Adam, Eve, and Darwin

     “Some evidence, however, doesn’t stand a chance against a compelling narrative.” 
                                  Kathryn J. Edin

According to Genesis 2:7,  God made the first person, Adam “out of the dust of the ground” and later made Eve out of Adam's rib.  There is an oft repeated story in Jewish folklore about a young, precocious Jewish boy who asked his yeshiva Rabbi, “Where did Cain’s wife come from?”  Rather than answer the question, the Rabbi sharply rapped the young boy’s knuckles while explaining that people much more intelligent than he were wise enough not to ask such a stupid question!  Apparently, the only possible answer would invoke the taboo of incest.

Every sexually-reproducing mammal (including humans) ever born received two sets of genetic material, one from their “father” and one from their “mother.”  From this fundamental biological scientific fact, there are only two conclusions to be drawn from the story of Adam and Eve: It is either a metaphor or the authors were ignorant.  Creationists are fond of asking the question, “If humans descended from monkeys, why are monkeys still in existence?” Their question (if sincere) reflects a stunning level of ignorance about the theory of evolution.

A  species is defined as a group of organisms that have reproductive integrity, meaning that they can only mate and produce viable offspring with  members of their kind.  For example, dogs and cats are distinct species and cannot cross-bred.  Speciation is the process that permits the formation of new species through the long process of evolution.  No child is an exact copy of their parents, but a combination of genetic material from both.  They in fact receive two full genomes, one from their father’s sperm and another from their mother’s egg.  Both genomes have been copied numerous time during the life of the parents in one of the most high-fidelity replicating systems known to exist.  However, occasionally a copying “error” is made resulting in a mutation that is transferred to the offspring via sexual reproduction.  Most mutations are fatal, some are neutral, and very few others confer some survival advantage (usually slight) to the offspring.

All specie populations contain variations which are the raw material of evolutionary change.  If any of the variants (subspecies) enjoy a sufficient survival advantage in its environment (also subject to change), it may over time come to dominate that population (gene pool).  At some point in time, the two separate populations may reach a stage (usually due to physical separation) where they can no longer interbreed and produce viable offspring. It is at this time that the variant becomes a new species.  The original species from which the new species descended may continue as a viable species or more likely will become extinct.  Regardless of the fate of the original species, the new species can never again engage in cross-lineage mating with its "mother" species.  This should free creationists from any concern that a monkey might suddenly insert itself into their personal family tree during their next birthing event.

The above summary of speciation, the evolutionary process by which a new species can arise should be treated only as an “appetizer” before a full-course meal at the table of Darwin.  Recommendations are provided at the end of this essay for the benefit of those interested in a fuller and deeper exploration into this vital subject.  Jonathan Swift’s words, “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him” foreshadowed the fate of Charles Darwin by over one-hundred years.  Even today, one-hundred and fifty years after the publication of the Origin of the Species, the dunces are still all in “confederacy against him.”

Unable to sustain any arguments based on facts against Darwin’s actual theory of evolution, the creationists resort to attacking a caricature of their own making.  For example, Darwin never said that man descending from monkeys, but that man descending from a common ancestor with the chimpanzee or bonobos.  Molecular biology and the sequencing of the human (and chimpanzee genome) demonstrates this fact above beyond all reasonable doubt.  This line of attack is not only completely fallacious, but is also stale and outdated.  It was first employed in the year 1860 on the occasion of the  famous Oxford evolution debate between Thomas Henry Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce in which Wilberforce asked Huxley whether it was through his grandfather or his grandmother that he descended from a monkey.  Huxley  replied “that he would not be ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor, but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used his great gifts to obscure the truth.” The “monkey argument” was employed again in 1925 in the Scopes Monkey Trial where William Jennings Bryan argued for the prosecution while Clarence Darrow served as the defense attorney for John Scopes who was on trial for teaching evolution in a state-funded Tennessee high school. Even today right-wing religious fundamentalist are fond of saying that if you teach children that they descended from apes, they are more likely to behave like one.

Religionists have struggled to gain acceptance for creationism as a viable and scientific alternative to Darwin’s theory of evolution.  At first they appealed to the courts in an attempt to force the teaching of creationism as an alternative to evolution.  After the courts repeatedly ruled that creationism was a religious belief and not science and therefore could not be taught in public schools, they repackaged it and called it Intelligent Design.  In 2005 the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania ruled that Intelligent Design was creationism renamed, and was a religious belief and not a science.  Religionists have not given up and are now attempting to gain politically what the courts refused to grant.  Unfortunately what is essentially an issue of the separation of church and state has created an anti-science movement within the ranks of conservatives.

It is not necessary to understand all the complexities of Darwin’s theory of evolution to appreciate the fallaciousness and the absurdity of the creationists’ argument.  They claim that God created all living things on earth at one time approximately 10,000 years ago and they remain unchanged ever since.  They base this claim not on any scientific evidence, but on the creation story told in the book of Genesis.  Genesis actually presents two versions of the creation, one in chapter one and another in chapter two, and they disagree with each other as regards the order of creation.

The theory of evolution, descent with modification according to natural selection explains how all living things evolved from one or more original life forms beginning over three billion years ago.  Creationism maintains that all life was created at one time by a supernatural deity 10,000 years ago and has remained unchanged in the intervening years.  Given the fact that evolution requires billions of years to accumulate small changes to account for all living things, a young earth is at the heart of creationism.  Fortunately, the idea of a 10,000 year old earth is easily disproved by the sciences of  geology, chemistry, and physics.

Leonardo da Vinci realized in the fifteenth century that maps of the world were only a snapshot of its geography taken at just one instant in time and were not static.  He noticed that the coasts of eastern South America matched perfectly with the western coast of Africa indicating to him that they were once joined together in the past.  In 1912 the German geologist and meteorologist Alfred Wegener discovered an explanation he called continental drift. All the continents rest on giant plates floating on a river of molten iron under the surface of the earth, and are in fact moving.  The idea of continental drift was controversial beyond belief and was not accepted until the 1950s.  Today the model of plate tectonics is accepted science along with the fact that the continents are moving away from each other at the rate of just less than one inch per year (the same rate that human fingernails grow).  Continental drift has also been confirmed by satellite technology. 

The distance from North America to Europe is 4,911 miles, and they are moving apart at the rate of approximately one inch a year.  And since they were once joined together at one time in the past, it is child’s play to show that a 10,000 year old earth is preposterous.  It takes over 60,000 years for the continents to move one mile.  If the earth was only 10,000 years old, Europe would be visible from New York City today.  Other evidence of the continents slowly moving apart is the fact that Plymouth Rock is located fifty feet further west than where it was when the Pilgrims landed in 1620.

Scientists have determined by a number of technologies that the earth is 4.57 billion years old.  The magnitude of error of a 10,000 year old earth is equivalent of measuring the distance from New York City to San Francisco to be less than ten yards.  The creationists’ argument highlights one of the many dangers of fundamentalism.  In order to reconcile their religious beliefs with science, creationists must undermine people’s confidence in science and education, which of course is vital to the survival of the human species. It should be remembered that the idea of reading any Sacred book (including the Bible) literally is only one-hundred years old.  In fact Saint Jerome (editor of the most widely used Bible) suggested a literal interpretation for the illiterate masses and an allegorical one for more advanced minds.  But  as Carl Sagan remarked, “You can't convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it's based on a deep seated need to believe.”

Paul MacCready calculated that 10,000 years ago the human population plus their livestock and pets constituted less than 1% of the terrestrial vertebrate biomass on the planet earth, and that it has increased to 98% today.  Without quibbling over his calculations, it is quite evident that by almost any metric, the human species has been a very successful.  Tuft professor and distinguished philosopher, Daniel Dennett makes an interesting and important corollary observation. Modern humans have not changed that much organically in the last 10,000 years!  We have the same brain and the same genome (DNA) as our distant ancestors.  Dennett attributes our success over the past 10,000 years to our ability to acquire, accumulate, and use “tools for thinking.”  Man’s survival as a species rests on this one rather simple concept and our challenge is to educate our children on how to think and not what to think. Superstition and supernaturalism are the sworn enemies of reason and should be opposed by all educated people, or in the words of Albert Einstein,  “Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I am not sure about the universe.  But that might just be me being stupid.”   

