Reckless Apologetic Presumptuousness

It may seem that bible-believers should be well-informed as to what is actually written in the bible. But firsthand experience often suggests that we should not be so ready to make such assumptions. Defenders of the Christian faith may be amply rehearsed on certain doctrines they're expected to believe and protect from criticism. But such knowledge is often a far cry from the record found in the bible itself. All too typically, believers tend to depend on extrabiblical sources to spec out their "doctrines." This is because the bible's own treatment of the positions which inform those doctrines is frequently ambiguous, insufficiently explained, and even inconsistent. The New Testament, for instance, nowhere explicitly identifies its god as a "trinity" - a god that is "one" but has "three persons" in which each person is equal to the others. And with statements attributed to Jesus, supposedly a member of this three-headed deity, like "my Father is greater than I" (Jn. 14:28), it is hard to see how one could believe that the New Testament is in uniform agreement with such a doctrine. To defend the belief that it is uniform, apologists turn to extrabiblical sources - to council rulings and the work of theologians. By turning to an Augustine, a Calvin, a Hodge or a Van Til to defend Christian doctrines, apologists performatively admit that appealing to the bible itself is not sufficient to support and defend them. And by leaning on such sources, believers are easily lulled into the habit of assuming that the bible is not only wholly uniform throughout, but also that it says more than it really does.

A glaring example of apologetic inflating of the the biblical record beyond what it actually says, is one that even many critics are prone to miss. The issue here has to do with what the apostle Paul knew or did not know of the Jesus portrayed in the gospels. Most believers and non-believers commonly assume that the apostle knew the same details as those which we find in the four gospels of the New Testament canon. Even the order in which the books of the New Testament are arranged seems to encourage this common erroneous assumption - that the apostle Paul preached the same Jesus as the one found in the four gospels. The order of the books in the New Testament, with the four gospels appearing first, then the book of Acts, then the many epistles of Paul and other Christian writers, and concluding with the Apocalypse, actually does not reflect the order in which these documents were written. In actuality, the first writings on the scene were the Pauline epistles. Only later did the biographical accounts contained in the gospels come to be written. In fact, it may very well be the case that the apostle Paul was not aware of the gospels Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, or the book of Acts, for the available evidence strongly suggests that Paul was already dead by the time the gospels, as they currently stand, were composed, let alone disseminated

Facts such as this, however, do nothing to prevent apologists who are anxious to defend their faith-beliefs from exxagerating Paul's knowledge of Jesus to include what we find only in the gospels. In his "A Study of Apologetic Preaching," Christian apologist and devoted Bahnsenite Roger Wagner writes,

In Lystra, Paul and Barnabas encountered a man who had been crippled from birth (Acts 14:8). As Paul began to preach the Gospel of Christ, this man responded by faith. We are not told by Luke what Paul was saying at this early stage in his proclamation, but presumably he was telling the people of this town about the earthly ministry of Jesus of Nazareth and the many wonders that He performed (cf. Acts 2:22). (1)

Elsewhere Wagner writes:

In this earlier preaching the full outline of the life, death, and resurrection was do doubt covered, so much so that the crippled man was able to put his faith in Christ as one who could heal him at Paul's word. (2)

Wagner is basing his assumption of what Paul might have known about the gospel Jesus by interpolating what he reads in Acts into his view of Paul, even though the book of Acts was written possibly as late as CE 90, whereas Paul probably met his doom in the 60's. (3) In spite of his far-reaching assumptions, Wagner admits on top of this that, due to Paul's and Barnabus' alleged protestations to a group of Greeks who mistook them as gods and an ensuing uprising, "Paul did not have time to prepare a careful message for the people of Lystra under these conditions." (4) Wagner also confesses that "We cannot know on the basis of Luke's summary of the message (probably received secondhand from Paul) just how much the apostle actually said." (5) Given these admissions, on what basis would Wagner suppose that the apostle Paul "was telling the people of this town about the earthly ministry of Jesus of Nazareth" and that he had preached a "full outline" of Jesus' life? This is something apologists usually prefer to gloss over so that such assumptions ride unchallenged.

Wagner's own statements indicate that he can only "presume" this. But by making such presumptions, apologists show how much they take completely for granted even though the writings in the New Testament in no way justify such overstatement. Below I have listed significant gospel details of Jesus' alleged earthly visit which are nowhere mentioned in the apostle Paul's copious letters. In his letters, the apostle Paul nowhere mentions:

- Bethlehem (Jesus' supposed birthplace)

- a place called 'Nazareth' (as in "Jesus of Nazareth")

- a Roman census (6)

- parents named Mary and Joseph

- angelic visitations to both Mary and Joseph

- the Virgin Birth (7)

- the Slaughter of the Innocents

- the Magi (they were magically summoned to meet the baby Jesus)

- John the Baptist (8)
- Jesus' baptism

- Jesus' career as a carpenter (9)
- Galilee (10)

- Jesus' itinerant preaching ministry in Judea (didn't the apostle know about this?!)

- that Jesus was a teacher of morals (11)

- that Jesus taught in parables

- Jesus' prayers

- Jesus' many miracles (Paul nowhere has his Jesus turn water into wine, stilling storms, feeding 5,000 or walking on lakes)

- Jesus' healings and cures (no mention of the blind receiving their sight, for example, after Jesus spits into dysfunctional eyes)

- Jesus' exorcisms

- Jesus' temptation in the wilderness

- Mary Magdalene

- Nicodemus (mentioned only in the gospel of John)

- Judas Iscariot (a key player in the lead-up to the passion story)

- Gethsemane (and Jesus' hesitation there)

- a trial before Pilate

- Peter's repeated denials

- Jesus' flogging (12)
- Jesus' crucifixion outside the walls of Jerusalem (13)
- a place called "Calvary" (mentioned only in Luke 23:33)

- the two malefactors condemned with Jesus

- Jesus' words from the cross

- the spear thrust in Jesus' side

- the darkness over the earth

- the earthquake

- the rising of the saints mentioned only in Matthew 27:52-53 (14)
- Joseph of Arimathaea

- Golgotha

- female witnesses

- an empty tomb (Paul never even mentions an empty tomb!)

- Doubting Thomas

As anyone at all familiar with Christianity can clearly see, this is quite a list. So the problem here is simply way too big to be casually swept under the rug with the kind of insouciant presumptuousness that Wagner's statement typifies of modern apologetics. For instance, on what basis can someone say that the apostle Paul taught "Jesus of Nazareth" when he nowhere even refers to a "Nazareth" in any of his many letters? Similarly, on what basis can one say that the apostle Paul taught about Jesus' earthly ministry, when his letters make no reference to such a thing? The "basis" that allows believers to make such reckless assumptions amounts to nothing more than "simply a reading of the epistles through Gospel-colored glasses" (15), that is, by baselessly assuming that Paul and the gospels are talking about the same "Jesus."

What's very striking is the fact that in two places in his letters, the apostle Paul warned his intended audience about being seduced by competing versions of the gospel. In his letters,

Paul was addressing people who had accepted the supreme importance of Jesus, but were nevertheless in danger of falling victim to what he regarded as an erroneous Christology - 'another Jesus' (2 Cor. 11:4), and not what he preached (Gal. 1:6-9). (16)

The apostle himself tell us,

I marvel that ye are so soon removed from him that called you into the grace of Christ unto another gospel: Which is not another; but there be some that trouble you, and would pervert the gospel of Christ. (Gal. 1:6-7)

If it is the case that, during the time of Paul's ministry to the Gentiles, competing Christologies were circulating among the converted (and Paul's own statements attest to the fact that there were), what would have prevented those rival views of Jesus from being merged with the views expressed in Paul's epistles to create an amalgamated Jesus story? The list above demonstrates a dramatic distinction between Paul's Jesus and the gospels' Jesus. On what basis could we rule out the possibility that the Jesus of the gospels is the product of fusing Paul's views, which present none of the specifics which are crucial to the Jesus of the gospels, with conceptions of Jesus foreign to the Pauline Jesus which included descriptions of time and place of events in a recent earthly life of Jesus and which grew in legend as they circulated? Given what we can find in the New Testament record, a comparison of the gospels with the Pauline epistles shows a very wide variance between their respective portraits of Jesus. All four gospels bulid up to and climax with Jesus' crucifixion, which the apostle Paul clearly thought was important. But Paul gives no setting for this supposed event. Wells points out that

from Paul's premiss of the supreme importance of knowing 'Christ crucified' (I Cor. 1:23 and 2:2) one would expect him to be explicit about the Passion and at least to specify the when and where. He is so imprecise about it that he may well have thought that it occurred one or two centuries before his time of writing. We know from Josephus that at these earlier dates holy men had been crucified alive in Palestine and not, as was the usual Jewish custom, only after they had been executed by other means. (17)

We know from the history of Christianity that wide divergences in belief have been very difficult for the church to contain and prevent. Many casually assume that earliest Christianity was a completely homogenous, uniform and monolithic movement, with all believers everywhere being "of one accord." Surely the book of Acts would like us to believe this of the post-Easter Christians. But Paul's letters suggest that quite the opposite was the case: that the influence of non-Christian ideas and teachings were constantly making intrusions among the converted, and that disputes between himself and the Jerusalem Council gave Christianity a rocky start from its earliest days.

