Bahnsen's Three Charges of Prejudice

On pages 135-138 of his book Always Ready (page numbers in this blog entry refer to this publication), presuppositional apologist Greg Bahnsen seeks to indoctrinate his readers with the presumption that criticism of Christianity is necessarily borne on "prejudicial conjecture," that

unbelievers, both educated and uneducated, take the offensive against Christianity before they have become familiar with what they're talking about. In the place of research and honest assessment of available evidence concerning some aspect of the Bible, many unbelievers have substituted personal conjecture about what "seems likely" to them. (p. 135)

Apparently "unbelievers" are not supposed to put much stock in what "seems likely" to them, but why they shouldn't remains unexplained. Regardless, we should not let ourselves be fooled by Bahnsen's use of "many unbelievers" as if he meant only a portion of those who do not number themselves among Christendom. It's clear from the context of his statements that he wants to give his devotees the impression that all non-believers are uninformed about the teachings of Christianity (even though a great number of non-believers in the west are themselves former Christians or have at least been widely exposed to Christian zealots), and therefore their criticism of Chistianity couldn't possibly have any bearing on the matter. For instance, on p. 137, Bahnsen writes: When we defend our Christian faith, then, we must constantly be on the lookout for the way in which the reasoing of unbelievers rests on prejudicial conjecture. When stated in this fashion, the impression is that one is supposed to that "the reasoning of unbelievers" will be the product of "prejudicial conjecture," even before this has been established. Apparently Bahnsen thinks this is responsible advice.

At any rate, Bahnsen goes on to cite three indications of prejudice which budding apologists should expect to detect in "the reasoning of unbelievers." Let's review them.

1) Prejudice vs. Impartiality: "The first [indication of] prejudice is the assumption that the Biblical text is no different from any other written document which we find in our natural experience throughout history - which of course begs the fundamental question over which the believer and unbeliever are arguing!" (p. 136)

If it is the case that "the assumption that the Biblical text is no different from any other written document...begs the fundamental question over which the believer and unbeliever are arguing," wouldn't the opposite assumption - namely the assumption that the biblical text is significantly "different from any other document which we find in our natural experience throughout history" - also "beg the fundamental question over which the believer and unbeliever are arguing"? Bahnsen's rebuttal to reasonable impartiality regarding texts presented for review to non-believers requires him to take for granted the premise that the bible is singularly different from other texts without the need to first establish this premise. In other words, he takes the bible's utter uniqueness as a self-sufficient primary which does not need to be validated. If he could validate this premise, why would he need to do this? Also, we might ask whether Bahnsen would be able to validate his god-belief if he did not take such a premise for granted. In essence, he seems eager to reserve for himself the privilege of "beg[ging] the fundamental question over which the believer and unbeliever are arguing" while simultaneously denying this privilege to non-believers. The anxious defender of a weak case would need such an advantage.

But is it really so inappropriate to view the books of the bible as "no different from any other written document"? Bahnsen gives no reason against this other than that it allegedly "begs the fundamental question over which the believer and unbeliever are arguing." The Muslim could deploy the same tactic with respect to the Koran. In actuality, there are overriding general features of the bible that it shares with all other written documents which put the bible on the same level. For example, like other written documents, the bible itself is a written document. Like other written documents, the bible consists of words written on pages which can be read by readers who can read the language in which those words are written. Also, like other written documents, the bible consists of written statements which readers can examine and relate to the broader sum of knowledge which they have acquired throughout their lives, and thus form judgments about the quality of its content, whether it is true or false, useful or useless, meaningful or meaningless, etc. This is the case with the bible just as it is with a play by Shakespeare, a poem by Pushkin, a play by Molliere, an essay by Jefferson, or a book by Greg Bahnsen. In the case of Shakespeare's play, Pushkin's poem, Molliere's play, Jefferson's essay and Bahnsen's book, each can be judged by its content. Is Bahnsen saying that we should do this in the case of every written document except the biblical text? Is Bahnsen worried about what outcome may transpire if someone does judge the bible by its content? If he were so confident that everything in the biblical text is true, would we expect him to fear the outcome of people independently judging it by its content, just as we do in the case of an essay by Russell or a newspaper article?

