompson gazelle, or the Ichneumon spider example given above (which is technically incorrect--the Ichneumon is an insect order of wasps, not spiders), or the diagrams of big-bigger-biggest fish eating one another in a food chain lesson. We see chimpanzees (often portrayed as emotionally deep) tear the arm out of its socket of a captured bonobo money (and then eat it with the bonobo screaming there) [PH:GN:84]. We see killer whales, playing with their seal pup food, throwing it back and forth like a beach ball (while the terrified pup is still alive) [NS:DNNHE:xii]. We know that foxes will chase and capture the same shrew, just to let it go and repeat the process [CS:AM:60], and we use the 'cat playing with the mouse' image as a metaphor.

And we also know how tight of a grip bible inerrancy can have on the mind of its devoted disciples.

The quotes above intimate that this situation is radically inconsistent with the existence of the Christian God.

Not really, the "Christian" god as defined in the bible is bi-polar.  But the "Christian" god believed in by most Christians today is little more than a compassionate Santa.  I'm more interested in showing the problems with the biblical data.  The question of why most Christians have a higher moral view of God than the bible teaches, is not very important to me.

There are many, many issues involved in this question, so let me begin by listing some of these:

    Question One: To what extent is the existing predatory situation created by God, and to what extent does God 'endorse' it now? (In other words, has it always been like this, or to what extent is this the result of the Fall or of the Flood?)

    This question will require some basic study of what the biblical data is, and what range of options might exist for how we 'fit' predation into our view of creation, providence, etc. So the data for this will be primarily biblical.

 Jesus made clear that God is the one who feeds the birds:

 26 "Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow, nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they? (Matt. 6:26 NAU)

So when we see a hawk, which is a "bird of the air",  sadistically tormenting a cuckoo bird that is still alive in the effort to eat (video here, warning: graphic, not intended for children), Jesus thinks this is what the "heavenly father" intended.

    Question Two: How extensive is 'painful predation'? (In other words, DO all things REALLY live only at the expense of agonizing death by those lower on the food chain?)

 Dismissed.  No, obviously, not all food is acquired by lesser animals in a brutal fashion.

    This question will be answered by biological data. We will need to survey the food chain, and ask questions of scope of predation (as opposed to the other possible ecosystem relationships, such as parasitism or commensalism) as well as to what extent each of the creatures involved in a prey-predator relationship actually "feel agony" in a meaningful sense.

No, if your god is omnipotent, he could have created life forms that don't need to inflict misery on others.  he could cause grass to grow by creative decree, cause all life forms to eat this grass, and there you go, no "need" for god to "sustain" the food chain in ways that make predatory behavior sound "necessary".

    Question Three: Where exactly in the act of predation is the theological/moral problem?

The general consensus of modern humanity, including most Christians, that "love" is not sufficiently broad as to be part of anything that displays a level of cruelty that appears arbitrary.  Therefore, the more the bible says god is "loving", the more the existence of carnivores refutes that doctrine.  That is, reality requires either that the bible is wrong and this contradictory loving/sadistic god doesn't exist for the same reason anything else with contradictory properties cannot exist, or, the bible errs in ascribing infinite love to this god.  Sure, we can always trifle that an infinite intelligence might have higher mysterious reasons, in conformity to "love", for allowing sadism in nature, but then again, the bible doesn't consistently support classical theism, the bible god often makes mistakes, and the "anthropomorphism" excuse to get away from these passages, are never grounded in their grammar, immediate context, larger context, cultural context, or genre.  

Is there a moral problem with carrion beetles that eat the dead carcass of an animal (who obviously doesn't feel any pain)?

No, because it is be the admission of most other Christians that infliction of unnecessary pain is the opposite of love. Your trifle that maybe god wished to create a greater good by wanting carnivores to inflict misery on other animals, is easy to dismiss:  under your own classical theism, your god was not required by circumstances to use that method to achieve this unproven higher mysterious good.  If your god could maintain humans with nothing more than manna for 40 years in the wilderness (Exodus 16:35, Numbers 11:4-7), he could also just as magically supply food to all life forms, so that life can sustain itself without there needing to be any food chain involving bacteria or carnivores.

To what extent is there a problem with a gazelle having to avoid a predator every day (or every week) for decades--does this somehow cause "painful stress" for the gazelle that is radically worse (and to the point of "cruel, immoral suffering") than that of having to make a living every day by humans?

To what extent is there a problem with YOU having to avoid a predator every day?  Would you say there was a "problem" if every day you went outside your house, you couldn't stay alive unless you ran faster than the other humans chasing you with intent to kill you?   Live like that for a while, and I'm not so sure you'd continue thinking as highly about god as you currently do.

Is it in the "destructive" experience of the prey (perhaps painful)

What do you mean "perhaps"?  Gee, when the gazelle is screaming as it is being eaten alive, maybe we'd have to debate whether the gazelle was experiencing pain?

as it is being killed by the predator, implying that prey animals that feel no pain (such as zooplankton) as they are eaten are not "included" in this problem?

I'm not seeing the angle, Miller:  gazelles obviously do feel pain, and as an creationist, you are forced to credit their innate desire to avoid the predator to god, who surely is the only reasonable explanation for the gazelle's "intelligence"...right?

Is it in the fact that something dies at the mouth of another, instead of living forever, or only dying "of old age, in its sleep." Does dying of starvation (because some other animal group ate all the grass) count as predation?

 No, but I notice that you are avoiding the real issue by pretending you need to devote time to other questions that allow you to walk away from the problem at hand:  carnivores inflict sadistic misery on other animals, a reality inconsistent with any rational definition of "love".

Does dying of disease (because some very small life-forms attacked it) count?

Irrelevant.

    This, strangely enough, is a philosophical and theological question. How would we decide that it was wrong for a cockroach to die (instead of live forever)?

You'd stay more on track if you confined you analysis to the sadism in the animal world that you yourself mentioned earlier in this article (stuff like "We see chimpanzees (often portrayed as emotionally deep) tear the arm out of its socket of a captured bonobo money (and then eat it with the bonobo screaming there)"

You start losing the debate the more the life forms approach the level of human and are still subject to carnivores.