Doherty explains why the book of Acts is of central concern at this point:

Joined to the Gospel of Luke, the Acts of the Apostles followed as a means of accomplishing two things: one, to demonstrate that Paul belonged with the orthodox camp, that he had subordinated himself to the Jerusalem apostles' direction and was in no way a teacher of gnostic doctrines as Marcion had claimed; and two, to paint a Golden Age picture of the arly church and Christian community, supposedly before heresy had reared its ugly head. It also served to symbolize the (perceived) progression of the Christian movement from a Jewish sect to a gentile universal religion, inheritor of God's promises when the Jews had forfeited them by their unbelief in Jesus. (18)

In this way, the fusion of Paul's depiction of a spiritual personage and the gospels' portrait of an earthly god-man was sealed. But what is interesting here is that the author of Acts "never suggests that Paul had written any letters at all" (19), and yet half of the document is devoted to detailing the famed apostle's missionary adventures.

All of this points to a fallible beginning for Christianity in which early traditions of a vague and nondescript Suffering Servant figure underwent dramatic legendary transformation that resulted in the gospel stories that today's Christians take for granted. These facts, needless to say, pose insurmountable problems for today's believer, whose spokesmen, as we have seen, are more than happy to keep uninformed. Morever, apologists should think twice if they think they can outrun the implications of the early Christian record. Since presuppositionalists are eager to rest their case on what they call "the impossibility of the contrary" (another Christian myth that I have already debunked), they would, at minimum, have to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is impossible that the Jesus we read about in Paul's letters is not the very same Jesus we read about in the gospels. The only way apologists could go about assembling such a proof is by interpreting statements in Paul's letters according to details found only in the gospels, and that's precisely what's at issue here.

Notes:

(1) The Standard Bearer: A Festschrift for Greg L. Bahnsen, edited by Steven M. Schlissel, p. 442. Emphasis added.

(2) Ibid., p. 449. Emphasis added.

(3) I find G.A. Wells' historical ordering of the writing of the New Testament books to be the most informed, based on recent scholarship, that I have seen yet. This timeline puts the composition of the gospel of Mark between CE 70 and 90, and the composition of Matthew, Luke, John and the book of Acts in the 90's. See p. xi of Wells' Can We Trust the New Testament? Thoughts on the Reliability of Early Christian Testimony.

(4) The Standard Bearer, p. 443.

(5) Ibid., p. 444.

(6) For details of the problem this detail causes for the gospel of Luke, see Richard Carrier's The Date of the Nativity in Luke.

(7) For clues indicating that the idea of a virgin birth for baby Jesus was borrowed from pagan religions predating Christianity, see James Still's The Virgin Birth and Childhood Mysteries of Jesus.

(8) In The Sound of Silence: 'Top 20', Doherty asks:

And where is the Baptist? In Christian mythology there is hardly a more commanding figure short of Jesus himself. The forerunner, the herald, the scourge of the unrepentant, the voice crying aloud in the wilderness. Until the Gospels appear, John is truly lost in the wilderness, for no Christian writer ever refers to him.

(9) Interestingly, Mark 6:3 reads: "Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary..." while Matthew 13:55 reads "Is not this the carpenter's son? is not his mother called Mary?" Apologists will rush to say that both Jesus and Joseph were carpenters, even though no single author ever makes such a statement. Besides, isn't Jesus supposed to be "the Son of God"? One could be forgiven for supposing that Matthew's statement makes God a carpenter by trade.

(10) Both Galilee and Jerusalem figure prominently throughout the gospels, and yet the apostle Paul never associates these places with Jesus' pre-crucifixion life.

(11) For moral teachings attributed to Jesus in the gospels but which the apostle Paul gives as his own, see Wells, The Historical Evidence for Jesus, p. 33.

(12) In Challenging the Verdict: A Cross-Examination of Lee Strobel's 'The Case for Christ', Doherty points out that Paul "himself, as he tells us in 2 Corinthians 11:23-24, was flogged severely many times. Does he draw a parallel wih Christ's own flogging?" (p. 158)

(13) In fact, the apostle Paul gives no time, place or circumstance to his Jesus' crucifixion.

(14) On this most curious gospel tale, see Ed Babinski's What Happened to the Resurrected Saints?

(15) Dogherty, Challenging the Verdict, p. 171.

(16) Wells, The Jesus Myth, p. 74.

(17) Wells, The Jesus Myth, p. 57.

(18) Challenging the Verdict, p. 252n.83.

(19) Wells, Can We Trust the New Testament? p. 77.

by Dawson Bethrick

Is the Contrary to Christianity Truly Impossible?

Presuppositionalist apologists are fond of saying that they defend the claim that Christian mythology is true "because of the impossibility of the contrary." This slogan seems to have first been used by Cornelius Van Til, who incorporated it into his apologetic scheme. The implication is that any worldview which is not identical to that of Reformed Christianity, is in one way or another impossible. In apologetic practice, this line of defense ultimately amounts to the claim that "unless you presuppose the existence of my imaginary being, you can't reason at all."

Apologists who seek to defend their faith in this manner have apparently lost sight of what their own worldview explicitly affirms. Within the context of the Christian worldview, the attempt to “argue from the impossibility of the contrary” would ultimately be self-refuting. And here's why.

Christianity’s positions are based on what is written in the bible, and the bible claims that “with God all things are possible” (Mt. 19:26; emphasis addedd). Now, that’s what the ‘good book’ says. I didn’t write it, so don’t get sore at me for what it says. The point here is that, if the believer claims that some particular thing is impossible, then he is blatantly disagreeing with what is explicitly stated in the bible. Since the presuppositionalist wants to defend his Christian faith-beliefs on the basis of what he calls “the impossibility of the contrary,” he’s clearly assuming that something is impossible, and this does not square with what the bible explicitly teaches. So this aspect of the “presuppositional method” of apologetics is in its entirety inconsistent with the worldview that it is intended to defend. For this apologetic strategy to have any force, it must borrow from a rival worldview which does not teach that “all things are possible,” and yet it is precisely such a worldview which the “presuppositional method” claims is impossible. Thus, such a strategy is, within the context of the worldview it hopes to protect, completely self-refuting.

The problem gets even worse for the presuppositionalist. Given what is clearly and unmistakably affirmed in Matt. 19:26, the believer must accept as a possibility any worldview which rejects primitive worldviews like Christianity. If one accepts the view that “with God all things are possible,” then he would have to accept along with this the supposition that it is possible that this god has created viable worldviews which do not acknowledge his existence. Indeed, if this god is both omnipotent and infallible, who’s to say it could not create in such a manner? All this is to say that, on Christianity's premises, there is no such thing as an "impossibility of the contrary." Thus for the presuppositionalist to want to "argue from the impossibility of the contrary," he must abandon his Christian presuppositions and seek a compatible theory of possibility in some worldview which he has already said is impossible.

Now surely the apologist is going to want to squirm out of this agonizing pinch somehow. To do this, he’ll probably want to say that I’m taking Matthew 19:26 out of context. After all, this is the verse that he's going to have to deal with one way or another. So if he takes this course, we must ask: what is the context that I’m leaving out of my interpretation? The verse does say what it says, does it not? Reading through the passage will quickly show that the context here is rather thin to begin with. The statement in Matt. 19:26 is the answer that the gospel writer puts into Jesus’ mouth in response to a question asked by the disciples in the previous verse: “Who then can be saved?” As is typical of the Jesus of the gospels, no specific answer is given. (I'm reminded of Luke 23:3, where Pilate asks "Art thou the King of the Jews?" and Jesus' very informative answer was "Thou sayest it.") Rather, the question, which I would think is of great importance to believers interested in who gets to be “saved,” is answered as vaguely as possible. So again, what context is being overlooked here? Blank out.

The apologist might say something like, “Jesus didn’t meant that everything is possible. That would be absurd!” Well, who’s disagreeing with the fact that Christianity is absurd? The Christian apologist apparently is, and yet he has to adopt a rival worldview’s premises in constructing an apologetic method which says that rival worldviews are impossible.