Sources

1.  Intuition Pumps and other Tools for Thinking (2013) by Daniel  Dennett
2.  Darwin’s Ghost (1999) by Steve Jones
3.  Genome (1999) by Matt Ridley
4.  Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995) by Daniel Dennett
5.  Darwin’s Origin of the Species (2006) by Janet Brown
6.  Darwin’s Sacred Cause (2009) by Adrian Desmond
7.  Creation: How Science is Reinventing Life Itself (2013) by Adam Rutherford
8.  Living with Darwin (2007) by Richard Kitchner
9.  The Reluctant Mr. Darwin (2006) by David Quammen
10. The Blind Watchmaker (1996) by Richard Dawkins

The New Testament: History or Legend

The Bible is arguably the most “important” book ever written as measured by the number of copies sold and in circulation and its influence in the world.  Bibles are ubiquitous and can be found in almost every hotel room and are routinely provided free-of-charge to anyone requesting one.  The Bible is also highly significant given the fact that 54% of the world’s seven billion people claim belief in one of the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, or Islam).  Christianity alone accounts for two billion adherents worldwide.   In the United States 247 million people identify themselves as Christians representing 78% of all adults. The Bible, of course, is not just for Christians or people of “faith.”  Knowledge of the Bible is a sign of being educated, and is absolutely required in order to read and understand large bodies of secular literature.  It took the atheist Richard Dawkins, two full pages (in The God Delusion) to cite just some of the Bible’s inspired literary references, including, “a mess of pottage,” “he escaped by the skin of his teeth,” and “the apple of his eye.”  The Bible consists of 66 books, 39 in the Old Testament (OT) and 27 in the New Testament (NT). The OT was written by dozens of authors over a period of 600 years and the NT were written by 16 or 17 authors over a period of 70 years.  Most of this essay concerns the NT but some understanding of the OT is necessary to understand the NT because portions of the NT are alleged to have fulfilled OT prophecies.

Before it is possible to understand the NT and how it came to consist of its current 27 books, it is necessary to have some idea about the history of Palestine (and surrounding areas) in and around the first century.  Forgery prevalence, illiteracy, oral tradition, political strife and polytheism, and Proto-orthodoxy Christianity (in alphabetical order) are some of the important considerations vital to the understanding of how the NT and Christianity came about. 
                                               
                           Forgery prevalence

Forgery in the first century took many forms based on a variety of motivations.  Some students or followers wrote in the name of their master as a sign of respect.  Even today it is not unusual for professors to publish the work of their students in their name with or without crediting them.  Another practice was to ascribe the name of someone else to their writing such as “The Gospel According to Matthew” where Matthew is the claimed source, but not the actual author.  Other unknown authors wrote in the name of some known authority in order to gain recognition for their ideas that would not be possible if they wrote in their own name. This practice is still popular today.  For example, Martin Dugard writes in the name of the more famous Fox News celebrity Bill O’Reilly. Other writers forged writings in an attempt to further their ideas as well as to discredit competing ideas.  For example, the Apostle Paul (Saul of Tarsus) is generally considered to have written 14 of the 27 books in the NT,  although many Bible scholars think that seven of them are forgeries.  Many ancient writings were forged simply for profit.  Keep in mind that before the advent of the printing press (in 1439) everything was hand-written, a situation that made forgery a profitable undertaking.

                                       Illiteracy

Very few first-century Palestinians could read or write primarily because only the wealthiest citizens could afford education.  Reading and writing were considered separate skills and even by the low standard of  being able to copy letters, less than ten percent could write.  The average person was forced to employ scribes when faced with a requirement to read a document or commit something to writing.  The wealthier and better-educated people lived in cities compared to rural areas such as Galilee where their poorer country-cousins enjoyed fewer education experiences.  This relationship between cities and education persist worldwide even today.   Edward Glaeser, a leading urban economist wrote a book titled, Triumph of the City where he declared that “cities are actually the healthiest, greenest, and richest (in both cultural and economic terms) places to live.”  In the United States, “Appalachian” is a dog-whistle word for poverty and ignorance.  In rural agricultural families, the smartest sons or daughters are often selected and financed to attend college, and after graduation they move to the city and seldom return.  Michael Pollan expressed this idea in The Omnivore’s Dilemma sardonically when he remarked, “It’s a foolish culture that entrusts its food supply to simpletons.”


                                Oral Tradition

Given the low literacy rate of the first-century Palestinians, it is not surprising that the stories of their day-to-day activities would not be recorded but instead entrusted to the grape vine. The unreliability of such a system with its ample opportunity for distortion and fabrication is well-documented and will not be repeated here.  The important fact (accepted by a majority of scholars) to keep in mind is that the earliest writings upon which the NT rests  were not committed to writing for at least 40 to 70 years after the death of Christ.  It is also important to remember that the primary language of  Jesus and his disciples was Aramaic.

                  Political Strife and Polytheism

The first century was characterized by tension between the Jewish people and the Roman authorities.  The Jews were very much both a political and theological minority during this time.  The majority of the Roman population were polytheist (pagans) and employed many Gods to govern every aspect of their lives.  The concept of monotheism or one God was considered a strange and dangerous idea at the time.  It also posed a veiled threat to the legitimate authority of the Roman Emperor who was also considered to be a God.  Obviously the idea of only one God puts the emperor in competition with the God of the Jews.  Essentially the OT is the story of the struggles of the Jewish people against their enemies and various Roman Emperors and the expectation that God would send them a warrior King or Messiah who would lead them in victory over their Roman oppressors and establish a Jewish nation.
 
                         Proto-orthodoxy Christianity

Professor of NT Scripture, Bart Ehrman coined Proto-orthodoxy Christianity in recognition of the fact that until the fourth century there was not any such thing as Christianity. The NT only contains three references to the word “Christian,” and never in the context of Jesus founding a church or religion.  Until around 330 CE what existed was a number of religious ideas and advocates competing to become the dominate religion that we now call Christianity.  They include Ebionites, Marcions, Gnostics and the Paulines (followers of the Apostle Paul).

The Ebionites were the “Jewish Christians.” They considered Jesus to be the Messiah and rejected his divinity.  They also insisted that Jewish law and its rites must be strictly followed, including circumcision which was mandatory for any adult pagan man seeking to convert.  Ebionites believed that to be “right” with God was a matter of obeying Jewish Law and not a matter of having faith in Jesus.  The only Gospel they used was the non-canonical Gospel of James, who they considered the brother of Jesus.

Marcions  believed that there were two Gods, the God of the OT and the God of the NT.  The OT God was the wrathful and vengeful God of judgment that contrasted with the God of the NT (Jesus) who was the loving and merciful God of salvation.  The OT God created the world, chose Israel to be his people, gave them the law, and then condemned them and everyone else to eternal punishment when they disobeyed.  Jesus came into the world to save people from the wrath of the OT God.

Gnosticism was a mystical movement that stressed enlightenment as the only path to salvation.  They held the view that Christ was sent by God to reveal the secret knowledge enabling people to learn the truth.  They isolated themselves and lived in remote areas practicing personal poverty and sexual abstinence. They believed that after they mastered the truth that they would rise to God.

The Paulines were the followers of Saul of Tarsus (5 - 67 CE) who is considered the hero of the NT.  His very name reveals a startling fact (at least to modern people) that most ancient peoples did not have last names! The phrase, “road to Damascus moment” has become a popular synonym for indicating someone has changed their mind in a startling fashion perhaps even more of an epiphany.  The story of Paul traveling around and persecuting “Christians” until he received a vision from God while on the road to Damascus is perhaps the biggest story to come out of the oral tradition.  Paul's story of Christ, including the virgin birth, death, and resurrections eventually became canonical and lies at the heart of Christianity today.  There were other Proto-orthodoxy Christians in addition to the four mentioned here, but since “history is written by the victors,” their stories are either lost or hidden away and in many cases kept from the public eye.  History provides numerous examples of the synergy between pairs of men of thought and men of action. Jesus Christ and the Apostle Paul,  John Locke and Thomas Jefferson, and Karl Marx and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin are three notable examples. Paul, Jefferson, and Lenin all used the teachings of a philosopher to start three of the most monumental movements in history: a great religion, the first secular government, and a communistic dictatorship.  The story of Paul is in fact the story of the NT that eventually prevailed.  According to Bart D. Ehrman, “It was on his [Jesus’] later followers who have Jesus starting a new religion. Jesus appears to have had no intent to start a new religion.”


