Morality is Subjective – and That’s Okay

Atheists often face the charge that we have no true basis for morality. How can we, lacking a belief in a supreme law-giver, hold people accountable for their actions? Without God, isn’t morality just a matter of personal preference, with a nun’s opinion no better than a serial killer’s? Why should anyone follow anyone else’s standard?

Believers assert that only a transcendent, objective standard of morality, i.e. God, is sufficient for regulating human behavior. They say we need a standard that applies to all of humanity and is not simply one’s own individual opinion. However, a closer examination reveals that, even if divine morality can be shown to exist, it faces the very same shortcomings that believers ascribe to subjective morality.

Before they even begin the discussion, believers need to demonstrate that objective morality actually exists. More often than not, objective morality is taken for granted, but its existence is a claim that needs to be backed up. If believers want to point out deficiencies in subjective morality, that’s fine, but what if it’s all we have? You may wish you had a car that reliably starts and isn’t rusting through the floor, but if it’s your only form of transportation, you’ll have to use it in spite of its flaws!

What’s more, the objective morality asserted by believers simply wouldn’t work as well as they think it would. For one thing, God-based morality is not universal, despite the protestations of apologists. If the Christian God is held out as an objective source of morality, why should a Hindu care? Or a Buddhist, Taoist, Zoroastrian, and so on? If morality is based on any particular god, those who don’t believe in that god cannot be held accountable to that standard. In this way, a believer’s own “objective” morality falls short in the same way as subjective morality.

It gets worse. If we accept God is the source of morality, how do we then determine what is and isn’t moral? The problem is that objective morality is necessarily filtered through one’s own subjective human brain. If morality is revealed through a sacred text, then it comes down to the subjective interpretation of the reader. If morality is revealed through personal revelation, then of course this is subjective to the one who receives it. The end result is that every believer thinks they know objective morality, when in reality they can never be sure they have it right!

Observing the history of the church should make this obvious. Somehow, despite having access to the purported source of objective morality, Christians wind up on both sides of every major social issue. From abolition of slavery to feminism to civil rights to gay marriage to transgender issues, Christians seem to receive contradictory messages from their own God. How is this supposed to solve the “problems” of subjective morality?

The truth is that subjective morality is not as deficient as believers claim. Somehow, civilizations throughout history have converged on many of the same conclusions when it comes to moral behavior. There is no thriving modern society that allows for wanton murder, gratuitous theft, or unchecked rape. That’s because we’ve figured out that human beings thrive when we are all working together for the betterment of everyone. Barbarians don’t build skyscrapers, after all. Once we are no longer preoccupied with protecting our families and property, we can use the same time, energy, and resources for greater purposes.

Of course, there will be areas of disagreement as progress marches on, but the core tenets remain the same. Christianity is no improvement in this area. No one disputes the Ten Commandments, but practically all other issues are open to interpretation. All Christianity adds to the moral question is a dubious claim to divine authority and an unwarranted sense of superiority.

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Adam and Eve Wouldn’t Have Lasted Two Seconds Outside the Garden

Picture this: You’re Adam or Eve. You just fucked up big time. Your life of ease in the Garden of Eden, days spent naming animals and watering plants, is now over. You’ve been kicked out forever, left to survive with nothing to your name but the clothes on your backs. How will you survive without the Creator who once walked with you?

God cursed Adam to “cultivate the ground from which he was taken” (Genesis 3:23), as was his job in the garden (Genesis 2:15). But where did Adam learn how to farm in the first place, and why? He didn’t pick it up by trial and error, because error in farming means your crops die, and death was not yet a possibility.  Then again, if your crops can’t die, their cultivation becomes a formality. Why would God have the man he created go through the unnecessary motions of farming plants that don’t need farming — unless he already knew the man would need these skills to survive in the future.

And how good of a farmer could Adam have possibly been, coming from a paradigm where nothing could possibly die? Even the best farmers survive only at the whims of burning sun and fickle rain. It would only take one failed harvest for Adam to realize, “Oh, it’s not going to be so easy now, is it?” Adam also wouldn’t be in the habit of storing food for the lean times, either. We have no indication that the garden had seasons, and definitely no droughts or pestilence, so where would Adam get the concept of food shortages in order to be prepared for them?