Bahnsen goes on to say:

If the Bible is, as it claims, the inspired word of Almighty God, then the history of its textual transmission may very well be quite different than other human documents since God would have ordained that its text be preserved with greater integrity than that of ordinary books. (p. 136)

This is a common refrain coming from apologists, but the special pleading and appeal to unseen magical forces are simply embarrassing. In actuality, with the invention of the printing press and the print technology available today, the accurate replication of texts does not present the great potential for error that dogged the copyists of past centuries. Today one can go into any bookstore and pull a Mario Puzo novel off the shelf, and the same title sitting right next to it is precisely the same, right down to a typo on page 172, since they were replicated from the same print master by the same automated technology. Modern technology has at the very least significantly reduced the enormous potential for error that plagues copying texts by hand. No doubt the bible's copyists would have been green with envy had they known about the ease with which their precious bibles could be mass produced today. So ironically, Bahnsen is correct, in a way he did not intend, when he supposes that "the history of [the bible's] textual transmission" is "different than other human documents," since there is no shortage of "other human documents" whose textual reproduction is far more faithful to their respective originals than one could ever hope for in the case of the biblical text, since the automated print technology in use today was not used in the preservation of the biblical text.

But Bahnsen seems oblivious to another point which we would be wrong to ignore when considering his statement here. And that point is the fact that, when we attempt to justify a position by asserting the existence of an invisible magic being, one can argue anything. On the premise that there's an invisible magic being that can intervene in human affairs and actualize its wishes such that reality conforms precisely to its will (cf. metaphysical subjectivism), one could even argue that there is no need for a biblical text that must be read in the first place. On such a premise, one could simply argue that "divine knowledge" was zapped into the his mind by "the hand of God," thereby implying that the biblical text is completely superfluous. After all, if there were a magic being that could do this, why wouldn't it, and why would we need to rely on our own reasoned interpretation of "the Scriptures" to come fallibly to the "knowledge of God" which Christians claim to possess? The point is that, if we make allowance for the arbitrary, the arbitrary becomes the standard and reason becomes the first casualty. And when reason has been rejected in this fashion, the human mind has no way to recover itself.

2) Prejudice vs. Consistency: "The second indication of prejudice is that the unbeliever does not offer any concrete evidence that (say) some medieval monk tampered with the text before us today." (p. 136)

While above Bahnsen was happy to proceed on the premise that "God would have ordained that [the biblical] text be preserved with greater integrity than that of ordinary books," for which he supplied no supporting evidence, he now expects "the unbeliever" to offer "concrete evidence" to substantiate what is prima facie a reasonable possibility. Does Bahnsen really expect people to believe that it is impossible that some medieval monk deliberately tampered with the text? Is he expecting us to suppose that it is impossible that some medieval monk made a mistake in copying the biblical text? Indeed, it seems that one would have to be quite conflicted psychologically to expect people to accept on the one hand the possibility that an invisible magic being works through human hosts down through the centuries to preserve a religious text which would be superfluous anyway, while on the other hand denying the possibility of deliberate mischief or human error. Perhaps this is akin to the kind of skewed thinking one author of the gospel had in mind when he had his Jesus scold the "blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel" (Matt. 23:24). Indeed, the biblical text itself, in Romans 3:4, tells us "let God be true, but every man a liar," which explicitly endorses the assumption that human beings are by nature deceivers. Unless Bahnsen can show that the medieval monks who were responsible for the duplication and preservation of the biblical text were something other than human beings, it seems that the biblical text itself clearly supports the presumption that those same monks were just as prone to deception and vice as everyone else is supposed to be. So on biblical assumptions, we would be wrong to suppose that the medieval monks who took on the task of copying the biblical text were above deliberate tampering with that text as they copied it. But perhaps consistency was not one of Bahnsen's stronger points.

Nevertheless, in considering Bahnsen's claim that "the unbeliever does not offer any concrete evidence that (say) some medieval monk tampered with the text," we should ask: is he expecting his readers to take this claim at face value, without any supporting argument? Does he suppose - and/or does he expect his readers to assume - that critics of the Christian worldview are completely ignorant of what it teaches, in spite of the facts that Christianity is the dominant religion in the west and that former Christians typically make the most informed critics of Christianity? Do Bahnsen's gratuitous assumptions comport with the awareness he is trying to raise against prejudice? It seems that, if Bahnsen were genuinely concerned about prejudice, he would not answer alleged prejudice with just more prejudice.

