Reply to Steve Hays replying to Greg Bahnsen on the resurrection of Jesus

This is my reply to a Triablogue article by Steve Hays entitled:

Is it improper to argue evidentially for the Resurrection?
A friend asked me to comment on an old article by the late Greg Bahnsen:
https://answersingenesis.org/apologetics/the-impropriety-of-evidentially-arguing-for-the-resurrection/

However, a serious difficulty arises when the epistemological significance of the resurrection is separated from its soteriological function. It is correct to hold that God’s raising of Jesus from the dead saves us both from sin and agnosticism, but it would be mistaken to understand by this that the epistemological problem could be handled independently of the (broader) moral problem which is at its base. It is with regret that one notices neo-evangelicals severing the justifying efficacy of Christ’s resurrection from its truth-accrediting function. In reality, the latter is dependent upon the former. Only as Christ’s resurrection (with its ensuing regeneration by the Holy Spirit of Christ) saves a sinner from his rebellion against God and God’s Word, can it properly function to exhibit evidence for God’s truthfulness.

i) The significance of the Resurrection is multifaceted, so it's a question of which facet it is deployed to prove. It has an soteriological value but also evidential value. By raising Jesus from the dead, the Father vindicates the mission of Jesus, confirming who he claims to be. If Jesus was a false prophet, God would leave him to rot in the grave.

Then apparently Steve Hays forgot about that bible verse that says God may allow a false prophet to work genuinely supernatural miracles.  See Deuteronomy 13:1-3.  Apparently, the doing of a real miracle does NOT end the discussion about whether that person's message is what God wants the hearers to accept.

The problem for the Christian apologist at that point is how spiritually dead people are supposed to figure out which workers of genuinely supernatural miracles are approved by God, and which workers of genuinely supernatural miracles are false prophets god is using to test people.  Especially if spiritually alive people such as Catholics and Protestants cannot even agree on whether God has caused Mary to miraculously appear in modern times.

ii) The reversal of death is an overwhelming phenomenon, 

Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead and his turning a few fishes and loaves into enough to feed 5,000 people is also an overwhelming proposition, yet curiously, today's apologists reserve the mighty change in the disciples solely to Jesus' last alleged miracle, his rising from the dead.  What fool would trifle that there is an important difference between watching your messiah friend raise a 4-day dead decomposing corpse back to life, and your messiah friend being alive three days after he died?

ii) Due to common grace, some unbelievers are more reasonable than others. They retain more common sense. 

thanks for supplying me with all I need to justifiably blame god for my inability to see things your way.  I didn't deserve to be born into a sinful human race, but if your god made it happen anyway, then your ideas about what's morally "good" are probably too deranged to suppose you could profit from rebuttal.

Furthermore, since inductive argumentation is dependent upon the premise of uniformity, and since this premise can only be established by a Christian presupposing the truth of Scripture (for Hume’s skepticism has yet to be countered on anything but presuppositional grounds), the “evidentialist’s” argument is really presuppositional at base anyway. The non-Christian has no right to expect regularity in nature and the honest skeptic knows it; so, an inductive argument for the historical resurrection could only have been probative force for one who granted the truth of Christianity already. 

It's true that induction presents a paradox for secular philosophy. 

it's also a paradox for the inerrantist Calvinist who is sure that the stranger's claim of gold fish who audibly testify to the gospel, is false, but who nevertheless cannot absolutely deny that possibility due to his belief that stranger things have happened.

ii) It's true that many atheists raise a classic uncomprehending objection to the Resurrection by laying odds–as if this should be treated the same way as a naturally occurring event. 

It's true that many Calvinists raise a classic uncomprehending objection to the "god made my gold fish speak to me in English" report from the stranger on the bus, by laying odds, as if this should be treated the same way as a naturally occurring event.

i) It's true that there's often not enough common ground between Christians and some unbelievers to make a case for the Resurrection that an unbeliever will find convincing. 

then you disagree with Van Tilian Calvinist Jeff Durbin, who insists that unbelievers are quite sure that Jesus rose from the dead, they just don't wish to admit it because they like to live in rebellion against their creator.

ii) But this also raises the problem of the criterion. Which enjoys priority: criteria or paradigm examples? If you witness a miracle, you don't begin with criteria but with the event itself. 

Then you obviously disagree with Gary Habermas, Mike Licona, William Lane Craig and other evidentialists who start with criteria.  A fracture in the body of Christ likely more significant than whether you all agree that Tabasco sauce tastes great.

iv) I don't think it's necessary or realistic for a Christian apologist to assign odds to the case for the Resurrection. We simply marshall the available evidence. It is what it is. There's no need to conjure up an artificial statistic regarding the degree of probability. 

Then you disagree with all modern historians, including all apologists who defend the resurrection of Jesus in terms of probability, such as Gary Habermas, Mike Licona, and William Lane Craig.  You are horrifically naive, to say that the evidence "is what it is".  Do you need to be told why tautologies never promote the cause of truth?

v) I'd add, as I've mentioned on several occasions, that there's an overemphasize on scrutinizing ancient documentary evidence. While that foundation is indefensible, Christianity is a living religion with a living Savior. Jesus answers prayer. 

Let me know when you find any such case that you think is the most impervious to falsification.

Jesus appears to people. 

Really?  What's your best evidence?  I'm ready to discuss it bit by bit.  Consider yourself challenged to put up or shut up.

Christ’s resurrection does not entail his deity, just as our future resurrection does not entail our divinity! And one could not argue that the first person to rise from the dead is God, for on that basis Lazarus would have greater claim to deity than Christ! The evidentialist may prove the resurrection of Jesus, but until he proves every other point of Christianity, then resurrection is an isolated, irrelevant, “brute” fact which is no aid to our apologetical efforts. Only within the system of Christian logic does the resurrection of Christ have meaning and implication; and that system of logical entailment and premises can only be used on a presuppositional basis-you do not argue into it. 

That's too ambitious and quite artificial. Take the actual eyewitnesses to the Resurrection.

If you could show that anything in the NT comes from "actual eyewitnesses to the Resurrection", you might have a point.

They didn't prove every other point of Christianity to acknowledge and be revolutionized by what they saw. They didn't have to operate within an explicit system of Christian logic.

yes, they did, you are to reject all forms of logic except those which lead to apostle Paul's version of Christianity.  see Colossians 2:8.   True believers do not merely accept the evidence, they have been transformed by the renewing of their mind, Romans 12:2.  And they maintain such belief by automatically avoiding any gainsayer after the second warning, see Titus 3:9-11.

i) But the Scriptures were not enough. Disciples had to actually witness the Risen Lord to be convinced.

But the risen Christ still blesses blind faith.  Ask yourself what "do not see" means in John 20:29.  I suppose the reason John dishonestly placed his own theology in Jesus' mouth was because Jesus stopped appearing to people, and he needed to answer the concerns of converts asking "if Jesus appeared to you, why doesn't he appear to me?"

ii) An apologist has no control over the mindset of the unbeliever. Either God will open the eyes of the unbeliever or not. The duty of an apologist is simply to marshal the evidence that God has put at our disposal and leave the results to God.  Posted by steve at 11:30 AM

Then since you think the bible is best source of information possible, you are making Christianity unnecessarily complex if if you do anything more than quote bible verses to unbelievers to fulfill your apologetics obligation.  Perhaps your desire to go beyond the bible actually signifies you don't seriously think the bible is "sufficient", and you are just deceiving yourself by saying you think the bible is "sufficient".

Demolishing Triablogue: No reasons for hell

This is my reply to an article by Steve Hays of Triablogue entitled

Reasons for hell

Recently I was listening to philosophical theologians give bad answers on hell.

 You should have recognized their bad answers likely implied they have been previously warned at least twice against their error, and accordingly you should have obeyed that part of the bible that tells you to avoid them, see Titus 3:9-11.

I've probably discussed most of this before at one time or another, but it may be useful to summarize them in one place. By way of preliminary comment, the primary reason Christians believe in hell

Speak for yourself, it should be obvious to a smart guy like you that not all Christians believe in hell, unless you use that doctrine as a test of orthodoxy.  Can a person be genuinely born-again while adopting annihilationism, yes or no?  If yes, then couldn't it be argued that every bit of time you spend arguing peripherals, the more you sin by taking away time better spend defending essentials?

is because they believe what the Bible says about hell.

Well gee, so do the Jehovah's Witnesses and the 7th Day Adventists.

It isn't necessary to provide an independent, philosophical defense of hell.

Especially given that such would be impossible, lest you look a little too consistent in your Calvinism and admit you worship a sadistic lunatic.

It's useful in apologetics and evangelism to be able to do that, but the warrant for believing in hell doesn't rely on that.

There's plenty of good warrant for ascribing error to the NT doctrine of eternal conscious torment.

1. Infinite God
i) A typical objection goes like this: how can a just God mete out infinite punishment for finite sin? How can the sins of a lifetime merit infinite punishment? The typical reply is that a sin against an infinite God is infinitely culpable, and merits infinite punishment.

Except that God's justice against sin in the OT is very often FULLY satisfied by decidedly temporal means of atonement, such as animal sacrifice.  Hell, the master who rapes his slave-girl is automatically forgiven simply by donating one of his rams to the priests, no repentance or change beyond this is expressed or implied:

 20 'Now if a man lies carnally with a woman who is a slave acquired for another man, but who has in no way been redeemed nor given her freedom, there shall be punishment; they shall not, however, be put to death, because she was not free.
 21 'He shall bring his guilt offering to the LORD to the doorway of the tent of meeting, a ram for a guilt offering.
 22 'The priest shall also make atonement for him with the ram of the guilt offering before the LORD for his sin which he has committed, and the sin which he has committed will be forgiven him.   (Lev. 19:20-22 NAU)

Sometimes Leviticus is more specific than we might expect an ancient Hebrew author to be, to make sure the reader recognized how completely animal blood expiated God's wrath against sin.  Concerning Yom Kippur, or the once-yearly animal sacrifice:

 29 "This shall be a permanent statute for you: in the seventh month, on the tenth day of the month, you shall humble your souls and not do any work, whether the native, or the alien who sojourns among you;
 30 for it is on this day that atonement shall be made for you to cleanse you; you will be clean from all your sins before the LORD. (Lev. 16:29-30 NAU)

Gee, really?  Steve Hays would probably trifle "in what sense did they become clean before the Lord?" 

Well gee, in the sense that "The Lord viewed them as clean"?

Sort of like, if you barged into Steve's house and said "your mother was just murdered!', he would probably trifle "in what sense, after all, 'murder' can be used by modern American persons in a variety of different ways!".  Obviously, this text was intended to be read aloud to the mostly illiterate Israelites, and such people would not likely have conjured up the stupid semantic trifles in their mind that are conjured up by Steve Hays...and his concern to make sure the NT book of Hebrews continues being held up as inerrant.

That's a popular answer because it's compact and uses the same principle as the critic, only turning that principle against the objection. But as it stands, it's a bad argument:

Thanks for the honesty.

ii) It equivocates over the nature of infinitude. The objection is to a quantitative infinite punishment. A temporal infinite. Everlasting punishment. For finite, discrete sins.