To settle the matter, the apologist merely needs to state whether or not he agrees with the statement that “all things are possible,” and then we can see whether or not he is willing to argue in a manner that is consistent with what the bible explicitly states. If he says “yes, I agree with Matthew 19:26 in that ‘all things are possible’,” then he concedes that “arguing from the impossibility of the contrary” is anathema to Christianity’s own premises. If he says “no, I don’t think it’s true that ‘all things are possible’,” then he simply disagrees with what the bible explicitly states and concedes that he borrows his conception of what is and is not possible from a non-Christian worldview in order to assemble his defense of the Christian worldview, thus refuting himself.

No doubt apologists confronted with these points will spit and stammer in their desperation to protect their commitment to a faith-based worldview from internal critiques of this sort. But basically the only hope for escape is essentially to claim “that’s what it says, but that’s not what it means” and hope it succeeds in snowing people. And though he may succeed in convincing himself that there’s no problem here, others will not be so easily fooled.

by Dawson Bethrick

Christ Jesus: Still a Jumble of Contradictions

Earlier this month I published on my blog an article titled Christianity as the Worship of Self-Contradiction. In that piece, I explained how the Athanasian Creed makes it clear that the Jesus of the Christian New Testament constitutes the embodiment of contradiction as an object of religious worship. The Athanasian Creed tells us that Jesus is "fully God, fully man," making the Christian savior both fully divine and fully human at the same time. I listed 20 different attributes and properties ascribed to the Christian god that pose diametric conflict with human nature when those attributes and properties collide with their human counterpart in the so-called "incarnation" of the man-god Jesus, as conceived in the Athanasian Creed, which is taken as an authoritative statement in summary of what constitutes essential Christian doctrine by most believers in the West.

Of course, several who are confessionally invested in the devotional program of Christianity and who want to believe its teachings are true, were clearly disturbed by the findings of my critique. This is most likely the case because they want to believe that non-Christian worldviews are contradictory, and thus carrying on as if the presence of contradiction in one's worldview were in their eyes objectionable, they hold such defects as counting against those worldviews' claim to truth. Naturally, when this strategy is shown to apply against Christianity itself, and major contradictions are exposed in this primitive worldview, Christian apologists wax in anger and resentment, often unwittingly showing their true colors as a result.


Following Orders: Defending the Faith at All Costs

But there were a few attempts - albeit rather weak and unsubstantial - to counter my criticism. Some of these attempts were posted on the publicly accessible comments section of my blog, and others were sent to me privately on e-mail. In my present article, I would like to explore these responses.

To be sure, the exposure of a contradiction in one's worldview could spell disaster, especially if elsewhere in that worldview we find objections to contradictions. And though I don't recall reading anywhere in the bible that the presence of contradiction invalidates anything (its authors in fact appear to have been concerned with promulgating mysticism, and not with logical consistency), modern apologists, having borrowed from secular models in the formation and development of their defense strategies, carry on as if contradictions spelled death to one's worldview. And while these Christian adherents have had to seek outside the bible for such principles of thought in order to import them into their religious defenses, this may be an indication that some thinkers who like to style themselves as pious 'scholars' may in fact be slowly growing beyond the primitive and superstitious constraints of their arbitrary confession. However, it may be premature to consider such signs as a cause for hope.

One amateur apologist, a Mr. Paul Manata, who has commented on my blog in the past, was generous enough to provide a specimen of the kind of empty rejoinder that we should expect to find in reply to the kind of criticism that I have presented. Seeking to reply to me, Mr. Manata singled out the following statement of mine:

But herein lies a long list of contradictions, for God is not a man, and man is not a god. The Athanasian Creed is essentially saying that Jesus is both A and not A.

In response to this, Mr. Manata wrote:

So, take A, where A refers to, say, God. You just said that the athanasian creed said that Jesus is both A and not-A, tranlated, you just said the athanasian creed said that Jesus is both God and not God, but is that what the creed says? [sic]

Again, the Athanasian Creed says that Jesus is "fully God, fully man." That's what it says, and that is the statement that I interacted with to show that on this conception, Christianity amounts to the worship of contradiction as such. But Mr. Manata begged to differ (if not the question), and proceeded with the following frail defense:

So, in the case of Jesus we would have A (God) and B (man). Jesus is both A and B.

Mr. Manata says that "Jesus is both A and B," and contends on this basis that there is no contradiction. But by admitting that there are two distinct qualities joined together in one entity, Mr. Manata makes no progress in recovering lost ground. For unless B is identical to A, then B may in fact be just another way of saying non-A (or ~A, as Mr. Manata prefers). Now of course, there are cases of compatibility in which one can say that the same entity is A, B, C, and so on. For instance, one could say that Mr. Brown is A (a tax attorney), B (a good racketball player) and C (a father). In such a case, there is no contradiction. Mr. Manata has not shown that the Athanasian Creed's statement about Jesus being "fully God, fully man" amounts to this kind of benign combination of attributes. Indeed, no effort has been made to show that divine attributes are compatible with human (i.e., non-divine) attributes in the combination that is explicitly affirmed in the Athanasian Creed.

Furthermore, if an entity is said to be both A and B such that A has attributes which are directly negated by B, then any entity which is said to possess both A and its negation B (i.e., non-A), in fact amounts to a contradiction. For instance, if one said that Mr. Brown is both A (a tax attorney) and B (not a tax attorney), then he would be making two statements which are in direct conflict with each other. It is in this latter manner that the Athanasian Creed commits Christianity to a contradiction when it identifies Jesus as both "fully God, fully man." For so long as constituent terms have stable meanings, this is essentially saying that Jesus is both fully uncreated and fully not uncreated, fully divine and fully not divine, fully supernatural, and fully not supernatural, and so on down the list of attributes which I provided in my original article. Mr. Manata's unnecessary berating tone and slanderous remarks aside, he has not shown that the statement in the Athanasian Creed is not contradictory in this way.


Symptoms of Desperation: Meeting Stated Stipulations

In order to take control of the matter, Mr. Manata also offered the following statement:

A contradiction, dear Dawson, would be if the creeds had said that Jesus was God and was *not* God in the same sense and relationship. If they said this *then,* then dear Dawson, you'd have your A and ~A.

One immediate point that needs to be made here is that I cited only one creed in formulating my criticism, namely the Athanasian Creed. The use of the plural here is unwarranted. But the issue at hand is whether or not the conception of Jesus found in the Athanasian Creed commits believers to the worship of a contradiction. Unfortunately for many Christians in the West, since this creed "has been adopted by the Lutheran and several Reformed churches" [1] along with numerous other Protestant denominations, if in fact the Athanasian Creed paints Jesus as a self-contradiction, then it is likely the case that these Christian factions have been worshipping a contradiction all along, and its members, uncritical of church doctrine as they typically are, never really fully realize this.

Mr. Manata says that for the statement to be contradictory it would have to affirm "that Jesus was God and was *not* God in the same sense and relationship" in order to stick. Now the relationship in question would be an internal relationship, since the issue revolves around a single entity and its several mutually contradictory attributes. And since the Athanasian Creed is speaking of a single entity, the relationship in question would be between the entity in question and itself. So this portion of Mr. Manata's stipulation is satisfied. Additionally, the Athanasian Creed supplies the sense in which we are to understand what it is saying, for it says "fully God, fully man," which could only be taken to mean "in every sense and relationship." To say otherwise would be to say that Jesus is somehow less than "fully God, fully man." By use of the modifier "fully" to qualify the sense intended, the Athanasian Creed is telling us that there is no exception here: Jesus is in every way God, and in every way man. Anything less than this would compromise the sense intended by the Athanasian Creed as well as the mystical nature of Jesus that Christianity seeks to promote. It happens to be that God is said to be uncreated, divine, supernatural, perfect, immutable, immortal, infinite, etc. That is, by saying that Jesus is "fully God," the Athanasian Creed is saying that Jesus is therefore fully uncreated, fully divine, fully supernatural, fully perfect, fully immutable, fully immortal, fully infinite, etc. In other words, Jesus as "fully God" is uncreated in every sense that something could be uncreated, divine in every sense that something could be divine, supernatural in every sense that something could be supernatural, perfect in every sense that something could be perfect, immutable in every sense that something could be immutable, immortal in every sense that something could be immortal, infinite in every sense that something could be infinite, etc. Would believers say that their god is in some sense not uncreated, in some sense not divine, or in some sense not supernatural? It's up to them if they want to start watering down their own religious affirmations.