In fact, there is concrete evidence that someone tampered with the text, in some cases even before the monastic orders were instituted by the church and commissioned with copying it. For instance, the oldest known manuscripts of the gospel of Mark end at 16:8, while today's bible's have Mark end at 16:20. At some point, probably still very early, these latter 12 verses were tacked on, and I doubt a talking snake did this. The same is the case with the final chapter of the gospel of John, often referred to by scholars as the Appendix. The gospel most sensibly ends at chapter 20, but the version we find in our modern bibles includes a 21st chapter. One article on the topic describes it as follows:

The text of the Gospel of John appears to reach a conclusion at the end of chapter 20, as the text summarises the many signs that Jesus performed for his followers, not all of which could be recorded in the Gospel. John 21 begins simply with After these things... (Greek: Μετὰ ταῦτα) and nonchalently recounts another appearance of Jesus, as if the conclusion at the end of the prior chapter hadn't been there - as if the text was going "...and they all lived happily ever after. The end. Anyway, back in galilee they ...".

Who tacked on these endings on these gospels? In the case of the gospel of Mark, this is especially significant since without the added ending, Mark would end (and originally ended) without any post-resurrection sightings. And if believers insist that the last 12 verses of Mark's gospel are authentic scripture, then I have a jar of dark liquid for them to drink.

3) Prejudice vs. Informed Criticism: "The third indication of prejudice in the criticism of the unbeliever is that he or she has not taken account of the actual evidence which is publicly available regarding the text of Scripture. If the critic had taken time to look into this subject, he or she would not have offered the outlandish evaluation that the Biblical text is unreliable." (p. 136)

This is the same tired and over-used generalization that critics couldn't possibly know what they're talking about, and as such constitutes a prejudice on Bahnsen's part which he is more than happy to promulgate among his devotees. Bahnsen tries to bring his point home with the following autobiographical anecdote:

This came home to me with great force after taking an advanced course on Plato in graduate school, a course which took account of the textual criticism of the literary corpus of Plato's works. Our earliest extant manuscript of a work by Plato dates from right before 900 A.D…. and we must remember that Plato is thought to have lived roughly 350 years before Christ - thus leaving us with a gap of over twelve centuries. By contrast, the earliest fragments of the New Testament date less than fifty years after the original writing; the bulk of our most important extant manuscripts dates from 200-300 years after original composition." (pp. 136-137)

It is unclear what exactly Bahnsen thinks this contrast, which non-believers should have no problem acknowledging, is supposed to prove. Presumably Bahnsen's concern is to prove that Christianity is true, not that the earliest copies we have of the text of the New Testament are closer in time to their original writing than Plato's works. Even if we found a copy of Baum's The Wizard of Oz that was produced two weeks after he had completed it, what would this prove? Would this prove that there was actually an Emerald City populated with horses which perpetually changed colors and witches who could fly on broomsticks? Of course not. Perhaps Bahnsen is saying that, if we accept the existence of a man named Plato on the basis of his writings whose earliest manuscripts date some twelve or so centuries after the time when he is supposed to have lived, then we should accept the existence of a god-man named Jesus whose extant biographical documents date to within decades of their supposed original composition. But this is a non sequitur which relies on blurring certain key distinctions. For one thing, in the case of Plato's writings, someone had to compose them. Whether they were originally written by Plato himself, or by his pupils, is really irrelevant. The teachings in those writings are attributed to a man, and whether this man's name was Plato or something else, is not really that big a deal. Since non-believers are not people who worship a god, they aren't going to deify Plato either. If it turned out to be the case that the ideas we attribute to Plato were actually conceived and developed by a small band of Scythians, would it cause us to change our lives? Let's not forget also that none of the texts in the New Testament purport to have come from Jesus' own hand. Many of the texts are anonymous, some are clearly pseudonymous, and contrary to what Bahnsen claims, the New Testament record is far from "remarkably uniform." (p. 137; see my blog Reckless Apologetic Presumptuousness.)