However, to say a sin may be infinitely culpable swaps in a qualitative concept. An infinite degree of badness. I'm not sure if that's even meaningful.

Skeptics like me will use such concessions from Christian apologists to straighten out the idiots that warm the pews every Sunday.  Half of the atheist bible critics' plight is in simply getting the "Christian" to correctly understand their own book.

In addition, what does it mean in this context to say that God is "infinite." In what morally relevant sense is God infinite in this argument? Perhaps what is meant is that God is infinitely good, so that a sin against an infinitely good God is infinitely bad, meriting infinite punishment. "Infinite" in the sense that God is as good as anything can be. Indeed, better than anything else. The uppermost maxima of goodness or exemplar of goodness. Something like that.
When you try to unpack the argument, it gets messy. I don't think this is a good argument as it stands.

Again, thanks for the honesty.

It does, however, contain a grain of truth, so I think it can be rehabilitated in some respect:

iii) There is a moral principle where the same action may be worse depending on who you do it to. It's worse to betray a friend than a stranger. It's worse to mistreat your elderly mother than to mistreat the telemarketer. So there can be degrees of culpability, not due to the action itself, but who it's directed to. Taken to a logical extreme, the argument is that we owe the most to God, we have the greatest obligation to God, so sinning against God is the worst kind of sin.

Except that in Steve Hays' very staunch 5-Point Calvinism, it is this infinite god who intended the sinner to sin the way he did, so that offending god by sinning is sort of like offending the person whom you gave a black eye to, because they took your hand and hit themselves with it.  How the fuck could a Calvinist believe anybody could "offend God"?  Is God offended when we manifest perfect compliance with his secret will?

Hays' displays his disturbing consistency by arguing elsewhere that God secretly wills that people disobey his revealed will, which while logical enough under his Calvinism, is viewed as shockingly heretical by most Christians.  See here.

Steve continues:

iv) There is, though, another complication to this argument. In what sense can we sin against God? We can't harm God.

Good point.  And yet Malachi uses the word "yet" to duck the obvious criticism that it is logically impossible to steal from God, see Malachi 3:8.  That's sort of like saying "Can a sinner make God go out of existence?  Yet you have caused God to stop existing."  Interesting how the little "yet" word can successfully shield an argument from deserved criticism.

It is, however, possible, to wrong someone without harming them. A thankless, malicious son can dishonor his father's memory. Suppose his dad was a conscientious father, but the son spreads scurrilous rumors about his late father that destroy his father's reputation. In one sense it's too late to harm is father. But there's still something terribly wrong about the action.

But according to Steve Hays, we only sin because God has infallibly predestined us to, and has secretly willed that we disobey his revealed will.  One can only wonder whether our "wronging" god even makes sense under such a fatalistic system as Calvinism.  Is it "wrong" to conform to God's secret will, yes or no?  If yes, then God is a stupid sadist for blaming us for such wrong since he rigged the game to make sure we couldn't possibly deviate from "wronging" him.  If "no", then god deprives himself of any basis to bitch, lest you serve a god who condemns people for OBEYING him?  But because Steve is brainwashed, he will just blindly assume that the idiot who wrote Romans 9:20 rendered all objections frivolous.

2. Eternal existence
i) A basic reason hell is forever is because human beings are forever. If human beings have an immortal soul (not to mention the resurrection of the body), then whatever happens to human beings will last forever.

Except that there are plenty of Christians and Christian scholars who teach annihilationism.  Probably because the "wrongness" of these doctrines are somewhat less obvious than the wrongness of 2+2=5... so that you can hardly blame them for adopting such doctrine.

They have an unending destiny because they have an unending existence. So whatever happens to them will go on forever. It continues because they continue. Annihilationists duck that by denying that human beings are naturally immortal.

ii) Now this is more of a necessary rather than sufficient condition for eternal punishment. In principle, it could be a argued that while whatever happens to them is never-ending, it needn't be the same thing forever. It can change. That's the contention of the universalist, as well as exponents of postmortem salvation. That requires a separate response.

It is, however, important to make the initial point that one reason damnation is inescapable is because existence is inescapable. Damnation never ceases because the damned never cease to exist.

Except that this is a philosophical objection, whereas Steve Hays' first commitment must be to the bible, whose OT clearly indicates god's justice against sin can be, and often is, fully satisfied by less than infinite means, such as animal sacrifice.  See above.  The reasonableness of that view is not going to be diminished merely because god's jailhouse lawyer can simply tack "in what sense?" onto everything they ever think of.  Steve Hays doesn't get to dictate how much stupid pretentijous trifling the unbeliever must put up with in his apologetics before they become reasonable to just flip him the middle finger and walk away. 

3. Apropos (2), a supporting argument is that damnation is forever because the damned continue to sin. An objection to this argument is that people have a capacity for change.

That can be true, but what causes them to change? In Christian theology, God's grace is transformative. If, however, God withholds his grace from the damned, then they don't get better. If anything, they get worse. More hardened.

Which denies the view of freewill held by most Christians, to the effect that we are just as capable of accepting Jesus solely by our freewill as we are capable of making a peanut butter sandwich by our own freewill.  Attributing only the good in your life to "god's grace" and the sin only to "self" is just stupid inconsistency, which renders void the many biblical passages on god "rewarding" those who do good.  If it wasn't us doing the good, then giving us a prize at the end anyway cannot rightfully be called "reward".  If the good doesn't come from us, but only from God, then only God can logically be "rewarded" if at all.

4. Apropos (3), why doesn't God enable the damned to change? Why doesn't God grant them the ability to repent?

This goes to another principle in Christian theology: in terms of eschatological judgment, some sinners get what they deserve while others get better than they deserve (no one gets worse than they deserve).

Sort of like when both of your kids disobey you and each eat one cookie before dinner, you beat one of them with a rod (Proverbs 22:15) and ground them for a month, while you give the other one $50 to go blow at the mall however she wishes, with your blessings.  Are you a fuckhead parent, yes or no?  Or did you suddenly discover how wonderful god was for enabling his jailhouse lawyers to invent "ad hoc" excuses whenever expediency dictates?

The reason the damned never leave hell is because they don't deserve to leave hell.

That's right.  If the 12 year old non-Christian girl who has done many good works of charity and gets good grades in school, should happen to reject the gospel invitation, then die in a state of unbelief in a car crash on the way home from church, God's righteousness permits no other fate for her except conscious eternal torment in "hell".

They don't deserve a better life.

You'd have been a bit more honest with your own doctrine had you specified that newborn babies do not deserve to be protected from death by rape.  God was never 'required' to give them anything better, so when he leaves them to suffer, this is nothing short of god's righteousness in action, amen?

Of course this violates common sense, since if everything is covered by the sovereignty of god, then the fact that most babies are not raped to death makes it reasonable for any Christian to suppose that God feels a moral obligation to give such protection.

That's their just desert, and there's nothing wrong with that. Indeed, there's something right with God.

Sort of like if you came home to find your mom being raped by a whole gang, the fact that she is a sinner and the fact that God himself obviously wasn't doing anything to protect her, makes it at best ambiguous whether or not you "should" do anything to prevent this crime.  But I'm sure that if you found out this happened to some mother down the street, and her son just stood around solely by choice and not fear while his mother was raped. you'd feel better knowing that God secretly wanted the rape and this neglect to happen exactly the way it did. 

Revealed will of God = "thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not murder", etc.
Secret will of God = "you shall kill that child, you shall obey that traffic signal", etc.

Is it morally good to act in conformity to the revealed will of God, yes or no?

Is it morally good to act in conformity to the secret will of God, yes or no?

Steve's Calvinism forces him to admit that Hitler's massacer of the Jews in WW2 was in perfect conformity to the "secret" will of God.  So...was it morally good for Hitler to act in conformity to God's secret will, yes or no?

Or did Steve suddenly discover there's room in Calvinism for moral relativity?

Hopefully you have a better understanding of why biblical theology causes me, an atheist, to stay awake at night, all worried "what if I'm wrong and the creator really is a sadistic lunatic?"

In Christian theology, God doesn't treat all equally-undeserving sinners alike.

Which is precisely why it is reasonable to call him a sadistic lunatic.  Just like if you didn't treat to the same discipline all of your kids who disobeyed you in the same exact way.  When the punished ones cry out "why didn't you punish her too?", you'd be 'godly' to reply "my ways are mysterious, I don't have to explain myself to you, and since you are getting what you deserve, you have no right to complain if I let other persons, equally deserving of this punishment, off the hook."  I'm sorry, but Steve is a fool to derive theology from Matthew 20:11-15...and so was Jesus for teaching such obviously unfair stupidity.  How would the world be if all employers were that arbitrary?

He draws a distinction. You shouldn't expect to get better than you deserve.

So because none of us "deserve" to have food, clothing and shelter, it can only be sinful and thus unreasonable motive why we seek these things.  Steve, why do you seek for that which you don't deserve?  isn't that sort of like the new inexperienced crew member at McDonald's wanting his starting wage to equal that of the crew members who have been there for 3 years?

Steve is also wrong biblially to condemn our wanting more than we deserve.  If God sends his rain on the just and the unjust (Matthew 5:45), then our aquiring things we don't deserve is a routine that God is responsible for, and therefore god is responsible for this routine creating a habit and expectation in our mind that we should have some things we don't deserve.

Throwing dice to decide god's will is biblical (Acts 1:26), so you should expect to get more than you deserve through the inevitability of chance + time.  Throw the dice often enough and they are bound to roll winner, and when they do, Calvinists will insist god wanted it that way.

In fact, Calvinists would say God is ultimately responsible for whatever defects in biblical and logical reasoning that you might engage in.  Could anything have more powerful justification than "god wanted it that way"?  No.  If the most reasonable thing possible is conformity to god's will, then under Calvinism, beating children to death is equally as reasonable as saving a little girl from drowning.  BOTH acts are exactly what God wanted, and by definition, God's will cannot possibly ever be "unreasonable".

To get just what you deserve is the essence of justice.

And for a justice system to decide for itself which among the two equally guilty criminals to let off the hook, and which to prosecute, is the antithesis of justice, lest you stupidly insist that the justice meted out in American Courts every day for the last 200 years is a bad idea? (Conforming to God's secret will, as America's history absolutely must, is a bad idea?).  Only in Calvinism could you get in trouble with God for doing exactly what he wanted when, where and how he wanted.  Everybody else would call this sadistic lunacy, and Calvinists reply with "that's just human logic!"

Let's just say God infallibly predestined me to avoid joining the Calvinist cause, ok?

They don't get out of hell because they deserve nothing better. They are in their natural element.