How would we decide that it was wrong for a cockroach to die suddenly by ingestion by a bird (instead of suddenly by an end-of-life(?) failure of some internal biological function, such as the heart)?

Easy: unless you simply play with words as expediency dictates, birds eating cockroaches "alive" doesn't sound very "loving", even granting that the cockroach is a mere insect with far less self-awareness or pain-receptors than humans have.  So the more you credit such unloving circle of life to your god, the more justified we are to say he is either unloving, or his ideas of love are completely opposite to most of his own people understand "love" to be.  Do I eat hamburger?  yes.  Does that mean I think I can reconcile cattle-slaughter with "love"?  No.  I happily admit not everything about me is "loving".  Your god doesn't have that excuse, unless you become an open-theist.

How would we decide that the suffering of a zebra for 3-5 minutes at the fangs of a cheetah morally "outweighed" the previous 20 years of growing, reproducing, not being eaten or mauled by a predator (being mauling by a predator generally reduced mobility and results in capture quickly thereafter), and community life for some 20+ years?

Easy, under your own creationism, you are forced to blame god solely for the zebra's desire to struggle against the cheetah and attempt escape.  Why does your god want the zebra to struggle against the cheetah, if your god intended for the cheetah to get food that way?

What, is your god like a child with toy soldiers, deliberately setting up circumstances intended to cause life forms to clash and inflict misery on each other?       

Is it "wrong" for my white blood cells to attack and devour bacteria that is harmful to me?

Only if you think the killed bacteria were able to experience as much pain and conscious suffering as the zebra does in the mouth of a cheetah.

    About all we can do with this question is expose the value assumptions that are inherent in the question, and how they are being "used" by the objection.

Then you didn't do a very good job of it.  bonobos that scream while their arms are ripped off by chimpanzees obviously reveal a far bigger contradiction between god's "love" and nature, than what you might find when bacteria are killed by white blood cells.

And once again, there would be no "need" for your god to create such a sadistically interdependent food chain, if the bible is correct in saying he could create ex nihilo and feed humans for 40 years solely on manna.  Under those assumptions, God's choice to feed carnivores by giving them the instinct to hurt other animals is about as arbitrary as the child who throws 15 different insects into a small jar just to watch them tear each other apart.  You don't want to say your god takes pleasure in sadistic shows, but that's your problem.  When you are capable of earning money to pay the rent, but you instead choose to solve the rent problem by robbing a bank, nobody really gives a shit as you testify in court about how your killing of the bank teller achieved the higher good of causing her immediate family to grow closer to Jesus.  Your higher mysterious goals do not transform an evil act into a good act.  Therefore, that also holds in the case of your god's actions in causing suffering.  It doesn't matter if he has higher mysterious reasons for doing this.  The fact that he could achieve his same goals without needing to employ such sadistic measures, shows him to be unloving by any reasonable definition.

I think this is the part where you suddenly discover how biblical open-theism is.

We might also be able to subject these assumptions to some more rigorous philosophical analysis, by examining implications of those assumptions.

Something you'd never do if you came home and found out Rover ate the cat.

    Question Four: How exactly would the predatory situation count as evidence against the Christian God, given the actual details of the food chain/web interrelationships?

Already explained that:  the more you identify the Christian god as the god of "classical theism" (i.e., your god is all-powerful, etc) the more your god could have caused life on earth to sustain itself by means other than carnivorous.  Sort of like if you have a decent education and could easily get a job to pay the bills, the jury will not listen very long as you try to explain how the larger good achieved when you murdered the bank teller (her family grieved and started going to church more) overrides the smaller good you'd have achieved by simply earning your own money.  Where you could have achieved your purpose without inflicting misery, your choice to inflict misery anyway reasonably demonstrates apathy and sadism.  Since the classical-theist god hardly "needed" to create carnivores merely for living things to stay alive, his choice to achieve that system by more sadistic means, demonstrates his apathy and sadism.

    Here we are in another philosophical arena--this is NOT a biological issue!-- and we will have to examine (1) the general evidentialist argument from evil, (2) how the biologists mentioned in the quotes (e.g., Dawkins) are using biological data in philosophical arguments to reach theological conclusions (and how trustworthy such an approach might be); and (3) what alternative scenarios for biodiversity (e.g., all creatures use photosynthesis instead of biomass consumption, all carnivores are scavengers) might be feasible and/or "more moral".

How moral was God's limiting people to eating manna for 40 years?  How moral was it for god to cause grass to grow without the aid of carnivores? How moral was it for god to limit the diet of cattle to grass?

And you wish to pretend that god "needed" carnivores"?  Sure, maybe like a kidnapper "needs" victims.

    Question Five: Are there elements in the existing predatory and/or larger ecological situation that might support the Christian claim that "God is good to all He has made"?

Only if you could, in good conscience, say "God is good to all He had made" to the bonobo while its arms are being ripped off by the chimpanzee.  And yes, I'm thinking bible inerrancy has its grip on your mind that tightly.  

Bible inerrancy caused Hank Hanegraaff (Bible Answerman of CRI) to foolishly argue in the 90's that conscious eternal torment in basically literal hell fire is "loving" of god, so there really aren't any meaningful controls here on the depths to which you are capable of sinking, where you feel doing so will rescue bible inerrancy.  Never mind that Hank eventually found fundie-evangelicalism to be bullshit and joined the Greek Orthodox church.  We have to wonder whether the passing of time will also similarly alert him to the unbiblical and sadistic nature of fire-torture.

    Here we are in another philosophical arena. Can the data of predation as it exists today be interpreted in such a way as to support the proposition that "God arranges matters such as to minimize pain in the life of non-human creatures, in the context of His overall purposes and designs?" (or similar propositions).

No.  As explained previously, the fact that God limited Israel to manna for 40 years proves that he not only can, but sometimes even does, think just magically creating food out of thin air is a legitimate way to solve the food problem, in which case he could have caused all creatures to be limited to eating such ex nihilo food, and we wouldn't be having this debate today.

Or, God have been satisfied with limiting life forms to the immaterial realm, mooting their need to eat, which means all the misery inherent in the physical food chain is avoided.

 You admit in one of your pushbacks:

Without trying to decide this issue here, let me simply point out that Dr. Ross' argument only actually applies to consumption of meat, not to the killing of it. In other words, all carnivores could have been scavengers and only eaten meat dead of 'natural causes'--predation itself is not required to solve the 'energy problem' for active creatures.

