See Part 1 General Comments
Part 11: The Problems with Luke
Part 16: My Conclusion
Addendum 1: Lee Strobel and Problem of Hell
As with the previous addendum, this is a relic from earlier drafts when I still had it
in mind I was going to write a much more comprehensive rebuttal. This was originally meant to preface the
discussion, and contains my thoughts on why it is ridiculous to even get into
the discussion of trying to prove Christianity from the evidence.
The Problem
of Hell
I remember
the first moment when, as a teenager, it suddenly occurred to me that although
my Church kept talking about the “good news of Christianity,” it was in fact a
horrific view of the world I was being presented with. According to what the Church preaches, the
majority of the world’s population is destined to be tortured for all eternity
in hell. Call that what you will, it’s
not “good news.” Objectively speaking,
it would be far better for the vast majority of people if the atheists were
right, and there was no God, and consequently no hell.
More
than any other intellectual issue, the problem of hell caused me to lose my
faith.
Although
some people like to laugh about it, I’m somewhat sympathetic to Pascal’s Wager which states that you might as well believe in God, because if
there is a God then you go to heaven, and if there isn’t a God, it doesn’t
really matter anyway. If this truly worked, the insurance against
Hell comes at a cheap enough price.
The
problem though is that Pascal’s Wager assumes a binary opposition between
faith and disbelief. In fact, since most
of the world’s religion claim exclusivity, to believe in one is to reject the
others. When you become a Christian, you
are rejecting Islam. And then what
happens when Mohammed comes down on the clouds instead of Jesus?
Christopher
Hitchens more correctly theorized that belief in religion is
like Aladdin’s cave. To escape from the
cave, Aladdin was presented with a choice of multiple doors, one of which led
to safety, and all the others led to certain death.
Or,
to quote Homer Simpson when he was explaining to his wife why he didn’t want to
go to Church: “And what if we picked the wrong religion? Why every week we’d just be making God madder
and madder.”
It
is the problem of heaven and hell that makes everything Lee Strobel says so
ridiculous. If so much is at stake, is
this the best evidence God has left us with?
Are we reduced to psychoanalyzing the trustworthiness of a group of
fisherman in order to avoid being sent to hell for all eternity? Why doesn’t God just appear and tell us what
he wants us to believe?
Why
It’s Absurd To Even Get Into This Debate
The
same questions asked about the Gospels can be asked about any other ancient
document. Did Homer really write The Iliad ? How true are the events in The Iliad?
But
in the case of The Iliad, no one would argue that you could go to
hell if you got the wrong answers to these questions, and it would be
ridiculous to do so.
Lee
Strobel asks us to believe in the Gospels because the Gospels are authentic eyewitness
testimony, and because the apostles proved their faith by dying for it, and no
one would die for a lie.
In
response to this, a number of things can be said. First of all, there are historical reliability
problems with many of the early Christian traditions about the martyrdom of the
apostles. But even assuming that the
tradition was historically reliable, we might note in passing that lots of
people have died for a lie. Joseph Smith
died as a result of fabricating Mormonism (W), but probably not because he
particularly wanted to. Rather, at a
certain point, the events he had set in motion got out of his control, and it
became too late for him to back down and retract it.
The
910 followers of Jim Jones died for a lie (W),
but they did it because they were deluded.
It
could also be that the disciples found it difficult to go back to being
ordinary fisherman after they had experienced a level of fame and social
recognition associated with ushering in the messianic age, and that they were
quite happy to ride this wave as long as they could. (Human beings are not always entirely
rational creatures—historically, people have died for less.)
But
whatever conclusion you end up with, to even consider the question you have to
put yourself in the absurd position of having your eternal salvation dependent
on your ability to successfully psychoanalyze a group of fisherman across a
distance of 2,000 years.
The
same problem occurs with the authorship of the Gospels. Even assuming Lee Strobel was right on this,
what a bizarre thing to have your salvation hinge on—how well you are able to
follow the literary clues in the Gospels to deduce their authorship.
And
it becomes even more bizarre when you consider that you and I are able to
conduct this investigation from an extremely privileged position with all the
resources of the world’s libraries at our fingertips. But that isn’t true for everyone.
When
the Christian missionaries go up to the Cambodian hill tribes and tell them
that they are all going to hell unless they accept Jesus Christ (which, by the way, they are currently doing), how are the illiterate hill tribes
supposed to evaluate the reliability of the Gospels?
And
when competing Muslim and Christian missionaries try to proselytize the same
groups of hill tribes in Cambodia (as described in this NEW YORK TIMES ARTICLE HERE), or the villages in West Papua (as described in this AGE ARTICLE HERE), and the Christians tell them they are going to Hell unless they
believe in Christ, and the Muslims tell them they are going to Hell unless they
believe in Mohammed, how are the hill tribes supposed to make a logical
decision between the two groups?
To
accept that there is some sort of “right” answer necessary for salvation, even
if this answer is arrived at through careful examination of the historical
evidence, is ridiculous.