If we deserve nothing better than hell, why did God allow us to exist for the present on this better-than-hell earth?  Does God sometimes give people what they don't deserve?  If so, then why couldn't there be a strictly philosophical argument that this way of God remains true in the afterworld (i.e., sinners deserve to be in hell longer, but God limits the amount of time they spend there anyway, for the same reason he often makes life easier for undeserving criminals)?  Something is greatly amiss in your trifling attempt to make your sadistic god's ways sound plausible to modern western ears.  But since you view yourself as a puppet on a string, I'm sure you couldn't care less whether your reasoning does or doesn't square up with common sense.  Cultists are experts are justifying their departure from common sense and convincing themselves God wanted them to act contrary to "worldly wisdom".  The brainwashing is the same whether you push Christianity or ISIS.

There's something nihilistic, something morally subversive–even diabolical–about the idea that no matter what anyone ever does, it makes no ultimate different to what happens to them. To treat good and evil alike.

Then blame your god, who often treats criminals and law-abiding people alike.  And blame yourself for promoting Calvinism, a doctrine that says our sense of making a genuine difference is completely illusory and false, we can do nothing whatever except react to an infallibly predetermined plan.  And your god often treats evil and good alike.

5. Suppose (ex hypothesi) that human agents start out as a clean slate. By that I mean, suppose that initially they have no rap sheep. Their moral record is spotless.

There's no ex hypothesi about it, the bible forthrightly calls little kids "innocent", see Psalm 106:37-38, Matthew 18:3, 2nd Kings 22:16, 24:4, and under James 4:17,  which predicates sinfulness upon knowledge, for which babies, then who know nothing (i.e., they don't know the difference between good and evil, Isaiah 7:15) are correctly deemed "innocent".  If that contradicts Paul's doctrine of original sin in Romans 5, lets get excited about preaching the good news to those lost inerrantists.

I'm not an inerrantist, and for academically rigorous reasons, therefore, I really don't care if another part of the bible tells Steve that babies are infected with original sin, this doesn't impose the slightest intellectual obligation upon me to give up my reliance on grammar, context and genre, and add "reconcile this with what the bible says elsewhere" to the list of hermeneutical principles that scholars agree apply here.  Most Christian scholars are not inerrantists, those who are inerrantist cannot even agree amongst themselves about its scope, Steve Hays himself allegedly thinks the Chicago Statement on Bible Inerrancy was less than perfect, etc, etc.  So bible inerrancy is not sufficiently settled as to deserve being exalted in my mind to the status of governing hermeneutic.  I will NOT give up an otherwise contextually and grammatically justified interpretation of a bible verse merely because the interpretation contradicts my interpretation or somebody else's interpretation of some other bible verse.

Hays will trifle that biblical passages calling people "innocent" are only meant with reference to the human standard, but alas, it is "god" who is doing the talking in all the above-cited passages (at least as far as Steve is concerned) so it is Steve's burden to show that the "human standards only" interpretation arises from the grammar, context or genre of such passages.

Steve continues:

The first time I do something evil, that puts me behind.

Except that in Steve's world, whether raping children is "evil" depends on your frame of reference, and is therefore only a moral relativity.  Even if we granted that baby-rape violates God "revealed" will, Steve has already argue that any and all acts of man, including sin, necessarily conform to God's "secret" will, so that a completed act of baby-rape is biblically in harmony with God's secret will.

In other words, Steve wants us to believe that you can be "evil" because you conformed to the will of God.  Sort of like the parent who punishes their child for doing an act exactly when, where, and how the parent intended the act to be done (!?).  There's an excellent reason why Paul's smoke and mirrors evaporates at Romans 9:20.  There is no moral method anywhere near any accepted convention of reason or common sense, that will justify punishing a person for perfect obedience.  Except of course in the bible, where the stupider the act, the more "spiritual" it is (where you defeat death by getting yourself killed, and where strength is made perfect by lack of strength).  I call victory when Christians feel forced to decry the superiority of 'human reason'.  That's what one should expect from stupid cultists whose doctrines completely defy anything remotely approaching sensibility.  Whether it's about Jesus or Vishnu hardly matters.

Because I can't change my past, if I do something evil, I can't get back to where I was before I did evil.

Which would justify a lifetime of depression after you jaywalk.  Isn't it obvious how evil sin really is?

I can't get out from under that. If I did something evil, then it will always be the case that I did something evil. That's indelible. It doesn't fade with the passage of time. I don't become less guilty. Once I do something evil, there's no way to put that behind me. It's permanent. Evil has a timeless moral quality. There's no decay rate. The past is irrevocable.

Then the same must be true about your good deeds.  They too are permanent, right?

And the more evil things I do, the further behind I fall. A lifetime of cumulative wrongdoing.

Now you are just preaching the choir.

This is why vicarious atonement and penal substitution are fixtures of Christian redemption.

Maybe that's also why god offers to "forget your sins", because they are permanent? (Isa. 43:25-26).  No, Mr. God's Jailhouse lawyer, that doesn't mean he is only claiming to exempt people from the penalty for sin.  Read both verses, the human sense of literal memory failure is meant, even if the consequence is that this god would have to be insane.  The dumber it makes god look, the more likely the interpretation is correct, amen?

Without a Redeemer who atones for your sin, on your behalf and in your stead, your culpability because increasingly hopeless.

No, all we need is charcoal briquettes, a pair of tongs, and obviously non-existent creatures who seem to think heaven has air:

 1 In the year of King Uzziah's death I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, lofty and exalted, with the train of His robe filling the temple.
 2 Seraphim stood above Him, each having six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew.
 3 And one called out to another and said, "Holy, Holy, Holy, is the LORD of hosts, The whole earth is full of His glory."
 4 And the foundations of the thresholds trembled at the voice of him who called out, while the temple was filling with smoke.
 5 Then I said, "Woe is me, for I am ruined! Because I am a man of unclean lips, And I live among a people of unclean lips; For my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts."
 6 Then one of the seraphim flew to me with a burning coal in his hand, which he had taken from the altar with tongs. 7 He touched my mouth with it and said, "Behold, this has touched your lips; and your iniquity is taken away and your sin is forgiven." (Isa. 6:1-7 NAU)

(and Steve says "mere anthropomorphism! the get-out-of-jail-free card that is by definition necessarily always a correct interpretation with no obligation to actually justify it from the grammar or context or genre.)

Actually, we can be exempted from the penalties of even the most egregious sins (i.e, adultery and murder) by nothing more than god waiving his magic wand:

 11 "Thus says the LORD, 'Behold, I will raise up evil against you from your own household; I will even take your wives before your eyes and give them to your companion, and he will lie with your wives in broad daylight.
 12 'Indeed you did it secretly, but I will do this thing before all Israel, and under the sun.'"
 13 Then David said to Nathan, "I have sinned against the LORD." And Nathan said to David, "The LORD also has taken away your sin; you shall not die.
 (2 Sam. 12:11-13 NAU)

Feel free to dig your own theological grave by pretending the subsequent divinely caused death of David's baby was the "atonement".  You can't cover it with Yom Kippur, that didn't cover intentional sins.  Now what?  Maybe David committed adultery without intention?

Steve continues:

6. Counterfactual guilt
Another factor I've discussed, although it has yet to catch on, is that it's very nearsighted to limit culpability to the sins of a lifetime.

That's right.  If your teenage son jaywalks, you should save up to finance the desecration of his grave marker after he dies.  Culpability doesn't cease with physical death.  Only in stupid fanatical religion.

The sins we commit are related to our circumstances. Change the circumstances and we'd commit a different set of sins.

or not sinned at all, such as changing "we went to the titty-bar" to "we went to church".

It's not so much about committing a particular sin, but the character of the sinner. Put him in a different situation and he will commit different sins.

Put sinners in different situations and they might not sin.  Hence, the reason Christian parents counsel their kids against running around with the wrong crowd.

It's arbitrary to exclude from consideration all the wrongdoing he'd commit if the opportunity presented itself, and he could get away with it, as if guilt and innocence in God's eyes is a matter of lucking or unlucky timing or setting. Wrong place. Wrong time. Just missed it. Had you been there an hour sooner or later.

In other words, sin is inevitable...and yet God still bitches at humans over that which they are incapable of avoiding, sort of like bitching about the fact that humans need water.

But more directly to the point:  there are gullible or 'weaker' Christian brothers that will sin simply because of the peer pressure from other Christians, whereas had those Christians not come to visit, the weaker brother would probably not have sinned as he did.  So you are wrong, Steve:  how you act really IS dependent on the timing of your arrival to any situation and other circumstances.   The Christian man who has an anger problem shows up at his ex-wife's house and she's the only person there, and he does not sin.  But if he had showed up 5 minutes earlier when her boyfriend was there, he probably would have started a fight.  Steve, you are stupid if you think circumstance doesn't contribute to what motivates a person to sin or refrain from sin.

You also pretend that any act we might engage in would be sinful, when in fact chance and circumstance do not merely dictate what evil we'll do, but what ACT we will engage in.  Tarnishing the future possibility as an inevitable "sin" doesn't make sense, otherwise, why bother trying to stay away from Christians who live in sin?  If you are running around drinking on Saturday night, or staying at home reading your bible, you are still bound to sin, regardless, so how the fuck could it "matter" which way to spend that evening? 

What are you gonna say next?  Maybe that reading the bible is sinful for a Christian because their sin nature requires that their motive in doing so was to become puffed up with knowledge?

Yes, there are fuckhead Christians who demand that Christians repent of their repentance.  Read Valley of Vision by the Puritans, which is apparently approved of D.A. Carson and other prominent conservative Protestants.  I've heard the same in plenty of Protestant and Calvinist churches years ago.  I call them fuckheads because if you are too sinful to properly repent in the first place, then you are just sinning every subsequent time you repent of your prior repentance...in which case this Puritan soliloquy is little more than a dirge about the inevitability of sin.  Gee, maybe it was sinful also for any Puritan to compose or read Valley of Vision?

Steve continues:

7. Finally, and perhaps most fundamentally, critics of hell approach this issue from the wrong end.

So since many critics of hell are Christians, skeptics observe that even spiritually alive people have no guarantees of noticing important theological truth, making it even more reasonable for the spiritually dead person to stay completely away, if they so choose, from biblical "theology".   So for many non-Christians, it's much safer and more reasonable to just laugh off Christianity.

In Christian theology, the default assumption is that sinners are already lost.

I much prefer what Jesus said, and have fun getting original sin out of anything he said.  It would be like squeezing blood from a turnip.  See here and here.  Plenty of churches today are Pelagian, but its hard to remember that because the Protestants and Catholics usually squeal the loudest through the media.

They didn't start out in the right direction, then take a wrong turn. Rather, sinners are in a lost condition from the outset. They don't have to do anything extra to go to hell.

If you believe infection with original sin makes one worthy of hell, then you have no basis for making aborted babies any exception, as they too are worthy of hell, and apparently only an emotional worldly mammalian dislike of infant torture is the basis for any exception.  And Steve will triumphantly proclaim that if you don't like the idea of god subjecting babies to eternal conscious torment in hell forever, it's only because you aren't sufficiently "spiritual", the excuse cult leaders use to desensitize their followers to the obvious violations of common sense the cult requires them to engage in.  Yet Steve wants non-Calvinist Christians to view him as something other than brainwashed.