“Gospel” comes from the Greek word meaning “good news.”  The four NT Gospels consists of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John and are shorthand for their actual titles such as The Gospel According to Matthew. This is an explicit recognition of the fact that the biblical scholars do not know who originally wrote them.  In fact, The Gospel of John explicitly claims not to be written by an eyewitness. The first three Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) are called the “synoptic gospels” because they include many of the same stories about the life of Jesus. Matthew and John were disciples whereas Mark and Luke were apostles (associates).  Matthew was thought to be a tax collector and Mark was a secretary to the disciple Peter. It is thought that Luke was a traveling companion of Paul.  Bible scholars agree that Mark was written first (66–70 CE) and John last (90 to 95 CE).   Matthew is considered a summary of Mark and was written from 30 to 40 years after the death of Christ.  Its source was the “oral tradition,” a collection of stories passed from person to person in the manner of the children’s game of telephone where the first child receives a short message and the whispers it to the adjacent child who then repeats the process until the 30th child reveals the final message which typically bears scant resemblance to the original message.

Matthew, Mark, and Luke all tell a similar story, however only Matthew and Luke give accounts of Jesus’ birth.  Jesus does not appear in Mark until he was an adult.  John on the other hand is the outlier of the Gospels and was written last. According to Biblical scholar Bart Ehrman, “The idea of Jesus being divine was a later Christian invention and is only found in John.”  Paul’s writings constitute over 50% of the NT (counting the forgeries). In Galatians, Paul claimed that he did not meet with the apostles in Jerusalem and he learned the “Gospels” via divine revelation.  Later in Galatians 1:18:21 he refers to a trip to Jerusalem as his second trip,  but in Acts 9:11,15 there is a third trip.  Is Paul denying that he ever meet with the apostles in Jerusalem in order to boost the idea that he received the source for his writings directly from Jesus?   Many NT scholars believe that what people today call Christianity is based more on Paul teachings than those of Jesus.  The synoptic Gospels all portray Jesus as establishing the Kingdom of God with him as King and with the disciples each ruling over one of the twelve tribes of  Israel on earth.  Heaven was not a place you went to, but would take place on earth and would happen during the lifetime of the disciples.  This is a far-different story from the one in current Christianity.

The Virgin Birth is only claimed in Matthew and Luke.  Matthew is keen to show Jesus’ life and death, fulfilling the prophecy of Isaiah 7:14 which he accomplished by mistranslating the word alma (maiden or young unmarried woman) as parthenos (virgin).  Perhaps the most startling thing about the NT is the fact that it does not contain the story of the resurrection.  Mark, Luke, and Matthew all begin the story with the empty tomb, but differ on who was involved in the discovery.  According to Mark, they saw one man, according to Luke they saw two men, and according to Matthew they saw an angel.  Amazingly, the Gospel of Peter, the only actual account of the resurrection was excluded from the NT by the founding church founders.  His account included the following:

"Early in the morning, when the Sabbath dawned, there came a crowd from Jerusalem and the country round about to see the sealed sepulchre. Now in the night in which the Lord's day dawned, when the soldiers were keeping guard, two by two in each watch, there was a loud voice in heaven, and they saw the heavens open and two men come down from there in a great brightness and draw near to the sepulchre. That stone which had been laid against the entrance to the sepulchre started of itself to roll and move sidewards, and the sepulchre was opened and both young men entered. When those soldiers saw this, they awakened the centurion and the elders, for they also were there to mount guard. And while they were narrating what they had seen, they saw three men come out from the sepulchre, two of them supporting the other and a cross following them and the heads of the two reaching to heaven, but that of him who was being led reached beyond the heavens. And they heard a voice out of the heavens crying, “Have you preached to those who sleep?” and from the cross there was heard the answer, “Yes.”  Apparently the image of two angels so tall that their heads reached the heavens, supporting Jesus, whose head reached beyond the heavens, and a talking cross was just too much for the church fathers."
   
Matthew and Luke are the only Gospels that give a genealogy of Jesus’ family, and they are vastly different.  They both trace his lineage from David and through Joseph and also insists that Mary was a virgin meaning that Joseph was not his father.  This creates a problem.  According to the OT, God will send a Messiah to lead the Jewish people against the Romans and reclaim Israel for the Jews as promised by God.  Both versions cannot be true; if Jesus was born of a virgin, he cannot be in the required line of Joseph.  If Joseph was his father, he cannot be divine.  Interestingly, Matthew traces Jesus back to Abraham, whereas Luke goes all the way back to Adam.  Matthew emphasizes Jesus as the Jewish savior, whereas Luke makes him the savior of all people.  Paul selected Matthew’s version in an attempt to convert the pagans in the Roman Empire because they represented a largest and richest source of converts for his version of Christianity.  Matthew also dropped three generations from Luke’s genealogy because he wanted to remain in the tradition that something very important happens every fourteen years.  Matthew wanted three groups of precisely fourteen generations in the genealogy of the son of David, the Messiah Jesus. 

It is important to note that there is some numerology at work in the NT.  Seven has always held special meaning for people and 14 is of course 7 times two.  This plus the idea that there are three generations of groups of fourteen in Matthew’s genealogy yields up the number three with an obvious link to the trinity and a somewhat obvious link to the number of books (twenty-seven) in the NT since three cubed equals twenty-seven! Other examples are the number “3;” Jonah (3 days in the whale), Jesus (3 temptations). In Luke, Pilate declares three times that Jesus is innocent in a subtle way of deflecting blame away from the Romans and onto the Jews.

The divinity of Christ can be seen more as a reflection of Paul’s thinking, rather than the earlier oral traditions of the first century.  Remember, writings attributed to Paul constitute more than fifty percent of the NT.  Paul quickly learned that the Jews were hostile to his version of “Christianity” and refused to convert and insisted on following Jewish law completely.  Paul also realized that the pagans constituted a larger source of converts, and the requirement to undergo circumcision was a major impediment to their conversion. This represented a basic conflict between Peter and James, and Paul.  According to Matthew 5:17-20,  converts to “Christianity” had to keep the Jewish law (including circumcision) to enter the Kingdom of heaven, whereas Paul in Galatians 5:4, says “Christians need not keep Jewish Law to enter the Kingdom of heaven and circumcision puts a man in danger of losing his salvation.”  A number of Paul’s writings were very much in conflict with Jesus’ teachings.  For example in 1 Corinthians 7:7,  he says “ For I wish that all men were [single] even as I myself.” In 1 Corinthians 7:1, he states “It is good for a man not to touch a woman.”  And in 1 Corinthians 7:4,  Paul claims “The wife does not have authority over her own body.”   Modern readers should be forgiving if they detect a whiff of homosexuality and gender bias emanating from the Apostle Paul.

This was the situation that existed until the Emperor of Rome, Constantine converted to Christianity in 312 CE.  In 331 CE. he ordered fifty Bibles produced at the empire’s expense.  Bishop Eusebius was charged with the task and hired professional scribes to do the writing and also built a special place where the work would take place called a scriptorium.  Their task was to gather up all the copies of the various Gospels and determine which one’s were the “originals” reflecting what the original authors actually said.  The first copy of the NT was written in Greek sometime between 330 and 360 CE. It could not have been written before 325 CE. because it contains the Eusebian Canons, and it could not have been written after 360 CE. because of certain references to Church fathers in the margin.  Pope Damasus I commissioned the Greek Scholar Jerome to translate the Greek NT into Latin and he spent three years (382–385 CE.) in Rome working closely with Pope Damasus and the leading Christians to produce what was called the Latin Vulgate (Latin translation of the Bible).  Athanasius, the Bishop of Alexandria was the first to list the 27 books of the NT in 367 CE.  It took 300 years to decide which books were canonical, but it took Johannes Gutenberg and the printing press (1439) to seal the deal.

Most modern NT readers are not aware of the “Gospels” that were excluded by church fathers such as Bishop Eusebius, Bishop Athanasius, and St. Jerome.  According to Chris Carpenter, the Program Director for the Christian Broadcasting Network there are fifty-two books from the second and third centuries that were excluded from the NT.  Collectively, they give evidence of an attempt to meld Greco-Roman philosophy and Christianity in order to make Christianity more palatable to a Greco-Roman world.   One such book, The Gospel of Barnabas claimed that the OT belongs to Christians because the Jews broke their covenant with God when Moses smashed the first set of the Ten Commandments.  The Gospel of John (8:42-44)  makes the same point stating that “the Jews are not the children of God, but the children of the Devil.” Other examples of  apocrypha Gospels include, The Gospels of Thomas, Peter, Judas, Mary, and Marcion.

