Cold Case Christianity: Is Heaven Reasonable? No, and thanks for asking

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

Cold Case Christianity: Is Heaven Reasonable? (Free BibleInsert)
Posted: 09 Nov 2018 01:00 AM PST

Humans have been thinking about life after death from the earliest of times. Heaven has been the topic of ancient authors and contemporary thinkers. Countless books, movies and television programs have been produced on the topic. This year’s entry, Heaven is for Real, continues the long tradition of fascination with the afterlife. But is Heaven reasonable? Are the any good reasons to believe there might be a life beyond the grave, aside from the very obvious teaching of the Bible? This week, I’ll spend some time examining the case for Heaven and we’ll look briefly at the nature of Heaven as described in Scripture. We’re also providing a Bible Insert for March 2014 summarizing this information.

As a theist, I obviously believe the evidence for God’s existence is strong. I didn’t always believe this to be the case, but having arrived at this conclusion, the following reasoning would incline me to consider the existence of Heaven, even if I didn’t have access to a Bible:

The Evidence Persuades Us a Good God Created Our World

There are good, reasonable arguments for the existence of a Creator God and the mere existence of a world in which love is possible (in spite of the presence of evil) is an indication this God is good.

Then the mere existence of a world in which hatred is possible (in spite of the presence of evil) is an indication that this 'god' is evil.  Same logic.

A Good God Would Not Create a World in Which Justice, Satisfaction and Joy Are Unattainable

If God is good, He wouldn’t create beings for whom justice, satisfaction and joy are elusive and unavailable.

 Speak for yourself.  There are millions of people today and in the past whose every waking moment was filled with undeserved misery and suffering.  Assuring us that justice will surely be served from another dimension is nothing but the hope of the hopeless, and irrational.  Atheism provides the only rational spark to give a shit about correcting injustices during a person's physical life.

Justice, Satisfaction and Joy Is Often Unattainable in This Temporal Earthly Life

Yet our common experience tells us justice is not always served here on Earth (bad people often get away with their crimes) and while we continually pursue satisfaction and joy, we find that it is fleeting and transient.

Therefore, If There is a Good God, It Is Reasonable to Believe He Has an Eternal, Heavenly Life Waiting for Us in Which Complete Justice, Satisfaction and Joy Will Be Realized

So where is justice, satisfaction and joy to be found? If God has designed us for eternity, and offers complete justice, satisfaction and joy in the next chapter of our existence, He will accomplish all we expect of Him and everything His nature demands.

 The ending of the Book of Revelation does not teach that evil will finally be eradicated, it only teaches there will come a day when god's heavenly city is on earth, and evil-doers will continue to live outside of it:

 10 And he said to me, "Do not seal up the words of the prophecy of this book, for the time is near.
 11 "Let the one who does wrong, still do wrong; and the one who is filthy, still be filthy; and let the one who is righteous, still practice righteousness; and the one who is holy, still keep himself holy."
 12 "Behold, I am coming quickly, and My reward is with Me, to render to every man according to what he has done.
 13 "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end."
 14 Blessed are those who wash their robes, so that they may have the right to the tree of life, and may enter by the gates into the city.
 15 Outside are the dogs and the sorcerers and the immoral persons and the murderers and the idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices lying. (Rev. 22:10-15 NAU)

 Wallace continues:

If the case for God’s existence is reasonable, the case for Heaven’s existence is also reasonable.

 But the goodness of heaven doesn't necessarily follow.  You would never insist that the man who built a house was good merely because what he did will shield some people from rain and wind.  So it doesn't matter if there is a god and he created this world.  That doesn't get you to the "he is good" part.

Furthermore, your god "stirs up" the Medes to rape women in Isaiah 13:16, see context, so you need to stop with all of his luvy duvy god shit already...unless you suddenly discovered in the last few seconds that Isaiah isn't supposed to be part of the biblical canon?

Thoughtful consideration of this reality (in light of God’s nature) can also tell us something about the nature of Heaven. Even if I knew nothing about what Christian Scripture teaches about the afterlife, I would still be inclined to believe Heaven is a place of perfection:

If there is a Creator God, He created everything from nothing; matter from non-matter, life from non-life.

 No, there being a creator god does not automatically imply he created everything from nothing, that's just you importing biblical assumptions of creation ex nihilo into your comment here.

If God can do all that, he has unfathomable power

 Mafia bosses and dictators have unfathomable power too.  Not sure if they descended morally so far that they caused men to rape women, the way your god does in Isaiah 13:16.

If God has unfathomable power, he has the power to eliminate imperfection

No, the fact that his power is "unfathomable" doesn't mean it has no limits, it just means we humans would conclude god is very powerful.  The power to eliminate perfection is not something that logically follows from having great power.

Worse, if your god were perfect, then he'd have been perfectly content before creating anything, and by being so content would have no motive to create anything...just like if you are perfectly content after a big meal, you have no motive to eat.  So if there is a god and he created the universe, he cannot have been perfectly content, he must have been lonely, or he must have thought his existing righteousness could be surpassed by complicating his life and creating things that were not necessary to his own happiness.

If God has the power to eliminate imperfection, He can certainly eliminate it from the realm in which He exists

Then because you think God exists in the physical realm too and not just the spiritual realm, he can also elimitate imperfection from sinful humans, in which case you lose the "god gave Adam and Eve freewill" defense to the charge of evil.  God is clearly willing to have creatures serve him even when they are incapable of doing wrong (i.e., what the saints are doing who are dead, whose spirits are allegedly in heaven), so you can no longer say god's desire that we worship and love him authentically requires that he give us freewill.  The departed saints now in heaven are incapable of choosing evil, so apparently god himself thinks those who cannot possibly chose evil, can still authentically love and worship him.  Thus God could have given such constitution of the will to Adam and Eve, and they would have avoided making evil choices.