They didn't lose their way at some point along the journey. There was no fork in the road where they made a fatal moral choice. To be saved requires divine intervention.

But since the divine doesn't exist, we need not worry.  I only refute idiots on the internet for the benefit of the innocently ignorant people that might otherwise get sucked into all this stupid crap because of their lack of critical thinking skills.  Struggling to pay the rent and raise kids doesn't leave much opportunity to figure out why scholars disagree with each other about hermeneutics and historiography.

It's like a movie villain. He's already a villain when the movie begins.

So babies are already deserving of hell upon conception.  Another reason most spiritually alive Christians find Calvinism about as persuasive as atheism.

There's no backstory about how or when he became a villain. Does it have something to do with his childhood? Did he gradually turn to evil? Was there a crossroads where he made a decisive choice for evil?

Once again, Jesus did not teach the doctrine of original sin, and you are a hypocrite anyway for thinking the word of any follower of Christ could possibly have the same significance as his own words, as there is allegedly an infinite difference between advice from God himself, and advice from people claiming to represent him.  You are more safe depending on God's word, but you open the floodgates of ceaseless questions and uncertainty when you start telling yourself the words of other sinners are "inspired by God too".

That's not where the story begins. As far as the plot goes, there was never a time when he wasn't on the wrong path.

I end this post where I began it:  all attempts by hellers to "reconcile" or "harmonize" the OT texts on God's justice with the NT texts teaching eternal conscious torment, are clearly little more than the word-games you'd expect from a jailhouse lawyer (my scholarly view is that 2nd Temple Judaism became more and more influenced by pagan religion, hence, "hell" in the OT become more and more defined as the centuries go by). God's alleged "need" for justice against sin is itself contradictory to at least one biblical passage.  If God can exempt people from the consequences of sin as easily as waiving his magic wand (2nd Samuel 12:13), you'll find only deaf ears when you try to "explain" that God's holy nature "requires" that he judge sin. 

And expect theological disaster if you trifle that God's killing David's baby was an atoning sacrifice for David's sins of murder and adultery.  But without that type of atonment, you have no atonement, and hence, God can permanently exempt you from the penalty of sin without atonement and apparently nothing more than waiving his magic wand.  Or making you eat burning wood (Isaiah 6:6-7).

Did you notice that when Triablogue comes to town, atheists just scream in terror, run the other way plugging their ears and saying "Fall on us and hide us from the presence of Him who sits on the throne"?

Neither did I.

Demolishing Triablogue: Why do people believe in hell?

This is my reply to an article by Steve Hays entitled

Why do people believe in hell?

Posted by steve at 8:31 PM

I'm going to comment on an article by David Bentley Hart:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/opinion/sunday/christianity-religion-hell-bible.htmlHe's an essayist and Eastern Orthodox theologian. One of those chic fashionable theologians like Miroslav Volf or Eugene Peterson with a following among those who view themselves as progressive Christian cognoscenti. This is their idea of intellectually respectable Christianity. The Protestant counterpart to Catholic Thomists.

It raises a troubling question of social psychology. It's comforting to imagine that Christians generally accept the notion of a hell of eternal misery not because they're emotionally attached to it but because they see it as a small, inevitable zone of darkness peripheral to the larger spiritual landscape that–viewed in its totality–they find ravishingly lovely. And this is true of many.

i) I don't have a precise idea regarding the scale of damnation, but I hardly think it's small.

If a smart spiritually alive Christian guy like Steve the Staunch Five Point Calvinist doesn't have any precise idea regarding the "scale", he can hardly balk at spiritually dead skeptics who laugh at the bible's apparently intentional ambiguity about the scale.

ii) And I regard eternal retributive justice as a necessary background for a moral universe. That's not peripheral.

Then you apparently don't understand your own god's sense of justice.  God commanded the death penalty for crimes considered the most heinous, such as adultery and murder, yet in 2nd Samuel 12:13, after David has committed those two sins, the prophet Nathan says God has "taken away" David's sins therefore the otherwise mandatory penalty of death will not be required.  Gee, god can just "take away" sin in such unqualified manner?  Yet if you try to save this by saying David's baby was killed by God (v. 15, 18), then we are looking at God approving of child sacrifice for sin.  If the baby wasn't killed to "atone" for David's sin, then there is nothing left in the context to provide that atonement.  If you assume Yom Kippur would fix that, you are wrong, intentional sins could not be atoned for by the yearly sacrifice, see Numbers 15:28-31.  Exactly what sense does it make to say David's sins of adultery and premeditated murder were "accidental" or "unintentional"?  None.  So there you go, nothing in the religious context or literary context indicates that David's capital offenses were "atoned" for in any way, yet God was somehow still able to wave his magic wand and get rid of those sins regardless.  

And since getting rid of those sins did not require eternal suffering, it is not true that "god requires eternal suffering" for sin.  That's just NT horseshit, or, the inevitable evolution of Judaic theology.  Hart::

      But not of all. For a good number of Christians, hell isn't just a tragic shadow cast across one of an otherwise ravishing vista's remoter corners; rather, it's one of the the landscape's most conspicuous and delectable details.

Steve: "Delectable"?  After all, the idea comes to us in such a ghastly gallery of images: late Augustinianism's unbaptized babes descending in their thrashing billions to perpetual and condign combustion; Dante's exquisitely psychotic dream of twisted, mutilated, broiling souls. St. Francis Xavier morosely informing his weeping Japanese converts that their deceased parents must suffer an eternity of agony.

All of which worries today's mature adult skeptic who knows that for centuries religious authorities have been exploiting the ignorance of the masses to scare them into conformity.

Hart's tactic is to discredit hell by amalgamating an image of hell based on disparate literary and ecclesiastical traditions. But that's an exercise in misdirection. We can strip away the traditional accretions. The core doctrine goes back to the witness of Scripture.

The God of the OT is always FULLY forgiving sin with decidedly temporal measures like animal blood (in Leviticus 19:22, the raptist is atoned for and forgiven by simply giving up one of his rams to be sacrificed, the raptist's repentance is nowhere expressed or implied).   So I'm pretty sure the eternal conscious torment taught by Jesus (Matthew 25:46) contradicts the sense of God's justice in the OT, and you can hardly blame a skeptic for using the earliest revelation as the gold standard by which to judge the later revelation.  Hart:

Surely it would be welcome news if it turned out that, on the matter of hell, something got garbled in transmission. And there really is room for doubt.

Steve:  Welcome for whom? Welcome for the wicked? No doubt it would be welcome to the wicked to elude justice in the afterlife as well as this life.

And since "afterlife" makes about as much sense as do the lyrics to "Smells like Teen Spirit"....Hart:

No truly accomplished NT scholar, for instance, believes that later Christianity's opulent mythology of God's eternal torture chamber is clearly present in the scriptural texts.

Steve: The principle of hell isn't "torture" but retributive justice.

yeah, rolling around roasting in flames can't be torture because it can also be something else.  Like water cannot be water if it is also being used as a 'weight'.

In some cases that may involve torture. It would be poetic justice for someone who tortured (or ordered the torture of) the innocent in this life to be on the receiving end of the process. But that's not the essence of eschatological punishment.

Of course torture isn't part of the biblical portrayal of eschatological punishing.  That's why Luke 16:25 characterizes hell as "agony" and Revelation 14:11 says this agony is ongoing 24 hours per day.

Hart:  It's entirely absent from St. Paul's writings. The only eschatological fire he ever mentions brings salvation to those whom it tries (1 Cor 3:15). 

Steve:  How did Hart miss this passage?
4 Therefore, among God’s churches we boast about your perseverance and faith in all the persecutions and trials you are enduring. 5 All this is evidence that God’s judgment is right, and as a result you will be counted worthy of the kingdom of God, for which you are suffering. 6 God is just: He will pay back trouble to those who trouble you 7 and give relief to you who are troubled, and to us as well. This will happen when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven in blazing fire with his powerful angels. 8 He will punish those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. 9 They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might 10 on the day he comes to be glorified in his holy people and to be marveled at among all those who have believed (2 Thes 1:5-10).

Hart missed nothing:  that's a fire that causes destruction, not endless agony to a body incapable of destruction.  Your translation isn't accurate; the Greek word underlying "destruction" is  ἐκδίκησις ekdikesis and means retribution or vindication.  But either way, since your god is allegedly omnipresent, the only logically possible way the people in hell can be shut out from the presence of the lord is for this retribution to cause them to go out of existence, otherwise known as Annihilationism.

He goes on to say:
There are a few terrible, surreal, allegorical images of judgment in the Book of Revelation, but nothing that, properly read, yields a clear doctrine of eternal torment.

So he asserts. But that brushes aside exegetical arguments to the contrary

No, it's a statement of his beliefs about those passages in Revelation.  he would only be 'brushing aside' if somebody presented exegetical arguments to the contrary and he simply turned away from them.  Hart is a real biblical scholar, so it's not likely he's unaware of how the fundies respond.  But it's not up to Steve Hays of Triablogue to decide exactly when and where some liberal scholar decides to turn his OP ED into a scholarly rebuttal.

Hart:  Even the frightening language used by Jesus in the Gospels, when read in the original Greek, fails to deliver the infernal dogmas we casually assume to be there.

He acts like he's the only person who can read the Gospels in the original Greek.

On the other hand, many NT passages seem–and not metaphorically–to promise the eventual salvation of everyone.

i) Arminians and universalists help themselves to the same prooftexts. As a Calvinist, the universalist prooftexts present no new or special challenge for me because I interpret them the same way I interpret Arminian prooftexts. 

And the Arminians/Universalists don't find the fundie prooftexts as any new or special challenge because they interpret those the same way they interpret the Calvinist prooftexts.

I don't have to make any adjustments. I already have a counter-interpretation.

Then there is no reason to characterize the Arminian or Universalist interpretation of biblical "hell" or "lake of fire" as constituting any type of "adjustment".

ii) But over above that, there's also the problem of arranging passages into a particular chronological sequence. Consider two eschatological sequences:

a) The dead pass into the intermediate state. On the day of judgment there's the general resurrection. They saints experience everlasting bliss while the wicked experience everlasting misery.

b) Some of the dead experience postmortem remedial punishment, after which they go to heaven. They pass through a purgatorial hell on the way to heaven.

Biblical eschatology as a consistent (a) sequence. But the universalist sequence is nowhere found in Scripture. Indeed, it requires splicing and rearranging the standard sequence.

Not a problem for atheists like me who stand solid on the obvious fact that the NT doctrine of eternal conscious torment diametrically contradicts god's sense of justice in the OT.  See above.

Hart:  Still, none of that accounts for the deep emotional need many modern Christians seem to have for an eternal hell. And I don't mean those who ruefully accept the idea out of religious allegiance, or whose sense of justice demands that Hitler and Pol Pot get their proper comeuppance, or who think they need the prospect of hell to keep themselves on the straight and narrow. Those aren't the ones who scream and foam in rage at the thought that hell might be only a stage along the way to a final universal reconciliation.