Worse
yet, it means that for hundreds of years the salvation of millions of Chinese
was of no importance to God.
As
Thomas Paine said, if God truly had something he wanted to communicate to all
of humanity, it is within his power to do so.
He didn’t need to wait 1,500 years until Christian missionaries reached Asia, he could simply have emblazoned on the moon,
written in all languages, that “Jesus Christ is Lord.”
[I
once had a Chinese friend ask me why wasn’t Jesus placed in an area where the
Chinese would have had more historical access to his teachings if it was so-all
important for everyone to believe in him.
“Besides which,” he said, “if God did need to send a Messiah, China
would have been the logical place to send him.
China
was one of the most literate civilizations in the ancient world and kept
meticulous historical records of everything.”]
Furthermore, to borrow more from Thomas Paine, Paine also points out that if God really wanted everyone to believe in the resurrection of Jesus, the event should have been a public demonstration that was witnessed by all. Instead, even according to the account in the Gospels, Jesus only appears to his followers in secret. And so these select few men are then meant as a stand in for the entire world. So in order to believe in the resurrection of Christ, we have to believe first in the integrity of the men who supposedly witnessed it, and secondly in the integrity of the men who wrote down their stories. Lee Strobel defends both of these propositions, but notice how ridiculous the premise of the debate is before we even enter it. Is this what our salvation is supposed to hinge on? Our ability to determine, at two-thousand years distance, the reliability of the testimony of a handful of eyewitnesses? Why didn't God just make a public demonstration that would have been available to all?
Well
Then, What About Faith?
If
salvation by reason is ridiculous, then what about salvation by faith? Trusting in faith is equally ridiculous, I
believe.
Salvation
by reason involves trusting your head to get the right answer to save you from
damnation. Salvation by faith involves
trusting your heart (or your gut) to save you from damnation. But although the mechanisms for arriving at
the correct answer are different, the concepts are equally ridiculous. Both concepts assume that there’s
a right answer and that you must arrive at.
Salvation
by faith would be somewhat less problematic if all people of faith arrived at the
same answer—that is, if everyone who trusted their religion to blind faith
ended up being lead by God to become a Christian. But obviously this isn’t the case. And what’s really interesting is that if you
talk to a Muslim, or a Mormon, they will describe their faith to you in exactly
the same way that Christians do.
I
don’t know how many of you have had the experience of talking to Mormon
missionaries, but they’re a visible presence in many parts of Asia, and when
they came to my door once in Japan, I thought I was going to talk sense into
them.
Now,
Mormonism is a religion that makes absolutely no sense. As Lee Strobel himself says:
As authors John Ankerberg and John Weldon
concluded in a book on the topic, “In other words, no Book of Mormon cities
have ever been located, no Book or Mormon person, place , nation or name has
ever been found, no Book or Mormon artifacts, no Book of Mormon scriptures, no
Book of Mormon inscriptions… nothing which demonstrates the Book of Mormon is
anything other than myth or invention has ever been
found. (Lee Strobel, p. 107)
In
fact, it’s even worse than that.
Linguistic and genetic evidence contradict the Mormon claim that Native
Americans are descendents of the 10 lost tribes of Israel. Advances in Egyptology over the years have
since proved that the meaning of ancient Egyptian scrolls that Joseph Smith
claimed to translate have no relationship to what Joseph Smith claimed. There is the incident (made famous in South Park)
in which the original translations of the book of Mormon were lost, and Joseph
Smith was unable to duplicate them. Et
Cetera.
I
pointed all this out to the Mormon missionaries, and they listened to me
politely, and for each objection I raised, they said they just encouraged me to
pray to God about my doubts, and they were confident God would move in my heart
and God would show me the truth if I asked for it.
The
next week they came back to my door and said that since their last conversation
with me, they had prayed about all the things I had said, and they felt that
God had responded by moving in their hearts and they felt that now their faith
was stronger than ever.
Well,
how can you logically argue with that?
But
the thing was, this was exactly the same type of language that I had heard
growing up in the Church. My Sunday
School teachers had also taught me to pray to God about my doubts, and
encouraged me to feel God moving in my heart.
I’ve
since heard Muslim friends describe their faith in the same terms. They know their faith is true because they’ve
felt God move in their hearts.
Well,
far be it from me to dispute what some people do or do not “feel” in their
hearts about their faith.
The
only thing I can say is that against such testimony I’m left with little
resources to determine whose feelings of faith are legitimate, and whose are
delusional. If you grant the power of
faith to one religion, you must grant it to all who claim it. And by the way, they all claim it.
How
ridiculous is it then to claim salvation is dependent on such a faith?
I’m
sure certain people feel that they really do have authentic faith, but this is
not difficult to explain psychologically.
When my Mormon friends had doubts about their faith, they prayed to God
to remove their doubts. I think we know
enough about psychological reinforcement to understand that if you want to
believe something, and you tell yourself to believe something, and you pray to
believe something, you will end up believing it no matter if there is a God
working in your heart or not.