Contrariwise, man is none of these things. As I pointed out in my blog (and which has not been challenged), Christianity teaches that man is not uncreated, not divine, not supernatural, not perfect, not immutable, not immortal, not infinite, etc. And since Jesus is, according to the Athanasian Creed, "fully man," Jesus is therefore fully not uncreated, fully not divine, fully not supernatural, fully not perfect, fully not immutable, fully not immortal, fully not infinite, etc. That is, Jesus as "fully man" is not uncreated in every sense that something could be not uncreated, not divine in every sense that something could be not divine, not supernatural in every sense that something could be not supernatural, not perfect in every sense that something could be not perfect, not immutable in every sense that something could be not immutable, not immortal in every sense that something could be not immortal, not infinite in every sense that something could be not infinite, etc.

I submit, therefore, for the reasons I have given here, that according to the Athanasian Creed's formulation, "Jesus was God and was *not* God in the same sense and relationship," and this is vouchsafed by the modifier "fully" applied to both components of Jesus' alleged nature. For "fully" could only mean complete in every sense. And to the discredit of his own rebuttal, Mr. Manata failed to identify any sense in which Jesus is neither "fully God" or "fully man," which is what he would have to do if he wanted to wage an effective case against the charge of contradiction. Thus the stipulations which Mr. Manata has stated have been met.

Even per Mr. Manata's own criterion for deciphering the Athanasian Creed, there is on every point in question a standing contradiction affirmed in the notion that Jesus is "fully God, fully man." His protestations to the contrary have been unhelpful in salvaging his worldview from being found to consist essentially of the worship of a self-contradiction. And though he presented very little substance (if it could be called this) in response to my criticism, Mr. Manata proclaims that he has "proven, by strict rules of logic," that there is no contradiction affirmed in the Athanasian Creed, even though it's clear that he nowhere fully engaged the issue, but rather simply offered a semantic device ("B" in place of non-A) to make it appear that no contradiction was being affirmed.


A Test Case: Square Circles

But in case I have misunderstood the essence of Mr. Manata's rejoinder, I am willing to explore his suggested solution a little further. As a hypothetical case by which apologetic attempts to rebut my criticism can be tested, let me apply those attempts to the delightfully playful notion that defenders and critics of religion have for so long enjoyed batting back and forth. I am speaking of the notion of square circles. It is commonly accepted without challenge that the notion of a square circle is a self-contradiction: something cannot have both the shape of a square and the shape of a circle at the same time and in the same sense. One shape is "a rectangle with all four sides equal," and the other is "a closed plane curve every point of which is equidistant from a fixed point within the curve." (Webster's) The notion that a single shape is both a square and a circle constitutes a contradiction and as such the notion of a square circle can serve as a case in which proffered solutions to the charge of contradiction in Christianity can be tested. If the notion of a square circle can pass unscathed through apologetic solutions to the problem of the Athanasian Creed, then we can safely say that those solutions are unhelpful in untangling the matter in favor of the Christian worldview.

The apologetic effort that we have seen - an effort to interpret the Athanasian Creed in order to dissolve the charge that it entails a contradiction by saying that Jesus is both A and B (instead of A and non-A) - can be used to show that the notion of a square circle is, by the same "logic," not contradictory. Mr. Manata says that Jesus is "A (God) and B (man)," that is "both A and B." On this basis, he dismisses the charge of contradiction. However, by the very same logic, the charge that the notion of a square circle is self-contradictory can be dismissed by saying that a square circle is A (a square) and B (a circle). Since a square circle would be "both A and B" on Mr. Manata's reasoning, the notion of a square circle is not self-contradictory.

Who would accept this in the case of the notion of square circles? Would Mr. Manata? Perhaps we would rather not want to know the answer to such questions.


Pauline Shuffle: The Manata Maneuver

But the problem here should be clear: if the same attempts used to rebut my detection of a contradiction in the nature ascribed to Jesus Christ in the Athanasian Creed can be used to make the notion of square circles seem logically consistent, then why should we expect such tactics to be effectual in dissolving the contradiction exposed in the nature of Jesus as the Athanasian Creed describes it? Mr. Manata says that Jesus is both A (God) and B (man), and thus it's not a contradiction. Similarly, the advocate of square circles could say that a square circle is both A (a square) and B (a circle), and, on Mr. Manata's logic, there's no contradiction. In fact, one could use this ploy in dispelling any charge of contadiction. One could, for instance, say that the moon is A (rock) and B (cheese), that Albert Einstein was A (a man) and B (a woman), that the Queen Elizabeth II is A (a cruise ship) and B (an omlette). On Mr. Manata's "logic" none of these statements could be found to be contradictory. Indeed, any charge of contradiction can be met with what I shall dub the Manata Maneuver, since this ploy consists of moving out an uncomfortable term (e.g., non-A) and replacing it with a euphemism (e.g., B) which enables the apologist to carry on with the pretense that there is no contradiction, when in fact there is.

In the standard condescending tone that is typical of his discourse, Mr. Manata emphasized his point that "Jesus is both A and B" in a comment which he later apparently retracted (since he deleted it), saying:

Technically, to any trained dimwit, as it stands the athanasian creed sayeth, "Jesus is both A and B" where A stands for God and B stands for man. [sic]

And though the Athanasian Creed in fact says that Jesus is "fully God, fully man," the particular terms used to signify the variables matters not. We could use X and non-X just as well. The point, however, is that if God is something other than man, then if A refers to God, man must be designated as something other than A, that is, not A. Substituting B for "not A" is simply an attempt to cover a real and present contradiction. If it's not a contradiction for a single entity to be both "fully God" and "fully man" since this amounts to it being both A ("God") and B (man), then similarly a square circle is not a contradiction since it, too, is both A (a square) and B (a circle). What is to keep a thinker from thinking of a square circle as both A and B? As we saw above, Mr. Manata's own formulation proposed to undo the contradiction affirmed in the Athanasian Creed can be used to make the notion of a square circle seem non-contradictory, even though it is. Why then should we accept Mr. Manata's formulation as a suitable explanation of the notion that Jesus is "fully God, fully man"? Blank out.

A similar attempt to rebut my criticism was sent to me by one apologist who contacted me privately. His response was to say that "Christ was God that took on a human nature," saying that "these are two distinct categories," and thus there is "no contradiction" in the notion that Jesus is "fully God, fully man." Again, using this approach one could say that a square circle is a square that "took on" a circular nature, and thus the notion of a square circle, on this "logic," is not self-contradictory. After all, don't squares and circles constitute "distinct categories"? This same individual also stated that "a contradiction is defined as a proposition and its negation." Indeed, this works for me as well. The claim that Jesus is "fully God, fully man" thus amounts to the claim that Jesus is fully immortal (since God is said to be immortal) and fully not immortal (since man is not immortal). Similarly, Jesus is fully uncreated (since God is said to be uncreated) and fully not uncreated (since man according to Christianity is part of creation). Again and again, my criticism survives the challenges brought against it in flying colors.


Venturing Out: Identifying Unspecified Contexts

But one might ask: What about biblical context? Do statements in the bible rescue Christ-worship from internal contradiction? The apologist who contacted me privately said I should take into account "immediate and larger contexts." And though this individual did not specify what he had in mind or where to find these "immediate and larger contexts," I don't see how a Christian apologist could object to my consulting the Christian New Testament to identify them. The question at issue is the nature of the Christian god vis-à-vis the nature of man, for Jesus is supposed to be both the Christian god and a man. John 4:24 says that "God is a Spirit." And in Luke 24:39, we read that "a spirit hath not flesh and bones." Already a major internal discrepancy is taking shape in the pages of the bible itself. For we know that man has flesh and bones, and since "a spirit hath not flesh and bones," this could only mean that man is not, unlike the Christian god, "a Spirit." So given what the Athanasian Creed says informed with the "immediate and larger contexts" as found in the Christian New Testament, we have the following:

Jesus is fully Spirit ("fully God") and fully non-Spirit (since man has flesh and bones).

Indeed, the more we look into this matter, the more secure is the conclusion that Christianity in fact and in principle boils down to a perverse worship of contradiction as such.

Mr. Manata, in his characteristic puffery, repeats his poorly defended claim that there is no contradiction here, and ejaculated that "any dimwit within 57 pages into an intro to logic text could have figured this out." But what "logic text" has Mr. Manata cited that agrees that square circles are not contradictions? Indeed, no citation to support his rebuttal attempts has been provided. Thus we have an empty appeal to an uncited, unspecified "logic text," and it's certainly doubtful that any logic text worth its salt is going to say a contradiction is not a contradiction.