Steve: 
i) Being the demagogue that he is, Hart has engineered a rhetorical dilemma. He imputes an untoward motive to many Christians who uphold hell. In one sense it's hard to defend yourself against the charge. If you really do harbor untoward motives, you'd deny it. So it's a maliciously circular allegation.

None of which affects the atheist argument against biblical "hell".

ii) Then there's the false dichotomy of insinuating that if you believe something because you're supposed to believe it, you can only do so ruefully or grudgingly. If, however, something is true, it may also be morally, emotionally, and/or intellectually satisfying. We can believe something out of duty but also believe it to be good or admirable. In that event we don't even have to reach for duty.

Same for atheists.

iii) I suspect that like many Christians, I have mixed feelings about hell. On the one hand I hope all my loved ones are saved. And natural human compassion extends that impulse to many (but not all) strangers.

But if God has predestined one of your loved ones as "reprobate", then your desire that they be saved constitutes sin on your part, because you desire something that God forbids.  But again, your mixed feelings about hell just make atheists more reasonable to say that biblical "hell" is little more than an ancient convoluted scare-tactic, and accordingly dismissed with prejudice.

On the other hand, injustice is galling. A world without ultimate justice mocks the good.

That doesn't mean the world's morality arises from transcendent causes.  Mockery exists.

Erases the difference between virtue and vice, good and evil.

The basis for such differences is entirely subjective.  The "wrongness" of torturing babies to death solely for the sake of entertainment disappears as soon as the people who give a shit about that crime stop thinking about it.

Ironically, universalism is casting the same shadow as atheism in that regard. Nothing you do ultimately makes any difference.

Which only bothers immature people who never really recognized how temporal their own significance was.

Universalism has a nihilistic underbelly in that respect. Like Hinduism and Buddhism, where enlightened reality is beyond good and evil. Nihilism and fatalism go together.

iv) While universalism has an undoubted element of appeal, there's a coercive quality to the universalist bargain. The offer is that God will save your murdered daughter for a price: only if God also saves the man who murdered her. Save both or damn both. Sophie's Choice transposed to the key of universalism.

Which is about as complex as "you can't have bad without good".

v) Compassion is the ability to care about the plight of those whose misfortunate you haven't personally experienced.

Then we cannot properly calculate whether you are compassionate about all those children who have suffereed horribly in human history, since you apparently are capable of mopping up the floods from your tears sufficiently to turn on your computer and post defenses of Calvinism.

Despite that, you imaginatively project yourself into their situation. What if that was me? Paradoxically, while it may be wrong to harbor vengeful feelings toward your personal enemies, if you have any, it can be commendable to wish the worst for someone else's enemies. That's a disinterested kind of vengeance. A longing that justice be done on behalf of others.

Now you are contradicting Proverbs and other passages which forbid one to desire harm to come to one's enemies:

 17 Do not rejoice when your enemy falls, And do not let your heart be glad when he stumbles;
 18 Or the LORD will see it and be displeased, And turn His anger away from him. (Prov. 24:17-18 NAU)

Oba 1:12 "Do not gloat over your brother's day, The day of his misfortune. And do not rejoice over the sons of Judah In the day of their destruction; Yes, do not boast In the day of their distress.
Job 31:29 "Have I rejoiced at the extinction of my enemy, Or exulted when evil befell him?

Hart:  Theological history can boast few ideas more chilling than the claim (of, among others, Thomas Aquinas) that the beatitude of the saved in heaven will be increased by their direct vision of the torments of the damned.

Steve:  That's another trope that opponents of hell constantly trot out. Again, it's just an ecclesiastical tradition.

So is the apostolic authorship of the gospels.

But as long as he brings it up: while it would be wrong for the saints to derive glee from watching the damned suffer forever, there's nothing intrinsically wrong–indeed, there's something intrinsically right–about victims seeing assailants punished.

But what else could be going on in the victim's mind when watching the assailant get punished, except rejoicing that the assailing is now suffering?   Merely characterizing this as "joy that justice was done" is nothing but a politically correct label to whitewash the absolute reality of the victim's natural desire for vengeance.  Nothing is more ignorant and uninformed than the Christian victim who insists on forgiving their attacker.  Jesus was a pussy, you need to grow the fuck up.

That's not the same thing as hell mounted with cameras so that saints can voyeuristically tune into the miseries of the damned. But when victims see their assailants punished, that's a way to put the ordeal behind them and move on to better things.

Because their sense of vengeance is fulfilled, contrary to the above-cited bible verses.

Hart:  But as awful as that sounds, it may be more honest in its sheer cold impersonality than is the secret pleasure that many of us, at one time or another, hope to derive not from seeing but from being seen by those we leave behind.

Steve: Well that depends. Suppose a Muslim woman converts to Christianity. As punishment she is gang-raped and beheaded. On the day of judgment, is there something wrong with her waving goodbye to her assailants?

If she isn't pouring out her heart and desiring their salvation, then yes, Romans 10:1.

They watch her turn around and enter the everlasting light of paradise while they are left behind. It sinks in that they were blindly following a false prophet.

Something God could have given them an infallible foretaste of with a vision sprinkled liberally with his magic Ezra 1:1 fairy dust.  Then they surely would have recognized the error of their way no less clearly than Christians do the day they "get saved".

They never once paused to ask whether there was any decent evidence for Muhammad's prophet pretensions?

God could have put such questions into their heart, had he gave a fuck about them, Revelation 17:17

They used Islam as a pretext for sadism.  They were the winners in this life but the losers in the next life. Their victim was the loser in this life but the winner in the next life.

Only because your god infallibly predestined them to be that sadistic.  So it's still God's fault, not theirs, lest you stupidly argue that there can be a way in which a puppet can become culpable?

Hart:  How can we be winners, after all, if there are no losers? Where's the joy in getting into the gated community and the private academy if it turns out the gates are merely decorative and the academic has an inexhaustible scholarship program for the underprivileged? What success can there be that isn't validated by another's failure? What heaven can there be for us without an eternity in which to relish the impotent envy of those outside its walls. 

Steve:  i) To begin with, the Bible does have a doctrine regarding the reversal of fortunes.

The hope of the hopeless.

ii) That said, Hart's imputed motive is twisted. Christian missionaries are like escapees who got out of the war zone but keep going back to rescue others. They don't say, "I made it! To hell with the rest of you!" No, having found the way out, they go back into the hellhole to lead as many of the lost as they can into the light.

Which is stupid for them if they are Calvinists, since by becoming Calvinist, they can then become as relaxed as Steve Hays is about evangelism, so that if they decide to use grace as a license to sin or engage in neglect, well, God must have predestined such apathy on their part too.  There is no greater possible justification for any action, than that God has infallibly predestined it and the human agent never had any genuine possibility of deviating from it.  Now what?  Does your god get angry with people for doing exactly what he wanted them to do in the precise way he wanted them to do it? 

Sort of the like the fuckhead father who punishes his son for doing his chores exactly the way dad wanted?  Oh, I forgot, "god's ways are mysterious", and excuse Steve doesn't find very convicning when Christians use to to help justify Arminian soteriology.

iii) Speaking for myself, when I look forward to the afterlife, it has nothing to do with keeping a tally of the losers. It has nothing to do with thinking about the damned at all.

Then read your bible, desiring for God to kick ass on the unbelievers is precisely what the disembodied souls in heaven do:

 9 When the Lamb broke the fifth seal, I saw underneath the altar the souls of those who had been slain because of the word of God, and because of the testimony which they had maintained;
 10 and they cried out with a loud voice, saying, "How long, O Lord, holy and true, will You refrain from judging and avenging our blood on those who dwell on the earth?" (Rev. 6:9-10 NAU)

Demolishing Triablogue: Steve Hays wants divinely inspired eyewitnesses to desire to use hearsay sources. Matthew and Mark

This is my reply to an article by Steve Hays of Triablogue entitled

Matthew and Mark

Saturday, April 16, 2016

i) A conventional objection to the traditional authorship of Matthew is that an apostle wouldn't make use of a secondhand source like Mark. There are several problems with that objection:

But none of them are very persuasive, therefore, we skeptics are well within the bounds of reasonableness to say that a person who not only had their own eyewitness memories but was promised by God himself to have special divine ability to recall the facts about Jesus to their own mind, would not very likely depend on a hearsay source to the great extent most Christian scholars believe Matthew depended on Mark:

 26 "But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I said to you. (Jn. 14:26 NAU)

 However, we might expect somebody who has no divine inspiration, to do what most other authors do, and rely on prior sources to help create his story.

ii) According to Acts 12:12, Jerusalem was Mark's home town. So Mark may well have had firsthand knowledge of Jesus whenever Jesus came to Jerusalem.

"May"?  That's how you think you "win" a debate about what happened in history?  Positing mere possibilities?  I'm a really smart skeptic, I recognize that such a debate turns on which explanatory theory about historical events is most "probable".

You are also assuming that the "Mark" of Acts 12:12 is the exact Mark who authored the gospel, when in fact even conservative inerrantist Christian scholars admit Mark's name was very common:

A mediating position is that the book was written by someone named Mark, but not the John Mark of Acts. A major consideration in favor of this claim is that Mark was one of the most common Roman names.

Brooks, J. A. (2001, c1991). Vol. 23: Mark (electronic e.). Logos Library System; The New American Commentary (Page 26). Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers.

iii) Moreover, Mark hits many of the major points in the life of Christ. It's not as if Matthew is going to omit those events. Since these are key events in the life of Christ, we'd expect him to repeat them. And there's a rough chronology to the events, so why would Matthew make a special effort to change the plot?

Matthew could have relied on his own allegedly divinely inspired eyewitness memories to compose the gospel...without changing Mark's plot or relying on Mark at all.  The reliance is reasonably construed to mean the Matthew author did not have his own first hand memories of Jesus' life, which of course would necessarily imply the author wasn't one of the original 12 apostles.

iv) But here's another factor that's overlooked. Mark's mother hosted Christian gatherings in her home.

More objectively, the mother of a guy named Mark did that.  Whether that was the exact "Mark" who allegedly wrote a gospel is far from reasonably secure.

Peter knew the location of her home. Indeed, the slavegirl knew the sound of his voice (v13), so he must have been a frequent visitor.

Only if you are an anti-supernaturalist and deny that God could cause her to recognize Peter's voice.  Wow, I didn't know Steve Hays adopted the fallacy of naturalism.

But then, it must have been known to the other apostles. It stands to reason that Mark had many opportunities to befriend other apostles, as long as he and they were in Jerusalem.

As long as you can make the case for the Mark of Acts 12 being the Mark of the gospel, more reasonable than the other theory that says Mark was too common of a name to pretend that all NT references to it surely refer to one and the same man.

So what if Matthew was one of his informants? If Mark writes about some things he didn't personally observe, what was his source of information? Given his access to some of the apostles, they'd be a prime candidates.