The adage that “the victors are the ones who write the history” was never more clearly illustrated than in the case of the NT.  A cursory review of its history gives rise to the suspicion that it reflects more the hand of man than the inspired word of God.  This is more evident to those who read it as history rather than as a devotional.  The historical story of the NT is seldom taught, except in the various seminaries attended by those primarily destined for the ministry.  Lay people are zealously shielded from the fruits of the clergyman’s education and are instead fed a steady diet of a sanitized “Sunday-school” version which is more the story of Paul than the story of Jesus.  Perhaps, Friedrich Nietzsche had this thought in mind when he said, “In truth, there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross.”  Thomas Jefferson was both captivated by the moral philosophy of Christ and repelled by the corruption of his message by Paul and the other Christian founding fathers.  He believed so passionately in Jesus, the moral philosopher that he compiled and published his own personal Bible (The Jefferson Bible) and considered himself to be a Christian Deist.  Mahatma Gandhi shared the sentiments of Nietzsche and Jefferson when he said,  “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”



Sources:                               

1.  Misquoting Jesus  (2005)  Bart D. Ehrman
2.  Jesus, Interrupted (2009) Bart D. Ehrman
3.  Forged (2011) Bart D. Ehrman               
4.  The Battle for God (2000) Karen Armstrong 
5.  The Gnostic Gospels (1979) Elaine Pagels
6.  The Bible: God's Word or the Work of Man? (05/6/2015) Blog (The Needlefish Chronicles)

Atheism

        

In my Blog The God Hypothesis I argued that a score of  “6.9” (where “1” equals a theist and a “7” an atheist) on Dawkins’ Spectrum of theistic probability was the most rational position to take on the question of the existence of God.  I came to this conclusion after evaluating four formal arguments and three informal arguments supporting the existence of God and two arguments against it.  I will briefly review a few of those arguments here and invite readers interested in more detail to read it for their selves at,  Needlefish Chronicles. Why “6.9” and not “7?”  My answer demonstrates a major difference between science and religion.  Science embraces uncertainty, whereas religion rejects it.  Science stands by ready to dismiss any of its most cherished theories any time the evidence warrants it.  One can in fact win a Nobel Prize in physics for being wrong as was the case of  Albert Michelson and Edward Morley. They spent years trying to prove that the speed of light was variable depending its direction of travel relative to the earth’s path around the sun.  Michelson hypothesized that light would move faster when traveling in the same direction as the earth. They shared the 1907 Nobel Prize in physics for what has been described as the “most famous failed experiment” in history.  Science also abhors authority (dogma) while religion celebrates it and demands unquestioning acceptance.  In Einstein’s words, “Blind belief in authority is the greatest enemy of truth.”

In the God Hypothesis I specified the God Hypothesis as a theistic one where a personal God interacts with mankind doing such things as answering prayers and performing miracles.  I could have just as easily defined a deistic God hypothesis where an impersonal God established the “laws of nature” and then withdrew allowing the universe to operate according to those laws. The theistic God Hypothesis can be considered the strong God Hypothesis and the deistic God Hypothesis the weak one.  Acceptance of the weak hypothesis defines a deist.  Many of America’s founding fathers were deists as well as most scientists such as Einstein who once said, “It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropomorphic concept which I cannot take seriously.”

I prefer Dawkins’ Spectrum of theistic probability because it eliminates the dogma of certainty when considering a question that is in fact unknowable (at least at this time).  Religious labels are only a bit of shorthand useful for providing a quick answer to complex questions or to demonize people you dislike.  Howard Bloom, a polymath, calls himself a “cold stone atheist.”  How does that compare to a “6.9” on Dawkins’ scale and what is his reasoning?  Or an even tougher question, where should a deists be placed on the scale?  For me “agnostic” is the most troubling label and the most abused.  Would it be a  “4.0?”  I consider myself a “weak” atheist (deist) in part because of formal arguments such the Epicurean Trilemma,  Karl Popper's Falsification Principle, Hume’s Test for Miracles, and Ockham's Razor (lex parsimoniae).

                                                         Epicurean Trilemma

Epicurus (341–270 BCE) was an ancient Greek philosopher and the author of the Epicurean Trilemma, “Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”  The Epicurean Trilemma has been a thorn in the side of theologians and Christian apologists for over two thousand years. In my opinion the Epicurean Trilemma is sufficient justification to reject the strong God Hypothesis, but not the weak God Hypothesis.

                                            Karl Popper's Falsification Principle

Karl Popper’s Falsification Principle says for any theory to be true, there must be a way to imagine or show that it is false.  For example, Darwin’s Theory of Evolution makes a host of predictions and could be falsified by demonstrating that any one of its predictions was not true.  In over one-hundred and fifty years this has not happened, but it could.  On the other hand, the weak God Hypothesis cannot be falsified since it does not make any predictions.  Therefore on the basis of Karl Popper’s Falsification Principle alone, the weak hypothesis could be comfortably rejected.  I myself accept it “provisionally” until such time that better evidence or argument is available.

                                                        Hume’s Test for Miracles

Every hypothesis must have alternative explanations for what is being claimed.  In the case of the claim that God created the universe, is there any other explanation?  Yes, cosmologists offer the “Big Bang” as an alternative argument.  Theists maintain (without any proof) that “you cannot create something out of nothing” (the idea of Ex nihilo).  Physicists have demonstrated that the problem is not Ex nihilo, but the impossibility of creating “nothing” to begin with because “virtual” particles are always present even in “empty” space.  These  “virtual” particles are just an inherent part of the universe.  Hume’s Test for Miracles states that for a miracle to be true, the alternatives to the miracle would have to be greater than the miracle being claimed.  The idea of a supernatural deity creating the universe has to be the greatest miracle ever.  For it to be true the “Big Bang” would have to be even more miraculous than the idea of a supernatural deity.  Therefore, the God Hypothesis fails Hume’s Test for Miracles.

                                                                Ockham's Razor

Ockham's Razor is an argument based on the principle of parsimony or economy of thought.  Simply stated, it is the appealing idea that if there are conflicting alternatives for explaining any
question of substance, then the simpler of them is most likely the correct one.  The most famous equation in history, Einstein’s e=mc² is a classical example (energy = mass times the speed of light squared).  Now compare the Big Bang theory to the God Hypothesis as an explanation for the universe.  Which one is the simpler?  Of course,  both explanations are quite complex, but considering the unlimited powers of a supernatural being, the Big Bang has to be the simpler and according to Ockham's Razor is more likely to be true.  The Bible itself confirms this in Ecclesiastes 8:17 (New Living Translation), “I realized that no one can discover everything God is doing under the sun [too complex]. Not even the wisest people discover everything, no matter what they claim.”
               
Stephen Hawkins is one of the best known theoretical physicist and cosmologist in the world today.  He was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics (a position once held by Isaac Newton) at the University of Cambridge between 1979 and 2009.  He and others have demonstrated how the universe could have been created by the “laws of nature” without the assistance of God.  His argument is buttressed by the “Law of Parsimony.” It is not possible to imagine a more efficient method and God above all else must be efficient or he/she cannot be God.  Efficiency is the heart and soul of engineering and the creator of the universe must be an engineer.  Also, please note that the  "Law of Parsimony" is a further refutation of Anselm's Ontological argument.

Some readers may have sensed a contradiction between rejecting the strong God Hypothesis (atheist) and accepting the weak God Hypothesis (deist).  No, it is just a matter of how one describes the nature of God, and depending on which hypothesis is used, both positions can be consistent.  This is the whole problem with labels, especially the label atheist.  People of faith (theists) have gone out their way to discredit atheism.  For example, describing the communist during the Cold War as “godless communist” (atheists must be communists!).  Atheists are routinely thought to be immoral based on the disproved idea that morals can only come from God, and without God people will not be able to tell right from wrong. Communism is in fact a dogma in the same way Christianity or Islam is a dogma.  Adherents of both are not permitted to question any aspect of the proclaimed doctrine.  The major tenets of morality are found in every culture regardless of their predominant religion.  In the United States, if you ask someone if they believe in God, they almost never ask “which” God you are referring to.  Most people will assume you are referring to the Christian God.  Many atheists will answer “agnostic,” or perhaps “deist.”  However, when polled about their religious preference, “none” consistently polls around 20%.  About 53% of the world’s people claim to be followers of one of the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, or Islam) and, of course, accept the strong God Hypothesis.  Since most of my fellow Americans are (or claim to be) Christians, I will share my reasons why I am not a Christian on the grounds of morality and failed prophecy.

                                                              Grounds of Morality

Original sin and the virtue of sacrifice are deeply rooted in Christian doctrine.  The idea that children are responsible for the sins or bad acts of their parents is repugnant to most people.  For example, please consider the April 2014 case of Mary Grice.  She was four years old in 1960 when her father died leaving her mother, Sadie, with five children to raise. Sadie received survivor benefits from Social Security until her children turned age 18.  In 2014 after 37 years of silence and four years after Sadie Grice died, the Social Security Administration claims it overpaid someone in the Grice family in 1977, and is now coming after her daughter Mary for repayment.  Few if any people will see this decision as a moral one, even if they fail to view it as a matter of original sin.

