My virgin-birth rebuttal at Patheos

A Catholic blogger wrote a piece on the questionable historicity of the nativity stories.  See here.

I posted the following reply:

barry • a few seconds from nowHold on, this is waiting to be approved by messyinspirations.First, Since the apostles would have been babies at best when the events of Jesus' virgin birth and childhood took place, and because nobody ever dared allege that Mary or Joseph wrote any of the 4 canonical gospels, an assumption of apostolic authorship of the gospels necessarily reduces the nativity stories to hearsay. It doesn't matter if we grant the assumption that Matthew and Luke conducted interviews with Mary and Joseph. The person giving us the facts is not somebody with personal first-hand knowledge, therefore, the nativity stories cannot be anything other than "hearsay".
 Second, skeptics cannot be considered unreasonable for adopting a position also adopted by most Christian scholars; that Mark is the earliest gospel. If the other three gospels came later, then it is reasonable to infer that the reason only two of the later gospels mention the virgin birth is because they are embellishing the earlier story. We naturally expect that between the earliest and later forms of the same story, the latter is more likely the one to contain the embellishments. That simple common sense is not going to disappear merely because the necessary ambiguity and non-absolute nature of the historical evidence enables a fundamentalist apologist to conjure up trifling excuses all day long about why Mark and everybody believed in the virgin birth and simply "didn't wish to repeat it".
 Third, nobody seriously claims that Jesus was referring to actual historical events when giving his parables. So it is also reasonable to deduce that the gospel authors found Jesus' use of fiction-to-support-theology useful and good when applied elsewhere, so that getting people to believe in high Christology was more important than whether the stories intended to facilitate such belief were actually true. It is not true that a stranger will necessarily kidnap your kids...but then again, you create far more good and family safety/cohesion if you just teach your small child 'stranger-danger'. The higher good of family safety trumps the idiot who trifles that "stranger-danger" isn't necessarily true. For that reason, it is reasonable to assume that the gospel authors would have found getting a person to believe the way the authors did, far more important than whether the "facts" that such faith was predicted upon were actually true. That's rather stupid under modern western notions of truth, but we are talking 1st century Palestine, where people 14 years after the fact will swear they saw heaven despite continuing to be unable to tell whether their flying into the sky was physical or spiritual (2nd Cor. 12:1-4). Fundamentalists probably think the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy was written by Moses in 1400 b.c.
 Fourth, fundamentalists have a nasty habit of automatically concluding that if they can think of any non-contradictory "how-it-could-have-been" bare possibility scenario in favor the historicity of the nativity stories, then presto, that bare possibility necessarily and conclusively trumps any possibility set forth by a skeptic. That is inaccurate and irrational: In 20 years of attacking the gospels, I've seen plenty of fundamentalist defenses of the nativity stories. I think TWO of them attempted to show that historicity was more likely than embellishment. once again, nobody wins a historiography debate by merely showing the way they believe does not involve logical contradiction or is founded upon mere possibilities. The person who wins the historical debate is the person who shows that their theory is more likely to be true than the theory they disagree with. Sure, its possible Mark knew of and approved of the virgin birth stories but chose for his own reasons to avoid mentioning them, but that's only a possibility. You will have to show that this is more likely than the skeptical theory that says Mark, with his goal to prove Jesus was the divine son of God, would never "choose to excude" nativity stories that support his intended theme often more powerfully than the pericopes he DID choose to record.
 Fifth, I have formed particularized rebuttals to the particular arguments of Licona, Habermas and W.C.Craig in favor of the resurrection, and if it be reasonable to conclude Jesus did not rise from the dead, then under apostle Paul's logic, we are also reasonable to conclude Christians are false witnesses who are still in their sins (1st Cor. 15:15-17), which, makes it reasonable to deduce that Christians are then under YHWH's death penalty even if we granted that they did genuinely supernatural miracles (Deuteronomy 13:1-5). Since YHWH doesn't think the doing of a miracle automatically infuses the theology taught therein with divine approval, then it doesn't matter if we grant the miracle of Jesus' virgin birth for the sake of argument, we'd still have to ask whether Jesus taught in harmony with the Law. 2,000 years of Jewish opposition to Christianity might have a tendency to render skeptics "reasonable" even if not "infallible" in attacking Christianity.
 Sixth, fundamentalists don't merely claim skeptics are "wrong", they also say we are "fools" or "unreasonable" to deny the historicity of the virgin birth narratives. That being the case, if we wish to disprove their contention, we don't have to prove that the skeptical position is "correct", we only have to prove that the skeptical position is "reasonable". If the fundies can become 'reasonable' by merely positing possibilities, they must extend that luxury to skeptics and concede that skeptical possibilities render the skeptic reasonable.
 Seventh, the biggest problem here is the stupid fundamentalist who is always casting bible inerrancy in terms of accuracy. That is, since Jesus was either virgin born or he wasn't, we should expect the historical evidence to show that he was, or show that he wasn't. This is stupid: Jesus was born 2,000 years ago, and the records of such birth are similarly 1,950 years old. Any historian will tell you that you don't answer questions of ancient history in terms of accuracy, you only answer them in terms of probability. How LIKELY is it that the nativity stories are true? How LIKELY is it that the nativity stories are embellishment?
 Eighth, if any fundamentalist thinks Matthew was written to both Christian and non-Christian Jews, that gives you a pretty good idea of how anti-intellectual Matthew was: he expected non-Christian Jews to be persuaded Jesus was virgin born...because of a story...a story that, given Matthew's likely 60 a.d. date of publication, is thus a story that comes to those non-Christian Jews 30 years after the fact. Think legends take at least a full generation to materialize? Think again, read Acts 21:18-24. And most Christian scholars including Licona and Craig Evans admit that Matthew and John engaged in "artistry" and either invented history or placed historical events in a time that they didn't actually occur, so that there is plenty of scholarly justification to say that the gospel authors' concerns for accuracy were not quite as fanatical as those of modern fundamentalists.