Except that conservative Christian scholars refuse to blindly assume that because a church father said Mark followed Peter around, surely everything in Mark's gospel is rooted in Peter's preaching:

Petrine influence cannot be proved or disproved, but it should be acknowledged as a possibility. Even if that part of the tradition were false, the part about Mark being the author could still be correct.

Brooks, J. A. (2001, c1991). Vol. 23: Mark (electronic e.). Logos Library System; The New American Commentary (Page 27). Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers

At the same time, the evangelist had no inhibitions about employing traditional motifs, vocabulary, and style in his own redaction. Consequently, for the most part, one can only speak generally and tentatively when seeking to delineate between tradition and redaction. This conclusion does not dispute Mark’s use of traditional materials or the availability of multiple sources, but it does mean that one cannot precisely reconstruct or always identify the exact content of his source or sources.
...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.

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

Hays continues:

Indeed, he may have gotten information from several apostles, but if only two of them wrote Gospels, that's our only basis of comparison. We wouldn't recognize the input from other apostles who never penned Gospels.

 We also don't recognize anything distinctively 'Petrine' about Mark's gospel.  Indeed, one could argue, on the basis of Mark's shorter version of Peter's confession of Christ and Christ's bestowing him with special power (Mark 8:29, crf. Matthew 16:16-19) that the author of that portion of Mark didn't really like Peter.   See my blog piece on that specific synoptic parallel here.  See here for another blog piece on the problems of the early church associating Mark with Peter's preaching.

Suppose he questioned Matthew about Jesus, and incorporated that into his Gospel. Later, Matthew reads Mark and thinks to himself, "Well, as long as Mark is using my material, I might as well write up my own recollections to include additional material that I didn't mention to Mark." Or something like that.

Suppose he didn't. 

Would Matthew be using Mark?

under your hypothetical, yes, of course.  But unless you sacrifice your high view of Matthew's eyewitness status and divine ability to recall Jesus' words to his own mind, the mere fact that you can trifle about how an eyewitness could possibly want to use a hearsay source isn't going to disturb the reasonableness of the skeptical position that says such a person as Matthew likely would not use such a source.  At least not as extensively as most Christian scholars say Matthew used Mark. 

It might appear that way, given the order in which they were published. But the Apostle Matthew can one of Mark's sources even though his Gospel was published after Mark's Gospel.

Sure, and I believe Matthew very early wrote out sayings of Christ in Hebrew, Mark could possibly have used such a thing.  But you aren't going to persuasively argue that Matthew's Hebrew original was every bit as extensive as the canonical Greek version.

In that case, Matthew isn't using Mark; rather, Mark is using Matthew. It's just that Mark published some of Matthew's material before Matthew got around to publishing his own material. To some degree, it was Matthew's material all long.

But not to a large degree, so the eyewitness's using a hearsay source remains a significant problem refusing to be answered by the desperate trifles of those who cannot see anything but biblical inerrancy.

Mark borrowed from Matthew before wrote his own Gospel. Indeed, Mark's Gospel may have given Matthew the stimulus to do his own.

That doesn't get rid of the fact that under your own laudatory assumptions about Matthew, such a man simply is not likely to find sources less direct than his own divinely inspired memories as sufficient material to help him compose a gospel.  If Matthew came into the scene at 9:9, then he can rely on his own memories for everything that happens thereafter.  And when he doesn't, its probably because the author is not an eyewitness.

Incidentally, if Papias is right, it's possible that Mark made use of some catechetical material that Matthew originally produced in Aramaic.

That doesn't show the unreasonableness of saying a divinely inspired eyewitness normally doesn't desire to use sources less authoritative than his own brain.

v) If that sounds convoluted, here's a comparison. Wayne Grudem is one of John Frame's students. Grudem published a popular systematic theology.

Over 20 years ago, Frame mentioned in class that reading Grudem's Systematic Theology was a bit of a deja vu experience because he noticed that Grudem had incorporated some of Frame's lecture material into his systematic theology. Years later, Frame began turning more of his own classroom lectures into hefty books.

Now, a keen-eyed reader who compared the two, reading them horizontally, might be struck by parallels between Grudem and Frame. Since Grudem wrote before Frame, he might conclude that Frame borrowed from Grudem. But it's really the other way around. You can't infer the order of conceptual dependence from the order of publication. Grudem borrowed from Frame, not vice versa.

Once again, Matthew's Hebrew original was likely limited mostly to a few sayings of Christ.  So even if Mark used that Hebrew original, that is not the equal of Mark using the more extensive canonical Greek Matthew.  The problem of an eyewitness apostle relying on a hearsay source doesn't go away by merely showing a tiny bit of an apostle's testimony was the earliest source.

vi) Incidentally, this can be a cause of bitter feuds in the history of math and science. The question of priority. A scientist or mathematician may have been the first person to discover something or formulate a theory. And he scribbled it down. But he didn't publish it right away. Sometimes he's scooped by another scientist or mathematician who got it published first. Sometimes that's an independent development, but sometimes the published scientist or mathematician got it from the unpublished scientist or mathematician in private conversation or private correspondence. Watch the fur fly when he steals his thunder.

So I'm not making some outlandish proposal. This is a pretty commonplace distinction, both in principle and practice.

The skeptical theory that says a divinely inspired tax-collector capable of writing inerrantly on his own likely wouldn't think he needed any source beyond his own infallible memories for everything between Matthew 9:9 and 28:21, is, also, not an outlandish proposal.  You therefore fail to show that the skeptical theory (i.e., Matthew's author using a hearsay source makes it likely the author is not eyewitness Matthew) is improbable.

Why Triablogue's endlessly trifling bullshit cannot possibly matter

Triablogue's Jason Engwer puts a shitload of effort into trying to prove that the Enfield Poltergeist was real.

He does this so that he can then prove atheism wrong.

But as I've noted before, my skepticism of Jesus' resurrection renders the alleged wrongness of atheism irrelevant.

Even supposing atheism is wrong, that doesn't mean "atheist is in trouble with the Christian god".

All it means is that a god exists.

Since 

a) the apostle Paul said Jesus' failure to rise from the dead would turn Christians into false witnesses who are still in their sins (1st Cor. 15:15), and

b) I continue beating down the way Engwer, Hays, Licona, Habermas and W.L. Craig interpret the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus, 

it really doesn't matter if a god exists, the fact that I am reasonable to deduce this god is not the Christian god creates the stark possibility that the Christians are in just as much trouble with this god for misrepresenting him, as they think atheists are for denying his basic existence.

Before you can leap from "you are wrong" to "you are unreasonable", you have to show that the being wrong is more likely to lead to some type of disaster.  But if the evidence for Jesus' resurrection is as unpersuasive and weak as I claim, the best the apologists could possibly be left with is that there is some "god" out there, so that atheists remain wrong even if it be reasonable to deny Jesus rose from the dead.

At that point, whether that god even cares whether anybody misrepresents him or denies him, would be forever open to blind speculation, except for trifling Christians who would automatically default to the OT god upon discovery that the NT is bullshit.

But according to Deut. 13, even when the prophet does a real miracle, he STILL might be leading people into error, and therefore, such miracle-worker would STILL suffer the wrath of this god.  

That is, according to the OT principle, Jesus' miracle of rising from the dead does NOT end the discussion of whether the OT god approves of him.  But I have yet to see any Christian argument that the OT YHWH approves of Jesus, they rather think his resurrection miracle is the end of the debate.

They also blindly insist that because Jesus uses the divine title, he IS YHWH, a contention that has kept the church divided since even before the Council of Nicaea.

Therefore, the Christians are getting precisely nowhere by wasting such enormous amounts of time trying to prove atheism wrong, or that a spiritual dimension exists, or that physicalism is false.  Atheists don't start becoming unreasonable unless their being in the wrong can be proven to have likely disastrous consequences.  Sure, I might be wrong to say Japan is located in Australia, but unless you could show that this wrongness will likely lead to harmful effects on myself, you are never going to "prove" that I "should" care about being wrong.  

I'm pretty sure that Bigfoot is a hoax and was never anything more than a fairy tale and a man in a monkey suit...but why should I care if that is wrong and the creature is a genuine cryptid?    Does Bigfoot denial have a history of causing skeptics to get the flu more often than the average person?

Because the evidence for Jesus' resurrection is poor, and because the NT doctrine of eternal conscious torment in the afterworld contradicts the OT concept of god's justice, the atheist has no reason to 'worry' about atheism being 'wrong', at worst they will experience nothing more than permanent extinction of consciousness, a fate they already accept.  Pissing off god is about as fearful as pissing off a puppy.

Therefore, trying to prove atheism is wrong is a fruitlessly and purely academic waste of time (i.e., has no serious application to anybody's actual life beyond mere idle intellectual curiosity, and is equal to trying to prove somebody else wrong about whether the Trojan War ever happened).

There's a possibility that angry space aliens will zap you...but how much effort should an atheist put into protecting herself from such disaster?  Maybe always wear a radar-deflecting hat?

There's a possibility that a wild animal will kill the atheist after they walk in the front door of their house, but how much effort should the atheist put into protecting herself from such possible disaster?  Maybe peek in every window before going in the house, or installing motion detectors?  FUCK YOU.

There's a possibility some "god" will roast atheists alive in hell forever, but how much effort should the atheist put into protecting herself from such disaster?  Maybe spend the next 50 years trying to figure out which view of God is correct so they don't end up joining the wrong cult and end up making things worse for themselves by adding the sin of heresy to their existing sin of unbelief?  FUCK YOU.

I've said it before and I'll say it again:  in light of god's hiddenness on the one hand, and the Christian apologist's mouthiness on the other, it appears Christian apologists love atheists more than their own god does.  Irony never sucked quite as much as that.

Demolishing Triablogue: Hume's abject failure, even if real, does not hurt skeptics in the slightest

Triablogue's Steve Hays posts a link to a discussion with a Christian author James N. Anderson, who wrote a book called "David Hume", wherein he argues the standard Christian apologist party line that Hume's famous argument against the credibility of miracle-reports involves fallacious reasoning, therefore, skeptics lose, and there cannot be any reasonableness to one's a pirori dismissal of any particular miracle claim.

John Frame's Amazon.com review of the book boasts:

But James Anderson's book shows that it is the followers of Hume who should be frightened. Anderson presents an account of Hume that is accurate and comprehensive, yet concise. It is easy to follow. And it shows clearly where Hume went wrong, and how his errors illumine the biblical alternative. Hume fell into skepticism because he failed to think God's thoughts after him." --John M. Frame

See here

Before we even start, the whole "hume-bashing" thing is irrational for Christian apologists, because their own bible leaves the distinct impression that the unbelievers go to eternal conscious misery at death.  So since unbelievers cannot know when they will die, and the stakes are ostensibly this high, the bible appears intended to foster the belief that the unbeliever does not have 5 minutes from now or 5 weeks from now to 'get saved'.  If they are always one mere heartbeat away from the gates of hell, such extremely urgent danger means the only possible rational choice is to "get saved" now, right now.