Let’s say the worst happens. Adam’s first post-fall crop fails miserably, and now he and Eve are facing a long winter without enough food. They could return to foraging, scraping by on seeds and plants. However, thanks to the fall, some of those plants are poisonous now! The Boy Scouts won’t exist for another 6000 years, so they have no clue which plants will sustain them and which will make them vomit until they die.

And let’s not forget that other winter threat: disease. Bacteria and viruses that were once benign are now seeking hosts to infect, and Adam and Eve don’t have years of immunity built up to help them fight illness. Who needs an immune system in a world free of disease? God must have cooked it up on a whim before sending them on their way. In fact, he must have carefully tuned their immune system — they must die eventually, of course, just not immediately. How thoughtful!

Oh, and the winter pinch is not just affecting Adam and Eve. The world has predators now, carnivores who need a new food source since their bodies no longer digest fruit and plants. Why not start with the fleshy pink hairless apes shivering vulnerable in the cold? It would have only taken a single starving saber-tooth tiger to snuff out the only two human beings in existence.

I suppose the Christian answer to all these questions is “magic”: God magicked illness away, magicked predators away, magicked in enough sun and rain (but not too much!) and so on. However, this just turns God into a clingy helicopter parent, no longer walking with them but still orchestrating their lives behind the scenes. It’s as if he realized his discipline went too far but couldn’t bring himself to take it back — after all, what kind of lesson would that teach his impressionable children? As always, the Genesis story only makes sense as one of many creation myths mankind has invented, not as a literal description of historical events.

Book Review: Cold-Case Christianity

In The Case for Christ and other books in the series, Lee Strobel paints himself as a serious reporter who know how to ask the tough questions and ferret out the truth. Strobel uses his journalistic credentials to give his book weight, but by lobbing softball questions at a single side of a multi-faceted story, he shows a distressing lack of professional standards.

It is therefore appropriate that Strobel provides the introduction to J. Warner Wallace’s Cold-Case Christianity. Wallace is a former homicide detective and cold-case investigator who proposes that his bona fides him unique insight into the most famous death in history: the crucifixion and purported resurrection of Jesus Christ. Unfortunately, like Strobel, Wallace does his profession and his faith no favors when he selectively applies his job experience to an unrelated field.

In order for Wallace’s credentials as a homicide detective to bolster his case, he must apply his skills consistently, going through the same process with the death of Jesus as he would with the deaths he investigates professionally. If he fails to apply the same standards to both investigations, he undermines the very thesis of his book. Moreover, Wallace must make solid connections between his cold cases and the case for Christ; he is not a historian, so it is important that he demonstrate that his job experience still applies to 2000-year-old events. By the end of the book, Wallace has failed on both counts.

Wallace can’t make it past chapter 2 before showing his hand. He notes that the deaths he investigates fall into one of four categories: natural, accidental, suicide, or homicide. In detective work, there is no category for “supernatural death”. However, when it comes to the death and supposed resurrection of Jesus, Wallace insists that a supernatural option must be on the table. One of his favorite phrases is “bias against the supernatural,” an accusation he lobs at skeptics whenever possible.

So why doesn’t Wallace consider supernatural options as part of his day job? Is he not demonstrating his own “bias against the supernatural” by failing to do so? Wallace never gives any explanation for the differing methodologies. He claims that, in the case of the resurrection, divine intervention “accounts for the evidence most simply and most exhaustively, and it is logically consistent (if we simply allow for the existence of God in the first place).”

However, an all-powerful, omnipresent God is a simple and exhaustive explanation for literally any phenomenon — until, as has happened since the dawn of modern science, a naturalistic explanation supplants the supernatural. The tooth fairy perfectly explains how lost teeth get replaced with money, until one’s parents are caught in the act.

