My challenge to Alisa Childers: justifying skepticism without falsifying Christianity

 Here is my reply to a video by Christian apologist Alisa Childers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETyzqrM3tB8

(wow, within about 20 minutes, Childers deleted this comment!)

Here is the full text in case that post is deleted (it was, about 20 minutes after I posted it).

Barry Jones

0 seconds ago

Even assuming Christianity is everything Childers thinks it is, one of the most powerful justifications for gospel-skepticism is the inability of any Christian to make a prima facie case for their claim that the bible "applies to us today". First, even assuming the OT and NT were complete as 66 books and viewed as canonical by Christians of the mid-first century, the fact that 2,000 years have passed, and the fact that today's Christian scholars disagree with each other over nearly every statement in the NT, means the question of why anybody thinks the bible "applies to us today" is legitimate and needs to be definitively answered by those who insist the bible "applies to us today". THEY are making the claim, they have no right to expect others to believe it until the prima facie case is made. Just like Protestants have the right to disregard the Apocrypha given their reasonable belief that Catholics have failed to make a prima facie case that it is canonical. Second, exactly what in the bible "applies to us today" is furiously debated within Christianity, particularly between dispensationalists, and between them and those who espouse covenant theology. If spiritually alive people disagree so much on that question, they are fools to "expect" spiritually dead unbelievers to figure out which Christian view is the "right" one. Third, the question of how and whether the bible "applies to us today" cannot be answered with solely biblical authority, which means the conservative or fundamentalist answer to that question should not be treated as if it was as equally correct as anything stated in the NT. The survival of the bible between the first century and today was due to reasons outside the biblical text itself. Mostly anonymous strangers from history made decisions about what was to be in a NT "canon", the records we have from Eusebius and others indicate there was much dispute at the early stages, and today's Christians, despite lacking the first clue as to who these strangers were, still insist that such strangers surely were "inspired by God" to adopt the canonical opinions that resulted in the current 27 book NT canon. It doesn't matter if that canonical theory is true, you cannot DEMONSTRATE it to be true, and the less you "demonstrate" such a thing, the more reasonable it is to say the formation of the canon had less to do with "god" and more to do with doctrinal and political controversies by people who had zero divine infallibility. You can't evne prove the slightly identifiable biblical authors were infallible in anything they wrote, how much worse for anonymous strangers before Eusebius who made decisions about what should be in the canon? Fourth, then there is the other problem of why Christians today view those strangers as "inspired by God" to "recognize" the 27 book NT canon. If those strangers were inspired by God to make such decisions, why don't Christians view those "discoveries" to be equally as infallible and binding as they view biblical text itself, which they also claim is "inspired by God"? Is there something in the bible that specifies that when God inspires later generations of Christians, that inspiration will be less intense than the inspiration God allegedly bestowed upon the original biblical authors? No. So the problem is that today's apologist wants us to believe God "guided" these strangers between the 1st and 3rd centuries, in their decisions concerning what books should be in a "canon", but god did NOT guide them with that level of infallibility that he allegedly did for the biblical authors. Skeptics observe that there was no evidence that God "guided" any such people in the first place, so for the skeptic, these trifles about God bestowing different levels of inspiration on different people involved in the bible's preservation unto today, is nothing but idle speculation. The evidence in favor of the Christian viewpoint is nowhere near as strong or convincing as to render skepticism about the matter "unreasonable". Fifth, when the skeptic refuses to listen to any Christian unless they are inspired by God to the point of inerrancy, today's apologists will immediately balk because they know perfectly well that there are no Christians today who possess that intense level of divine guidance. But we have to ask: the inability of today's Christian to provide the requested goods the way the allegedly divinely inspired apostles did, doesn't mean the request is unreasonable: If heresy and spiritual deception carry all of the horrific eternal consequences the bible seems to teach, the skeptic is very reasonable to insist that the risks of getting involved in this Christianity-business are so great, the only reasonable position is to limit one's education abour the bible to just those Christian teachers who possess infallibility...which is perfectly harmonious with the biblical model, in which the allegedly divinely inspired apostles were the proper "teachers". Us skeptics are thus perfectly reasonable to disregard any "teachings" from anybody except those who possess the same level of divine guidance that Childers thinks the original biblical authors had. Our daily decisions (to drive a car, to eat a meal without checking for poison, etc) do not carry the horrific and eternal consequences that the bible seems to attach to Christians who espoused false theology (Matthew 7:22-23, Galatians 1:6-9). Most Christians cannot avoid agreeing with me on the point. The Calvinists don't want you to learn from Arminian teachers, and Arminians don't want you to learn from Calvinists. Yes, apparently, we DO have to worry about the consequences of being misled by imperfect "teachers". It hardly needs to be pointed out that no Christian today can make any showing that they possess that level of divine guidance they speculate was possessed by the human biblical authors, therefore, the skeptic is just as reasonable to ignore the teachings of an imperfect Christian today, no less than the skeptic is reasonable to refrain from betting his life savings after getting advice from an imperfect prophet. WE are taking that risk, it is OUR soul that stands to lose and lose big...the Christian has no right to pretend that we "should" be willing to risk our eternal fate by trying to learn from Christian teachers who lack this critical attribute of infallibility. Thus the skeptical demand for infallible Christian teachers remains reasonable despite the Christians' obvious inability to supply them. Sixth and finally, it doesn't matter if Jesus really rose from the dead. That does NOT automatically "vindicate" Jesus. Deuteronomy 13:1-5 warns that the Hebrews were not to follow the teachings of a prophet even if he accomplished a genuinely supernatural miracle. The right test was whether the prophet spoke in harmony with the given Mosaic Law. So applying the same principle today, we do not ask whether Jesus rose from the dead, because even if he did, that could not reasonably foreclose the question of whether he taught heresy. We ask whether his teachings were in harmony with Mosaic law. They were not, especially if we read him, as Christians themselves do, through the lens of Paul's law-free gospel. The notion that Jesus' death "fulfilled" the law and changed anything is merely a claim of Paul and some of Jesus' early followers. By no means is that claim beyond dispute. And in light of Matthew 28:20, it would appear that regardless of how Matthew interpreted the theological consequences of Jesus' death in "fulfilling the law", the risen Christ nevertheless required that all future Gentile converts obey everything he previously taught the apostles. What did Jesus previously teach the apostles? Jesus' statement in Matthew 5:17-20 becomes reasonably legalistic when interpreted within its own context (Jesus requires actual personal righteousness on the part of each individual person, see vv. 21 ff, the context in no way shape or form suggests "imputed" or "imparted" righteousness). There is no generally accepted rule of hermeneutics requiring non-Christians to adopt only those interpretations of the bible that harmonize with each other. Not even most Christian scholars adopt biblical inerrancy. In a nutshell, that's a very powerful justification for skepticism toward Christianity. That's all it is. It does not prove Christianity false. As testified by numerous deadlocked juries, you can be reasonable to adopt a view that is contrary to the truth, if in fact what's "true" is extremely difficult to ascertain.

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