The End of Christianity (11 page)

People who claim otherwise are just fooling themselves.
The tools of the historian are inadequate for the task of detecting miracles.
The historian must be skeptical, must seek independent corroboration, must assume a natural cause for events in history, and must never claim more than the evidence allows. Historians qua historians cannot use faith to establish their historical reconstructions, otherwise they could be easily duped by claims that witches flew through the night, or that the sun really did stop dead in its tracks for Joshua. In this manner, the historian is a model outsider when it comes to Christianity. He or she sets faith aside as irrelevant, just as a scientist does, in the interests of getting at the truth. Such a method has produced the goods so many times it makes our heads spin, whereas faith can only get lucky with hunches at best.

Plenty of natural explanations have been suggested for the claim that Jesus miraculously resurrected from the grave, too. The visionary basis for the view that Jesus arose from the dead beginning with Peter (or Mary Magdalene) works just fine, as I suggested in my book
Why I Became an Atheist.
Bob Price offers a natural alternative in a later chapter for this book. But nonbelievers do not have to propose an alternative scenario at all, just as historians don't have to do so. One historian can look at another historian's reconstruction of what happened at Custer's Last Stand and say such a scenario is improbable without having to suggest a better alternative. It could well be that after showing such a reconstruction is improbable there just isn't enough evidence to say what actually took place.

WHO HAS THE MOST EXTRAORDINARY CLAIMS?

The improbability of Christianity becomes even more pronounced when we consider the nature and number of extraordinary claims it makes compared to other religious viewpoints. An extraordinary claim is a claim about an alleged event considered improbable because it's outside the realm of the ordinary, something we wouldn't expect to happen. The only kinds of out of the ordinary or extraordinary claims I can accept are those that meet two criteria: (1) they are within the range of what science considers naturally possible; and (2) there are good reasons based on good evidence to think these claims are about events that actually took place.
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The most improbable kinds of extraordinary claims are about alleged events that cannot be explained within nature and thereby require supernatural being(s) or forces to explain them. If someone claimed he or she levitated, that would be an extraordinary claim of this sort because it would be something against what is expected in the natural course of events—something like the Transfiguration of Jesus told by the Gospel writers (e.g., Mark 9:1–8). If that same person also claimed he or she vanished, that would be an additional extraordinary claim. If that person then claimed to have rematerialized in a remote part of the globe, that would be a third extraordinary claim. The important point is that these are three independent extraordinary claims. People might come to believe the first one happened but not the second or the third, or come to believe the second claim but reject the first or the third ones, and so on. So I see no reason why we must believe them all if we come to believe in one of them. Even believing in one of them doesn't seem reasonable without a ton of evidence.

Protestant evangelicalism is a wildly improbable faith inside a Christian faith that is already more improbable than others because of the number of extraordinary claims being made. The following chart shows the major religious and nonreligious viewpoints based on the number of extraordinary claims they each make. The more extraordinary claims they make, the farther to the right these positions are placed:

This scale shows us which viewpoints make the most extraordinary claims. On the left side is the atheist (or agnostic) who makes no extraordinary claims about supernatural beings or forces at all. I know such an assertion is contested by believers, but it's the only familiar and consistent way to explain what an atheist is when contrasting the atheist position to those who believe in supernatural beings and forces. Atheists are nontheists and by extension nonbelievers. We do not believe in supernatural beings or forces and hence do not make any extraordinary claims about nonnatural entities that are beyond what we can or should expect. We simply have no religious beliefs in that sense.
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As we move off to the right, the pantheist claims all is
one.
While this is a hard claim to wrap one's head around, it is a simple one. The pantheist makes only one extraordinary claim, even though it's a huge one that denies everything we experience every single day of our lives as an illusion (
maya
).

With deism we see an additional extraordinary claim is being made. Deists only accept what reason leads them to, and for most of them this means there is only a creator God. Their claim is more extraordinary than pantheism since they affirm a spiritual reality that exists in addition to the reality we experience, inhabited by a creator God (which is a kind of dualism as opposed to a monism).

The Orthodox Jew accepts the existence of a creator God but in addition also believes the Old Testament is the revealed word of God. The Muslim accepts some of the early portions of the Old Testament but in addition believes the Koran is additionally revealed by God (i.e., Allah) and that Jesus was his prophet.

See a trend here?

Unlike the Jews and the Muslims, Christians believe in a creator God, the Old Testament, and also the New Testament as the revealed word of God. Christians also believe there is a Trinitarian God, an incarnation, a supernatural atonement for sins, a resurrection of Jesus, and all the other miracle claims in the New Testament. There are mutual beliefs shared with these other religions, but the point is that Christians add many
more
to them.