 Precisely.  God could have made any life system he wished, including one that involved no carnivore activity. Once again, if you could have solved the rent problem by getting a job, but no, you instead chose to solve it by robbing a bank and killing one of the tellers, nobody will listen to you as you insist that the greater good of the teller's family growing closer to Jesus through their grief, outweighed your evil in murdering her.

Us atheists don't listen to such excuses, even when they are applied to "god".

We would have to conclude that a very basic (low-carnivory, low dietary restrictions, "CNS non-violent") food-chain was created by God, but that the eco-dynamics of the system were substantially modified at/after the Fall and the Flood. 

 That's irrelevant, life didn't suck after the Fall merely because of the Fall, as if the original sin automatically degraded nature.  Life sucked thereafter because God chose to curse the creation:

 14 The LORD God said to the serpent, "Because you have done this, Cursed are you more than all cattle, And more than every beast of the field; On your belly you will go, And dust you will eat All the days of your life;
 15 And I will put enmity Between you and the woman, And between your seed and her seed; He shall bruise you on the head, And you shall bruise him on the heel."
 16 To the woman He said, "I will greatly multiply Your pain in childbirth, In pain you will bring forth children; Yet your desire will be for your husband, And he will rule over you."
 17 Then to Adam He said, "Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree about which I commanded you, saying, 'You shall not eat from it'; Cursed is the ground because of you; In toil you will eat of it All the days of your life.
 18 "Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you; And you will eat the plants of the field;
 19 By the sweat of your face You will eat bread, Till you return to the ground, Because from it you were taken; For you are dust, And to dust you shall return."
 20 Now the man called his wife's name Eve, because she was the mother of all the living. (Gen. 3:14-20 NAU)

 Miller continues:

Nevertheless, the modifications allowed to be introduced were calculated, designed, and are regulated in order to preserve bio-diversity and life on the earth, and still achieve overall "more good than bad" in the system. 

 You've never shown that the current system produces more good than bad.  In fact your own bible characterizes the entire world as evil (1st John 5:19), and that the world does little more than give its creatures a reason to groan (Romans 8:22).

Thus the predator-prey relationships (broadly considered) that we see today will have more elements that are "positive" (e.g., defensive modifications, poisons that eliminate feeling/pain as they kill, underdeveloped nervous systems of the largest number of prey) than elements that are "negative" (e.g., violent death involving actual suffering for long periods of time in higher mammals). 

 And since god's merely producing manna by magic and limiting all life forms to eating this would completely eliminate any "need" for carnivores, your god's refusal to do it that way was arbitrary:  he created the carnivore system because he enjoys watching life forms endure horrific misery, not because he couldn't think of a better plan.  

We are also told that God is only 'tolerating' and 'regulating' this situation at the present,

 Implying everything that is implied when a parent doesn't endorse, but only "tolerates" and "regulates" the times in which the babysitter is allowed to sexually molest the child. Yet the more "holy" you pretend god is, the less likely such a fantastical being would "tolerate" or "regulate" anything unholy.  Sort of like the more homophobic the neighbor is, the less likely they would "tolerate" or "regulate" gay men acting gay within their own house.  It just goes without saying.

 and that His purpose in history of rich bio-diversity, in community balance, in loving affirmation, and in the harmony of peace and companionship will eventually be achieved. 

 The hope of the hopeless. 

And then the "lion will lay down with the lamb."

Not sure whether I'll bother to answer Miller's "pushback" commentary, since my arguments against his main points here are powerful and not disturbed by the pushbacks.  The observation that God can approve of a feeding system for life that involves no pain (i.e., creating manna ex nihilo), does a pretty powerful job of demonstrating the evil of a god who chooses to create a painful circle of life anyway.  Trifles about "god's ways are mysterious" are never accepted by Christians when such trifle is is used by 'heretics', so fairness dictates that Christians likewise be prohibited from hiding behind this excuse.

Cold Case Christianity: Some parts of the bible are anti-science

This is my reply to an article by J. Warner Wallace entitled

 I got this in my email March 6, 2019:

Are Christians "science-deniers"?

Many Christians are anti-science, and they don't have a lot of difficulty justifying their position from the bible. Apparently God's motive for causing people to misunderstand each others' languages at the Tower of Babel was because God feared that their joint efforts were enabling them to make scientific achievements that, for whatever reason, this god feared:

 1 Now the whole earth used the same language and the same words.

 2 It came about as they journeyed east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there.

 3 They said to one another, "Come, let us make bricks and burn them thoroughly." And they used brick for stone, and they used tar for mortar.

 4 They said, "Come, let us build for ourselves a city, and a tower whose top will reach into heaven, and let us make for ourselves a name, otherwise we will be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth."

 5 The LORD came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built.

 6 The LORD said, "Behold, they are one people, and they all have the same language. And this is what they began to do, and now nothing which they purpose to do will be impossible for them.

 7 "Come, let Us go down and there confuse their language, so that they will not understand one another's speech."

 8 So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of the whole earth; and they stopped building the city.

 9 Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of the whole earth; and from there the LORD scattered them abroad over the face of the whole earth.

 (Gen. 11:1-9 NAU)

  If this story were restricted to pagan sources, you'd be very quick to say the last part of v. 6 shows the god to be fearful that humanity is growing beyond his control.  But no...the story is in the "bible".  It is thus the inerrant word of an allegedly all-powerful god, therefore, when this god says "please stop beating on me, it hurts too much!", surely this cannot be taken literally, because other parts of the bible says god is all-powerful, and the bible can never contradict itself, end of discussion. 

Well fuck you, I consider bible inerrancy to be false doctrine, I do not immediately cry foul when an otherwise grammatically and contextually justified interpretation of a verse causes it to contradict what the bible says elsewhere. 

And you certainly aren't putting any intellectual obligation on the skeptic to think the last part of v. 6 is surely non-literal.  There is no grammatical or contextual justification for pretending the last part of v. 6 in this long passage is the only part that conveniently isn't literal.  Mormons can always think of some damn theory to reconcile their Book of Mormon with it's infamous lack of archaeological support...but do such self-serving theories place YOU under any intellectual compulsion?  Hardly.