Answering the Catholic case for objective morals

This is my reply to an article by catholic apologist Christopher Akers entitled

God and Objective Morality

Christopher Akers

SATURDAY, JULY 8, 2017

There is a rather simple, yet nowadays rarely discussed, philosophical argument that can help lead to assent to the existence of God. It has the potential to change the hearts and minds of those who seriously consider it.

Which means you probably aren't a 5-Point Calvinist...one of those Christians who says unbelievers are so steeped in sin, they are "totally unable" to seek after God (First point of Calvinism; total inability), so that if a sinner does seek after god, this was not a combination of their freewill and god's grace, but solely of god's grace (leading to the question "why doesn't take away the total inability of all sinners?", and the Calvinist answers "because god does not wish to save everybody").  If you think the Calvinists don't know about John 3:16, 1st John 2:2, 1st Peter 3:9 or 1st Timothy 2:4, think again.

The argument, succinctly, is that for an objective moral system to exist, God must exist.

If you mean "objective" according to the dictionary system, then yes.  The reason any act of man is objectively immoral, by definition MUST be for reasons completely independent human belief or feelings.

For a moral system to be truly objective, moral law must stem from a source external to humanity. Otherwise, all we have is subjective human moral opinion, no matter how it is dressed up.

Agreed.

The implications of this are particularly fascinating, especially since the vast majority of nonbelievers live and act as if they believe in an objective moral system, while their own belief system makes this logically impossible.

I would agree with you that many non-Christians live out their morality in ways inconsistent with their beliefs about the origins of morality.

Musing on such questions played a key role in my own conversion to the Church.

That's too bad, as blaming morality on "god" is quite the absurdity, for myriad reasons.

Thinking deeply about objective morality forces you to question why you act as you do on a day-to-day basis, and what sort of rationale lies behind your moral choices.

We are physical mammals living amongst other physical mammals who compete for resources and in doing so, often find other mammals that help us survive, and still other mammals that threaten our survival.  Asking whether Hitler or Mother Theresa were "right" is like asking which bug is "right" as a spider attacks a fly.  The only morality governing the situation is the morality of the players, and the morality of any other life form that cares enough to cast its opinion on the matter.

If unbiased logic is employed, the conclusion is clear: without a divine lawgiver moral choices and actions must be subjective and ultimately meaningless.

This is true.  "ultimately meaningless" would mean our moral choices, regardless of what they might be, do not have any significance that transcends humanity.  Whether you burp at the table or mow down a schoolyard full of children with an AK-47, your actions mean precisely nothing beyond the human beings who care to comment about them.  However, if you get a lot of human mammals together who happen to agree on basic morals, "group-think" can set in and you can start errantly thinking that the majority view on morality is something that "transcends" the group of mammals who enjoy such agreement.

And maybe they cannot be blamed, since to engage in such mental error achieves an even greater degree of solidarity that is otherwise key to mammalian groups surviving and thriving.  Christianity is wrong, but that would be irrelevant if it could be shown that it leads to human beings enhancing their ability to survive and thrive.  Not all false beliefs are harmful.  "New Atheists" that shit all over religion like it's nothing but alien toxic waste are high on crack.

It is terrifying to understand the full implication of the words of Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov, that “without God everything is permissible.”

"Ultimately, they are correct". How could child rape on this earth possibly be of concern to alien life forms that might be living 5 billion light years away?  Child rape is a terrible thing, but only in the context of earth-based humanity.  Looking at earth from a long distance, our hurting each other would likely be viewed by some advanced alien intelligence with about the same degree of concern as we have in watching insects kill each other.  We ourselves are a higher life form, and look how utterly apathetic we are to lower life forms when we feel such lack of concern will help us feel better about ourselves. 