Now when we look at these positions based on who makes the greater number of extraordinary claims, then isn't it quite obvious Christians do—especially those who accept all ten creedal affirmations? If we step back and ask how many extraordinary claims each of the monotheisms have, then Christianity has more by far. While all theisms are improbable, it sure would look to
an outsider
that Christianity is preposterous precisely because of the number of extraordinary claims being made.
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If we rightly define the larger viewpoint as the one having the greater number of extraordinary claims chained together as a cluster, where the whole cluster can only be as probable as the weakest link, then Christianity is the most improbable viewpoint of them all. For any two extraordinary claims, if each has a chance of being true of 1 in 100, the odds of
both
being true are 1 in 10,000; add a third, and those odds drop to one in a million, and so on down the line. Christians must defend too many beliefs, any one of which, if false, would be fatal to their whole faith. Therefore Christianity is by far more preposterous than Pantheism, or Deism, or Islam, or Orthodox Judaism, while evangelicalism is the most wildly improbable faith of them all.
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I am so sure of this that I'm willing to risk Pascal's Wager on it. His “you should believe or you risk hell if you're wrong when you die” gambit has no more force on me than someone who runs around town crying “wolf” all the time or someone who screams that “the sky is falling.” You would think that if I'm willing to risk going to hell for what I think then I must be pretty sure, right? I am. I have to be. Just keep in mind that Christians are not bothered in the least that they are risking Allah's hell by not being Muslims. We all risk the hells of other religions. All I'm doing is risking one more hell than others do. Once I've risked one of them, they all look like nothing but the exact same empty threat, just repeated over and over. Because that's what they are. And if God wants our true heartfelt obedience at all, then why does he threaten us with eternal punishment if we disobey—is this any reasonable way to gain what he wants from us?

In fact, as far as I'm concerned, Christian theism has no more credibility than Scientology, Mormonism, Haitian Voodoo, or the southwest Pacific Ocean cargo cults, because they are all based on faith.
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It has no more credibility than the many different dead ancient religions of the past, including the faith of ancient Israel and several of the other early Christianities that didn't survive, or the many other resurrected savior cults that preceded it (such as those of Zalmoxis, Romulus, and Osiris).
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Skeptics reject all these religious faiths because none of them offers satisfactory answers to basic questions—nor do they present sufficient evidence to accept them. So it is not the case that we single Christianity out for rejection, and therefore it's not the case we do so because we have hardened, sinful, selfish, prideful, rebellious hearts, or that we had poor father figures, or any such nonsense.
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All such attempts to dismiss our rejection of Christianity tacitly admit that the Christian faith does not offer good reasons to believe based on sufficient evidence. For you would never see a serious scientist dismissing another scientist in the same manner by saying: “That guy had a poor father figure, so that's why he rejects my new theory!”

Since I'm a thinking person, I cannot accept just any claim at all. Given the number of false beliefs that have been propagated down through history and in today's world, I am right to require reasonable answers to basic questions, and I am right to require sufficient evidence commensurate with the claims being made before I will accept them. I can see no reasonable objection to this requirement at all.
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Even if there is a god, he supposedly created me this way, as a thinking person. So the existence of a god changes nothing, for it would be duplicitous and counterproductive of a deity to create me as a thinking person and not also provide me with the answers and the evidence that a thinking person needs to accept the Christian claims.

There are Christians who object that we should not trust our intellect. But it seems utterly contradictory for them to appeal to our intelligence when arguing for why we cannot trust our intelligence. There are Christians who object that our thinking about such matters is unreliably clouded because our minds are fallen. But that means thinking people are hopelessly condemned because we don't know any other way to search for the truth but by using our minds. There are Christians who object that it doesn't matter if thinking people can't understand the truth because all of us deserve to be condemned for the sin of our first human parents in a Garden of Eden anyway. But isn't it obvious that only if some of us would
not
have sinned under the same initial conditions can such a test be considered a fair one rather than a sham? But if some of us would not have sinned in the Garden of Eden under the same “ideal” conditions, then there are people who are being punished for something they never would've done in the first place. There are Christians who object that we are in a cosmic war where thinking people are just unfortunately being deceived by Satan. But since humans are no match for Satan's supposed intellect and power, then God is to be blamed for allowing Satan's continued existence or for not successfully helping us to know the truth. It just seems unreasonable for God to demand that deceived people should ask for his help when they don't even know that they are deceived enough to ask for his help in the first place.

Bertrand Russell was asked what he would tell God on judgment day as to why he did not believe. Russell reportedly said: “Not enough evidence, God, not enough evidence.” That's what I would say. If a good omnipotent God existed, there would not be so much massive suffering in the natural world. In fact, the probability that such a God exists is inversely proportional to the amount of suffering there is in the world (i.e., the more suffering there is, then the less probable it is that God exists), and there is way too much suffering to suppose that he does. If there is a God who wants us to believe in him, there would not be so much religious diversity spread around the globe. The probability that the Christian God exists is also inversely proportional to the amount of religious diversity that exists (i.e., the more religious diversity there is, then the less probable it is that God exists), and there is way too much religious diversity to suppose that he does.

If the “God did it” explanation is to be taken seriously, modern science should not be able to offer much in the way of alternatives to that explanation. Either believers argue from the gaps in scientific knowledge to their God or they don't. If they do, then they are arguing from ignorance, which is a well-known informal fallacy that believers use in each new generation as science closes previous gaps only to open up new ones. If believers don't argue from the gaps and instead claim God is merely the sustaining creator of the universe, then our universe ends up being indistinguishable from one without God at all. The probability that the Christian God exists is thus inversely proportional to the amount of reasonable alternative scientific explanations there are for religious claims (i.e., the more science can explain without God, then the less probable it is that God exists), and there are way too many scientific explanations to suppose that he does.
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