But still, Bahnsen claims that there is "actual evidence which is publicly available regarding the text of Scripture." Evidence which supports specifically what? That the New Testament was written almost 2,000 years ago? Who disputes this? Is Bahnsen saying that there's "actual evidence which is publicly available" which supports the view that the events it records actually happened? In regard to "Scripture," Bahnsen says that "its truth has a public nature, open to inspection" (p. 127), but complains that teachings such as those about a "[c]onscious life following physical death, everlasting damnation, and a future resurrection are not readily accepted." (p. 126) But what evidence does Bahnsen or any other Christian apologist present to support its teachings? For instance, "the text of Scripture" claims that there is a heaven. What "publicly available" evidence can Bahnsen or other Christians supply to support this claim? Where is this heaven, and how can its existence be verified? Can such a claim be scientifically tested? If not, why not? The existence of extraterrestrial places, such as planets, moons, asteroids, comets, nebulae, galaxies, etc., can be scientifically verified, so why can't heaven? "Scripture" also claims that there is a hell, presumably a place where souls are flame-broiled without reprieve for all eternity. (I thought souls were immaterial - how is it that they can burn? If God has a soul, is it flame-retardant?) What "publicly available" evidence do Christians supply to support these claims? Do they accept them because they know of concrete evidence for their existence, but choose to keep that evidence to themselves? Or, do they accept these teachings as truth without evidence, perhaps in the fear that it might be true?

Let's consider another example. In Matthew 27:52-53, the following event is said to have occurred when Jesus died on the cross:

52 And the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose,
53 And came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many.

Now, this is quite a remarkable event indeed. Either that, or it's a complete fabrication. Since Christians want to say that the entirety of the bible is wholly true, inerrant and infallible, they consequently would defend the claim that this event really happened. But what evidence do we have for this that is "publicly available"? No other New Testament document corroborates this alleged event - perhaps that's what Bahnsen meant by the "The word of the Lord is self-attestingly true and authoritative"? (p. 25) But if such an event did occur, it would be astonishing to find that no one other than the author of Matthew would have thought to make a note of it. Indeed, no extrabiblical source supports it. Imagine a crowd of reanimated corpses walking throughout a city who "appeared unto many" of its inhabitants, and yet no witness had the presence of mind to write about it! Apologists may claim that the author of Matthew was an eyewitness, but even the book of Matthew does not claim this; indeed, it records other things that its author could not have been an eyewitness (such as the virgin birth, the temptation in the wilderness, etc.). Perhaps we're supposed to believe this story on the basis of the supposed fact that the earliest manuscripts date to within 200-300 years of its original writing? I trow not.

For that matter, what "publicly available" evidence supports the claim that Jesus rose from the dead? The bible cannot serve as proof of this since it is where this claim is found in the first place. A claim does not double as its own proof. It is the claim which needs to be proven in the first place. Showing that the copies of the writings in which the claim is found date to within 200-300 years of their original composition does not prove that the claim contained in those writings is true. A proof needs support relating to the details of the claim which is being proved. (Of course, there's no way to prevent apologists from delivering a Poof!)

So it seems that Bahnsen's charge that non-believers operate on the basis of prejudice is itself an instance of the pot calling the kettle black. In fact, it's rather easy to see through. What's sad is that Bahnsen's devotees lap up his contempt for non-believers as if it were water at the height of drought season. Whatever makes them feel better, I guess.

by Dawson Bethrick

What Happened to Paul?

Does anyone know what happened to Paul Manata? He seems to have departed the scene completely, and without even saying goodbye! There's been no activity on his blog Pressing the Antithesis since Oct. 14, and the last I saw of him in any comments section was when he tried to tackle one of my arguments in this post of Goosing the Antithesis. And while I've been described by Aaron Kinney as "a proverbial Navy SEAL in the war of ideas," Paul typically displayed a formidable tough-guy persona when interacting with non-believers. Could it be that his bad-boy image was just that, an image fabricated for purposes of intimidation? Where oh where has Paul run off to?

Will we be seeing milk cartons with Paul's picture on it with the caption "Have you seen me?" or "Missing since 10/14/05"? Perhaps it would include details that might give a clue as to how to locate him. For instance, it could say "Ht. 6'1", Wt. 190 lbs. Last seen embarrassing himself on non-Christian blogs trying to defend belief in invisible magic beings," or something along these lines.