Therefore, Heaven is a place of perfection

Then lying must be a sign of perfection:

 19 Micaiah said, "Therefore, hear the word of the LORD. I saw the LORD sitting on His throne, and all the host of heaven standing by Him on His right and on His left.
 20 "The LORD said, 'Who will entice Ahab to go up and fall at Ramoth-gilead?' And one said this while another said that.
 21 "Then a spirit came forward and stood before the LORD and said, 'I will entice him.'
 22 "The LORD said to him, 'How?' And he said, 'I will go out and be a deceiving spirit in the mouth of all his prophets.' Then He said, 'You are to entice him and also prevail. Go and do so.'
 23 "Now therefore, behold, the LORD has put a deceiving spirit in the mouth of all these your prophets; and the LORD has proclaimed disaster against you."   (1 Ki. 22:19-23 NAU)

Wallace continues:

Even from this simple line of reasoning, it’s easy to see why we might believe Heaven is a place of perfect justice, satisfaction and joy. This reality ought to give us reasons to rejoice and reasons to be concerned. While Heaven will certainly be a place of perfection, all of us should think earnestly about our own imperfection. Are any of us qualified, based on our own merit, to enter such a prefect, holy realm?

 Yes.  Aaron and the Levitical prieists were capable of entering the Holy of Holies into the presence of God, without becoming perfect.  So sinners can indeed dwell in the presence of God.  All this talk about how God is too righteous for our sinful selves to be around, is nothing but high and mighty systematic theology.

The case for Heaven’s existence and perfect nature should cause us to examine the nature of Salvation as offered through the sacrifice of Christ.

 The smarter Christian humbly follows the gospel that was taught by the very words of Christ alone, that is, the form of the gospel before Jesus died.  The fact that such is not sufficient for you, speaks volumes.

The reasonable existence of Heaven points to the reasonable necessity of Jesus’ death on the cross.

 That's just stupid, heaven was considered a reality by all pre-Christian Jews, most of whom shunned any idea that God would accept human sacrifice.

Steve Braude's Levitating Table

Steve Braude, author of "The Gold Leaf Lady and Other Parapsychological Investigations" (University of Chicago Press, 2007), gets all excited when a table levitates:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9mVoQFqR6o

here's my reply:




 Braude "explains" in this interview.

Sorry, but it doesn't matter if the spiritual realm is real, Christian apologists, who routinely cite to Braude's investigations as "good evidence" of the paranormal, cannot intellectually obligate atheists to give up materialism with such stuff.  Atheists are not "irrational" or "unreasonable" to point out the obvious flaws in this stuff as reasons to continue saying such evidence doesn't defeat materialism.

Demolishing Triablogue: Bad Christian apologetics bingo

This is my reply to an article by Steve Hays and comments thereto from Epistle of Dude


Steve Hays mocks Genetically Modified Skeptic's newest video game:

The Triablogue villagers reply in kind, and I respond respectively:

Epistle of Dude11/03/2018 12:06 PM

Also:What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

It's better to say that you cannot intellectually obligate another person to give up their belief because you make unsupported comments about reality. 

Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.

 No, biology is the study of living things, period.  Conclusions about how life arose from non-life are part of biology, called abiogenesis.  Old earth creationists also believe God intended for animals to rip each other apart before sin (i.e., death before sin), which would mean he was characterizing this horrible carnivorous world as "very good" in Genesis 1:31.  See Hugh Ross and Kent Hovind duke this out on the John Ankerberg show.

Materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a divine foot in the door.

 Yes, there might be Christian-hating atheists who are that prejudiced.  But the opposite of materialism is an exercise in sophistry, since all attempts to use empirical evidence to "prove" the existence of non-material things, must fail.  Frank Turek with his big bang spaceless timeless immaterial god is a fucking joke.  For example, even creationist think-tanks such as ICR deny the scientific validity of the big bang and insist it is unbiblical.   How can Turek seriously claim to intellectually obligate skeptics to his view, when other equally orthodox "born again" Christians, all of whom have a master's degree or greater in a scientific field find his position absurd.

We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.

 That's exactly right.  You are an atheist with respect to every non-Christian religion's deities.  The difference between you and me is one single god, YHWH.

The God of the Bible is evil.

he doesn't just kill king David's baby, he needlessly causes it to suffer a horrible sickness for 7 days before killing it...thus proving that this bible-god desires to torture babies:

 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.
 14 "However, because by this deed you have given occasion to the enemies of the LORD to blaspheme, the child also that is born to you shall surely die."
 15 So Nathan went to his house. Then the LORD struck the child that Uriah's widow bore to David, so that he was very sick.
 16 David therefore inquired of God for the child; and David fasted and went and lay all night on the ground.
 17 The elders of his household stood beside him in order to raise him up from the ground, but he was unwilling and would not eat food with them.
 18 Then it happened on the seventh day that the child died. And the servants of David were afraid to tell him that the child was dead, for they said, "Behold, while the child was still alive, we spoke to him and he did not listen to our voice. How then can we tell him that the child is dead, since he might do himself harm!" (2 Sam. 12:11-18 NAU)

God causes men to rape women in Isaiah 13:16, as I show in another post.

In Deuteronomy 28, God pushes the following threats on those who would dare disobey him:  He will cause their wives to be raped (v. 30), he will cause parental cannibalism (v. 53-57).  Then god assures them that he will take just as much "delight" to inflict these sufferings on the disobedient, that he took when bestowing blessings upon the faithful (v. 63).

Yes, your god is evil...unless you disagree with Frank Turek's moral argument and suddenly discover that rape can be morally good in certain circumstances?

 Epistle of Dude continues:

The Bible promotes slavery, genocide, sexism.