The same with Jews and their non-Christian interpretation of the OT "messianic prophecies".  They aren't placing YOU under any intellectual compulsion merely because speech is non-absolute and any fool with 5 minutes education in sophistry can always think of some damn excuse or other to make his false theory seem something less embarrassing than willful stupidity.

Then fundies also provide biblical justification to be anti-science by noting that the bible never expresses or implies that illiterate people should learn to read and write.

Well gee, if the Christianity of the NT can be lived out while the convert is unable to read and write, how much emphasis do you suppose Jesus and the apostles would place on Christians performing scientific tests?
Gee, maybe God wants people who cannot read or write to engage in the scientific enterprise? 

What would YOU, the INERRANTIST, think today about the "scientist" who wants to be regarded as legitimate, but who cannot read or write?

The bible's utter apathy toward illiteracy is a powerful indirect argument that its authors thought their originally intended addressees should not be wasting their time doing "science", when actually the problem of "sin" is sufficiently severe as to justify devoting one's attention entirely to rooting it out.  Modern day Christians who bother to obtain scientific credentials could do far better to simply preach the gospel and rebuke heretics.  The example of Jesus and the apostles needs to be followed, not trifled with.  If that leads to disaster, that's your problem, Jesus should have known better than to give you partial instructions that cause the church to by plagued by in-house bickering for 2,000 years.

According to many skeptics, "Anti-science attacks come from conservative Christians who believe it is their moral duty to fight perceived evils that often include science researching areas that fundamentalist faith already has 'answers' for." Is this true?

 Yes, lots of fundamentalist Christians feel that way about "science", and they have biblical justification to condemn "worldly" pursuits.  YOU have ZERO biblical justification for even starting to give a shit about anything the non-Christian world might have to offer.  If you can fulfill your duty to God well enough by focusing solely on bible study and evangelism (Matthew 6:31-34, God will provide your daily needs when you make preaching the gospel your top priority...why would Matthew provide these particular words for posterity? Probably because he thought such words applied with equal force to later generations of Christians, and weren't restricted to just the 1st century).

Are Christian believers afraid of scientific study?

That's an unfairly loaded question, some are, some aren't.

Are Christians "anti-science"? How would you respond to this common objection?

By informing the "apologist" that it sure is funny how anti-science the church was when Galileo came along.  The Catholics forbade him teaching anything he thought "scientific" if it contradicted their geocentric bible.

Lest you think you can escape this condemnation merely because you aren't Catholic, John Calvin agreed that Michael Servetus should be put to death for teaching against the trinity doctrine (as documented by attorney and former Calvinist Standford Rives, see here, which shows Calvin's anti-scientific bigotry and unwillingness to allow for opposing but equally justified views), Calvin thought that the bible's teaching of geocentricism was clear and compelling enough to justify labeling any gainsayers as fools (see here) and Martin Luther's geocentrism is well documented (see here and here).

The issue is not whether you promised to promote Luther and Calvin as god's infallible teachers.  You probably didn't.

The issue is whether Christians throughout history have found what they felt was clear biblical justification to deny scientific truths or otherwise act in a way that hinders rather than helps science advance.  They did.  You don't shake off these cobwebs by simply carping that they were wrong. These men weren't dolts, they were practiced in the art of hermeneutics and would hardly have said what they said if they felt the bible supported their giving the other side a fair hearing.

A "quick shot" response:

 Probably because you are more interested in hooking people with quick one-liners than in asking them to use their brains to properly analyze in-depth argument. 

Here is just one suggestion (of three) from the Quick Shot section of our phone app:

Gee how did the Holy Spirit manage to do his job effectively before humans discovered electricity?  Gee, maybe your next book will be "The Holy Spirit didn't know how to effectively promote the gospel until I invented Cold Case Christianity" ?

“Christianity isn’t anti-science, but it is anti-scientism. ‘Scientism’ is the belief that science is the only way to know anything.

Then you are horrifically stupid, because you cannot show that anybody ever discovered new truth by means other than their five physical senses.  I say this being perfectly well aware of Daniel 9 and Acts 9.  I also say this being aware that some people believe in the tooth fairy. 

But there are many things we know without the benefit of science at all,

 Ok, so you are a rationalist, I'm an empiricist.  Sure is funny that you cannot even BEGIN to demnonstrate the truth of rationalism, without appealing to at least one of my 5 physical senses.  Rationalism is laughable nonsense.

like logical and mathematical truths (that precede scientific investigations),

No, you wouldn't know mathematical truth if you never had any physical sensations, as inferred by the fact that even most people with functioning senses have difficulty with math.

The same with logical truths: If you had no physical sensory experience whatsoever, you wouldn't know the difference between logic and lollipops, since you wouldn't learn language and thus you'd only think at the level of the lower mammals.    Humans learn by analogy and illustration, you don't get that if you are completely deprived of all physical sensation for your entire life.

metaphysical truths (that determine if the external world is real),

If you think metaphysical truth, like "god" can be known without science, then go head, and demonstrate god's existence without using any type of scientific method to make the case.  Thus you are not allowed to observe data, formulate hypotheses, test the hypotheses, and repeat.  Good luck.

moral and ethical truths (that set boundaries for our behavior),

No, the Christian apologetic argument that some morals are "truth" is utterly misguided and just plain wrong, and you fallaciously always assume, but never explain, why you think human consensus is a marker of divine input.  You just automatically assume it must be god's law in our heart if most of us condemn child rape, while in fact you refuse to blame god for the human consensus that it is immoral to burn children to death, despite your bible-god thinking such punishment to be morally good (Leviticus 21:9, Joshua 7:15).

aesthetic truths (like determining beauty)

Sorry, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, that's why although somebody can think some woman to be beautiful, you think she's a warthog.  See here.

and historical truths.

No, historical truths might not be as solid as scientific truths due to non-repeatability, but the scientific process of drawing data, testing hypotheses and peer-review are all the same.

Feel free to believe you can communicate telepathically with people living in the sky, but such flight of fancy doesn't remotely place the skeptic under the least bit of intellectual obligation.  All it does is provide you with a 60-second answer that is tapered to the likes of today's attention-deficit people.  It promotes book sales, and little more.