Of course, in order to a find naturalistic explanation for an event once thought to be supernatural, we must at some point acquire new information. In Wallace’s cold cases, this could take the form of new eyewitness testimony or previously unavailable DNA evidence. If no new evidence comes to light, the case remains cold.

In these investigations, Wallace never takes the additional step to say, “I have no natural explanation for this murder, therefore God must have teleported a bullet into this man’s cranium! This explanation is simple and accounts for all the evidence — and saying otherwise shows an anti-supernatural bias on your part!” And yet, this is exactly how Wallace treats the data points surrounding the resurrection. Were Wallace applying his professional standards consistently, Jesus’ death would be filed away with the rest of his cold cases.

The first half of Cold-Case Christianity has Wallace recounting incidents from homicide investigations that he believes are analogous to investigations into the gospel accounts. However, the connections he draws are often specious and unconvincing. One chapter compares the martyred apostles with suspected criminals pitted against one another under interrogation. Why didn’t the apostles rat each other out like suspects often do, instead choosing to go to their deaths? The problem is, Wallace explicitly compares Peter in Rome with Thomas in India, where one was never in a position to rat out the other.

In another chapter, Wallace notes the importance of keeping eyewitnesses at a crime scene separated before detectives arrive, lest they start comparing notes and ultimately give homogenized, collusive accounts. Wallace also observes that the gospel accounts often agree with each other, sometimes verbatim, but to him this affirms their reliability as eyewitness testimony. He says these facsimiles “may be the result of common agreement at particularly important points in the narrative, or (more likely) the result of later eyewitnesses saying, ‘The rest occurred just the way he said.’” But don’t both Christian and secular biblical scholars widely accept that Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source? Wouldn’t access to other accounts make them unreliable eyewitnesses by homicide investigation standards?

This is one of many examples where Wallace ignores obvious, well-established objections to the gospel accounts in favor of weaker targets. For instance, he spends a whole chapter defending a very early (pre-70 CE) date for gospel authorship, and he specifically contrasts this with his own atheistic assumption of second- or third-century authorship. Both dates are minority views among biblical scholars; Wallace glosses over the more common view that the gospels were written in the late first century. Why the omission?

In addition to this, Wallace repeats the classic apologetic that the apostles would not have allowed themselves to be martyred for what they knew to be a lie. But what if the disciples weren’t lying? What if they were just plain wrong? Wallace doesn’t address this reasonable alternative, going after the easy mark instead.

Possibly the worst example comes toward the end of the book, where Wallace questions what would have inspired the disciples to preach the gospel even as it cost them their lives. Making a comparison to cold cases, Wallace claims that “Sex, money, and power are the motives for all the crimes detectives investigate. In fact, these three motives are also behind lesser sins as well.” He ably dismantles the notions that the disciples were inspired by any of these three incentives (which no skeptic has ever claimed), but he ignores the elephant in the room.

What about religious fervor? Surely Wallace has seen the lengths people will go and the things people will do in the name of their god. It’s in the news every day! Is Wallace oblivious to the idea that the disciples were religious zealots? Or does he simply ignore an obvious explanation because it doesn’t fit into his narrative?

Going into these books, I try to assume the author is sincere until they give reason to believe otherwise. Unfortunately, Wallace gives plenty of reasons to doubt his sincerity. He seems to have found an interesting hook that looks profound on a book cover, but his apologetics ring hollow because he knows he’s preaching to the choir. He’s not intending for his audience to apply the slightest amount of scrutiny that would reveal the holes in his arguments. If he’s trying to build a legal case for Christ, it would ultimately be thrown out of court.

Dismissing Minimal Facts With Minimal Effort, Part 2

In part 1 of this series, I introduced the “minimal facts” approach to Christian apologetics and briefly touched on three events surrounding the resurrection that apologists claim are beyond criticism. As it turns out, the cases for the crucifixion, burial, and empty tomb of Jesus are not as airtight as apologists would have you believe. There are still a couple more “facts” worth addressing, and as you can imagine, they’re quite problematic as well.