SLAVERY
In the biblical context, "slavery" was worse than the Antebellum South:  God gave the Hebrews permission to acquire slaves from the surrounding pagan nations:

45 'Then, too, it is out of the sons of the sojourners who live as aliens among you that you may gain acquisition, and out of their families who are with you, whom they will have produced in your land; they also may become your possession.
 46 'You may even bequeath them to your sons after you, to receive as a possession; you can use them as permanent slaves. But in respect to your countrymen, the sons of Israel, you shall not rule with severity over one another. (Lev. 25:45-46 NAU)

And apparently Moses, the alleged author of Leviticus, understood this to mean that they could make war against whoever they thought their god wanted them to kill, then keep the surviving little girls as slaves:

 14 Moses was angry with the officers of the army, the captains of thousands and the captains of hundreds, who had come from service in the war.
 15 And Moses said to them, "Have you spared all the women?
 16 "Behold, these caused the sons of Israel, through the counsel of Balaam, to trespass against the LORD in the matter of Peor, so the plague was among the congregation of the LORD.
 17 "Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known man intimately.
 18 "But all the girls who have not known man intimately, spare for yourselves.   (Num. 31:14-18 NAU)

 (of course, "for yourselves" wasn't limited to merely working, it also meant "marry and have sex with", as even inerrantist Christian scholars admit:

Women who had known men sexually, whether Midianite or sinful Israelite men, were to be considered unclean, since they were the main instrument of Israel’s demise at Baal Peor. Only the young girls would be allowed to live so that they may be taken as wives or slaves by the Israelite men, according to the principles of holy war (Deut 20:13–14; 21:10–14).

Cole, R. D. (2001, c2000). Vol. 3B: Numbers (electronic ed.). Logos Library System;
The New American Commentary (Page 499). Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers.

 Forcing little girls into marriage or slavery soon after kidnapping them and killing their parents, is clear from:

 10 "When you go out to battle against your enemies, and the LORD your God delivers them into your hands and you take them away captive,
 11 and see among the captives a beautiful woman, and have a desire for her and would take her as a wife for yourself,
 12 then you shall bring her home to your house, and she shall shave her head and trim her nails.
 13 "She shall also remove the clothes of her captivity and shall remain in your house, and mourn her father and mother a full month; and after that you may go in to her and be her husband and she shall be your wife.
 14 "It shall be, if you are not pleased with her, then you shall let her go wherever she wishes; but you shall certainly not sell her for money, you shall not mistreat her, because you have humbled her. (Deut. 21:10-14 NAU)

And don't even get me started on how this marriage rite necessarily ignores the desires of the female captive.  And that this marriage rite was prescribing rape is clear from the Good News Translation of v. 14:

¹⁴ Later, if you no longer want her, you are to let her go free. Since you forced her to have intercourse with you, you cannot treat her as a slave and sell her.

GENOCIDE
As far as "genocide", the average person doesn't give two shits about the technical definition: what we mean is that the ancient Hebrews went around killing thousands of people, no different than what the pagan tribes of those days did.  But for geeks who don't have a life and think the point of living is to act like a pretentious jailhouse lawyer, and pretend that technicalities are the only motive the brain has for continuing to function, "genocide" is legitimately defined as "the intentional killing of all of the people of a nation, religion, or racial group"

Genocide is a justifiable term where the point of killing was extermination of any group or nation.  The precise motive (i.e., racism, etc) is irrelevant.

Therefore, when Paul Copan and Matthew Flannagan argue that the "genocide" charge against the ancient Hebrews is technically false, they are wrong.  Genocide does not require the victors to have any particular motive, only that they engage in large-scale massacre of certain people of any locality or identity.

So it is grammatically justified to characterize the divine command to the Hebrews for wholesale slaughter, to be a command to commit "genocide". The "fact" that the pagans victimized thereby were excessively corrupt (itself a false notion) is irrelevant:

 16 "Only in the cities of these peoples that the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, you shall not leave alive anything that breathes. (Deut. 20:16 NAU)

 2 "Thus says the LORD of hosts, 'I will punish Amalek for what he did to Israel, how he set himself against him on the way while he was coming up from Egypt.
 3 'Now go and strike Amalek and utterly destroy all that he has, and do not spare him; but put to death both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.'" (1 Sam. 15:2-3 NAU)

Indeed, you should read the entire chapter 15 of 1st Samuel, the point of the story was that God removed Saul as king of Israel because Saul did not carry out the extermination order as fully as God had required.

Copan's and Flannagan's attempts to get away from the obvious, show them to be struggling against reality in a quite vain and humiliating way.  Christian apologist Dr. Lydia McGrew (wife of bible scholar Timothy McGrew) does not find Copan's excuses the least bit convincing.

How can Christian apologists expect spiritually dead people to recognize such arguments as successful when spiritually alive people often find such arguments fallacious?  Can it be reasonable to suggest that because spiritually alive people cannot even agree on how disgusting god is, skeptics and atheists can be rational and reasonable to consider the biblical data fatally ambiguous and thus unworthy of seriously involved analysis?

SEXISM
As far as sexism, of course Paul was sexist, he thinks "worldly fables" are fit only for "old women":

 7 But have nothing to do with worldly fables fit only for old women. On the other hand, discipline yourself for the purpose of godliness; (1 Tim. 4:7 NAU)

Epistle of Dude continues:

Teaching children religion is child abuse.

 I do not agree with the more radical atheists that this is so.  The average church-goer is not abusing their child by simply going to church and instilling a belief in spirituality in their child.  It only becomes "abusive" when the parent pushes that shit so much that Jesus ends up being every other word.  It is the "fundamentalist" form of Christian faith that is psychologically abusive.  There is nobody there to answer the child's prayers, but they are taught that silence only means god has chosen not to answer...sort of like the reason my coffee table didn't take away my desire to play the lottery when I prayed for this desire to depart,  is because my coffee table doesn't wish to answer me at this time.  FUCK YOU DREAMER.

    Epistle of Dude11/03/2018 12:14 PM

    ☍

    Why doesn't God heal amputees?