Christians believe that science can tell us many important things, but not all important things.

The trouble being that you cannot demonstrate that anybody has ever discovered truth in ways other than their physical senses.  Yet you act like this rationalist perspective is "clear".  Dream on.

How could science possibly tell us anything meaningful about the historicity of Jesus or the historical reliability of the Bible?”

 Easy: "science" doesn't necessarily imply "test tubes" or "chemicals".

"Science" is simply a method of analysis that involves drawing data, making observations, inferring hypotheses and submitting one's tentative theory to peer-review.  Repeat.

If you keep these distinctions in mind, then it is accurate to characterize historiography as 'science'.  It's just not "hard" science.

Sorry Wallace, you have failed in your quest to pretend we can know any "truth" without employing the scientific method to some degree.  The day you start demonstrating that you came to discovery previously unknown truths by means not involving use of any of your 5 physical senses, is the day I reconsider my position on this matter.

Cold Case Christianity: THIS is why missing data in the gospels justifies skepticism

This is my reply to an article by J. Warner Wallace entitled

Cold Case Christianity:

How Can I Trust the Gospel Accounts When Some Are Missing Important Details? 

Posted: 20 Mar 2019 01:56 AM PDT 

A visitor to ColdCaseChristianity.com wrote recently to express her concerns and growing doubts about Christianity.

Or maybe you are concerned about a criticism I wrote against one of your beliefs, and you are just pretending the concern originated in what this unnamed Christian said.  We must consider all options.  You are a sinner, your honesty is far from deserving of presumption.

Raised in the Church, she finds herself questioning the reliability of the Gospel authors because some of them failed to mention important events in the life and ministry of Jesus.

 Congrats to atheist bible critics like me, because such a concern likely wouldn't originate from within her faith or her church.  It was likely a skeptic who motivated her to grant legitimacy to the argument from silence.

Why does only one Gospel writer mention the Raising of Lazarus?

Given that John has no problems lying about what Jesus said and did, the other 3 likely didn't mention it because it never happened.

Why does only one writer mention the dead people who rose from the grave at Jesus’ crucifixion?

Christian apologist and inerrantist Dr. Mike Licona credits this to the Matthew-author's desire to mix history with fiction.



See here.

You can hardly blame skeptics for agreeing with him. Unfortunately, Matthew also explains the empty tomb in spite of the guards, with a dramatic tale of an angel with appearance of lightning frighting the guards into comatose state (28:4).  That easily qualifies as "apocalyptic imagery" no less than the zombie resurrection. Gee, when did the average evangelical fundamentalist Christian ever learn in church that just because the gospels report something in a manner that looks like historical reporting, doesn't necessarily mean it was actual history?  NEVER.

There are many examples of singular, seemingly important events mentioned by only one of the four Gospel authors. Shouldn’t all of the alleged eyewitnesses have included these events, and doesn’t the absence of information in a particular Gospel cast doubt on whether or not the event actually occurred?

 Since you are so quick to use American law to analyze the reliability of the gospels, you'll be disappointed to know that American law allows the jury to interpret a witness's omission or silence to be the logical equivalent of a positive denial:

"Impeachment by omission" is a recognized means of challenging a witness's credibility. "A statement from which there has been omitted a material assertion that would normally have been made and which is presently testified to may be considered a prior inconsistent statement." State v. Provet, 133 N.J.Super. 432, 437, 337 A.2d 374 (App.Div.), certif. denied, 68 N.J. 174, 343 A.2d 462 (1975); see also Silva, supra, 131 N.J. at 444-45, 621 A.2d 17; State v. Marks, 201 N.J.Super. 514, 531-32, 493 A.2d 596 (App. Div.1985), certif. denied, 102 N.J. 393, 508 A.2d 253 (1986). This principle is widely accepted. Jenkins v. Anderson, 447 U.S. 231, 239, 100 S.Ct. 2124, 2129, 65 L.Ed.2d 86, 95 (1980) ("Common law traditionally has allowed witnesses to be impeached by their previous failure to state a fact in circumstances in which that fact naturally would have been asserted."); Kenneth S. Broun, McCormick on Evidence § 34 (7th 784*784 ed. 2013) ("[I]f the prior statement omits a material fact presently testified to and it would have been natural to mention that fact in the prior statement, the statement is sufficiently inconsistent."); 3A Wigmore on Evidence § 1042 (Chadbourn rev. 1970) ("A failure to assert a fact, when it would have been natural to assert it, amounts in effect to an assertion of the non-existence of the fact.")

 from Manata v. Pereira, 93 A. 3d 774, 783-4- NJ: Appellate Div. 2014

That is cut and pasted from my more in-depth article that shows how the basics of American jurisprudence render the gospels unreliable and inadmissible.  See here. 

Wallace continues:

My experience working with eyewitnesses may help you think clearly about these issues and objections. You can trust the Gospel eyewitness accounts, even though some are missing important details:

 Then you are already contradicting modern laws of evidence.  Wallace...you are not allowed to automatically assume that any possible "how-it-could-have-been" scenario you conjure up to explain an eyewitness's silence, is the only reasonable way to interpret said silence.  We the jury shall make our own decision whether the witness was silent because she thought it false, or merely "chose to exclude" it for her own unknown reasons.

Eyewitness Accounts Vary Based on Their Scope

When I interview an eyewitness, I am very careful to set the parameter for the testimony before I begin.

Something you obviously cannot do with ancient written testimony whose authors have been dead for 2,000 years.

I usually frame the interview by saying something like, “Please tell me everything you saw from the moment the robber came in the bank, to the moment he left.”

A request you don't know the gospel authors were intending or not intending to fulfill , in their motive to write.  I'd really like to ask Matthew "please tell me everything the risen Jesus told you during those 40 days of appearances which Acts 1:3 says you experienced, not merely the 15 second snippet you limited yourself to in your last chapter."

Unfortunately, such a request for greater quantity is useless in light of the death of the gospel authors.

If you believe in the power of prayer, why don't you ever tell your followers to ask God to fill out for them the factual details they wish the gospel authors would have included?  Or do we all recognize that nothing fails quite like prayer?  If the gospels are divinely inspired, such a prayer to God would be perfectly reasonable.  Yet you've never dared embark on such a futile undertaking as that.