The idea of sacrifice (animal or human) is a reprehensible idea.  If an all-powerful deity such as God wanted to absolve his children of sin, surely he could have thought up a better way than torturing and killing his “son.”  I personally reject the idea of sacrifice as an immoral act.  Every time I see someone wearing a cross around their neck, I am reminded of George Carlin when he asked the question, “If Christ had been killed in an electric chair, would Christians wear a replica of an electric chair around their neck?”


                                                             Failed Prophecy

In Matthew (16: 28) Jesus is very certain about when he would return to earth. “Truly I say to you, there are some of those who are standing here who will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom.”  In this passage, Jesus was talking to his disciples and he makes it very clear that some of them “will not taste death” until he returns.  Since the disciples are long-ago dead, this is a failed prophecy.  It should be noted that this was the first of many failed prophecies predicting the second coming of Christ.  Failed prophecies number in the thousands since the death of Christ.  Harold Camping made a highly publicized prediction that the rapture would occur on October 21, 2011.  Warren Jeffs, the president of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints predicted the end of the world would happen on December 23, 2012.  When it did not happen, he blamed it on his followers' lack of faith and changed the date to December 31, 2012 for another failed prophecy.  Fortunately, Warren Jeffs is now in prison, having been convicted of raping numbers of young girls in the name of religion.

Predicting the end of the world or the second coming of Christ has become a popular and  profitable cottage industry.  Jeane Dixon predicts it will occur in the year 2020 after her previous prediction of  February 4, 1962 failed.  John Hagee, a popular TV evangelist predicted that the end will come between April 2014 and March 2015 or in less than a year as this is written.  Predicting “end times” is an extremely profitable venture.  For example, in 2005 Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye (authors of the Left Behind series) ranked 9th according to Amazon’s 10th Anniversary Hall of Fame based on the numbers of books sold at Amazon.com.  Scientists are the only people on the planet with an “end time” prediction based on facts and not some supernatural fantasy.  It is based on the law of entropy and is sometimes called “sun death” and it will happen in about five billion years.  Many people think that is a simple matter of the sun going dark like a candle that burns out.  The truth is a much different story.  The sun will not burn out, but instead will start to burn even hotter.  This will happen when the sun’s hydrogen supply is exhausted and it then switches to “burning” hellion causing it to swell one-and-a-half times its normal size and grow more than twice as bright as it is now. The surface temperature of the earth will rise from about 68̊F to 167̊F causing all world’s oceans to evaporate and for the earth to incinerate.  And some people call this “Intelligent Design,” for the handiwork of a supernatural deity they call God!

Stephen Hawking was correct when he said, “One can't prove that God doesn't exist, but science makes God unnecessary.”  Even though the existence of God cannot be proved or disproved, it must be considered unknowable.  However, many religious claims can be tested using the tools of the science.  Consider the following question, “Does prayer work?”  This is a scientific question that has already been answered many times.  In the year 2000 the John Templeton Foundation spent $2.4 million dollars on a ten-year double-blind study on the effectiveness of prayer on the medical outcome of heart patients undergoing surgery.  In a double-blind study the participants (patients, doctors, and the people praying) and the persons administering the study are not allowed to know the critical aspects of the study including which patients are being prayed for.  Patients are assigned numbers and the people praying are only given the patient’s number.  The researchers monitored 1,802 patients at six hospitals who received coronary bypass surgery to reroute circulation around a clogged vein or artery.  The patients were divided into three groups. Two groups were prayed for and the third was not. Half the patients who received  prayers were told that they were being prayed for and half were told that they might or might not receive prayers.  Remember the doctors did not know which group the patients were in.  After analyzing complications in the 30 days after the operations, the researchers found that 59% of the patients who knew that they were being prayed for suffered complications compared with 51 percent of those who did not know.  A host of other studies has also demonstrated that the prayer is not effective.  Lou Holtz, the famous Notre Dame football coach was once asked about the effectiveness of pre-game player prayer.  He answered that prayer works best when the offensive line averages over three-hundred pounds.

There is a majesty in the understanding the secrets of the natural world.  History has clearly shown that nature guards her mysteries jealously and most of the low-hanging fruit has already been picked.  People like Newton, Darwin, and Einstein have experienced the transcendent and spiritual joy of discovering a previously unknown shining jewel in nature’s crown.  Richard Dawkins in his book The Magic of Reality gave example after example of the beauty of the universe and nature and the joy of viewing the world unencumbered by dogma and superstition.   Atheists are frequently accused of being strictly negative and lacking a meaningful and satisfying alternative to theism and super naturalism.  Some atheists have resorted to the label “humanistic secularism.”  Others use the sobriquet, “Brights” to describe their view where “Bright” is being used as a noun and not a verb.  I personally prefer the term “free thinker” but do not hide from the atheist label.

The rejection of super naturalism and dogma is the bedrock of free thinkers and skeptics.  This includes the idea that we only have one life to live and we want to live it to the fullest without any hope of some afterlife, and the scientific method and reason are the best tools available for achieving it.  Skeptics insist that actions have consequences, and no shaman or priests can absolve you from the results of your bad decisions.  We also subscribe to the idea that man is a custodian of the earth and all of its life forms and not its biblical master.  We also believe that ethics and morality are the results of years of trial and error experiments as to what actions promote human happiness and which ones do not.  We feel that the Golden Rule is morally flawed and the concept that everyone has some degree of responsibility for the happiness and well-being of our neighbors both locally and globally is superior.  In short, atheists are spiritual people who enjoy joyful ecstasy from many sources, including science, literature, music, art, nature, and most important from the inspiration and accomplishments of family, friends, and strangers both past and present.  Or in the words of Ken Wilbur, “There is more spirituality in reason's denial of God than there is in myth's affirmation of God, precisely because there is more depth... even an "atheist" acting from rational-universal compassion is more spiritual than a fundamentalist acting to convert the universe in the name of a mythic-membership god.” 


People often ask, “Why do atheists object to religion so vigorously?”  I will not rehash all the terrible things that have been done throughout history in the name of religion and duplicate countless books on the subject.  However, I highly recommend Steven Pinker’s 2013 book, The Better Angels of Our Nature for a comprehensive and balanced view of the history of violence in the world.  I object to Christianity primarily because of its assault against reason going back to Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit of the “Tree of knowledge of good and evil.” Under what system could that be bad? Once someone decides that the answer to any question is “God,” then there is not any need to look any further for a better answer.  History is full of examples where people like Newton, Galileo, Copernicus, Darwin, and Einstein had the courage to look for answers that actually explains some phenomenon and makes verifiable predictions.  This is the way the human specie has advanced by using reason to increase the storehouse of knowledge to improve the well-being of the world's people.  Relying on super naturalism can only serve as an impediment to that progress and is best discarded.  A good start would be to change our education system to teach students how to think and not what to think.


Sources

1.  The God Hypothesis (5/20/2014)  Blog (The Needlefish Chronicles)
2.  The Better Angels of Our Nature (2013) by Steven Pinker
3.  The Magic of Reality (2011) by Richard Dawkins
4.  Jesus, Interrupted (2010), by Bart D. Ehrman                 

The God Hypothesis

Much ink and blood has been spilled throughout history over the question of the existence and nature of God.  Stephen Jay Gould, the Harvard professor and evolutionary biologist coined the term “Non-overlapping magisteria” (NOMA) to suggest that science and religion exist in distinct and separate spheres of inquiry without any overlap.  Others reject NOMA and maintain that the question of the existence of a supernatural entity is a scientific question best addressed by using the same tools used to solve any other questions of interest.  It is in that spirit that I state God’s existence as a hypothesis to be evaluated using the tools of science, reason and logic. Of course the existence of God is unknowable in a scientific sense and is best thought of in terms of probability.

Richard Dawkins, the Oxford evolutionary biologist, created a useful a seven-step Spectrum of theistic probability ranging in scale from “1,” strong theist (100% certainty) to “7,” strong atheist (equally certain, “There is no God”).  Please note that the strong theist and strong atheist are both irrational positions since they are assumed to be true without any evidence or argument. Both Carl Jung’s statement, “I do not believe, I know” and the atheist who declares, “There is no God” are both relying on something other than reason. The remaining points on the spectrum are: “2,” De facto theist (“Very high probability, but some uncertainty”), “3,” Leaning towards theism (“I am very uncertain, but I am inclined to believe in God”), “4,”  Completely impartial (“God's existence and non-existence are exactly equiprobable.”), “5,”  Leaning towards atheism (“I do not know whether God exists but I'm inclined to be skeptical”), and “6,”  De facto atheist (“Very low probability, but short of zero”).