Come to think of it, it seems that Paul's retreat is not a sole instance, for other apologists seem to have given up as well. Perhaps they all decided to take a vow of silence? Of course, that would mean that they couldn't tell us lest they break their vow silence.

by Dawson Bethrick

Tape-Loop Apologetics

If you find yourself confronted with an apologist - especially one steeped in the mystical casuistry of presuppositional apologetics - it won't be long before he brandishes one or more of his shiny terms of endearing negation before you and challenges you to "account for" some philosophical issue covered in some apologetics handbook. One such term is the word 'immaterial', an elusive notion which is integral to modern apologetic discourse, but which apologists typically do not define in positive terms. As Rand so poignantly noted, "their definitions are not acts of defining, but of wiping out." (Atlas Shrugged, p. 951) The concept 'immaterial' supposedly refers to something (which presumably exists) that is "not material." Of course, this only tells us what it is not, not what it is, so whatever it is remains unidentified. This is most ironic of course, since Christian apologists tend to make "meaning" an important element in how they characterize the antithesis between believers and non-believers, frequently intimating that "meaning" is only possible if there's a god, and yet here they are often hard-pressed to provide meaning to their key terms.

As an example of what they mean by 'immaterial', apologists often like to point to "the laws of logic," just as Greg Bahnsen did in his debate with Gordon Stein. Yes, that's right, it is strange to see people who enshrine invisible magic beings and other religious notions carry on as if they were concerned for logic. And it's not surprising that a religionist would seize on the laws of logic as an example of what they mean by "immaterial" since religionists in general typically have little or no understanding of concepts. Indeed, I've never found any book in the bible that teaches a theory of concepts. And how exactly does one prove that the laws of logic are in fact "immaterial"?

The presuppositional playbook stipulates that the apologist keep control of the conversation (which he quickly wants to characterize as a debate) by focusing the discussion on the non-believer's view of the world while the apologist hides his own faith-based worldview behind his back, keeping its nonsensical teachings conveniently out of sight. This is the real purpose behind the apologist's attempt to challenge the non-believer to "account for" some item that is usually topical to the mind and its operation, such as the assumption that nature is uniform, logical inference, scientific inquiry, moral judgment, etc., as if his religion had anything important to say on these matters whatsoever. The apologist doesn't really care about the issues that he challenges the non-believer on; if he did, he'd have already adopted an honest-to-reality philosophy. On the contrary, the apologist hopes to keep the non-believer busy explaining his own non-believing position while hoping to spring his Christian dogmas on the non-believer to "clean up" after the non-believer's worldview has been "destroyed" by the apologist's shallow grasp of philosophical matters.

Again the apologist exhibits a most pungent irony here, for in spite of all the feigned importance that the he places on being able to "account for" such things, we should not be surprised when the apologist shows himself unable to "account for" the totems of his worldview. The following brief dialogue shows how the apologist loses at his own game:

Presupposer: "How can your chance-bound, relative-only materialistic worldview account for immaterial entities?"

Non-Believer: "I'm not sure what you're asking. But please, tell me, how does your Christian worldview account for the 'immaterial'?"

Presupposer: "By the self-attesting sovereignty of the Triune God of Christian theism."

Non-Beleiver: "Is this god material or immaterial?"

Presupposer: "God is wholly immaterial."

Non-Believer: "So let me get this straight: you 'account for' that which is 'immaterial' by appealing to that which you say is 'immaterial'? How does that explain anything?"

Presupposer: [blank out]

Notice how the apologist's challenge is so easily shown to loop around and bite him in his nether regions. For if he appeals to the very thing that's being called to be explained, then he simply makes no progress in providing an explanation, for in the end he simply winds up with what he's called to explain. And indeed, if the apologist is challenged to "account for" the "immaterial," what options does he have? If he points to something material to "account for" that which he calls "immaterial," then he's basically admitting that matter is "ultimate" (a favorite presuperstitionalist term). But if he points to something allegedly "immaterial" to "account for" that which he characterizes as "immaterial," has he really explained anything?

The same kind of problem arises when apologists claim pretend that pointing to their god will somehow explain the origin of life. But their god is said to be alive already, so pointing to somethat that's alive does not help explain the origin of life. They're just pointing to what needs to be explained. In the final analysis, it is shown that the apologist is guilty of the very charge he levels against non-believers: the failure to "account for" something important in his own worldview.