In the final analysis, it's clear that apologists recognize that there's a fire here, for if they didn't think their doctrine were burning in devouring flames, they'd not be in such a rush to put it out. Can apologists devise some way to make "fully God, fully man" logically coherent? Apparently only by not engaging the details of the matter, for none have presented a worthy defeater of the points I have raised.

by Dawson Bethrick

[1] Michael Martin, The Case Against Christianity, (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1991), p. 10.

Christianity as the Worship of Self-Contradiction

Christianity is, if nothing more, the worship of Jesus. According to orthodox Christianity, Jesus is the god of the Old Testament come down to the earth, incarnated in the flesh of a human being, and so-called "king of kings," even though his only crown was assembled from thorns which corrupted his flesh.

In evangelizing, many adherents to Christianity carry on as if they were really concerned about the presence of contradictions in one’s worldview. While pretending that their worldview is wholly consistent and free of any contradiction whatsoever, Christianity's apologists roam about like lions seeking whom they may devour on the charge of contradiction and fallacy. What’s often overlooked by both the apologists themselves and unsuspecting non-believers, is that Christianity reduces quite literally to worship of a walking contradiction. This is not hard to see, but it is impossible for apologists to distangle.

The Athanasian Creed makes this unmistakably clear when it affirms that Jesus is “both God and Man,” that he is "fully God, fully man," that is, both wholly divine and wholly human.

But herein lies a long list of contradictions, for God is not a man, and man is not a god. The Athanasian Creed is essentially saying that Jesus is both A and not A. Observe the following 20 essential qualities attributed to the Christian god which man does not share with it:

* God is uncreated, but man is not uncreated
* God is divine, but man is not divine
* God is supernatural, but man is not supernatural
* God is perfect, but man is not perfect
* God is immutable, but man is not immutable
* God is almighty, but man is not almighty
* God is sovereign, but man is not sovereign
* God is omniscient, but man is not omniscient
* God is omnipotent, but man is not omnipotent
* God is omnipresent, but man is not omnipresence
* God is omnibenevolent, but man is not omnibenevolent
* God is infallible, but man is not infallible
* God is infinite, but man is not infinite
* God is eternal, but man is not eternal
* God is immortal, but man is not immortal
* God is incorporeal, but man is not incorporeal
* God is non-physical, but man is not non-physical
* God is immaterial, but man is not immaterial
* God is incorruptible, but man is not incorruptible
* God is indestructible, but man is not indestructible

And even though only one of these would have to stick in order for there to be a real (as opposed to an "apparent") contradiction, we also note that man is biological in nature. But how could one say that the Christian god, which is said to lack a body, is biological? And while Christians say that their god is worthy of worship, would they say that human beings are worthy of worship? In fact, it is hard to find any quality ascribed to the Christian god by Christian sources that man has.

Since Christians worship Jesus, and Jesus is claimed to be both one thing and also its logical opposite, we can only conclude that Christians therefore literally worship a contradiction. And since they worship contradiction, how can they find the presence of contradictions (or supposed contradictions) in non-Christian worldviews objectionable? Perhaps their complaint is that non-Christian worldviews don’t have enough contradictions, or that non-Christian worldviews do not give contradictions enough respect. At any rate, if one is to avoid contradictions, this much is certain: one must abandon Christianity.

by Dawson Bethrick

Only Two Worldviews?

It has become fashionable among many Christian apologists to assert repeatedly the claim that there are only two worldviews. For instance, in his discussion At War With the Word - The Necessity of Biblical Antithesis, apologist Greg Bahnsen makes the following affirmation:

There are two fundamentally different worldviews in terms of which men conduct their thinking and in terms of which they understand the use of reason itself.

In the same discussion, Bahnsen, while quoting his mentor, Cornelius Van Til, qualifies the senior professor's statement to make nature of the perceived division or antithesis clear, saying

"It is necessary to become clearly aware of the deep antithesis between the two main types of epistemology", Christian and non-Christian.

So Bahnsen clearly wants his followers to assume that the whole spectrum of philosophies can be divided into two fundamentally opposed categories, that which is Christian in nature (presumably whichever flavor of the day Bahnsen held to), and that which is not Christian in nature.

Such a claim implies a global uniformity within Christianity that simply does not exist. Vast divisions and schisms characterize the splintered, sectarian landscape of what could be roundly called Christian theology. These internecine divisions are the offspring of disputes and obscurities which have raged throughout the history of Christianity since its inception. These disputes have only increased throughout the history of Christianity, and the primitive desert ideology now stands as one of the most internally divided religions in the world. These internal conflicts have not left the practice of apologetics untouched. Today we find endless debates on the proper way to defend the mysticism of Christianity, whether it should rest on appeals to evidence, or whether it should simply be accepted unquestioningly on someone’s say so. Look at the disputes among self-described presuppositionalist apologists themselves. You have the so-called Clark-Van Til controversy, which stems from, among other things, differences on the matter of “the incomprehensibility of God” (both sides cohere in that they worship the incomprehensible, but they disagreed on the implications this had for epistemology). Even strong divisions mark the relationship between Greg Bahnsen and one of his professors, John Frame. In yet another case, culminating frustration drove one apologist trying to resolve a deepening dispute with a fellow apologist to throw his hands up and proclaim "this is hopeless!" It is hard to see how these apologists could maintain the wild intimation that Christians "think God's thoughts after Him" when their conversations are filled to the brim with such infighting. Are the thought patterns of the "original knower" so tangled that its mouthpieces should be caught up in endless internal bickering when “thinking” the original knower’s thoughts “after Him”?

Also, the claim that the categories of Christian vs. non-Christian adequately identify the only two worldviews available to men (many apologists even maintain the dubious claim that a non-Christian worldview as such is impossible in the first place), implausibly suggests a uniformity among non-Christian worldviews that doesn’t exist either. The descriptor ‘non-Christian’ could feasibly apply to a wide diversity of worldviews such as Hinduism, Shintoism, Buddhism, Taoism, Existentialism, Dialectical Materialism, Zoroastrianism, eastern occultism, animism, monotheism, deism, pantheism, rationalism, skepticism, etc., and yet the only thing that would hypothetically link these utterly different conceptions of the world together would be that they are not identical with the flavor du jour of Christianity preferred by the defending apologist, which is certainly not a fundamental. It is, as it were, a mere guilt by association fallacy which enables apologists to ignore fundamental differences so that they can treat all non-Christian worldviews as one massive package-deal, thus conveniently attributing to all the errors of some. This would simply lighten the load for the apologist’s burden. But it couldn’t be more naïve or, worse, disingenuous.

But there is a narrow sense in which I would agree with the statement that there are essentially only two fundamental ways of looking at the world, and therefore essentially only two worldviews. But I would certainly not try to defend such a view on the untenable basis of Christianity's faulty premises. The matter that concerns us here is far more fundamental than Christianity is prepared to deal with. What I have in mind is the nature of the relationship between consciousness and its objects. There is, in the realm of philosophy, no issue which is more fundamental than the subject-object relationship (since consideration of any other issue would require such a relationship), and yet no passage in the bible addresses it. On the contrary, the authors of the bible, like most thinkers, took this matter completely for granted, and thus were unable to fully grasp the profound error which resulted from the reversal of this relationship which roots the religious conception of the world. Even the so-called “transcendental argument for the existence of God,” which pretends to be an “attempt to discover the preconditions of human experience” (1), nowhere deals with this fundamental relationship, even though without it there would be no experience to speak of.

If there are in essence only two basic conceptions of the world, there is the one which consistently holds to the primacy of existence principle, and then there is any version of the worldview which seeks to cheat this principle by assuming the primacy of consciousness (i.e., the primacy of the subject, the primacy of wishing). In other words, there is on the one hand Objectivism, which is the only worldview I know of that consistently and self-consciously builds upon the basis of the primacy of existence, and on the other hand there is any variant of subjectivism that the human mind can invent, such as Christianity. The former worldview is squarely premised on the objective orientation of the subject-object relationship. It is called objective because it recognizes and consistently holds to the fact that that the object of awareness holds metaphysical primacy over the subject of awareness. On this view, an object is what it is independent of consciousness. Anyone can confirm this by looking at any object and seeing whether or not it conforms to his wishes. Wishing is a conscious activity. But do wishes alter the objects we perceive? No, they do not. If I get my credit card bill and it’s charging me $500.00, will the amount that I owe suddenly drop to $5.00 if I wish hard enough? No, it doesn’t. Why? Because of the primacy of existence principle, i.e., the primacy of the object of awareness. Objectivism is the only worldview that consistently recognizes, understands and applies this principle throughout its teachings.