4. Jesus appeared to people post-resurrection.

From the historian’s perspective, we don’t have independent sources for many of Jesus’ purported post-resurrection appearances. The Emmaus road experience is only found in Luke. The Sea of Tiberias appearance is only reported by John. An appearance to “five hundred brethren at one time” is only mentioned by Paul, as he quotes an early church creed while writing to the Corinthians.

The creed recorded in 1 Corinthians 15 is often cited as evidence that Christians believed from a very early date that Jesus had appeared to others after his resurrection. However, the fact that Christians believed something had happened is not necessarily related to what actually did happen. This will come up again.

Apologists will claim that this creed arose far to early for legends to develop surrounding the resurrection. Nonsense! How long did it take for nutcases to start claiming that 9/11 was an inside job, Sandy Hook was a false flag operation, or Tupac was still alive? And that’s with the wealth of information available in an Internet-connected society! How quickly will legends spring up when all your information comes from the rumor mill buzzing around town?

Might these supposed appearances have a naturalistic explanation? We do know that grief-induced hallucinations are surprisingly common, and we also know that stories tend to grow in the telling. Maybe one or two of the disciples had such an experience and told the others. Over time, the experiences of a few disciples evolved into the experience of all the disciples, seeing Jesus at the same time. This is certainly a more plausible explanation than the dead coming back to life.

5. The disciples came to truly believe that Jesus rose from the dead.

How one responds to this “fact” depends on how it is phrased. I don’t know of any scholar who disputes that the disciples and earliest Christians believed that Jesus rose from the dead — but far fewer would conclude that Jesus actually did.

It should be pretty obvious that belief has no inherent relation to the truth of a proposition. People believe in the power of Jesus, astrology, crystals, homeopathy, CrossFit, Santa Claus and all kinds of incorrect ideas.

Moreover, people sincerely believe in incorrect ideas. Apologists often object that no one would allow themselves to be martyred for proclaiming what they know is a lie. Agreed, but who said the disciples were lying? They may well have been sincere in their belief that Jesus rose from the dead — sincerely wrong.

So we see that, as usual, Christians have trouble getting their facts straight, but even if we were to grant apologists all of their claims, the minimal facts approach still suffers from a fatal flaw.

Think of it like a magic show, with the classic trick of the magician sawing their lovely assistant in half. Unless you’re a stage magician yourself, you might not have access to all the ins and outs of how magicians perform their tricks. All you have are a handful of facts that you and the rest of the audience have all observed.

• The assistant is a whole person before lying down in the box.
• The magician saws through her.
• The assistant appears to be split in half.

If you can’t figure out the trick, do you immediately assume that the magician has real magic powers? Or do you pick from a list of unconfirmed but entirely mundane explanations? Perhaps the saw is fake. Maybe there’s a secret compartment, or a mirror. The supernatural is probably dead last on your list, right below secret alien technology.

The minimal facts should be treated the same way. We simply don’t have access to all of the events of Jesus’ crucifixion and its aftermath, and, barring some monumental archaeological find, we probably never will. Somehow, when communicating to humanity the most important story in history, God has left us to play connect the dots without all the dots. The information available to us is simply not enough to get the full picture of these three days in Judea two millennia ago, and certainly not enough to determine that a crucifixion victim rose from the dead.

 

Dismissing Minimal Facts With Minimal Effort, Part 1

The minimal facts approach has become a popular approach to Christian apologetics, and I can see why. It allows believers to run an end-around on one of atheists’ favorite topics: confusing and contradictory Bible passages. It basically says, “Hey, let’s set aside these 200 questions where scholars disagree and focus on these four where they do!”

At its core, the minimal facts approach is an argument from ignorance. The apologist presents a series of facts and asks the listener, “How can you explain these facts without the resurrection?” The apologist thus attempts to shift the burden of proof onto the listener, asking them to disprove a theory that the apologist has yet to prove!

It is possible, however, to play the apologist’s game and face their “facts” head-on. While the apologist asserts one unified explanation for all presented facts (namely, the resurrection), non-believers aren’t required to provide one unified alternative explanation.