But getting saved as quickly as possible necessarily means getting saved upon the basis of the limited biblical knowledge the sinner has at the point of decision, thus increasing the risk that "getting saved" might end up causing the new Christian to join the wrong denomination or hold the wrong theology, leading to a risk that they will go the rest of their natural lives never appreciating that they just heaped even more divine curse on themselves than they did as unbelievers (Galatians 1:8-9).

If the same bible counsels that unbelievers take the time to study, that is no more significant than the Christian apologist of today who encourages the same:  If the unbeliever really is in such horrifically urgent danger of eternal damnation, then the reasonableness of speeding oneself toward salvation is going to remain, whether or not the bible elsewhere counsels any amount of prepartory "study".  If you really are hanging over the edge of a cliff by a thread, how could "take your time to think about it to make sure you make an informed decision!" coming from the person offering help, possibly "prove" that you can safely delay accepting that help?  So if the bible teaches both the terrible urgent danger that unbelievers are in, but elsewhere teaches that it is reasonable for the unbeliever to take the time to study up on the subject, then the bible is simply contradicting its own message of urgent danger.

The point is that the apologist's own bible would make it "reasonable" for the skeptic to scream in horror at his own spiritual peril and "get saved" in the quickest manner possible...which means the bible is making a person reasonable to engage in an impulsive sort of conduct that is decidedly anti-intellectual, not to mention spiritually dangerous given that the act occurs without any serious prior study, thus increasing the risk the unbeliever will join the wrong church and forever be blinded to their own ensuring perdition.

So because the bible's pretense that the unbeliever is in horrifically urgent danger, is likely to set the unbeliever on the very course of hell the bible allegedly wants the unbeliever to be rescued from, this is such a colossal violation of common sense and self-consistency as to alone justify the skeptic who chooses to use the bible for little more than practicing kicking 80-yard field goals.

Furthermore, I have already extensively examined the pro-resurrection arguments of Licona, Habermas, and William Lane Craig, and have forceful reasons to disagree with their conclusion that Jesus rose from the dead.  Thereore, even assuming some miracles are real and atheism is false, so what?  that's not going to render resurrection-skepticism the least bit unreasonable, and if Jesus didn't rise from the dead, the mere basic existence of 'god' will always be insufficient to pretend that this god is angry at those who deny his existence. 

Finally, Triablogue will inevitably default to the OT YHWH in case Jesus didn't rise from the dead, but in light of Deut. 13's requirement that the false prophet who works true miracles be put to death, the OT is clearer about YHWH's anger at those who misrepresent him, than toward those who simply deny his basic existence.  So not even the reality of miracles and god can do what Triablogue wants, and render one's apathy toward Christian claims unreasonable.

So let's get started with the more specific rebuttals:

(I attack mostly the hypercalvinist Steve Hays in this post, since he pipes up so much about the fallaciousness of naturalism and how atheists cannot account for some miracle claims.  So the Christian reader should remember that I have tapered my attack here to Hays' CALVINISM.  That is, I often use Hays' Calvinism against him in the rest of this article.  I'm quite aware that Arminians would not feel threatened by an attack on Calvinism, but it is the plight of every atheist that Christians contradict each other so much, that a rebuttal to one style of Christianity does nothing to affect the others.  Don't take this article to mean I can only demolish miracle claims by bashing Calvinism. That might indicate you don't know how to read English.  The vast majority of my miracle research criticisms herein are reasonable and epistemically warranted regardless of which exact form of Christianity is true).

First, no Christian apologist has ever asserted how long or intensively a person confronted with a miracle claim "should" investigate it before they became reasonable to start drawing ultimate conclusions about its truth or falsity.  Would the reasonable person surely always spend more than one day researching any particular miracle claim?  Might the possible danger in joining the wrong church (Galatians 1:8-9) make it reasonable to avoid drawing conclusions about the miracle of Jesus resurrection until one has studied the matter for at least 25 years?  What's 25 years compared to eternity, right?  So apologists have no moral or intellectual justification to condemn skeptics who don't spend as much time bothering with miracle claims as the apologists subjectively wish.

Second, rejecting miracle claims a pirori can certainly be justified by appeal to past experience, just like the Christian Trinitarian at Triablogue do not automatically go into objective-robot-mode whenever they meet a Jehovah Witness.  They have already determined that the Trinity is a real thing and truely biblical doctrine  hence, when the JW says "the trinity is unbiblical", Triablogue dismisses the criticism a priori.  Deciding that you already know enough to know that another claim is false, is otherwise called "learning".  You'd never learn, if you forbade yourself from automatically dismissing claims.  What good does it do to learn?  After all, if somebody else comes down the pike and argues in favor of something you deny, you wont' be objevtive unless you respond to their contentions on the merits.

The problem here is that the bible does not allow apologists to be that objective.  You are supposed to be beyond any possibility of changing your mind when you become a Christian:

 39 But we are not of those who shrink back to destruction, but of those who have faith to the preserving of the soul. (Heb. 10:39 NAU) 

 19 They went out from us, but they were not really of us; for if they had been of us, they would have remained with us; but they went out, so that it would be shown that they all are not of us. (1 Jn. 2:19 NAU) 

 38 For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers,
 39 nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Rom. 8:38-39 NAU) 

 5 We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ, (2 Cor. 10:5 NAU) 

 21 and being fully assured that what God had promised, He was able also to perform. (Rom. 4:21 NAU) 

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. (Heb. 11:1 NAU)

Therefore, Christian apologists are hypocrites for characterizing the skeptic's similarly confident certitude as fallacious.

If the girlfriend knows from prior experience that her boyfriend is abusive, you cannot really blame her if she a priori dismisses his latest claim to have changed for the better.  Common sense does not always counsel that you objectively examine the merits of every possibly true claim that comes down the pike.

And a priori does not apply to my own skepticism, since I do not dismiss anything without analysis.   So if other skeptics committ this error, the apologist errs by broadbrushing these amateurs as if they represent what all skeptics do.  Count me out.  If you are honest.  The vast majority of us are willing to review any miracle-claim you pretend is the most convincing, so we can no more be lumped in with the few stupid skeptics than you can be lumped in with Pentecostal snake-handlers.

Third, Hume's allegedly "abject failure" is irrelevant, I myself have been challenging Christian apologists for years to produce the one single biblical or non-biblical miracle claim that they believe is the most impervious to falsification, including direct requests to Craig Keener (i.e., author of the two-volume work "Miracles", which does little more than merely catalog thousands of reported miracle claims).  See here.  I issued the same challenge to Steve Hays of Triablogue, who constantly rants and raves about the alleged fallacies of miracle-skepticism, who also thinks Keener's "Miracles" work is a "game-changer". See here.  As expected, in both cases, I've gotten zero response. 

So skeptics like me lose precisely NOTHING even if we admit Hume's particular argument against the credibility of third-party miracle claims was less than perfect.

Fourth, Anderson falsely charges Hume with arguing that no amount of evidence could possibly be good enough:

Anderson:I think it is, and I think most commentators on Hume’s argument say that it does stack the deck in advance. Hume acts like it doesn’t; he acts like he is just applying general principles of evidence to the particular case of miracles, but when you look closely at it, what it means is that no amount of evidence could possibly weigh in favor of a miracle. This is, in a sense, how absurd it gets: even if you witnessed a miracle with your own eyes, right in front of you, you shouldn’t believe your own eyes, according to Hume’s argument.
Zaspel:It’s just gratuitous.
Anderson:You can’t win. When it’s set up like that, you can’t win.

That's false, because Hume was talking about what basis we have to believe miracle reports from other people.  He was not talking about what one should conclude if one witnesses the miracle with their own eyes.  He in fact made clear that he was prioritizing how much a person should trust their own senses:

Our evidence, then, for the truth of the Christian religion is less than the evidence for the truth of our senses; because, even in the first authors of our religion, it was no greater; and it is evident it must diminish in passing from them to their disciples; nor can any one rest such confidence in their testimony, as in the immediate object of his senses.

...To apply these principles to a particular instance; we may observe, that there is no species of reasoning more common, more useful, and even necessary to human life, than that which is derived from the testimony of men, and the reports of eye-witnesses and spectators. 

Third, Christian apologists have never supplied sufficiently indisputable criteria for evaluating miracle claims.  Mike Licona says the claim must occur in a context charged with religious significance (here), but he only demands this because he knows that the miracle of Jesus' resurrection is charged with religious significance.  What he is doing to trying to give the reader a reason to avoid any paranormal claims made in absence of a religious context, so that the reader will be more likely to narrow their focus to just "religious" miracles.  But if mircales be concluded to occur in non-religious contexts, that opens the possibility that miracles can be real for purely naturalistic reasons.  You run the risk of discovering an explanation for miracles that needs no "god" or "Jesus".  That's contrary to the purposes of Christian apologetics, of course.

Fourth, Christian apologists routinely remind us that Jesus' miracle of resurrection, if true, automatically justifies concluding that the debate is over and Christianity is true.  Starting with Licona:

However, if Jesus rose from the dead, Christianity is true and Islam is false.

If Jesus really did rise from the dead, then he alone must know what is on the other side.

WHAT IF JESUS REALLY DID RISE FROM THE DEAD?This would have profound implications for our understanding of the universe, existence, morality, God, and everything else

If Jesus rose from the dead, Christianity is true and any worldview or religion that contradicts Christianity is false.

But the bible says some prophets who work genuinely supernatural miracles deserve the death penalty:

 1 "If a prophet or a dreamer of dreams arises among you and gives you a sign or a wonder,
 2 and the sign or the wonder comes true, concerning which he spoke to you, saying, 'Let us go after other gods (whom you have not known) and let us serve them,'
 3 you shall not listen to the words of that prophet or that dreamer of dreams; for the LORD your God is testing you to find out if you love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul.
 4 "You shall follow the LORD your God and fear Him; and you shall keep His commandments, listen to His voice, serve Him, and cling to Him.
 5 "But that prophet or that dreamer of dreams shall be put to death, because he has counseled rebellion against the LORD your God  (Deut. 13:1-5 NAU)

Paul apparently believed it was a real possibility for an angel from heaven to give somebody a false gospel:

6 I am amazed that you are so quickly deserting Him who called you by the grace of Christ, for a different gospel;

 7 which is really not another; only there are some who are disturbing you and want to distort the gospel of Christ.

 8 But even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to what we have preached to you, he is to be accursed!

 9 As we have said before, so I say again now, if any man is preaching to you a gospel contrary to what you received, he is to be accursed! (Gal. 1:6-9 NAU)

Indeed, the boys at Triablogue are all about "The catholic miracles at Fatima can be genuinely supernatural but also performed by demonic power", which is the absurd trifle they are forced to make, since otherwise they are proven hypocrites by automatially discounting non-Protestant miracle claims.

When Steve Hays pretends that Catholic miracles don't validate the Catholic faith, what he forgets to do is tell the reader how they can tell which cases of genuinely supernatural miracles are "from god" and which are "from the devil", if that distinction even means anything to such a hyperCalvinist as Steve.  See here.  