In this essay the God Hypothesis is defined as follows:  God is both a supernatural deity and a personal God who created the universe and all its contents including man.  He  performs miracles, answers prayers, and provides for eternal life or damnation.  He  possess the following powers: omniscience (all-knowing), omnipotence (all-powerful), and omnibenevolence (all-virtuous).  I will refer to God using the conventional masculine pronoun “he” in referring to “him.”  Philosophers and theologians have devised two types of arguments in support of the God’s existence, formal (structured) and informal (anecdotal).  Formal arguments in support include, the Cosmological argument, Anselm's Ontological argument, the Argument from Scripture, and the Argument from design. Informal arguments in favor include the Argument from morality, the Argument from justice, and the Argument from personal experience.  Arguments against include the Epicurean Trilemma, and  Hume’s test for miracles.

                                                Cosmological argument
           
The major premise of the Cosmological argument is, everything must have a cause and if the chain of causes is traced backward, the first cause (God) will be reached.  It is a very powerful, convincing, and easily understood argument.  Even an acknowledged elite-thinker such as Bertram Russell admitted in his book, Why I am not a Christian that he was convinced by the Cosmological argument until he read John Stuart Mill's autobiography.  According to Mills his father taught him that the question “Who made me?” cannot be answered “God,” since it immediately suggests the further question “Who made God?” The Cosmological argument contains the seeds of its own destruction and therefore must be rejected.

                                          Anselm's Ontological argument

Anselm's Ontological argument defines God as a being for which nothing greater can be imagined.  It further defines three categories of possible entities: “1,” things that exist in the understanding alone (such as the tooth fairy), “2,” things that exist in both the understanding and in reality (such as the sun), and  “3,” things that exist in reality but not in the understanding (obviously there are not any examples ).  If God is defined as the greatest conceivable being, than he cannot be in group “3,” since the concept of God is understood even by atheists. He also cannot be in category “1,” because a being in reality would have to be greater than a being only in the understanding and would contradict the major premise of the argument. Therefore by elimination, God must be part of the second category of things that exist in exist both in the understanding and in reality.  Anselm's Ontological argument is rooted on the unproven premise that something that exists in reality must be greater than something that is only imagined.  It can equally be argued that something can be imagined more perfect than anything known in reality.

                                                 Argument from Scripture

The Argument from Scripture is a classical example of a tautological argument or a self-reinforcing pretense of some significant truth. It normally takes the form of “The Bible is the inerrant truth because it was inspired by God” and “The Bible is God’s word because the Bible says so.”  The Argument from Scripture is similar to Lewis Carroll’s  Bellman's Theorem, “What I tell you three times is true” and is proof of nothing except for the lengths people will go in an attempt to defend the indefensible.  There is an old sausage adage that says, “If you love sausage, you should never watch them being made.”  After reading Bart Ehrman’s book,  Misquoting Jesus, The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, one could say the same thing about the Bible.

                                                            Argument from design

The Argument from design or teleological argument is based on the perceived evidence of deliberate design in the natural world.  It was originated by William Paley, an English clergyman and Christian apologist in his 1802 book,  Natural Theology.  Paley argued that if a watch was found in the woods, it would be reasonable to assume that it had a human designer.  Its intricate and complicated combination of parts precludes any possibility that its existence could occur by chance alone.  Paley then extended his argument of complexity to living things and contended that they are also too complex to have arisen by chance and therefore had to be the work of a divine creator called God. Ergo God exists!

The Argument from design reigned supreme until 1859, when Charles Darwin published The Origin of the Species and introduced what has been called “The greatest idea that anyone ever had,” the Theory of Evolution through natural selection.  Prior to Darwin, there was not any plausible alternative for explaining the immense diversity and complexity of life on earth. The Theory of Evolution through natural selection is a scientific theory and like all scientific theories must explain something (in this case the diversity and complexity of life), must make predictions (that turn out to be true), and must be falsifiable.  The word “Theory” is being used in the scientific sense as opposed to the common definition that is similar to a “guess.”  In science a theory is a proven hypothesis and is the highest standard of truth obtainable and can even be called a “Law.”

Anything beyond a brief introduction to evolution is better suited for a book rather than a short (hopefully) essay.  For those interested in a more thorough treatment of this important and fascinating subject, a number of excellent books are recommended at the end.  Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary geneticist provided the following definition in his 2009 book, Why Evolution is True:   “Life on earth evolved gradually beginning with one primitive species–perhaps a self-replicated molecule–that lived more than 3.5 billion years ago; it then branched out over time, throwing off many new and diverse species; and the mechanism for most (but not all) of evolutionary change is natural selection.”

In spite of the fact that virtually all the scientists in the world accept evolution as a scientific fact, millions of US citizens (mostly lay people) refuse to accept it for religious reasons.  A recent Pew poll indicates that 40% of US citizens reject evolution in favor of the creation story told in Genesis, the first book of the Old Testament.  These Creationists, mostly fundamentalist Christians read the Bible literally and argue that Creationism or Intelligent Design (ID) is an alternative scientific theory to evolution and should be taught in public schools along side of the theory of evolution.  Note that this in direct opposition to Saint Jerome’s suggestion that a literal interpretation of the Bible is for the illiterate masses and an allegorical one for more advanced minds. Even Saint Augustine, one of the most influential theologians of the Catholic Church said  that the Biblical text should not be interpreted literally if it contradicts what we know from science and our God-given reason.

The question of whether ID is a scientific theory or a religious belief was adjudicated in the District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania in 2005. The case involved the Dover Area School District requiring the teaching of ID as an alternative to evolution theory.  Eleven parents of students in Dover sued the school board in Tammy Kitzmiller v. the Dover Area School District maintaining that ID was a religious belief and violated the constitutional principle of separation of church and state.   On December 20, 2005, Judge John E. Jones III (a conservative Republican appointed in 2002 by George W. Bush) ruled that ID is not science and permanently barred the board from introducing into any school within the Dover Area School District.  He also prohibited them from requiring teachers to denigrate or disparage the scientific theory of evolution.  Judge Jones’ 139-page findings of fact was a stunning endorsement of evolution and a major defeat for those promoting ID as a scientific theory.

                                                         Argument from morality

Many apologists have argued that God’s existence is proven by the fact that morality exists in the world.  Their major premise is that without God, man could not be moral because without his presence man would resort to his inherent evil state that began when a talking snake convinced Eve to eat the forbidden fruit.  The Ten Commandments are often cited as an example of the proof of the argument.  Interestingly, there are several sets of “ten commandments” in the Bible including Exodus 20 that lists twenty-six commandments of which only four would be considered today to involve a moral issue.  They are, Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not steal, and Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor (perjury).  The prohibition of rape, incests, or slavery does not appear in any of list of commandments. The fact that 46% of world’s people are not followers of any theistic religion and still prohibit murder, stealing, and perjury by law demonstrates morality does not have to come from God.  John Rawls (1921 –  2002), an American philosopher and a leading figure in moral philosophy has shown clearly that morality has developed in all societies by trial and error.  Experience demonstrates that acts such as murder, rape, stealing, slavery and lying are detrimental to the happiness and contentment of all the people and were eventually outlawed by the state regardless and independent of their religious practices.

                                                          Argument from justice

The Argument from justice makes note of injustice in the world and then asserts that God must exist in order to eventually balance the scales of justice.  Caste systems, such as the one in India have long used this argument to quell unrest among the lowest and most disadvantaged classes claiming that they will have it better in their next life.  Saint Thomas Aquinas blurred the line between justice and revenge by suggesting the saints in heaven will be “permitted to see the punishment of the damned in hell” in order to “enjoy their beatitude and the grace of God more abundantly.”  The Argument from justice in addition to its obvious violation of God’s omnibenevolence does damage to William Gladstone’s idea of “Justice delayed, is justice denied” and is one of the least convincing arguments in favor of God’s existence.   