 There are several problems with the apologists who pretend that failure to heal amputees isn't a problem:

a) the apologists are always citing to Craig Keener's two-volume work "Miracles" as a game changer in favor of Christian apologetics, and therein, Keener mentions the miraculous regrowth of limbs, which forbids the apologist from pretending smugly that we never see regrown limbs because God never promised such ability.  The fools at Triablogue push Keener's amputee-healing stsories as if they are truth.

b)  the bible does promise that future Christians will do even "greater" miracles than Jesus:

  12 "Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in Me, the works that I do, he will do also; and greater works than these he will do; because I go to the Father.
 13 "Whatever you ask in My name, that will I do, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. (Jn. 14:12-13 NAU)

See the atheist perspective here.

----------------------------------------------------

snip-----------

    Jesse11/04/2018 1:02 AM

    ☍

    I think that the text of Psalm 103:8-14 (among others) debunks any notion of God in the Old Testament being cruel and hateful. Such a notion could not be further from the truth. Historical narratives are generally descriptive, not prescriptive, in nature. Context is key. All of the events that we may deem unpleasant in the Old Testament are ultimately a consequence of the Fall, and God has chosen to repair creation in the manner that He sees fit. Who are we to question Him? That would be my answer to Dawkins.

 Our being human is apparently sufficient to justify questioning God, it's what Moses did, and he apparently successfully knocked some sense into the divine head:

  9 The LORD said to Moses, "I have seen this people, and behold, they are an obstinate people.
 10 "Now then let Me alone, that My anger may burn against them and that I may destroy them; and I will make of you a great nation."
 11 Then Moses entreated the LORD his God, and said, "O LORD, why does Your anger burn against Your people whom You have brought out from the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand?
 12 "Why should the Egyptians speak, saying, 'With evil intent He brought them out to kill them in the mountains and to destroy them from the face of the earth '? Turn from Your burning anger and change Your mind about doing harm to Your people.
 13 "Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, Your servants to whom You swore by Yourself, and said to them, 'I will multiply your descendants as the stars of the heavens, and all this land of which I have spoken I will give to your descendants, and they shall inherit it forever.'"
 14 So the LORD changed His mind about the harm which He said He would do to His people.  (Exod. 32:9-14 NAU)

God is such a liar...he gives a really strong impression of seriously intending to kill the Israelites.  And since bible inerrancy is a false doctrine, no, I justifiably refuse to read this story through the lens of "God infallibly foreknows what we'll do".

faith alchemist11/04/2018 1:39 AM

☍

Blah blah blah Apollonius of Tyana blah bling bloo Dying and Rising gods blimp blorp Ishtar boppa footnote citing Carrier blah.

 Blah blah blah Jesus of Nazareth blah bling bloo rising from the dead blimp blorp god works evil in a way that keeps him immune from culpability for it, boppa footnote citing Will Craig blah.

As you can see, I am very frightened of Christianity, and can only feel better about my atheism by simply turning away from Christian arguments and hoping they'll just go away.  Yeah right.

Why did I sue James Patrick Holding for libel?

All the reasons I sued James Patrick Holding can be found in the First Amended Complaint which I filed with the federal court in Florida.  download here.

After reading it, it won't be hard to guess why Holding played the part of a Pharisee and invoked a technicality to escape having to answer on the merits.  Yes, that's exactly what the god of the bible wants Christians to do; if they can exploit a technical trifle to avoid honestly admitting their slanders, then by all means, do exactly what the corrupt world does, and lawyer up.  Yeah, that's the more honest way to show that you are more honest about the facts than non-Christians. 

 

Cold Case Christianity: How the Philosophy of Infinite Regress Demonstrates the Universe Had a Beginning

This is my reply to a video by J. Warner Wallace:

How the Philosophy of Infinite Regress 

Demonstrates the Universe Had a Beginning (Video)

Posted: 16 Oct 2018 01:05 AM PDT

 In this clip from J. Warner Wallace’s longer talk on the existence of God from cosmological evidence (based on his book, God’s Crime Scene), J. Warner describes how the philosophy of infinite regress demonstrates that time had a beginning and, therefore, ads to the case for a universe with a beginning.

(Wallace is wising up to his inability to prove things: he has disabled comments for this video at YouTube.  Apparently, apologetics has more to do with unobstructed preaching to the choir and less to do with answering critics.  Wallace knows about my counter-apologtics blog, and to my knowledge has done precisely NOTHING to attempt any answers, or interact with me).
 
It wasn't necessary to watch this video, the underlined portion above, showing what Wallace was arguing for, constitutes a logically impossibility, which would remain a fatal flaw regardless of what Wallace had to say about the problems of infinite regression.  Such fatal flaw can be demonstrated by comparing the Christian truth claim with other normative truth claims that are couched in grammatically equivalent terms:

Billy played baseball

Dorothy ate cereral

God created time

Notice: all verbs, and therefore those here (i.e., played, ate, created) presuppose time to already be in existence before the action they describe takes place.  Hence:

There was a time before Billy played baseball.

There was a time before Dorothy ate cereal.

There was a time before God created time (!?)

Since all three sentences are grammatically the same, whatever is logically true of the verbs in the first two, must also be true of the verb in the third.

First, "time before time" is clearly illogical because it is question-begging.  You may as well talk about the water before water.

Second, every biblical description of heaven depicts events there as taking place in no less temporal progression than they do on earth, suggesting that the bible leaves plenty of room for the supposition that God was doing things, one after the other, before creating this universe. If he was, then 'time' also limits god.

Finally, 'time' is not a fundamental component of reality, it is merely a fictional measuring device we invented to record the fluctuating distances between planetary bodies.  That's why at the same moment it is 3 p.m. in California, it's not 3 p.m. in Paris.  There is no such thing as seconds, minutes or hours, the only place they exist is in clocks.  "time" is nothing but a word that we use to help express our contentions about things past, present and future.  The idea that "eternity" is some type of different dimension where God views past and present in some unfathomable all-at-once "now" is pure fundamentalist Christian hocus-pocus, it cannot be sustained from the bible anyway, and is thus a concept worthy of nothing but ridicule.