Contrast the objective orientation of the subject-object relationship with the opposite view: the primacy of consciousness. Primacy of consciousness means primacy of the subject in the subject-object relationship. This is the view of the world known as metaphysical subjectivism: it holds that the subject of awareness holds metaphysical primacy over the objects of awareness. On this view, things are what they are, not because they exist and have a nature independent of consciousness, but because the knowing subject wants them to be the way they are. This is the view that essentially says “wishing makes it so,” granting to the subject of awareness the power to control its objects, to give them their nature, to cause them to obey commands, even to bring them into existence from nothing (“ex nihilo”). The subjective view of the world, which is the essence of religion, grants to consciousness a power which is not observed in nature. Such a power, far from what Michael Butler and other apologists might say, is not something that religious apologists innocently “discover” to be a precondition to man’s experience (for indeed, such a power is precisely what we do not discover in conscious organisms or experience in our lives). Rather, it is something they have imagined to be the case, and most likely want to be the case, and on the basis of such preferences stipulate rather than “discover” that it must be the case. In such a way religion is not only the worldview which holds that wishing makes it so, the very methodology of its defenses is itself an expression of the view that wishing has such power as well.

So here we have two of the three necessary essentials for a rational worldview: the facts that there are things that exist (cf. “existence exists”), and that some entities (including man) have the ability to perceive those things (consciousness). These two facts – existence and consciousness – are the preconditions of man’s capacity for experience. To make this experience intelligible, however, man requires a worldview which is consistently and self-consciously informed upon the primacy of existence principle identified above, which is the third essential necessary for a rational worldview. Rationality is the commitment to reason as one’s only means of knowledge and his only guide to action. Reason itself is premised on the primacy of existence principle, for it recognizes that wishing doesn’t make it so. A worldview which assumes that wishes have power over the objects of consciousness could only result in utter unintelligibility and absurdity, like a cartoon without reason or purpose, and thus can only short-circuit man’s capacity for rationality.

Many Christian apologists have claimed that Christianity is an objective worldview; some even claim that objectivity is impossible without specifically Christian premises. Apologist Greg Bahnsen says that it is the Christian apologist who “defends the objective truth of the faith.” (2) Likewise his mentor, Cornelius Van Til, says that Christians “must hold that only the Christian theist has real objectivity, while the others are introducing false prejudices, or subjectivity.” (3) Another apologist, Douglas Wilson, in a brief exchange with Farrell Till of The Skeptical Review, writes:

Objective and universal standards of reason, morality, and beauty simply cannot exist in your purely material world. You are fighting Christianity with borrowed Christian weapons.

Statements such as these clearly indicate that those making them think that objectivity is only possible on the basis of the Christian worldview. But it remains stubbornly unclear what these men meant by the terms ‘objective’ and ‘objectivity’. These concepts are not to be found anywhere the bible, so the apologists had to get them from some source(s) outside the bible. But which source(s)? And what do they mean by it? What definitions do they assume when using these terms? Typically they leave the meaning of crucial terms such as these up to their readers’ own assumptions. To compound the mystery of what Christians might mean by ‘objective’, we have statements like the following:

Because God exists, there is an objective reality -- a reality known and established by God… Christianity recognizes an objective worldview; the perspective of the Creator. (4)

Such statements make no sense, and even suggest that those making them have very little understanding of what Christianity teaches with respect to the subject-object relationship. We can know that Christianity is a form of subjectivism because it assumes the primacy of consciousness; and we can know that Christianity assumes the primacy of consciousness by looking at its core teachings. For instance, Christianity teaches that there exists a consciousness which created the universe. As the subject of consciousness, the Christian god is said to have spoken, or more accurately, wished the universe into existence. The universe, as the object of the Christian god’s consciousness, allegedly conformed and continues to conform to the ruling wishes of the ruling consciousness. This is just one example from Christianity of the subject holding metaphysical primacy over its objects.

Another example of the primacy of consciousness in Christianity is found in the doctrine of miracles. A miracle is an event in which the ruling subject causes an object to act contrary to its nature by merely wishing. For instance, in Mark 6:48-49, we read of a man who enables himself to walk on unfrozen water because he wishes to do so. In John 2 we read of water being transformed into wine simply because he wants it to be wine instead of water.

Yet another example of the primacy of consciousness in Christianity is the doctrine of prayer. Prayer is the act of verbalizing one’s own desires to the ruling subject and asking the ruling subject to conform reality accordingly. Many statements in the bible make it sound as if the believer should expect to get whatever he wants due to his faithfulness and prayers. For instance, Matt. 7:7 states “Ask, and it shall be given you.” Matt. 18:19 has Jesus say, “if two of you shall agree on earth as touching any thing that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in heaven.” In Matt. 21:22, Jesus is made to say, “And all things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive.” John 14:13-14 amplifies these promises further by having Jesus say “And whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If ye shall ask any thing in my name, I will do it.” A believer could presumably as that it not be true that Tokyo is a city in Japan, or that Greenland has less surface area than Iceland, and according to these statements, the believer could rightly expect reality to conform accordingly. A worldview couldn’t get more subjective.

As a member of the large group of worldviews premised squarely on the primacy of the subject, Christianity is exemplary in its commitment to subjectivism. What Christian would say that there are things in the world which do not conform to the intentions of Christianity’s ruling subject? Similarly, what Muslim would say that there are things in the world which do not conform to the intentions of Islam’s ruling subject? What theist would say that his god as ruling subject does not have power to control objects at will?

With these points in mind, it should be clear that there are in fact two basic conceptions of the world. On the one hand, there is the objective view which recognizes that objects do not conform to the knowing subject. The worldview that is consistent to this principle is called Objectivism. On the other hand, there is any variety of views which fail to grasp the objective principle and thus systematically corrupt the knowing process by granting validity, however implicitly, to the assumption that the subject holds primacy over its objects. Examples of this latter type are found in any variant of mysticism, such as Christianity.
_____________________
Footnotes:

(1) Michael Butler, “The Transcendental Argument for God’s Existence," in Schlissel, Steven M., ed., The Standard Bearer: A Festschrift for Greg L. Bahnsen, p. 79.

(2) Always Ready, p. 127.

(3) Survey of Christian Epistemology, quoted in Bahnsen, Greg, Van Til’s Apologetic: Readings & Analysis, p. 519. Italics original.

(4) Darrow L. Miller, Breaking the Web of Lies

by Dawson Bethrick

Is the Assumption of the Christian God Axiomatic?

Towards the end of his 7/27/04 discussion with Zachary Moore, Christian apologist Gene Cook asked the following question:

Why is my axiomatic assumption of the Christian god not a good starting point?

Gene's question itself makes a questionable assumption which needs to be probed. He assumes that his “assumption of the Christian god” (I take this to mean at minimum the assumption that the Christian god exists), is axiomatic in nature. Does he explain why his “assumption of the Christian god” is axiomatic? I could not find where he might do this. Instead, it appears that he wants just to slip it in, perhaps with the hope that it will be accepted unquestioningly. From what little he does give, it's unclear what Gene might mean by 'axiomatic' in this context. In fact, it’s unclear how axiomatic concepts could even make sense in the Christian worldview; the term is completely alien to the New Testament, and the idea of axiomatic concepts can only make sense in a worldview in which knowledge is understood in terms of logical hierarchy, and this in itself is foreign to Christianity as well. (Anton Thorn makes this latter point clear in his essay TAG and the Fallacy of the Stolen Concept.)

Contrary to what seems to be a common habit among Christian apologists, great care should be given to what we call axiomatic, for axioms identify the very foundation of our knowledge and worldview. The term is not to be used lightly. At the very least, axioms are not something we must infer from some prior point of departure. Rather, they name in the most general terms what we directly perceive, what we are first aware of.

So if Gene Cook wants to defend the position that his "assumption of the Christian god" is axiomatic, he would first have to identify the means by which he has awareness of what he has named "the Christian god." Did he have direct awareness of this god by looking outward at the world? It’s doubtful that this could be the case, because the Christian god is said to be invisible. When Gene looks out at the world, he sees the world of finite objects, not an invisible magic being. If Gene says that the world is evidence of his god, then he runs into the following problems:

1) he admits that his "assumption of the Christian god" is not axiomatic, for now it must be inferred from some prior point of departure (i.e., he is saying that his god's existence is inferred form what he directly perceives, and what he directly perceives comes first),

and

2) that which is finite, physical, corruptible and natural cannot serve as evidence of something that is said to be infinite, non-physical, incorruptible and supernatural. A is not evidence of non-A. (See for instance my blog Is Human Experience Evidence of the Christian God?)