                                            Argument from personal experience

This argument is best personified by the Bellman's Theorem, “What I tell you three times is true.”  It was coined by the Christian apologist Lewis Carroll in his 1876 book, The Hunting of the Snark.  It is a widespread device used by many people (explicitly and implicitly) in support of a host of beliefs ranging from alien abductions and Virgin Mary sightings, to the ability to communicate with the dead.  A fundamentalist Christian once told me that he was “saved” when he woke up in the morning and found the hotel Bible in his room opened to John 3-16 (“For God loved the world so much that he gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life”.  He swears that it was closed  before he went to bed.  Another friend was obsessed with UFO sightings and swore that he had personally witnessed several events that could only be explained by the existence of extraterrestrials.  Richard Dawkins cited a 1992  survey in his book The Magic of Reality indicating that four million Americans believed that they had been abducted by aliens.  Whitley Striebers’s 1987 book, Communion is the story of his abduction and is billed as his “true story” and is classified “nonfiction.”  José Luis de Jesús Miranda died of cirrhosis of the liver on August 8, 2013.  While living in Miami, Florida he claimed to be the reincarnated Jesus and had over two million followers and believers. The Argument from personal experience can be used to prove anything and must be dismissed by rational people in the absence of evidence and independent verification.

                                                     Epicurean Trilemma

Epicurus (341–270 B.C.E.) was an ancient Greek philosopher and the author of the Epicurean Trilemma, “Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”  The Epicurean Trilemma has been a thorn in the side of theologians and Christian apologists for over two thousand years and has even spawned the disciple of Theodicy in an attempt to explain away the contradiction between God’s omnipotence and omnibenevolence.  The question is, “How can evil exist in a world governed by an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God?” Apologists introduced free will in an attempt to square the circle.  According to this argument, God gave man free will to make choices and it’s man’s bad choices (Satan) that leads to evil and suffering.  This solved one problem, but created two new ones.

First, natural disasters such as earthquakes, tornadoes, floods, and hurricanes occur at God’s direction and cannot be attributed to man’s free will.  And second, free will cannot be reconciled with omniscience.   Keep in mind that  “all knowing” requires perfect knowledge of everything that has happened in the past, perfect knowledge of everything happening in the present, and perfect knowledge of everything that will happen in the future.  One example should make it clear why free will cannot exist in the same space with omniscience. Bill, an atheist lives and dies. An omniscient deity would have known that prior to Bill’s birth, life and death. If Bill had changed his mind and became a believer before he died, that would contradict God’s prior knowledge and thus invalidate his omniscience.  Apologists must make a choice,  allow for free will or omniscience, they cannot have both!

                                                        Hume’s test for miracles

David Hume (1711 – 1776),  a Scottish philosopher suggested a way of evaluating claims of miracles. In his words, “No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that the falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish.”  First, he defined a miracle as a ‘transgression” against one of the laws of nature such as gravity, and further noted that their occurrences would have to be very rare.   For example,  Bill claims that he saw Elvis Presley walking down the street.  If true, that would be a miracle.  There are at least three other explanations: he was mistaken, lying, or even delusional.  According to Hume’s test for miracles, the falsehoods (Bill was mistaken, lying, or delusional) would have to be more miraculous than the fact (seeing Elvis).  The possibility that Bill was mistaken, lying, or delusional does not come close to being more miraculous than the alleged fact of seeing Elvis alive and walking down the street, therefore the alleged miracle must be rejected.

The existence of God along with all the claims for his wondrous deeds is surely the mother of all miracles.  According to Hume the alternatives provided by science, such as the “Big Bang,” and Darwin’s Theory of Evolution would have to be even more miraculous than the idea that man created God, therefore the concept of God must be considered the work of men and not a miracle. Formal arguments such as the Cosmological argument, Anselm's Ontological argument, and the Argument from Scripture are easily defeated and are seldom used anymore by apologists.  The Argument from design has lost its appeal since Darwin’s Theory of Evolution provides an evidence-based explanation for the diversity of life.  Informal arguments such the Argument from morality, the Argument from justice, and the Argument from personal experience are best described as “wishful” thinking and can be used to support virtually any fantasy imaginable. And the Argument from Scripture suffers both from circular reasoning and the Bellman's Theorem.

Although the Epicurean Trilemma and  Hume’s test for miracles do not disprove the existence of God (after all it is impossible to prove a negative), they certainly make the God Hypothesis highly improbable.  The conflict between omnipotence and omnibenevolence, and the tension between free will and omniscience cannot be reconciled without major modifications to the God Hypothesis.  And since all the major religions conflict on major issues, it is a logical conclusion that at best only one can be true.  It has been said that one gets their religion along with their mother’s milk in recognition of the fact that for the vast majority of people, their “chosen” religion is determined by their place of birth and the religion of their parents.  If the God Hypothesis were true it would be reasonable to expect that the choice of one’s religion would be based on something more substantial than ones birth place and “choice” of their parents.  After considering all the arguments I feel that a score of  6.9 (De facto atheist) on Dawkins’ Spectrum of theistic probability scale is the most rational position possible. For me the most compelling arguments against the existence of God are the Epicurean Trilemma and Hume’s test for miracles.  In the words of Stephen Hawking,  “One can't prove that God doesn't exist, but science makes God unnecessary.”  Even if untrue, what is the harm in religious belief?  The answer lies in the words of Voltaire, “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”  The truth of this is well documented by countless atrocities committed in the name of God.



Sources

1.  Why Evolution is True (2009) by Jerry Coyne. 
2.  The God Delusion (2006) by Richard Dawkins
3.  Misquoting Jesus, The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (2005) by Bart Ehrman
4.  Why I am not a Christian (1957) by Bertram Russell
5.  The Magic of Reality (2011) by Richard Dawkins
5.  Free Will (5/14/2013) Blog (The Needlefish Chronicles)
6.  The Bible:  God's Word or the work of Man? (5/6/2014)  Blog (The Needlefish Chronicles)

The Bible: God's Word or the work of Man?

           

Professors and students at the Moody Bible Institute are required to sign a statement attesting that the Bible is the inerrant word of God and every word in it is absolutely true.  Ignoring the wisdom of beginning an educational experience with a dogmatic conclusion, if anyone makes a claim concerning the “inerrant word of God,” they have the intellectual obligation of determining just exactly what is God’s word.  Bart Ehrman, a noted biblical scholar and holder of a PHD from Princeton Theological Seminary did an extraordinary job of doing just that in his 2005 best-selling book,  Misquoting Jesus, The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why.
 
To understand the history of the New Testament (NT) and its creation, it is helpful to consider the following:  First, the history of Palestine at the time of Jesus was dominated by the conflict between the Jews and Roman authorities.  The Jewish people were waiting for the Messiah to come and lead the Jews to victory over the Romans and establish Israel as a Jewish state.   Second, illiteracy and ignorance were the predominant state of most people living at the time. In Acts 4:13 Peter and John are both described as “unlearned and ignorant men.”  Third, the original stories that eventually became the NT were not committed to writing until at least forty years after Christ died.  Prior to this the “Gospels” were created by word-of-month in a manner described by the Chinese as a “Thousand Whispers.”   Fourth, there was considerable conflict and competition for converts by the various religious factions based on stories about the life and time of Jesus.  In fact, there was little consistency in the first three centuries as to what it meant to be called a “Christian.” Ehrman coined the word Proto-orthodox Christianity to define a diverse group of people in recognition of the fact that Christianity was not a unified belief system until around 325 CE.   And fifth, most of people in the Middle East were pagans at the time.

The Proto-orthodox groups included Docetists, Adoptionists, Jewish-Christian Ebionites, and Gnostics.  As a group the Proto-orthodox Christians competed with each other for acceptance of their religious ideas and were eventually considered heretics by the “Christians.” Docetists believed that Jesus was not a full-flesh-and-blood human and that there were two Gods (the God of the Old Testament (OT) and the God of the NT. Adoptionists held the idea that Jesus was a human born to Joseph and Mary in the traditional manner and who was later adopted by God as the Son at the time he was baptized. The Jewish-Christian Ebionites regarded Jesus as the Messiah rejecting his divinity and insisting on following Jewish law and rites. These various groups were important because they account for a large portion of the significant variations found in various copies of NT manuscripts. The Apostle Paul (Saul of Tarsus)  was the most important leader in  the first-century religious movement that culminated into orthodox Christianity in 325 CE.  He died in 67 CE at least forty years after the death of Jesus and it is doubtful if he ever knew any of the disciples.

As Professor Ehrman noted, “There are more variations among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament.” The number of variations in the various ancient manuscripts has been put between 300,000 and 400,000 by a large number of Bible scholars.  Ehrman attributes these variations to unintentional copying errors by the scribes and to intentional changes motivated by advocates for their beliefs as to what the truth should be.  At the time when the NT stories were finally committed to writing the early “Christians” had to rely on amateur scribes because they could not afford to hire professional scribes.  Most of these scribes could not read and simply copied by rote without knowing what they were copying.