For all these reasons, the concept of creating time itself is sufficiently incoherent and problematic as to reasonably justify those atheists who laugh at the whole business, who also demand the creationist come up with something slightly less convoluted to 'explain' why a god is 'necessary' to explain reality.

 Of course, Wallace has jumped on the Big Bang bandwagon, and will thus pretend that God's creation of time is a completely different thing from actions we engage in on earth.  Not so.  The force of my rebuttal is contained in the grammatical realities that I pointed out.  If you wish to say God created time, you must either 

a)  accept that this is a logically contradictory idea, or 

b) insist that verbs for god's action are not governed by the grammatical realities that govern the verbs describing human action (but you'd have to justify that, and blind appeal to God being so much more wonderful and unlike anything is not going to suffice), or 

c)  insist that human language is incapable of coherently expressing this wonderful truth, in which case you just admitted that the language of Genesis 1:1 is equally incapable of expressing such alleged wondrous truth.

Cold Case Christianity: Is the Problem of Evil Really a Problem for Christianity? Yes

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

Cold Case Christianity: Is the Problem of Evil Really a Problem for Christianity?

Posted: 12 Oct 2018 01:14 AM PDT

I’m honored to train the adults and students at Green Bay Community Church, investigating the reliability of the New Testament Gospels and the nature of truth. Troy Murphy has done a wonderful job assembling a powerful staff at the city’s largest church. GBCC’s youth pastor, Evan Gratz, opened up his youth group to me on Sunday night. As usual, the best part of the time with students was answering questions at the end of the evening. The problem of evil was raised by a teenager who described her recent conversation with an atheist friend. As an atheist myself for most of my life, I resonated with the objection and offered a brief response: If what we believe as Christians is true, evil and suffering are only a problem for atheists. The problem of evil isn’t really a problem for Christianity.

But since what you believe as Christians is false, you are deprived of your fluffy magically wonderful after-world where nothing bad every happens.

I have already critiqued apologist Frank Turek's attempt to show that morality is inconsistent with atheism.

Evil and suffering are typically experienced and understood within the context of one’s life.

Right.  How else?

As an atheist, I hoped for (and expected) a life of approximately ninety years. In the context of this span of time, if I had developed cancer in my forties, I would have been angered by the amount of time stolen from me as I battled the disease.

 That anger would have been the result of you finding out facts about life that were contrary to your subjective desires.  Being angry about it hardly argues that your desires arise out of some objective standard of morality that transcends humanity.

In fact, if I had been diagnosed with a terminal disease at that age, I would have been outraged by the fact it was going to deprive me of fifty percent of the life I expected. When your life is only ninety years long, anything cutting the time short is evil, and any prolonged suffering along the way is unjust and intolerable.

But what if we could live more than ninety short years? What if our lives had a beginning, but no end? How would we see (and respond to) evil, pain and suffering in the context of an eternal life?

Given the incoherent nature of the question, it hardly requires a response.  What if the tooth-fairy gave you a vision showing you what the dark side of the Bermuda Triangle looked like from the Andromeda Galaxy?  How much more time would you spend analyzing the paranormal?

How many of you who can remember the painful vaccinations you received as a child?

How many of you remember Isaiah 13:16-17, where God apparently had a morally good purpose for causing men to rape women?  If the result of the pain is good (i.e., it hurts to get a shot in the arm, but the benefits of better health justify the pain), then under your own logic, because God thought the outcome of men raping women would tend toward some type of greater moral good, this would morally justify his causing rape no less than how we justify causing pain to a child when giving them a flu shot.

If you’re reading this article at the age of thirty, the small period of your life occupied by the pain you experienced during those vaccinations has been long outdistanced by the years you’ve lived since then. As time stretched on from the point of that experience, you were able to place the pain within the larger context of your life.

Correct.  But unfortunately most rape victims cannot do the same as they look back on their having been sexually assaulted.  Trust in the afterlife merely papers over the problem.  No analogy.

You don’t even remember it now. If you have pierced ears, ask yourself a similar question. The pain you experienced at the point of the piercing is nearly forgotten, especially if it has been years since it occurred. Evil, pain and suffering are experienced and understood within the larger context of one’s life.

But not rape and child murder.  You are not doing apologetics, you are warming up an already-Christian audience for the inevitable "God's ways are mysterious but we can be sure he works all things to the good for those that love him" crap.

If the Christian worldview is true, we are eternal beings who will live forever.

 The Christian world view is not true.  Hence, your conclusion doesn't follow.

We get more than ninety years, we get all of eternity.

 Now you are merely resting upon the biblical teaching about "eternal life", when in fact the reasons to reject Christianity thereby also perform the function of showing "eternal life" to have more in common with a 12 year old girl's crush on a Hollywood actor and less to do with actual reality.

Our experience and understanding of pain and evil must be contextualized within eternity, not within our temporal lives.

 Translation:  "If Christianity is not true, there will never be ultimate justice.  You don't like that thought, do you?  Well then, doesn't it feel better to believe in eternal life and a great day of judgment?"

Reminder, the book of Revelation doesn't describe the end as the wicked finally banished, it describes them as continuing to do wicked deeds, continuing unpunished,  while others are in heaven watching:

 8 I, John, am the one who heard and saw these things. And when I heard and saw, I fell down to worship at the feet of the angel who showed me these things.
 9 But he said to me, "Do not do that. I am a fellow servant of yours and of your brethren the prophets and of those who heed the words of this book. Worship God."
 10 And he said to me, "Do not seal up the words of the prophecy of this book, for the time is near.
 11 "Let the one who does wrong, still do wrong; and the one who is filthy, still be filthy; and let the one who is righteous, still practice righteousness; and the one who is holy, still keep himself holy."
 12 "Behold, I am coming quickly, and My reward is with Me, to render to every man according to what he has done.
 13 "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end."
 14 Blessed are those who wash their robes, so that they may have the right to the tree of life, and may enter by the gates into the city.
 15 Outside are the dogs and the sorcerers and the immoral persons and the murderers and the idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices lying.   (Rev. 22:8-15 NAU) 

Wallace continues:

Whatever we experience here in our earthly life, no matter how difficult or painful it may be, must be seen through the lens of forever.