I make sure to set the constraints the same way for each and every witness.

 And since you do nothing of the kind when restricted to documents authored by currently dead witnesses, as is the case with the gospels, all you are doing here is sounding intellectual without actually being intellectual.

Without these parameters, the resulting testimony would vary wildly from person to person.

So since you cannot impose those parameters on the 4 gospel authors, you are required to conclude their testimony varies widely from author to author for reasons not controlled for by your "parameters".

Some would include details prior to or after the robbery, some would include only the highlights, and some would omit major elements in the event.

 That's also because the eyewitnesses didn't all see the same thing or hear the same sounds.  That being the case, why do you automatically reject conservative Christian scholar Dr. Craig Evans' skeptical explanation for the John 11 raising of Lazarus being omitted by the Synoptics (Evans denies that we'd hear Jesus talking the way John's gospel presents, if we cold go back in time and listen to Jesus for ourselves, see here)?  How the fuck would you know whether the people who authored the Synoptics did or didn't know about that event?

But the skeptical solution (i.e., that assuming eyewitness gospel authorship, Matthew would surely have seen Jesus raise Lazarus, and with his desire to use apocalyptic fiction in his resurrection narrative anyway (Matthew 27:53, the zombie-resurrection story Licona denies the historicity of), and in light of the fact that Matthew alone has the risen Christ require his apostles teach the Gentiles "all" of the pre-Cross teachings (28:20), Matthew is especially likely to have mentioned the raising of Lazarus, were this a truely "historical" event).  So his omission reasonably implies he either never knew about it (suggesting it never happened), or he thought the story false (goodbye bible inerrancy). We are not limited to just picking an explanation that supports gospel reliability. 

If I want to be able to compare the testimony of two or three witnesses later, I’m going to have to make sure they begin with the same scope and framework in mind.

Something you cannot control for when dealing with documents authored by witnesses who have been dead for 2,000 years.

Furthermore, I object to your constant resort to "witness" and "eyewitness" in this analysis, as there are numerous cogent arguments that the gospels are at best a tangled pastiche of late Christian tradition and a few things Jesus really did say.  John Meier, Christian scholar, author of the comprehensive 4-volume "Jesus: A Marginal Jew", says that numerous times in the Synoptic gospels, a story about what Jesus said or did is in reality something created by Christian Jews, for example:

 See here.  I think this is where you try to do god service by exclaiming that just because a scholar more competent than you in the gospels, disagrees with you, doesn't necessarily mean he is in the right.  Well he doesn't have to be.  You can hardly label as irrational the skeptic who says the odds of who is right favor Meier far more than they favor you.

The Gospel authors clearly did not testify with the same initial instructions. There was no unifying investigator present to set the framework for their testimony, so their responses vary in the same way they would vary today if the scope of their testimony was not established from the onset. Mark, according to Papias, the 1st Century Bishop of Hierapolis, “became Peter’s interpreter and wrote accurately all that he remembered, not, indeed, in order, of the things said and done by the Lord. For he had not heard the Lord, nor had followed him, but later on, followed Peter, who used to give teaching as necessity demanded but not making, as it were, an arrangement of the Lord’s oracles, so that Mark did nothing wrong in thus writing down single points as he remembered them. For to one thing he gave attention, to leave out nothing of what he had heard and to make no false statements in them.” More concerned about accuracy of individual events than the order in which they occurred, Mark offered details like many of my witnesses who are interviewed without a unified parameter. Mark is simply recording the preaching of Peter, and Peter only referred to portions of Jesus’ life and ministry, making no effort to order them for his listeners.

Your uncritical acceptance of Papias' comment that Peter is Mark's source, is found faulty even by conservative evangelical standards.  Guelich says in the evangelical Word Biblical Commentary:

How is one to accept Papias’s testimony? On the one side, the preponderance of scholarship over the centuries has accepted this witness in total. It has its defendants among critical scholars today (e.g., Cranfield, 5; Kürzinger, BZ 21 [1977] 245–64; Hengel, Studies, 47–50). On the opposite side, many contemporary scholars have totally rejected Papias’s views (e.g., Niederwimmer, ZNW 58 [1967] 172–88; Kümmel, Introduction, 97; Körtner, ZNW 71 [1980] 171). Somewhere in the middle are those who accept Papias’s identification of the writer as Mark but question his explanation of Mark’s material as reminiscences of Peter’s preaching (e.g., Pesch, 1:9; Ernst, 21; Lührmann, 5).

Without doubt a close examination of Mark’s material will show that the evangelist did not simply write his Gospel based on his notes or memory of Peter’s teachings. The amazing similarity in language, style, and form of the Synoptic tradition between the Markan and non-Markan materials of Matthew and Luke (cf. John’s Gospel) hardly suggests that Mark’s materials were shaped by one man, be he either Peter or Mark. Furthermore, the Commentary will demonstrate the presence of multiple traditional milieus (e.g., the two Feedings), stages in the development of traditional units (e.g., 5:1–20), and the thematic combination of units into collections (e.g., 4:1–34) within the Markan materials that point to a more complex traditional background than mental or written notes of another’s preaching. Therefore, while Papias may accurately identify the author as Mark, his description of Mark’s source and content is oversimplified at best.

Guelich, R. A. (2002). Vol. 34A: Word Biblical Commentary : Mark 1-8:26.
Word Biblical Commentary (Page xxvii). Dallas: Word, Incorporated.

 I'm not saying you lose merely because I can find Christian scholars who disagree with your simplistic uncritical trusting acceptance of patristic testimony.  I'm saying you incorrect to charge skeptics with being unreasonable merely because they hesitate longer than you before accepting patristic sources.

Eyewitness Accounts Vary Based on Their Perspective and Purpose

They also vary sometimes because eyewitnesses tell lies or are sincerely mistaken. Funny how you never give that possibility any consideration.  Actually not really, you are an inerrantist:  You are not here to be objective, but to push the inerrancy agenda.  And if you started personally doubting biblical reliability, the fact that you have a history of making money selling biblical reliability justifies the suspicion that you'd never honestly or publicly admit it.  You become a liberal, and you can look forward to being abandoned by the inerrantist apologists you currently network with.  Most people aren't stupid enough to nuke their opportunities to make money and preserve stability.