The
same is true for the Christian motto: “God I believe, help thou my unbelief.” If you want to believe badly enough, your mind
will fall in line eventually.
This
is all the more true when you are surrounded by people who believe the same
thing, and who are constantly acting as a reinforcement on your faith. This is why religion has always historically
always been concentrated in geographic areas.
Faith
Versus Reason
My own
upbringing was that it was morally virtuous to rely on your faith even when it
seemed to be contradicted by reason. I
remember listening to sermons in which the pastor criticized those who relied
on their own intellect instead of their faith.
At school, I remember my Bible teacher talk in disparaging terms about
his scholarly friends who lost their faith once they started encountering
reliability problems with the Bible.
The
idea that faith was morally virtuous was ingrained in me for years. Every time I felt that my reason was leading
me away from my faith, I felt ashamed of myself for trusting in my reason
instead of in my faith. I never really
questioned the whole things until I encountered people like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, who asked why it was considered
a moral virtue to believe something without evidence. They concluded it was no virtue at all, and I’ve
eventually come to agree with them.
Religious
leaders like to decry intellectuals who put too much faith in their
reason. It’s not hard to see the appeal
of this—human reason is flawed, and intelligent people arrive at all sorts of
different conclusions about religion.
But what to replace reason with?
Faith? Faith is equally flawed,
and across the world people who put their trust in faith arrive at all sorts of
different conclusions about religion. If
I can’t trust my intellect to arrive at the correct decision, why should I then
put blind trust in my feelings?
The
Historical Reliability of the Bible and the Problem of Faith
I’ve touched on this before in past reviews, but the
interesting thing about modern Christianity is the huge gap between what
Christian scholars know, and what normal people are told every week at Sunday
School.
Today’s
Christian scholars and universities know full well about the historical
problems with the Bible. Even
conservative protestant Christian colleges (like Calvin College)
believe that there are serious historical problems with the Bible—the apostles
didn’t write the Gospels, Paul didn’t write half the letters ascribed to him,
Moses didn’t write the Pentateuch, historical evidence does not support the
story in Joshua, there’s no outside evidence for the Census in Luke….et cetera,
et cetera, et cetera.
And
yet, a lot of Christian scholars, knowing this full well, continue to believe
in Christianity.
This
is the really interesting question. How
can people know that the Bible is unreliable, and still believe in
Christianity? And this is the question I’d
be curious to hear the answer to.
Personally,
I’m skeptical that the claims of Christianity can be rationalized given the
historical problems with the Bible, but I have yet to hear a good Christian
defense of this. Maybe it’s out there
somewhere.
At
any rate, given that the historical problems of the Bible are established as
fact, this is the debate that people need to have going forward.
Lee
Strobel’s book, however, is attempting to move the debate backwards. He’s arguing that there are no historical
problems with the Bible. And this is
untrue. Demonstrably untrue.
Lee
Strobel not trying to advance the debate--he’s just trying to manipulate
certain facts, and hide others, to throw sand in the eyes of his readers. (And he’s assuming a reader who wants to be deceived
on this.)
The historical problems with the Bible make the problem of faith all the more severe. To paraphrase Thomas Paine slightly, if the Bible were the most perfect document ever created, it would still be difficult for us to believe in, because the possibility exists that someone could have written a falsehood, and because it would seem strange that God would entrust his revelations to only a handful of eyewitnesses when it was within his power to communicate it directly to all humanity, and even stranger that belief in this revelation, only communicated to a select few of humanity at a certain point in history, would be required for all people everywhere for all time to gain salvation.
However, when we find all the numerous problems with the Bible's accuracy--all the points where the Bible appears to contradict established history, all the scientific problems with Genesis, all the contradictions within the Gospels, all the apparent forgeries within the Bible,--if we consider all this, then how much more difficult does it become to believe in the Bible. Why would God keep throwing up all these obstacles to our belief if our entire salvation was dependent on this belief? Why wouldn't God make it be overwhelmingly evident to everyone that the Bible was perfect in every way if it contained his divine revelation?
The historical problems with the Bible make the problem of faith all the more severe. To paraphrase Thomas Paine slightly, if the Bible were the most perfect document ever created, it would still be difficult for us to believe in, because the possibility exists that someone could have written a falsehood, and because it would seem strange that God would entrust his revelations to only a handful of eyewitnesses when it was within his power to communicate it directly to all humanity, and even stranger that belief in this revelation, only communicated to a select few of humanity at a certain point in history, would be required for all people everywhere for all time to gain salvation.
However, when we find all the numerous problems with the Bible's accuracy--all the points where the Bible appears to contradict established history, all the scientific problems with Genesis, all the contradictions within the Gospels, all the apparent forgeries within the Bible,--if we consider all this, then how much more difficult does it become to believe in the Bible. Why would God keep throwing up all these obstacles to our belief if our entire salvation was dependent on this belief? Why wouldn't God make it be overwhelmingly evident to everyone that the Bible was perfect in every way if it contained his divine revelation?
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