 Then perhaps I can be reasonable to assume you aren't directing this toward atheists.

As our eternal life stretches out beyond our struggles in mortality, our temporal experiences will become an ever-shrinking percentage of our consciousness. The suffering we may have experienced on earth will be long outdistanced by the eternal life we’ve lived since then.

 Yeah right.  What else are you gonna say?  God loves you?  Well, if it sells books, I guess one man has just as much right to sell Jesus as another one does.

Our life with God will be a life without suffering, without pain and without evil. “God will wipe away every tear from (our) eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away” (Revelation 21:4). It will also be a life where justice is realized, “for the Lord loves justice; he will not forsake his saints,” (Psalm 37:27-28) and He “will judge the righteous and the wicked, for there is a time for every matter and for every work” (Ecclesiastes 3:17). As our glorious eternal life with God stretches beyond our temporal experience, whatever suffering or injustice we might have experienced here on earth will seem like it occurred in the blink of an eye.

 The only problem being that if we truly do have a spirit that doesn't desire food, water, material possessions or sex, God could have created mankind on earth without bodies, and if he had, about 99% of the sins in this world would have been preempted, all without violating anybody's freewill.  This bit of bad news means you are no longer allowed to hide behind "because god respects our freewill" to "explain" the existence of evil.  And if you think somebody we'll go to heaven and never desire to sin again, then apparently you believe it is indeed possible to create a world in which free creatures authentically love and worship god, but are guaranteed to never sin.  If god can achieve that in heaven, he could have created Adam and Eve with the same constitution of the will, they would never have eaten the forbidden fruit, and sin would have been permanently preempted.  If your doctrine of freewill forces you to leave open the possibility that saved Christians might sin even after they get to heaven, perhaps apologetics isn't your calling.

In the context of the Christian eternal life, pain, suffering and evil can be faced and endured with strength, hope and confidence unavailable in an atheistic worldview.

 The Mormons can boast the same thing about Mormonism.  Under your logic, that would reasonably justify the recently raped and depressed women to go join the Mormons.  Would you encourage this if she asked you?  Or would you bother the nice lady with all of your criticisms of Mormons while this lady is living with unaddressed emotional trauma?

What used to seem so unjust to me is now less egregious.

Perhaps explaining why most Christians don't really give a shit about trying to make the world a better place.  That time can be better spent evangelizing, because somebody soon a giant Jesus will float down from the sky on a galloping horse to make everything all better, amen?

What used to seem so unbearable can now be faced with hope. The problem of evil, from my new Christian perspective, isn’t the same kind of problem it was from my old atheistic perspective, because the problem of evil isn’t really a problem for Christianity.

 Bullshit, your god caused men to rape women, by his own admission.  Search for "Isaiah 13" in one of my articles.

If your god can cause rape on earth, consistent with his allegedly infinite righteousness, then causing rape for people in heaven would also be consistent with said alleged infinite righteousness.  You will say nobody in heaven deserves to be raped, but you already say that about women on earth (don't you?)  And if God is infinitely wise, the spiritually mature person is more likely to accept God's judgments without question, so that the more spiritual you are, the less you care about whether God's ways conform to universal standards of fairness and justice.  If you see god causing a man to rape a woman in heaven, the mark of spiritual maturity is to just shut up and avoid asking "why?", see Romans 9:

 18 So then He has mercy on whom He desires, and He hardens whom He desires.
 19 You will say to me then, "Why does He still find fault? For who resists His will?"
 20 On the contrary, who are you, O man, who answers back to God? The thing molded will not say to the molder, "Why did you make me like this," will it?   (Rom. 9:18-20 NAU)

Follow that trail of unquestioning devotion down the road apiece and you wind up becoming an abortion clinic bomber, a hijacker, or some other idiot extremist who cannot be reasoned with, because they are so sure that God's ways are mysterious.

Demolishing Triablogue: Calvinist Steve doesn't like God's ways

This is my reply to an article by Calvinist Steve Hays entitled

Friday, October 05, 2018

Must we earn the right to be heard?

In a recent interview with Christianity Today, Tim Keller said:

    Because the church has got so many of its own skeletons and so much coverup of sexual abuse and so on, I don't know how we can adjudicate…right now we don't have any kind of credibility for a lot of reasons…As the church tries to speak publicly to social issues…we have to do it with repentance. 

    https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2018/october-web-only/tim-keller-politics-news-midterms-united-states.html

That's true at the level of public perception, which makes it necessary to correct that misperception. I disagree with how Keller frames the issue. Christians don't need to apologize for "the church". I'm not "the church". I don't speak for "the church". And I shouldn't be saddled with what "the church" did before I was born. Moreover, I don't control "the church". I'm just one guy.

Sounds like the kind of reasoning atheists use to accuse the bible-god of injustice for causing later humanity to be infected with original sin that nobody else was responsible for except Adam and Eve.  I'm afraid your western sense of individualism is quite opposite from the earliest detectable Hebrew views set forth in the OT.  We have to wonder what David and Bathsheba's baby was telling itself as God tortured it to death for 7 days because of David's sin, a sin the baby himself obviously wasn't responsible for:

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.
 14 "However, because by this deed you have given occasion to the enemies of the LORD to blaspheme, the child also that is born to you shall surely die."
 15 So Nathan went to his house. Then the LORD struck the child that Uriah's widow bore to David, so that he was very sick.
 16 David therefore inquired of God for the child; and David fasted and went and lay all night on the ground.
 17 The elders of his household stood beside him in order to raise him up from the ground, but he was unwilling and would not eat food with them.
 18 Then it happened on the seventh day that the child died. And the servants of David were afraid to tell him that the child was dead, for they said, "Behold, while the child was still alive, we spoke to him and he did not listen to our voice. How then can we tell him that the child is dead, since he might do himself harm!"
 (2 Sam. 12:13-18 NAU)

 Maybe the baby was telling himself I shouldn't be saddled with what my dad did before I was born.  It's nice to know the one Calvinist on the internet who mistakes his blog for having an actual life, is so caught up in word-games he can't even tell any more when the crap he believes contradicts biblical teaching.