In addition, the witnesses I interview often want to highlight a particular element in the crime scene or a particular suspect behavior they think is important. Sometimes their choice of detail is influenced greatly by their own life history. Their values, experiences and personal concerns guide their selection of which details they include, and which they omit. Witnesses also typically try to offer what they think I am looking for as the detective rather than every little thing they actually saw. They are speaking to a specific audience (an investigator), and this has an impact on what they choose to include or omit. When this happens, I have to refocus each witness and ask them to fill in the details they skipped over, including everything they saw, even if they don’t think it’s important to me as a detective. If I don’t encourage eyewitnesses to be more inclusive and specific, they will omit important details.

The Gospel authors were not similarly directed. They had specific audiences in mind and particular perspectives to offer, and none of their testimony was guided by a unifying investigator who could encourage them to fill in the missing details.

 Then you are denying their inspiration by God, whom you say could very well have had them fill in the missing details had He wished them to.

Luke clearly had a particular reader in mind (Theophilus): “Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile an account of the things accomplished among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, it seemed fitting for me as well, having investigated everything carefully from the beginning, to write it out for you in consecutive order, most excellent Theophilus; so that you may know the exact truth about the things you have been taught (Luke 1)”. Like other witnesses and historians, Luke likely allowed his intended audience to influence his selection of details. His testimony was also most certainly shaped by his own life experience (as an educated man),his own personal history, and his values.

 And conservative Christian scholars can also be found who say this "Theophilus" was just a figure of speech, and that Luke used this name to characterize any Christian reader:

Where did Luke write from, and to whom did he write? These questions probably are unanswerable. Luke dedicated the book to Theophilus, and Theophilus is a Greek name. Did Luke then write primarily to Gentiles? If so, why did he concern himself so much with Jewish questions? Why the elaborate messianic proofs of Peter’s sermons in Acts 2 and 3 if not to provide his readers with a pattern for witness to Jews? The most likely answer is that Luke intended his work for Christian communities that included both Jews and Gentiles—mixed congregations such as those we encounter frequently in Paul’s epistles.

Polhill, J. B. (2001, c1992). Vol. 26: Acts (electronic ed.). Logos Library System;
The New American Commentary (Page 31). Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers.

In other words, Acts was written for believing communities, and thus not intended to satisfy skeptics, rationally warranting skeptics if they choose to ignore Luke and Acts.  They'd be acting more in conformity to the author's wish, than Christian apologists today who ignore authorial intent and childishly splatter every biblical thing to every part of the cosmos. 

Matthew did something similar when he highlighted the details of Jesus’ life most relevant to Matthew’s Jewish audience.

 But patristic accounts make clear that he wrote for Jews:

The Gospel according to Matthew was written to the Jews. For they laid particular stress upon the fact that Christ [should be] of the seed of David. Matthew also, who had a still greater desire [to establish this point], took particular pains to afford them convincing proof that Christ is of the seed of David; and therefore he commences with [an account of] His genealogy.

See here.

That is, the author of Matthew seriously expected for unbelieving Jews to find his story of Jesus' virgin birth to be true, and to find his use of Isaiah 7:14 to be legitimate.  In other words, if you are going to be so accepting of patristic testimony about gospel authorship, the apostles were rather gullible and anti-intellectual.  Any self-respecting non-Christian Jew, knowledgeable of the OT, would not be persuaded by such presumptive storytelling.  Scholars complain there's no evidence in pre-Christian Judaism that Isaiah 7:14 was considered messianic prophecy.  

Yet we have to believe that the author of the most Jewish sounding gospel, surely knew that non-Christian Jews do not just buh-leeve any interpretation of their OT that outsiders give.  Yet Matthew engages in precisely zero attempted justification for his use of Isaiah 7:14, nor does he provide anything useful to help non-Jews track these things down.  He had the objectivity-level of a KJV Onlyist who thinks screaming bible verses at people causes the Holy Spirit to do things.  He seems to think that there's just no rationality in questioning anything he has to say, thus preempting any need for him to bother with the least bit of documentation of sources.  No thank you.

Eyewitness Accounts Vary Based on Their Knowledge of Other Testimony

Sometimes an eyewitness will only provide those details he thinks are missing from the testimony of others. This is most likely to occur if the witness is the last one to be interviewed and he (or she) is already familiar with the testimony of the other witnesses. When I see this happening, I ask this last witness to pretend like he or she is the only witness in my case, “Try to include every detail like I’ve never heard anything about the case. Pretend like I know nothing about the event.” Once the witness has done that, I may go back and re-interview the prior witnesses to see why they didn’t mention the late details offered by the final witness. In the end, my reports related to everyone’s testimony will be as complete as possible, including all the details remembered by each person I interviewed.

The gospel authors were not similarly directed and re-interviewed. John was the last person to provide an account, and he clearly selected those events important to him, given his stated goal: “…many other signs Jesus also performed in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these have been written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing you may have life in His name (John 20)”. John knew what had already been provided by others, and he selected specific events (some which were previously unreported) to make his case.

 And as usual, you tell your followers nothing about the growing conservative Christian scholarly view that John's gospel attributes to Jesus things Jesus never actually said or did.  This, despite your quickness to believe everything you read in the early church fathers, such as Clement of Alexandria's statement, which clearly differentiates John's subject matter from the "external facts" subject matter in the Synoptics:

But, last of all, John, perceiving that the external facts had been made plain in the Gospel, being urged by his friends, and inspired by the Spirit, composed a spiritual Gospel. This is the account of Clement. ( Eusebius, Hist. Eccl., 6:14)     

But John, the last of all, seeing that what was corporeal was set forth in the Gospels, on the entreaty of his intimate friends, and inspired by the Spirit, composed a spiritual Gospel. (ANF, Vol. II, Fragments of Clement of Alexandria, From the Books of the Hypotyposes)

 It doesn't matter if you can trifle that Clement's remarks can be plausibly interpreted to say John also provided "external facts", you certainly cannot condemn as unreasonable my own interpretation that says Clement here was saying John's purpose was not to convey external facts.  The fact that my interpretation would kill evangelical conservativism in its cradle, doesn't suddenly mean the interpretation is wrong or unreasonable. 