He also fails to answer the same concern in his similar article here.  Steve will trifle that he was only dealing with cessationist objections, but if that be the case, then why hasn't Steve Hays ever provided the world with a biblical criteria for knowing when real miracles come from "god" and which come from "the devil"?

Did he write an article somewhere that says "If the person doing the miracle insists that Calvinism is biblical, you can be sure the miracle is being done by holy power"?

Or maybe Steve is open to the possibility that god does miracles for non-Calvinists in contexts that do not motivate people to worry about 'biblical theology' probably because God doesn't find theological accuracy to be as important as Triablogue does?  Gee, dogmatic, asshole know-it-all Christian sinners have never misunderstood god's will or the bible, have they?  Gee, when you learn to mistake your blog for an actual life, all you can do is discover more and more divine truth, amen?

So us skeptics are smart to reject the knee-jerk conclusions of Christian apologists.  If Jesus really did rise from the dead, that does not justify an automatic inference that he correctly represented YHWH.

But if so, then what more must a person do to help decide whether the miracle came from god or satan?

Would it be smart for the unbeliever who recognizes the legitimacy of that question, to put it on a back shelf until some Christian apologist answers it?  After all, Steve Hays thinks unbelievers are incapable of understanding spiritual truth, therefore, he can do nothing but support me as I wait for a spiritual person to figure it out.

What if the miracle doesn't provide any guidance as to what theology is true? Might we justifiably infer the supernatural entity doing the miracle fails to provide such answers because it thinks simple obedience to what one already knows is more important than "orthodoxy"? Oh, of course not.  Isn't it clear that when Jesus preached to Gentiles, he drew up a clear list of 'essential' doctrines and warned that failure to understand the Trinity and salvation by grace was a sign of the anti-Christ?

And in light of orthodox Jews condemning the NT and Jesus for the last 2,000 years, skeptics have more than sufficient justification to first study the Jewish objections to Jesus and the Christian responses, before making a decision on which person has the more robust position.  Unfortunately, that could take months or years...while the unbeliever is also supposed to believe that the longer they delay accepting Jesus, the more they put themselves at risk of eternal damnation.  LOL. 

For me personally, I've already read Justin's Dialogue with Trypho and have evaluated the arguments of Dr. Michael Brown and found them wanting, along with about 20 years of responding to Christian attempts to extract Jesus out of Micah 5:2, Daniel 9, Isaiah 53 and Psalms 16 and 22.  I just haven't set forth my criticisms of such matters in this blog very systematically.  Steve Hays cannot really say whether I need to do "more", so he has no moral basis to condemn me or any other skeptic for thinking the paucity of Brown's arguments justifies concluding that getting Jesus out of the OT requires wild stretches.  I'll take the NT methods of exegesis of the OT as my first case in point.  There's a very good reason Gleason Archer spent significant time trying to warn Christians away from adopting the methods of exegesis used by the NT authors:  you do that, and you wind up in stupidville real quick, and mistaking mere typology for actual substance.

Fifth, Hume's argument was basically sound even if one could trifle that he overstated a few things or otherwise erred.  Nothing in the New Testament qualifies as meeting Hume's common sense test:






The undeniable truth is that 

• It violates common sense to believe every miracle report you hear

• If you are going to avoid being gullible, you have to already have in place criteria to distinguish likely true from likely false miracle claims

• According to Steve Hays, the miracle investigator msut also have criteria for being able to distinguish genuinely supernatural miracles done by god, and genuinely supernatural miracles done by demonic power.  Yet Hays is a presuppositionalist and Calvinist, and thinks the unbeliever cannot possibly understand such spiritual things...yet he pretends as if they are under some type of intellectual obligation to go research something he says they cannot possibly understand.

• Hays is stupid because hsi logic would require that unbelievers first become spiritual (born again) so they can understand spiritual things enough to figure out which mriacles are godly and which are satanic, but if that happens, no miracle investigation will be necessary, DUH

• Hays never say how we can recognize the point where we can be justified to start drawing ultimate conclusions about such criteria and move on to evaluating actual claims?  5 minutes?  3 weeks? 

• No Christian apologist can provide usefully specific criteria for how long one must study miracle claims before being justified to start drawing ultimate conclusions.  Will one day of 8 hours of googling be sufficient?  They simply ask you to "check it out", as if you should just cover your eyes, reach into the bag, and begin your research in all the intenteional blindness of the way people win the lottery.  Well gee, with so many dogshit miracle claims in history and in the present world, where shall I start?  Fatima?  Benny Hinn?  Mel Tari and his "Like a Mighty Wind" book?  Or must I hold back and first develop criteria for knowing when a certain alleged miracle worker is too likely unreliable to deserve any serious consideration?  

• Does the fact that god also does miracles through non-believers complicate the process?

• No apologist, including the fools at Triablogue, has any criteria by which a person can tell how much time, money and resources they "should" (DING!  moral claim!) expend in researching miracle claims.  If an internet search shows a potentially viable claim, but no further information is available, how much intellectual obligation does god think is upon the unbeliever to pursue that lead with his own money? 

• If the bible doesn't say, isn't it true there is a substantial risk your own recommendation might disagree with god's own personal opinion?  you are a sinner, correct?  Your recommendations don't carry canonical authority, correct?  And yet what do you tell yourself about drawing conclusions about god that can possibly be true, but which cannot be supported from the bible?

• If the skeptic locates contact information for one alleged miracle witness, how much should he pursue contacting them?  Is shooting off one email to their last known email address sufficient?  or must he followup any silence with a paper letter to their last known mailing address?  If Calvinism is true, wouldn't that mean that whatever degree of laziness the unbeliever exudes in any miracle investigation, this was infallibly predestined by God, so that the unbeliever never had the ability to do more than what he ended up actually doing?  What then, will you fault a person for fulfilling God's secret will exactly as God intended?  "Shame on you: you obeyed me in the exact way I expected!" LOL

• Suppose an internet search yields a website of miracle claims that provides working links to downloads of testimony and medical files, is it enough to read all such material and then start drawing conclusions about likely truth/falsehood?  Or is the skeptic being too skeptical by delaying belief until they can authenticate such downloaded testimonies and medical files?  Gee, are courts of law just stupid for demanding "authentication"?  Of course they are, isn't it obvious that miracle-frauds never happen, so that automatically trusting anything from the internet claiming to be testimony or medical evidence is the more objective way to proceed?

• I kicked Steve Hays' theological ass all over hell and back in a debate years ago on the precise topic of how the skeptic is supposed to know when the evidence they uncovered has become sufficient to justify drawing ultimate conclusions, or even whether there is any intellectual obligation upon them to give one holy fuck about any such claims in the first place.  See here.  The smartest Calvinist in the world wisely refused to engage after posting his one single criticism, for reasons that will be obvious to anybody who reads the debate.

• Christian apologists cannot agree on where to "start" the miracle investigation (i.e., the resurrection of Jesus?  Or the fallacies of empiricism?  Would Steve Hays suggest that the methodological errors in naturalism make it reasonable for the naturalist to focus first on Christain critiques of naturalism?  What about the non-Calvinist Christians who take the parable of the Sower seriously, and conclude that there's more "magic in the air" by hitting the unbeliever with the straight gospel dope, as opposed to reading presuppositionalist rebuttals to certain philosophical beliefs?  

• If both should be pursued, which one should be first, how do you know, and how long should the unbeliever put forth effort to see whether or not your recommendation is sufficiently robust as to likely lead to useful conclusions?  Therefore Christian apologists have no moral or intellectual ground to chide a skeptic who makes their own subjective decision about precisely what subtopic of miracle investigation they should look into first, if any.  If the skeptic thinks seeing rebuttals to naturalism is the logical place to start since it will kick out their naturalistic foundation and motivate them to be more open to a supernaturalist foundation, there won't be any way to "prove" that he "should" have started with the resurrection of Jesus.  

• After Steve Hays makes all of his presuppositionalist Van Tilian-esque recommendations, how long should the skeptic compare this with the recommendations of other Christians who oppose presuppositionalism, before he can be rationally warranted to draw ultimate conclusions about whether Hays's recommendations were a prudent and smart starting point?  How long must i listen to the presuppositionalist Steve Hays and the evidentialist William Lane Craig give me contradictory advice on the "best" place to start, before i become justified to start drawing my own conclusions about the matter?  Must I first become a scholar of John Calvin and memorize all the ways that John Frame and Van Til disagree with each other before I dare make a judgment call?  After all, if I don't do that level of research, there will be enough questionable holes for Hays to come back in a blog article and say "he didn't cover this subject, he avoided that topic, he overlooked that over there..."  But if Hays is not god, then eventually he has to admit that common sense is going to require I reach a point at which I start making my own decisions.

• If you try to research some miracle claim, whether healings at Fatima or Jesus' resurrection, you are just choosing to do something else with your time than actually repent and believe the gospel.  If you are still an unbeliever as you go to the library to check out a book Steve Hays recommended, and you die in a car crash along the way, you go to a hell of eternal misery even if not "flames, according to Hays, because Hays does not believe the bible teaches there is any third option in the afterworld for "sincere" unbelievers who died while in the process of checking out apologetics claims, but before arriving at actual faith.  So, how long "should" the unbeliever "check out" why Lydia McGrew believes there is a special third place for just such people despite the obvious lack of biblical justification?  Should the unbeliever consider that McGrew has a Holy Spirit witness that must be as seriously considered as the bible?  If so, how long should that investigation take place?  Isn't it true that for every second the unbeliever spends investigating some Christian bullshit, the more they delay the day of their repentance, and therefore, the more they risk dying before repentance and ending up in hell?

• Hopefully neither Hays nor any Christian thinks unbelievers need to give up their spouse, kids, job and home and just sit on the internet all day homeless in a coffee shop googling miracle claims like crazy, all worried that the longer they delay repenting, the more they risk going to hell 9while yet knowing that to hurry up and repent requires them to limit their study, and possibly repent in a way that is not sufficient, or believe in a false Jesus which will then blind them the rest of their lives to the fact that they remain unsaved).  Yet Christians are forced to insist that the more you ignore Christ and pay attention to anything else (job, family, life) the more you DO increase the risk you'll die before getting saved (and thus go to hell).  Perhaps Jesus in Matthew 19:29 was being just a bit more consistent with his fanatical message of salvation-urgency, than are his modern-day defenders?

For all these reasons, skeptics need not have the slightest worry whether or not that Christian apologist over there accused Hume of violating common sense.  We have more than sufficient reason and justification to ignore bible and miracle claims until we start seeing biblical-style "miracles".  Especially in the mind of Steve Hays, who is a hyperCalvinist, who says every error unbelievers engage in, was infallibly predestined by God, so that the unbeliever could not possibly have done anything other than commit those errors.  Yet his god still bitches at human puppets for moving in the same direction this god had pulled their strings.  LOL.

Gee, how many miracle-claims did I ignore in the effort to write this blog piece?

How many Arminian YouTube videos did Steve Hays ignore when writing any of his Triablogue bullshit?