It suffers from a fallacy of personification, as if the church is just one thing, as if the church is identical in time and space, so that whatever was done at one time or place somehow transfers to "the church" at another time or place. 

 It does:

 26 And if one member suffers, all the members suffer with it; if one member is honored, all the members rejoice with it.
 27 Now you are Christ's body, and individually members of it. (1 Cor. 12:26-27 NAU)

Sorry, Steve, but your modern individualist viewpoint is quite contrary to many passages in the bible that presuppose corporate responsibility.  That's tragic because it is Calvinists who would need to specialize in that doctrine, given their belief that Jesus' didn't just die for sinners, but that his death actually saves all for whom it was intended, which is not everybody (i.e., Limited Atonement).

"The church" is an an abstraction. That's a necessary abstraction for ease of reference, but it's becomes an overgeneralization when individual distinctions in time, place, and person are swallowed up by an indiscriminate category.

If you were spiritually mature, you'd care less about linguistic gymnastics and more about obeying 2nd Timothy 2:14.   Don't miss the "solemnly" in that passage, apparently, Paul thinks it VERY important that Christians abstain from wrangling words.  You don't have a choice...which should be music to the ears of a fatalistic hyperCalvinist like you, who believe in a god who predestined you to love the sins that he wanted you to also feel bad about.  You'll excuse me if I think a mean little boy torturing ants is an appropriate analogy to your god and humanity.

I don't speak and act as a representative of "the church". My positions should be evaluated by whether they are right or wrong, true or false, backed by reason and evidence, rather than fallacious guilt-by-association, which is a lazy anti-intellectual shortcut.

 On what other basis did God punish David's baby for sins the baby didn't commit, except the stupid doctrine of original sin which arises out of guilt by association?  Apparently if you had been one of the young boys among the prisoners of war which Moses required death for (Numbers 31:17), you would have said Moses has engaged in fallacious guilt by association.  Sorry, Steve, but your Calvinism is far to cavalier for any smart atheist bible critic like myself to think it the least bit threatening to what I believe.  If God predestined you to do whatever you do, it logically follows he'd want you to praise him for making you do whatever you happen to end up doing.  Only in Calvinism is it "wrong" to praise God for the way his absolute sovereignty actually works.  I think you are looking into a mirror when you accuse others of anti-intellectualism.

You can get out of that by saying the male babies Moses ordered killed had also participated in the previous sexual sin at Peor, but only at the price of opening ancient pedophilia-doors you'll be later wishing you hadn't opened.  That's right Steve, just continue mistaking your blog for real-time human contact, and you'll sink deeper and deeper into that I-run-away-from-challenges-because-I'm-afraid-of-winning delusional mire that you apparently can't clean off the bottom of your shoes.

The situation is rather different with Catholics since they do acquire a corporate identity in a way that Protestants don't. Catholicism is fundamentally and pervasively institutional in a way that the Protestant faith is not,

 And their idea of corporate identity is more biblical than the Protestant version.  It doesn't matter if apostle Paul said divisions are good (1st Cor. 11:19), he also plainly declared, without qualification, that there should be NO divisions in the church (1:10, 12:25).  Jude 1:19 ascribes evil to those who "cause divisions".   I say Paul contradicted himself.  You ready to debate biblical inerrancy?  Or did God predestined you to think that only one reply per person was the foundation of immortality?

so Catholics can't disassociate themselves from what their denomination does in the same way Protestants can disassociate themselves from institutional Protestantism.

 Try reconciling that with Paul's metaphor that the entire body suffers when one member suffers, supra.

Of course, I also forget that as a staunch Calvinist, you believe your thoughts are infallibly predetermined.  I remember Calvinism...what a pile of demented shit that was...we are supposed to believe God predestined us to sin, but we should nevertheless live as if we think he didn't. FUCK YOU.

Carm Darn # 1: Matt Slick forgot to read v. 17

This is my reply to an article by Matt Slick entitled

Why does the Bible say houses will be plundered and wives ravished?

    "Anyone who is found will be thrust through, and anyone who is captured will fall by the sword. 16 Their little ones also will be dashed to pieces before their eyes; Their houses will be plundered and their wives ravished," (Isaiah 13:15-16).

This is simply a prophecy about what will occur.  It is a proclamation about the coming judgment of how Babylon will fall to the Medes.  If someone comments about a coming war and then states that there will be children who will be destroyed, houses plundered, and wives raped, does it mean that the one who is saying it is approving of it?  It just means that the unfortunate reality of war and its horrible consequences are easily known and even predicted.

 I think Matt forgot to read v. 17, here it is:

 17 Behold, I am going to stir up the Medes against them, Who will not value silver or take pleasure in gold. (Isa. 13:17 NAU)

Here is it in context. It is perfectly clear from the immediate context that God is claiming to "stir up" the Medes to inflict atrocities like rape upon the Babylonians:

 13 Therefore I will make the heavens tremble, And the earth will be shaken from its place At the fury of the LORD of hosts In the day of His burning anger.
 14 And it will be that like a hunted gazelle, Or like sheep with none to gather them, They will each turn to his own people, And each one flee to his own land.
 15 Anyone who is found will be thrust through, And anyone who is captured will fall by the sword.
 16 Their little ones also will be dashed to pieces Before their eyes; Their houses will be plundered And their wives ravished.
 17 Behold, I am going to stir up the Medes against them, Who will not value silver or take pleasure in gold.
 18 And their bows will mow down the young men, They will not even have compassion on the fruit of the womb, Nor will their eye pity children.
 19 And Babylon, the beauty of kingdoms, the glory of the Chaldeans' pride, Will be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah.   (Isa. 13:13-19 NAU)

If this prophecy had instead said God would be "stirring up" the Medes to deliver gifts of food to the Babylonians, the Christian apologists would not see any problem in saying God caused the Medes to do this good work.  So it is clear that the linguistic gymnastics arise solely from the apologist's dislike of the idea that god causes rape, it does not arise from anything in the grammar or the immediate context. We call that superficial method of interpretation eisogesis.