Perhaps Gene will say that he has direct awareness of his god by looking inward. In other words, when he consults the inner workings of his mind, he “sees” his god staring back at him. If he says this, then he has the following problems:

1) Extrospection (the act of looking outward) always precedes introspection (the act of looking inward) - thus anything said to be known by means of introspection cannot be axiomatic, for ultimately it must refer to that which is perceived extrospectively; to introspect, there must be content. Where did this content come from? From magic?

2) How did he identify what he "perceives" inwardly as the Christian god as opposed to something else? He would need to have some knowledge already in order to do that, which simply is another point against his assumption that his "assumption of the Christian god" is axiomatic.

3) How does he distinguish what he calls "the supernatural" from what he imagines? This is a big problem for the theist, and I've not seen any theists attempt to answer this question cogently.

And

4) How does he know that he is not confusing his emotions with a means of knowledge? Proverbs 1:7 (“The fear of God is the beginning of knowledge”) suggests that the believer’s starting point is emotional in nature rather than axiomatic. An emotional response, however, is not a primary; emotions are reactions to things we learn, not self-generated phenomena which causelessly manifest themselves in our conscious experience spontaneously. So the introspective route will only prove problematic for Gene, if he chooses to take it.

If he says that his god spoke to him directly, then the problems compound:

1) how did he identify the voice he heard as that of the Christian god?

2) spoken communication requires words, and words are symbols for concepts. Where did Gene get those concepts? And to what do they refer? To understand the words spoken to him, he would need some prior understanding. Otherwise he's just making up things that simply derail the hierarchical structure of knowledge, and such a course will only invalidate itself.

Again, not axiomatic by a long shot. Besides, what if everyone ran around claiming to have knowledge as a result of hearing voices in his head? Incidentally, it was in consideration of this very question (in reference to how Abraham supposedly knew that the voice he heard commanding him to sacrifice his son Isaac was that of the Judeo-Christian god), that presuppositional apologist John Frame threw up his arms and confessed, “We know without knowing how we know.” (Presuppositional Apologetics: An Introduction (Part I)) So if Gene claims that he heard a voice and said it belonged to the Christian god, one would hope that he could do better than Frame, and indicate how he was able to distinguish the voice he allegedly heard in his head as belonging to the Christian god.

Also, by simply affirming that their god exists, Christians are in fact borrowing from the Objectivist worldview, for the Objectivist worldview alone affirms the fact of existence as its very starting point. In encounters with Christian apologists, I've asked many to explain where they got the concept "exist," for clearly they assume that it has meaning. But none can answer where they got it. Many are even confused by the vanity and futility of many modern philosophical trends which just confuse the whole problem of abstractions while pretending to be presenting a solution to it. For instance, some thinkers treat existence as merely one of many attributes or properties that make up an entity. On this view a soccer ball is roundness, rubbery-ness, black-and-whiteness, bounciness, resilience, and along with these also existence. This ignores the fact that an entity which exists, is all of its attributes, not just some of its attributes put together with something additional which somehow makes it real.

Others treat an entity that exists as "an INSTANCE of existence," as one apologist put it, perhaps as an "instantiation" of a "universal" which somehow precedes the entity in some immaterial, “transcendental” realm which allegedly exists, a realm which is itself supposedly not merely an "instance," but a source out of which all instances come. On this view, man's knowledge of the universals is not made possible by a mental process of abstraction based on perceptual input from his environment, but by means of what Platonists called “anamnesis,” which is supposedly a kind of reminiscence of a time when man existed in that allegedly “transcendental” realm. Such ideas linger in modern philosophy like a bad odor. It’s time to open a window and let the cleansing breeze of reason come through and quench the stuffiness that has built up in Academia. In other words, it’s time that thinkers shed the stolen concepts that they’ve accepted unquestioningly for generations, and clarify their starting point once and for all.

Another point which is easy to overlook is that, those who say that belief in a god is axiomatic performatively contradict themselves whenever they attempt to prove that their god exists by means of argument. Proof is a process of logically securing a position on the basis of inferring its truth from some prior point of departure, one which ultimately has its basis in what we directly perceive. So a position which is inferred from some previously accepted position cannot itself be axiomatic. An axiom is a starting point, not a conclusion to some prior argument. If one presents an argument to secure the conclusion that a god exists, then the supposition that his god exists consequently cannot be his starting point. At the very best, one of the premises supporting that conclusion may be his starting point, but this could only be determined on a case by case basis, depending on the content of the argument so presented. So the apologist needs to decide: is his assumption that his god exists axiomatic in nature, or does this assumption rest on proof?

So, to answer Gene's question about whether or not his axiomatic assumption is good or not, we must ask: Is the “assumption of the Christian god” truly axiomatic? It appears not. Indeed, those who want to say that the “assumption of the Christian god” is axiomatic have their homework cut out for them, for I have raised a number of crucial points to the effect that this could not be the case. Besides, as an Objectivist, I already know what the proper axiomatic starting point to knowledge and rationality must be, and the implications of that starting point spell disaster for those who want to believe in invisible magic beings which go around creating universes and assembling a “plan” by which human history supposedly unfolds.

by Dawson Bethrick

Can Reformed Christians Count?

First they tell us that their one god is actually three in number. Then they say we're wrong when we point out that this belief of theirs amounts to a species of polytheism. So we ask: Do you worship one, or do you worship three? Typically, instead of clear answers, we get bad attitude, as if we were supposed to accept their tangled convolutions on their say so.

But the question of how many gods they worship is not the only issue where Christians show a poor ability for basic math. Another area where simple counting ability seems lacking is in the number of times Jesus has allegedly visited the earth. According to the traditional account, Jesus has so far come only once, but is apparently planning another visit at some unspecified future point in time. "Behold, I come quickly," the author of the Apocalypse puts into his Jesus' mouth (Rev. 3:11). And yet, who would think that 2000 or more years constitutes "quickly"?

But no. We are now told that Jesus has already paid a second visit! That's right, at least according to Paul Manata, Jesus already came a second time!! This second visit allegedly took place back in 70 AD, at which time Jesus is said to have "fulfilled" the "prophecy" to the effect that the Jerusalem temple would be destroyed. It seems that this visit in 70 AD by Jesus would have constituted his second "comming" [sic], as Mr. Manata puts it, since according to the gospels Jesus came once before during the reign of Pontius Pilate some 35-40 years before the razing of the Jerusalem temple. But Paul vehemently denies this reckoning, for in an exchange with Aaron Kinney of Killing the Afterlife, Manata snarled the following point:

You see, all you're doing is taking a preconceived understanding of Christianity, trying to fit me into that mold, and then acting like a child when I don't fit into it. You keep using the term "second coming." I DENY this term.

I thought this was rather novel, since historically Christians have taught that Jesus paid one visit already (in the first decades of the first century AD), and that they expect yet another "second coming" of Jesus to occur at some unspecified point in the future at which time the "end times" would be initiated (the authors of many of the New Testament writings apparently thought Jesus' next visit was "at hand").

Then I flip over to Craig Sowder's blog, and read his blog Dead in Christ where he writes:

I guess there is one good thing about being the dead in Christ. At Christ's second coming we get to rise first. (1 Thess. 4:16) (Emphasis added)

Now, Sowder is apparently a cut from the same theological cloth as Manata, for in the very same blog Craig writes, "I love the Reformed tradition." Paul makes a similiar confession in his blog profile, where he says of himself, "I am reformed in my theological, philosophical, and apologetical distinctives." But here one affirms the notion of a verbatim "second coming," while the other vehemently protests "I DENY this term."

So which is it? Is the term "second coming" a valid Reformed Christian notion, or not? According to one self-identified Reformed Christian, it apparently is. But according to another one, it isn't.

Obvious questions remain unanswered: How many times has Jesus come to the earth? Has Jesus already paid his second visit to earth, or is Jesus' "second coming" yet to come? Etc.

With internal controversies like this, which would be so easy to resolve by acknowledging that Christianity is just a myth, I dare say they make Christians look as though they cannot do simple arithmetic!

by Dawson Bethrick

Is Human Experience Evidence of the Christian God?

Christian apologists seem eager to take anything as evidence for their god's alleged existence. When asked if he could prove that his god exists on the All-Bahnsen list, for example, Christian apologist Chris Kersey pointed to Greg Bahnsen’s performance in his debate with scientist Dr. Gordon Stein. I have already presented an analysis of Bahnsen’s opening statement in my blog Bahnsen's Poof, which shows that the over-hyped apologist gives no identifiable argument whatsoever for the existence of any god, Christian or otherwise. I have yet to see any response to my analysis which salvages Bahnsen's opening statement to show that an actual argument establishing the conclusion that the Christian god exists can in fact be found in it.