Wallace continues:

He acknowledged his limited choice of data: “…there are also many other things which Jesus did, which if they were written in detail, I suppose that even the world itself would not contain the books that would be written (John 21)”. John admitted what we already know: witnesses pick and choose from their own observations unless they are specifically directed to do otherwise.

I don't have a problem with the gospel authors picking and choosing what material to include or exclude.  I have a problem with modern-day Christian apologists who blindly assume that only the explanations for this, which help defend biblical inerrancy, are the only explanations that have any significance.  Once again, you also know that eyewitnesses will differ because they are lying or mistaken, but you never entertain this obvious reality here...probably because to suggest the gospel eyewitnesses differ from each other due to lying or mistake, is to raise possibilities you don't wish to raise...such as bible inerrancy being a false doctrine.

Because the gospel authors were not specifically instructed, guided or re-interviewed by a single detective, we simply cannot conclude much from the differences between the accounts.

Bullshit.  If you think Peter was the source behind Mark's gospel, you'll have a hard time explaining one of Mark's more striking and unexpected omissions:

“Messiah”?  or “Messiah, Son of the living God”?
Mark 8	Matthew 16
27 Jesus went out, along with His disciples, to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and on the way He questioned His disciples, saying to them, "Who do people say that I am?"   28 They told Him, saying, "John the Baptist; and others say Elijah; but others, one of the prophets."   29 And He continued by questioning them, "But who do you say that I am?" Peter answered and said to Him, "You are the Christ."  (omitted!)    30 And He warned them to tell no one about Him.  31 And He began to teach them that the Son of Man must  suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes,	13 Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi,   He was asking His disciples, "Who do people say that the Son of Man is?"  14 And they said, "Some say John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; but still others, Jeremiah, or one of the prophets."  15 He said to them, "But who do you say that I am?"  16 Simon Peter answered, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God."  17 And Jesus said to him, "Blessed are you, Simon Barjona, because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but My Father who is in heaven.  18 "I also say to you that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build My church; and the gates of Hades will not overpower it.  19 "I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; and whatever you bind on earth shall have been bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall have been loosed in heaven."  20 Then He warned the disciples that they should tell no one that He was the Christ. 21 From that time Jesus began to show His disciples that He must go to Jerusalem, and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised up on the third day.

 Now what, Wallace?  Do you seriously think that Mark knew Jesus' answer was as long and theologically significant as the one we today see in Matthew's version, and Mark merely "chose for unknown reasons to exclude" such critically important part of Jesus' answer?  FUCK YOU.

Conservatives defend by saying Peter didn't wish to impose his authority on others, but this is total bullshit, since if Jesus really did give the longer answer preserved in Matthew, we are reasonable to assume Peter would not sideline Jesus' statement, but would have properly done what even Paul did, and make clear how and why he possesses the authority that he does.

Nah, the authority that Jesus bequeaths on Peter in Matthew's longer version is not something Mark would likely have omitted (Mark never has Jesus giving anybody "keys to the kingdom", so you cannot even pretend that "Mark covered the matter once and didn't feel it needed repeating"), had he known Jesus' answer was that long.  Therefore, you cannot blame me, any skeptic, John Meier, or most Christian scholars, for concluding that Mark omitted it because he and Peter remembered Jesus' answer being shorter, and therefore, Matthew's longer version is not what Jesus really said, it is what Matthew has falsely fabricated and embellished in the effort to give more dramatic effect to this particular scene.

Skeptics sometimes infer more from omissions (or inclusions) in the Gospels than what is reasonable, especially given the manner in which the Gospels came to be written.

And inerrantists sometimes give more weight to inerrancy-favoring explanations than the evidence will allow.  But surely its only the skeptics who are dominated by their presuppositions, while Christian inerrantists are objective calculators pushing no agenda.

Because the four authors were not specifically instructed, guided or re-interviewed by a single detective, we simply cannot conclude much from the differences between the accounts.

That's stupid, there's no Christian gospel scholar on the face of the earth that will say our modern inability to get the authors to fill in the blanks means we cannot draw reasonable inferences from the way they differ from one another.  Even inerrantist Christian scholars, such as J.A. Brooks,  explain Matthew's and Luke's softer form of a story than the version Mark gave, is because they are "toning down" language of Mark that they believe is errant or likely to support an errant view:

Mark 6:5 This statement about Jesus’ inability to do something is one of the most striking instances of Mark’s boldness and candor. It is omitted by Luke 4:16–30 and toned down by Matt 13:58.

Brooks, J. A. (2001, c1991). Vol. 23: Mark (electronic e.). Logos Library System;
The New American Commentary (Page 100). Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers.

If Matthew thought Mark's gospel was "inerrant", he'd no more "tone down" Mark's choice of wording than YOU would.  

We must, instead, do our best to employ the four part template we use to evaluate eyewitness reliability after the fact.

 No, we should examine the gospels using standard techniques that all historians use to analyze the probable truth-content of other similarly ancient documents.  There is some overlap between the methods of historiography used by historians, and rules of evidence as used in modern American courts, but the issues with ancient testimony are far more complicated than modern court rules of evidence were intended to address.  Wallace, do you know of any court cases where trial was allowed on a question that required the truth to rest upon what a 2,000 year old document said?  Obviously not.  When I accuse you of using clever marketing bells and whistles as gimmicks to con Christians into buying your stuff, that's not as inaccurate as you'd wish.  What's your next book going to be?  "True Colors:  How Techniques used by Painters Reveal the Truth of Bible Inerrancy?"

The fact that it doesn't make sense is precisely why there's money in it, remember?

This template (as I’ve described it in Cold-Case Christianity), provides us with confidence in the trustworthy nature of the Biblical narratives. That’s why you can trust the Gospel eyewitness accounts, even though some are missing important details.

I find it funny that you never considered an equally likely explanation, that eyewitnesses often differ from one another because some of them are lying or mistaken.  That's also a stark reality daily experienced in courts of law, but you omit this genuine possibility as if only a crazy person would consider it.

Probably because to even start talking about the possibility of eyewitnesses lying or being mistaken, opens the door to kissing bible inerrancy goodbye forever.   Wow, even criminal investigators are blinded by their own biases.  Thanks for the lesson.