Once again, child rape is certainly a terrible thing, but only in the context of human life.  If there is no life higher than human, then the wrongness of child rape is necessarily limited to earthly human life, since there is no evidence to suggest its wrongness extends beyond earthbound humans.

And yes, most people are not experts in moral philosophy, and they are also mammals with a nasty habit of mistaking their fist-pounding rah rah rah for divinely revealed ethics.  If people were just a bit more philosophically adept, they would be turtle-slow in automatically equating their basic moral opinions with divine decree.  They would correctly realize that cultural conditioning plays a gargantuan role in shaping our moral attitudes.

The longer you've been crediting god with your basic morals, the harder it is for you to honestly acknowledge the ultimately subjective nature of your ethics.  If a child is always taken to McDonald's for dinner every day, yes, they are going to feel taht something is "wrong" if an authority steps in and puts a stop to it.  So discovering there's no god and we are just mammals lost in space probably doesn't sound as appealing as perpetual Christmas in heaven, but mature adults eventually wake up and, even if reluctantly learn how to distinguish their dreams from actual reality.

Once you reach this point, the only choice left is between God and nihilism.

No, there are schools of thought out there which say life goes on after physical death, but not because of a "god" but because reincarnation and karma are simply how the universe works.

The more intelligent atheists realize this only too well, which is why this point is not often discussed.

Then I must be one of the more intelligent atheists, since I don't shy away at all from the taunting question "If god doesn't exist, then why do most mature adults in human history believe that child rape is absolutely immoral?"  To me the question is about as informed as "If god doesn't exist, then how could I ever know it is immoral for a girl to date before she is 18 years old?  Clever sophists can make certain conglomerations of words appear to be asking a legit question, when in fact the question is absurd.

Instead, the most heinous acts are simply “clearly wrong,” without any need to investigate further why this is so.

I agree that most atheists are inconsistent for aspiring to objective morality.  I agree with Frank Turek that atheists like Michael Shermer are inconsistent.  If there really is no life form higher than human, then what constitutes moral goodness is limited to what human beings think, and since they constantly disagree, the closest to "objective" you'll ever get is majority-viewpoint.  But majority viewpoints do not show objective truth, since majority viewpoints can be wrong.

Such an unsupported morality is literally nonsense, of course.

Agreed.

It makes you think of the maxim attributed to Chesterton, that “when a man stops believing in God he doesn’t then believe in nothing, he believes anything.”

An obviously false maxim, as few atheists believe "anything".   And a misleading maxim, since apparently, according to what we know of human history, believing in god never slowed down anybody from harboring false beliefs.  Christians would be forced to agree that the vast majority of non-Christian theists believe falsely about god.

To reiterate, the majority of individuals live as if an objective moral system exists, yet without God no such system can exist.

Once again, yes, even the people who don't believe in god are often guilty of living life as if their moral views originated in some "higher power".  It is an exceptionally rare atheist who will directly admit that we are little more than overgrown mosquitoes living on a damp dust-ball lost in space. Such brutal honesty simply doesn't score points with the other mammals in the group you are seeking to score points with.  But we all know that just chiming in and agreeing with everybody else dramatically increases the odds that one will score points with such groups.

C. S. Lewis lucidly outlined in the opening sections of Mere Christianity that people “appeal to some kind of standard of behavior that they expect the other to know about,” when moral disagreement rears its ugly head.

Yes, inconsistency reigns in the moral beliefs of many atheists.

The Tower of Babel by Marten van Vlackenborch, 1595 [Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden]
This is still the case in our own times, yet according to the mores of modern society, there is no one (more specifically, no God) to provide the standard. Logically, if this is the case, then the standard itself must fall.
I have debated this point often with atheist friends, some of whom have attempted to offer alternative “objective” ways in which one can understand morality. A certain interlocutor suggested that utilitarianism could be given as an example of a non-theistic objective moral system.

Only by violating the dictionary definition of the word "objective".  Any moral system, including utilitarianism, originates in humanity, therefore, it can never be truly "independent of the mind" (dictionary definition of objective).

Then again, morals can never be truly independent of the mind anyway, since they boil down to opinions which boil down to thoughts, which are themselves physical aspects of the brain, as proven from Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases.

Utilitarianism, however, is merely a philosophical theory posited by man. For even if every person on earth accepted utilitarianism, no one would be obligated to follow it in the same way that we are obligated to follow the moral law of the Creator of heaven and earth. Utility is as nought compared to Love, as readers of The Catholic Thing will know. There is no subtle difference here; the distance between these ideas is quite great – and obvious.

Agreed.

Another friend suggested that we only act as we do because of biology, and argued that we can extract objective moral truths from pondering our biological makeup and surroundings.