Kersey also pointed generally to a number of unspecified papers by Bahnsen that are available here. I’ve examined a number of Bahnsen’s papers available at this site, and I have yet to find one which gives good solid reasons to suppose his god exists. If he or other apologists have a particular article in mind, I'd be happy to take a look at it.

Then Kersey made the following statement:

In terms of evidence for God's existence, the answer inevitably is everything in human experience as well as experience itself.

Let’s examine what Kersey is essentially saying here. Basically, he’s saying that human "experience" is "evidence for God’s existence." The term ‘experience’ is probably preferred by apologists who want to rest their position on this case because it tends to be philosophically imprecise and approximate, thus allowing them to invest it with all kinds of questionable notions. Apologetics glossaries such as Frame’s A Van Til Glossary, Apologetics.org, Haus-von-Nomos, and the one in Bahnsen’s By This Standard, do not give entries defining this term. And why should they? After all, doesn’t everyone "just know" the definition of ‘experience’? Maybe, but in matters of philosophy where imprecision and approximation do more to obscure our ideas than enlighten them, care should be taken to qualify them with more precise terms. Thus it should raise our suspicions if apologists who want to use this term in key premises of their argument for the existence of the Christian god are reluctant to state their definitions for the record. How much confidence do such thinkers have in their argument? Are not Christians always telling us that there would be no "meaning" if their god did not exist?

Since consulting these apologetic sources themselves offered no intelligence on what they might mean by ‘experience’, I turned to Webster’s online dictionary, a non-biblical source, and found the following:

1 a : direct observation of or participation in events as a basis of knowledge b : the fact or state of having been affected by or gained knowledge through direct observation or participation
2 a : practical knowledge, skill, or practice derived from direct observation of or participation in events or in a particular activity b : the length of such participation
3 a : the conscious events that make up an individual life b : the events that make up the conscious past of a community or nation or mankind generally
4 : something personally encountered, undergone, or lived through
5 : the act or process of directly perceiving events or reality

The first two definitions both specify "direct observation" by a subject of an object ("events") in the process of acquiring knowledge or in participating in personally attended activity. And the final three similarly include some kind of conscious attendance or process of interaction with one's surroundings. So it should be clear that the essential which is common throughout these definitions is consciousness as such.

Now, it’s been my position all along that religious philosophies ultimately stem from a grotesque misunderstanding of the nature of human consciousness, a perversion which the ancients themselves never identified even though the view opposite to the one they verbally endorsed is inescapable. Central to that misunderstanding is the invalid view that consciousness has the power to create its own objects, which constitutes a complete reversal of the objective orientation of the subject-object relationship. This reversal can be observed throughout a religion’s metaphysical, epistemological, moral and social doctrines when one examines them with an explicit understanding of the proper relationship between consciousness and its objects in mind. Furthermore, the bible, which is the source of Christianity's many doctrines, presents no serious discussion of the fundamental nature of consciousness (I am not the first to question whether any of its authors had ever explicitly formed the concept to begin with; indeed, none of my bibles uses the term), and seemed to associate certain mental states (particularly the emotions or "passions") with the body's abdominal organs, not the brain and the nervous system which it regulates (the inclinations behind such associations no doubt arose due to the fact of mind-body integration, whereas their explicit religious views reduce to a division or dichotomy between mind and body). Also, the overt implications that the bible’s teachings have regarding the nature of consciousness, only show that its authors had uncritically adopted the primacy of consciousness model of metaphysics from their intellectual forebears, and this metaphysical view invalidates itself.

Because of such reversals and misunderstandings, Christians typically view consciousness as if it were somehow mysterious, unnatural, even "otherworldly." But it’s hard to see how one could maintain such a view given certain discoveries about consciousness that have become common knowledge due to a major shift away from the religious conception of the world to the scientific, thanks in large part to the achievements of the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution. We know, for instance, that human beings are biological organisms, and that there are definite physical organs in the human body which make consciousness possible, such as the brain, the nervous system, and those associated specifically with the senses, such as the eyes, olfactory nerves, taste buds, ears and skin. We also know that human beings are not the only biological organisms capable of consciousness, that other animals are conscious, and that the consciousness of non-human animals is also the product of similar organs in their bodies. All these facts, which are undeniable on a rational worldview, point incontestably to the view that consciousness is a natural, indeed biological phenomenon.

The Christian god, however, is said to be something other than natural. Christians prefer the dubious term "supernatural," a notion which seems to be invoked only when one has no legitimate explanation for some position he wants to maintain, thus making it an anti-concept which, according to Christian apologist Greg Bahnsen, means "whatever surpasses the limits of nature." (Always Ready, p. 178.) It’s not clear that anything "surpasses the limits of nature," for it’s not clear how one could determine just what the limits of nature may be. Indeed, in rational philosophy, to say that something has a nature basically means that something is itself, that to exist is to be something specific and therefore finite. In rational philosophy, the concept 'natural' is contrasted with 'man-made', that is, something taken from nature and altered in some way by man. But even shoes, watches and jumbo jets have their own specific nature, even though they are not naturally occurring, that is, occurring without the intervention of men.

And yet, believers continue to tell us that there are so-called "supernatural" beings, beings which are invisible and inaccessible to any of man's senses. This poses many obvious (and even not so obvious) epistemological problems for those who want to try to justify such beliefs, but this doesn't stop those who want to believe that their "supernatural" being exists from insisting that they do. The issue that I want to focus on here, however, is the fact that theists characterize that which is allegedly "supernatural" as something that is other than natural, and yet not man-made. So the theist introduces a third category which he calls "the supernatural," something which by definition is not observable in nature (for there is no reason to suppose that what we observe in nature "surpasses the limits of nature"), and, according to the theists' own vehement protestation, also not man-made (for believers would not want to allow that their deity is a human invention). So on the one hand we have that which is natural, and on the other hand that which is allegedly not natural ("supernatural"). In other words, A (natural) and non-A ("supernatural").

Given these points, then, let us return to Kersey's statement, that man's experience somehow qualifies as "evidence" for the existence of the Christian god. As described in their literature, the Christians' god is said to be "supernatural," immaterial, infinite and incorruptible. Man's experience, however, is neither of these; it is natural, material, finite and in fact corruptible (for man can and sometimes does misidentify what he perceives). So the question logically arises:

How does that which is natural, material, finite and corruptible serve as evidence of that which is supernatural, immaterial, infinite and incorruptible? In other words, how does A serve as evidence of non-A?

Or,

How does something serve as evidence of that which completely contradicts it?

Questions such as this seem to have slipped by apologists, for they continue to equate man's experience with evidence for the "supernatural" without bothering to attend to such questions. Recall, however, that the definitions of 'experience' given above specify direct observation. But the Christian god is said to be invisible (I Tim. 1:17), and thus at best not directly observable. And since man's experience entails his nature as a biological organism, it is by necessity also natural, just as are other bodily functions, such as respiration, circulation, digestion, etc.

But consider: suppose I perceive an object, such as the apple tree in my backyard. Christians like Kersey are in effect saying that this tree, or at least my consciousness of the tree, is somehow evidence of his god's existence. But what is it that I see? I see a tree, not a supernatural, invisible, magic being. The tree itself is not in any way like the Christian god is supposed to be; the tree that I perceive is a biological organism (and therefore natural) composed of atoms and molecules (and therefore material) which has a specific nature (and therefore finite), and which dies if denied the nutrients it requires (and therefore corruptible).

If I accept the tree as evidence of anything, I must accept it as evidence only of itself, of its own existence. To suppose that it is evidence of something other than itself - indeed, as evidence of something which fundamentally contradicts it (e.g., "supernatural," immaterial, infinite and incorruptible), I would at the very least have to infer this somehow from what I do perceive. But why would I interpret something I directly observe as evidence of something that contradicts what I directly observe? Such a process of inferring could not rest on what I perceive alone; it would in fact require certain assumptions imported expressly to bridge the gap between what I really perceive (i.e., what is real, natural, material, finite and corruptible) and what I can only imagine (since I can only imagine something that "surpasses the limits of nature"). Where would I get such assumptions, and what would their basis be, if not just the arbitrary imaginings that religion supplies?

Here is where the apologist simply blanks out, giving us absolutely nothing to go on, apparently expecting us to accept what they claim about "the supernatural" on their say so, i.e., on faith.

So unless the apologist can shore up his claim and give a plausible explanation as to how man's conscious experience can somehow serve as evidence of that which completely contradicts it on every essential, it is safe to assume that he has no case whatsoever to support his god-belief.

by Dawson Bethrick