Moreover, these alternatives don’t necessarily have to be the most plausible explanations on their own, just more plausible than a man rising from the dead. This is a relatively easy bar to clear! However, how one addresses the minimal facts depends on which specific ones are being presented.

1. Jesus was crucified.

This fact is uncontroversial (among non-mythicists), but also unspectacular. I feel fully comfortable agreeing for the sake of argument that Jesus, like all men, died. Finally, believers and non-believers find common ground!

2. Jesus was buried in a tomb.

This is where it starts getting controversial. Scholars such as Bart Ehrman have noted that Romans were not in the habit of granting traitors a proper burial, choosing instead to dump their bodies in a common grave. However, in How God Became Jesus, writing specifically to counter Ehrman, Craig Evans claims that we do have examples of Roman clemency to crucifixion victims, noting that “Peacetime administration in Palestine appears to have respected Jewish burial sensitivities” (p. 77).

So if Pilate could have allowed Jesus to be buried, the question becomes: did he? The story of Joseph of Arimathea does appear in all four gospels, but it is not without its own difficulties. For one thing, there is no town of Arimathea known to history. For another, different gospels give different reasons for the specific choice of the tomb. Matthew says Joseph buried Jesus in “his own new tomb” (27:60), but John says it was chosen simply because “the tomb was nearby” and it was time to prepare for Passover (19:42).

It is also sometimes claimed that a character like Joseph of Arimathea would be an unlikely invention. After all, didn’t the Sanhedrin just get through condemning Jesus to death? Why now introduce a sympathetic council member?

Two problems here. One, if Evans is right and the Romans did allow some crucifixion victims to be buried, it would be appropriate for a member of the council to ask Pilate for the body so the burial rites could be performed. And two, the gospels have a running theme of Jesus appealing to the most unlikely members of society. He’s already dined with tax collectors at this point, why not win over one of the Sanhedrin? Multiple gospels even quote a Roman centurion exclaiming beneath the cross, “Truly this was the Son of God!” (Mark 15:39 et al)

3. The tomb was found empty.

Oh boy. I recently did a whole post on contradictions in the resurrection accounts, but it’s hard to be brief when faced with the sheer incongruity of the whole scenario. Given that this event is supposed to be the turning point in human history, the watershed moment of the entire Bible, you would think God would inspire the gospel writers to keep their stories straight.

Apologists expect us to look at stories of women finding an opened or unopened tomb both guarded and not guarded by one or two men or angels before or after fetching the disciples or telling no one, and take away “Well, we can all agree that the tomb was empty!”

Regarding the women who ostensibly discovered the empty tomb, apologists raise the same point as with Joseph of Arimathea. According to them, the “criteron of embarrassment” makes it unlikely that the gospel writers would invent a story where women, legal non-entities at the time, are the ones who make the discovery. But is this really embarrassing, or is it entirely consistent with a character like Jesus who eschews social norms and appeals to the lowest strata of society?

For the sake of argument, let’s say we ignore all objections and grant the apologist all three of these points. Is resurrection the only explanation? Here’s my pet theory — and remember, it just needs to be more believable than a holy zombie.

Jesus is crucified. Joseph of Arimathea asks Pilate for the body, but Pilate, still peeved from being dragged into the whole affair, refuses the request. Not wanting to admit failure, Joseph tells Jesus’ followers that he has secured the body and buried it in a tomb. The next morning, the stone is rolled away and followers find the tomb empty.

No appeal to the supernatural required! We know historically that Pilate was a dick to the Jews, and we certainly know that people lie to save face. I believe this hypothetical scenario accurately explains the facts presented in a wholly naturalistic manner.

But there are yet more “minimal facts” to address! My next post will go into the purported post-resurrection appearances of Jesus and the rapid growth of Christianity.

Atheists Do Love to Sin – But There’s A Catch

For some reason, I’ve recently encountered multiple unaffiliated Christians making the same obnoxious claim about atheists. “See, all atheists secretly believe in God — they just choose to deny him because they want to remain in their sinful ways!” In order to make this statement, a believer must dismiss all atheists who found errors and contradictions in the Bible, or who have never had any supernatural experiences, or fail to see God react to human suffering, or see no logical reason to think any god exists, or who were raised without faith and just never changed — you see my point. So where did these believers even get such a crazy idea?