Once again, only by violating the dictionary definition of "objective" since that word means existing outside and independent of the mind.

This would be a world where we only act out of self-interest, where self-sacrifice is a lie, and where love is merely a “chemical reaction in the brain.”
Any way you try to turn it, this argument is simply incomprehensible. For if God does not exist, then who is to say whether it is right or wrong to follow specific biological urgings?

Excellent point.

Take the horrific act of rape, for example. If you follow a moral system based on mere Darwinian biology, where the goal of life is ultimately the propagation of genes, then could not rape be taken as a good as it may ensure a more widespread transmission of said genes?

Yes, and whether rape is morally good or bad depends on who you ask, given that the world and human history is full of not only rapists, but rapists whose sole motive for refraining from rape is fear of jail.

Those who hate rape and those who love it will give you different answers, and when you pretend the rapist's views deserve to be automatically discounted, and you call them "insane", you stop being an objective investigator, and you start preaching to the choir by appeal to what they already believe.  I would argue that those who cannot distinguish god from their strong moral beliefs, are naive about the origins of morality.

I am not claiming that my dear friend would ever argue for this, but this is an obvious example of the absurdity of reducing morality to biology.

Only absurd to people who think rape is wrong.  You will discount the significance of those who think rape is morally acceptable, but that's where you stop being objective in your evaluation. What are you gonna say next?  The only people that matter are American capitalists?  True objectivity doesn't automatically discount opinions held by those adopting some minority view.  Then again, most people lack the ability of cool objectivity necessary to deal with people whose morals are contrary to society.  We just want the local recently paroled child pornographer to get the fuck out of our town, not caring whether or how he will manage when the next town tells him to move on.  That's herd-mentality for you.  It is characterized by lack of concern for the long-term consequences, and therefore also childish in nature.  But such short-sighted thinking has the benefit of preserving one's social group from breakup.  I guess you cannot blame herds for engaging in herd-mentality.

Not to put too fine a point on it, there is a world of difference between the beauty of human sexual love and the famously violent copulation of many species in the animal kingdom.

We would not expect a person with your religious commitment to realize how many men and woman enjoy being hurt during sex.  When you say such people don't count because they are clearly insane, that's the point where you stop being objective and change over to appealing to what your own group believes in an effort to convince them.  One place to start your education is the bible, which does a pretty good job of showing how easily even people who are being activily guided by god, can fall into lifestyles that you think are deviant and gross.  Apparently, the squeaky clean catholics that always show up for Mass in their Sunday best, aren't the only life forms that are representative of human morality.

And when you decide that a catholic lady's expressed disdain for sado-masochistic sex is genuine, you run the possibility of being wrong, and that she likes such acts, but is only pretending to be more moral than she is because she wishes to stay in the good graces of her chosen circle of equally Catholic friends.  Gee, Christians have been never been duplicitous, have they?  If a Christian found sexual deviance attractive, surely they'd make that clear to their church?  WRONG.

We can see all around us the disintegration of civilized ethics that has resulted from the confusion over objective morality.

A phenomena that has no more ultimate significance than the fact that lions reduce the zebra population in Africa.  Since you are not a zebra, you couldn't care less.  So we have to wonder, if there was a life form outside earth higher than human, why shouldn't we think it would be as apathetic to our plight as we are to the plight of the baby zebra being torn apart?  The answer is:  blindly assuming the higher life form gives even two shits about us just happens to define "hope", and by its nature, hope achieves its ends equally well whether its object is real or fake.  Doesn't it just feel good to know we have a heavenly father?

And the confusion is only compounded by the well-intentioned people around us who speak as if objective morality exists while rejecting all the things, including the One, that must underpin it.
The veneer of civilized ethics that we still enjoy is due only to the afterglow of a Christian civilization,

No, there are strictly empirical mammalian reasons why higher mammals find the "civilized" type of life more conducive to their instinct to thrive, survive, and carry on their genes.  Civilization dramatically reduces the chances one's genes will disappear from the pool. most higher mammals don't go around purposefully looking to put their own existence at risk. 

and without care our inheritance may be completely cast aside. The connection between God and objective morality must be restated firmly, clearly, and often by priests, apologists, philosophers, catechists, et al. In fact, it must be shouted from the rooftops!

Except that under the Christian-invented "Occam's Razor" rule of thumb, the very fact that "god" is the most complex possible being (i.e., infinitely complex because he himself is infinite, allegedly) means "god" is always going to be "infinitely" less likely the true hypothesis, than any coherent naturalistic hypothesis for morality.  We don't need methodological naturalism to knock the Christian view all the way out of the ball park of probability or possibility...we only need to show that the empirical evidence favors naturalism, in order to successfully arrive at being "reasonable" to adopt it.

You've done nothing in this article that even remotely attacks the empirical basis for naturalistic morality.