This was the situation that existed until the Emperor of Rome, Constantine converted to Christianity in 312 CE.  In 331 CE he ordered fifty Bibles produced at the empire’s expense.  Bishop Eusebius was charged with the task and hired professional scribes to do the writing and also built a special place where the work would take place called a scriptorium.  Their task was to gather up all the copies of the various Gospels and determine which one’s were the “originals” reflecting what the original authors actually said.

The first copy of the NT was written in Greek sometime between 330 and 360 CE It could not have been written before 325 CE because it contains the Eusebian Canons, and it could not have been written after 360 CE because of certain references to Church fathers in the margin.  Pope Damasus I commissioned the Greek Scholar Jerome to translate the Greek NT into Latin and he spent three years (382–385 CE) in Rome working closely with Pope Damasus and the leading Christians to produce what was called the Latin Vulgate (Latin translation of the Bible).

Given the history as sketched out above it is not surprising to learn that today there are literally dozens of versions of the Bible in use.  Currently some version of the Vulgate NT is the most used by Christians rather than the earlier Greek NT (Codex Sinaiticus).  Of course, many of the variations among the numerous manuscripts (both Greek and Latin) were minor, however a number of them are highly significant and will be discussed at length.  For example, the divinity of Jesus was very much in question in the first century and the variations in many manuscripts reflect an attempt to comply with the Pauline story of the virgin birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

The similarity of two letters in the Greek alphabet was used to change 1 Timothy (3-16) to support the divinity of Christ.  The difference between the Greek letter theta (Θ) and the omicron (Ο) are slight.  A theta looks like an omicron with a line in the middle.  One feature of the Greek language (nomina sacra) is the custom of abbreviating sacred names.  For example, the Greek word for “God” is  written (ΘΣ) whereas the word “who” is written in Greek as (ΟΣ).  Johann Jakob Wettstein (1693 – 1754), a  Swiss theologian and well-known NT scholar noticed while studying the Codex Alexander manuscript that the book of 1 Timothy (3-16) had been changed.  The line in the middle of the theta was written in a different ink changing the meaning (in referring to Christ) as “God made manifest in the flesh” as opposed to “who was made manifest in the flesh.” This a most important discovery because this verse is often cited as evidence of Jesus’ divinity claims.  The issue of the divinity of Christ has long been disputed both by early church leaders and later Bible scholars. The issue was finally decided by a vote in the Council of Nicaea in the year 325 CE at which time Christ was declared to be the Son of God by a close vote.   The council also decided which Gospels were  to be included in the NT (canonical).  Many Gospels and other writings were excluded, including The Gospel of Mary, Judas, James, and Thomas.

The change to 1 Timothy (3-16) is significant because it is direct evidence of fraud and is not the only example of fraud in the historical record. For example, Christian apologists are fond of quoting the renowned Greek historian Flavius Josephus in support of the authenticity of the Bible.  They cite a passage allegedly from his book, Antiquities of the Jews (94 CE) that references Jesus.  It is important to note that Josephus wrote another book, The Jewish War, nineteen years earlier (much closer to the time of Christ) before he wrote Antiquities of the Jews, and did not mention Jesus at that time. The passage in question referencing Jesus is extremely brief in contrast to Josephus’ usual voluminous and exhaustive style.  As an example, in one case he devoted almost forty chapters to the life of just one king.  He wrote pages on petty robbers and obscure leaders of the time. Who could believe that he only wrote one paragraph about Christ?  It is for these reasons that Kenneth Harding and other scholars consider the reference to Jesus in the Antiquities of the Jews to be a blatant Christian forgery that was added many years later.

In another example of changing scripture to support Jesus’ divinity, Luke 2:33 originally read “his Father and Mother were marveling at what was said about Jesus,” but was later changed to “Joseph and his Mother were marveling at what was said about Jesus.” The original Luke 2:33 would imply that Jesus had an earthly father and mother whereas the changed version is more favorable to Jesus’ divinity.

John (5: 7-8) or the so named Johannine Comma is another important piece of scripture that was changed because it contains the most explicit statement in support of the Doctrine of the Trinity (“Father, Son and Holy Ghost”).  It can be found in the Latin Vulgate, but it is not found in the vast majority of the Greek manuscripts. This has resulted in a long-standing dispute over a major article of Christian doctrine. Isaac Newton one of histories brightest intellectual luminaries and a most pious Christian would not accept the Doctrine of Trinitarianism.  Many other notable historical persons, including Thomas Jefferson also rejected it.  Many Bible scholars believe that John (5: 7-8) was added to the NT and was not part of the majority of earlier manuscripts.

Perhaps even more troubling is the fact that the last twelve verses of Mark 16 (verses 9-20) were not in the original manuscripts and were also added later.  One of the most intriguing and dangerous verses (17-18) reads, “And these are signs that will accompany those who believe: they will cast out demons in my name; they will speak in new tongues; and they will take up snakes in their hands; and if they drink any poison it will not harm them; they will place their hands upon the sick and heal them.” These verses are a favorite of the Pentecostal Christians and in February 2014, Kentucky Pentecostal pastor Jamie Coots was bitten while handling a rattlesnake during a “Snake Salvation” church ritual.  He died after refusing medical treatment.  According to his son, his last words were “Sweet Jesus.”  Or in the words of  Voltaire, “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”

The tradition of scribes changing the texts during copying was so fragrant and pervasive that the author (perhaps John the Apostle) of  Revelations felt compelled in verses (18-19) to include the following warning: “I testify to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: If anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book; and if anyone removes any of the words of the book of this prophecy, God will remove his share from the tree of life and from the holy city as described in this book.”

After years of studying ancient Bible manuscripts, Ehrman concludes that the  Bible is not the inerrant word of God and must be considered the work of men.  He reasoned that if God had inspired the writing of the Bible, the final product would be one consistent work instead of a multitude of manuscripts with their many variations both insignificant and significant. He further concluded that many of the NT scriptural differences can be attributed to the Apostle Paul’s efforts to compete with his various rivals for the acceptance of his version of Christianity by the pagans. Professor Ehrman’s conclusion is most startling considering his background. He was born in Lawrence, Kansas and was raised in a religious family.  At the age of fifteen he was born again and became a fundamental Pentecostalist. He also earned a diploma from the Moody Bible Institute and graduated from Wheaton College (the alma mater of Billy Graham).

 I agree with his conclusion. I also sense that the forty-year delay from the time Christ died and when the first oral histories were committed to writing poses even greater problems for the integrity of the Bible. The oral history of the Gospels is an example of the game “telephone” in which one person whispers a short and simple message to another which is then passed through a line of people until the last player announces the message to the entire group.  In most cases the final statement bears little or no semblance to the original statement.  To think that the four Gospels could have been transmitted from person to person and maintain the integrity of the original stories for at least forty years is more than absurd.  Paradoxically the early Christian Church leader and author Tertullian (160 - 225 CE) used the idea of absurdity as  “proof” for the truth of Christian doctrine.  In his words, “I believe because it is absurd.”  He also said, “And buried, He rose again: it is certain, because it is impossible.”  In what other pursuit would absurdity and impossibility be offered as evidence that something is true?

David Hume (1711 – 1776),  a Scottish philosopher suggested a way of evaluating claims of miracles. In his words, “No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that the falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish.”  First, he defined a miracle as a ‘transgression” against one of the laws of nature such as gravity, and further noted that their occurrences would have to be very rare.   For example,  Bill claims that he saw Elvis Presley walking down the street. If true this would be a miracle. There are at least three other explanations; Bill was mistaken, lying, or even delusional.  According to Hume’s test for miracles, the falsehoods (Bill was mistaken, lying, or delusional) would have to be more miraculous than the fact (of seeing Elvis).  The possibility that Bill was mistaken, lying, or delusional does not come close to being more miraculous then the alleged fact of seeing Elvis alive and walking down the street, therefore the alleged miracle must be rejected.  If God revealed  his word to the authors of the Bible, that would be a miracle.  Its “falsehood,” that men wrote the Bible without any supernatural intervention or assistance would have to be more miraculous than divine intervention.  Professor Ehrman’s research clearly shows that the Bible as a work of men and is far less miraculous than it being the product of God. Therefore according to Hume’s test, the Bible must be considered he work of men and not a miracle. 



Sources:

1.  Misquoting Jesus, The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (2005) by Bart D.  Ehrman
2.  Why People Believe Weird Things (1997) by Michael Shermer
3.  The Magic of Realty (2011) by Ricard Dawkins
4.  The Gospel Truth (1/28/2013), Blog (The Needlefish Chronicles)