Romans 1:18-32 has Paul making a few broad claims about what he calls “unrighteous” individuals. First, they are well aware of God’s righteous nature; not only has “God shown it to them” (v. 19), but it has been revealed through creation, “clearly perceived…in the things that have been made” (v. 20). Are the unrighteous ignorant according to Paul? No, they actively “suppress the truth” (v. 19), and when it comes to belief in God, “they are without excuse” (v. 20).

Second, these individuals aren’t nearly as smart as they think they are. (I’m sure some Christians love this part.) “Claiming to be wise, they became fools” (v. 22), and so “their foolish hearts were darkened” (v. 21). It’s easy to make the connection to the oft-quoted psalmist writing “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God'” (Psalm 14:1).

Third, God has written off these people, allowing them to follow their base instincts like feral animals. Paul repeatedly states that God “gave them up”: to “impurity” (v. 24), to “dishonorable passions” (v. 26), to “a debased mind” (v. 28). As if he hadn’t already made himself clear, Paul concludes this section by reiterating that these wicked people know exactly what they’re doing:

Though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them. (v. 32)

So that settles it, right? Well, no. Surprisingly, a 2000-year-old book speaking in vast generalizations may not have captured the true motives of each individual non-believer.

To Paul’s first point, it’s apparently quite easy to look at the majesty of creation and not see the Christian god in any of it. For the last hundred thousand years, mankind has studied nature and seen all kinds of gods that are not Jehovah. Even though the Bible asserts that “The heavens declare the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1), civilizations throughout the millennia have gazed upon the night sky and seen a wide variety of pantheons represented, from Egyptian to Greek to Chinese and beyond. Modern astronomy has opened our eyes to the vast wonders of the universe without any inherent appeal to a deity.

Paul’s second point boils down to “You think you’re so smart!” Foolishness is by no means the proprietary domain of atheism. A Christian can declare, “Atheists are fools for not believing!” just as much as an atheist can say, “Christians are fools for believing!” Name-calling is no substitute for rational debate. I’d encourage both sides to give the other a chance to support their beliefs before we start dropping F-bombs.

If I were a Christian, I’d have deep misgivings about Paul’s third point. Imagine the implications of a God that gives up on people! Why would a loving god with the power to change anyone’s heart ever decide not to do so? Are some people just not worth it to him?

Christians, you know this can’t be the case. Haven’t you ever had a speaker at your church give an epic testimony of being lost in a quagmire of drugs, sex, or crime, only to be saved by the grace of God? If God didn’t write off Jeffrey Dahmer, David Berkowitz, or Nicky Cruz, why would he write off anyone?

So if the idea that “atheists just want to sin” has only dubious scriptural credentials, why does it remain so persistent? Is there any real-world support?

Here I must divulge a little trade secret: not all atheists have good reasons for rejecting God! I’m sure there are atheists who grew up in restrictive Christian households and, after seeing how much fun the rest of the world was having, decided “I want some of that!” So they rebel, ditch church, and go have themselves a good time.

However, pretending that all atheists reject Christianity for these reasons is just an excuse for believers to disengage. It’s way easier to reduce complex motivations to digestible stereotypes, and simpler to spout well-worn platitudes than wrestle with a tough argument.

I won’t lie, I enjoy being able to do certain things that were verboten as a believer. I drink with friends, I watch R-rated movies, and I still get the same rebellious glee from swearing as an nine-year-old who just discovered the word “ass”. But did I reject Christianity just so I could say “hell” all day long? Hell no!

Look at it this way: saying “atheists secretly believe but just want to sin” is like saying “Christians secretly don’t believe but just want hope in the face of suffering.” Sure, reassurance in times of trouble is a useful side benefit, but it may not necessarily be one’s main impetus for joining the church.

And if your main view of atheists is “they love to sin”, I’ve got bad new for you. Christians love to sin, too! They just take a break on Sunday mornings.