Also, Matt Slick is a Calvinist, so he would have been more honest had he said that God causes people to make all the choices that they do, including the sinful ones, such as rape.  Because of his Calvinism, Slick would not need to read v. 17, God's causing people to sin is too clear from other scriptures, so Slick would simply read that bit of theology into this text even if v. 17 wasn't there.

Cold Case Christianity: Do Atheists Believe in Just One Less God Than Christians?

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

Do Atheists Believe in Just One Less God Than Christians?

Posted: 21 Sep 2018 01:13 AM PDT

 As an atheist, I used to challenge my Christian friends with a common objection heard across the Internet today. Although my formulation of the objection differed from time to time, it was a lot like the popular statement attributed to Stephen F. Roberts:

“I contend we are both atheists, I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.”

My point was simple: All of us are atheists to some degree if you really think about it; we just disagree about which gods we reject. Christians are atheistic in their attitude toward, Zeus, Poseidon, Lakshmi, Vishnu, Cheonjiwang, Na Tuk Kong, Achamán, Huixtocihuatl and thousands of other historic gods. When asked, Christians typically offer the same reasons for rejecting these other “deities” that I would have offered for rejecting the God of Christianity. So (as I often claimed), if my believing friends simply approached Yahweh in the same way they approached other mythologies, they would inevitably take the final step toward rationality and reject all false gods.

I avoid that argument because Christianity, despite being false, obviously has more historical support than do the gods of other ancient religions.  You cannot get rid of Christianity quite as easily as you can get rid of Zeus.

This objection is still popular.

That's an unfortunate truth about modern-day culture.  Critical thinking has become an industry because the internet not only enables one to know more truth, it also facilitates ignorance.

I hear it (or read it) frequently in my efforts to make the case for Christianity now that I’m a believer. While there are certainly several valid responses, I’d like to offer one from my experience as a detective and case maker. I think it provides a brief, but rhetorically powerful rejoinder to this misguided, iconic objection.

In every criminal trial, a jury is asked to evaluate the actions of one defendant related to a particular crime. While there are millions of other people in the world who could have committed the crime under consideration (and indeed, millions of these people were actually available to commit the crime), only one has been charged. If the jury becomes convinced this defendant is the perpetrator, they will convict him based on their beliefs. They will convict the accused even though they haven’t examined the actions (or nature) of millions of other potential suspects.

 using the same logic, atheists can be reasonable to look at the evidence for Christianity and draw conclusions thereto, even if they haven't examined every supernaturalism argument in existence.

They’ll render a verdict based on the evidence related to this defendant, in spite of the fact they may be ignorant of the history or actions of several million alternatives.

So, atheists also can be reasonable to "render a verdict based on the evidence related to [god] in spite of the fact they may be ignorant of the history or actions of several million alternatives"

If the evidence is persuasive, the jurors will become true believers in the guilt of this man or woman, even as they reject millions of other options.

Same answer.

As Christians, we are just like the jurors on that trial. We make a decision about Jesus on the basis of the evidence related to Jesus, not the fact there may be many alternative candidates offered by others.

Then you cannot blame atheists for making a decision about 'god' on the basis of the available evidence, not the fact there may be many alternative candidates offered by others.

If the evidence is persuasive, we can reach our decision in good conscience, even if we are completely unfamiliar with other possibilities.

 Ditto the atheist.

Christianity makes claims of exclusivity; if Christianity is true, all other claims about God are false.

Correction, this is conservative Christianity which makes the claim of exclusivity.  It isn't like the liberal Christian inclusivists who believe in many other legitimate paths to God have never seen John 14:6 or the other standard biblical proof-texts that make up the exclusivist's entire reason for processing oxygen.

If the evidence supporting Christianity is convincing to us as the jury, we need look no further. In the end, our decision will be based on the strength (or weakness) of the case for Christianity, just like the decisions made by jurors related to a particular defendant must be based on the strength (or weakness) of the evidence.

And, as usual (and probably because you need to commit this error to sell books), you once again premise Christianity's truth entirely upon where the empirical evidence points...you leave no room in your argument for the biblical fact that there is an invisible subjective convicting of sin by the Holy Spirit that is also a part of, and more important than, the empirical evidence.  If you started pushing the subjective truth that the bible connects to one's ability to determine the truth of Christianity, logic would require that you stop promoting your book sales as obsessively as you do.  God has his part to play, which you cannot play for him, and since he played it for hundreds of years before internet, videos, printing press and electricity, you might consider that there is a genuine possibility you've blinded yourself too all these years:  the bible god, if he exists, thinks it much better for today's Christians to simply preach straight from the bible, plus nothing, and God will be responsible for making anybody sitting in the pews or on the street to become interested.

At the end of a trail, juries are “unbelievers” when it comes to every other potential suspect, because the evidence confirming the guilt of their particular defendant was sufficient. In a similar way, we can be confident “unbelievers” when it comes to every other potential god because the evidence for Christianity is more than sufficient.

Ditto the atheist.  Reasonableness in denying god's existence doesn't require refuting every possible argument for supernaturalism, for the same reason that the reasonableness of believing Jesus rose from the dead doesn't require refuting every possible argument for naturalism.