Such muddlemindedness is what we can expect to find when we examine the tape-loop antics of presuppositional apologetics. Like a dog chasing its tail, presuppositionalists simply make no progress except in digging their own intellectual graves.

by Dawson Bethrick

Probing Mr. Manata's Poor Understanding of the Axioms

In his 29 September comments to this Christian apologetics blog, amateur Christian apologist Paul Manata of Press the Antithesis has attempted to bring the Objectivist axioms into doubt with a series of questions he prepared. But curiously, even before he presented his questions, he announced his own ignorance on the matter:

First, I don't know what you mean by the axioms.

It is apparently upon this foundation of admitted ignorance that he proceeded to pontificate:

Ultimately, ‘existence exists’ is broken down to saying that only material particulars exist, this surely isn't a self-evident axiom. So, you can't ask if I agree with them since they are very vague and, once subjected to some kind of Wittgensteinian linguistic analysis, they are shown to not stand.

Notice the stupendous ignorance already in need of correction: a properly conceived axiom by definition does not “break down” into prior statements, for those prior statements would need a firm foundation in order be meaningful, and the axioms are the only proper foundation for meaningfulness. Since an axiom is a conceptually irreducible primary, it cannot be "broken down" into more fundamental affirmations. Additionally (and it is surprising that this would need to be pointed out), the axiom ‘existence exists’ and the statement “only material particulars exist” are not identical statements. To say that the axiom ‘existence exists’ can be “broken down to saying” something that is not identical to it, assumes that axioms are not conceptually irreducible, and if Mr. Manata is attempting to critique the Objectivist axioms, this is something that he would have to prove.

As for exclusivity, the only exclusivity of importance implied by the axiom ‘existence exists’ is that only existence exists. The axiom ‘existence exists’ does not “break down to saying that only material particulars exist,” since the clause “only material particulars exist” is not conceptually irreducible, and pointing out the fact that existence exists leaves open the question of the nature of any particular existent that may be discovered. So we have not only an ill-fated attempt to interpret an axiom which in no way necessitates such interpreting (indeed, one should not interpret on the basis of self-admitted ignorance), we observe the fallacy of the stolen concept in action: Mr. Manata is asserting a multi-concept proposition, which is not conceptually irreducible, at the same level of or prior to a foundational axiom, which is conceptually irreducible. Indeed, the statement “only material particulars exist” – whether true or not – already assumes the fact that something exists (namely the particulars that are said to be exclusively material in nature as well as both the subject and object of cognition).

Also, Mr. Manata’s confusion may in fact be due to an errant understanding of ‘self-evident’. Many philosophers have claimed self-evidence for certain of their formulations which in fact are not at all self-evidently true (some have even suggested that invisible things are self-evident - cf. Rom. 1:20), and this trend in philosophy has unfortunately led to pervasive confusion about what it means to say that a truth is self-evident. Unfortunately, Mr. Manata appears to have fallen victim to such confusion.

Another confusion here is the tendency to mistake generality for vagueness. The two are not the same. I can say “all birds are biological organisms”; this statement is a generalization, but it is not in any way vague. The concept ‘existence’ is the widest of all concepts (it includes reference to anything and everything that exists, whether observed or postulated), but this does not lead to vagueness. To say that the concept 'existence' is vague suggests an inability to discriminate between the real and the unreal. If someone says that birds exist, who would find this vague? Mr. Manata and other theists insist that their god exists, and yet they do not seem to be troubled by any vagueness here. Indeed, the concept ‘vague’ is an abstraction which assumes the validity of a whole chain of prior concepts which ultimately stand on the truth of the axioms. So again, one must assume the truth of the axiom in order to make such statements, which again is evidence of yet another stolen concept.

Mr. Manata then suggests that axioms, when “subjected to some kind of Wittgensteinian linguistic analysis,” can be “shown not to stand.” Here Mr. Manata would be wise to check his premises, indeed, his own foundations. For here he is seeking to discredit a conceptually irreducible foundational statement by using a massive abstract system whose own foundations lie in the darkness of obscurity and which ultimately assume the primacy of consciousness (i.e., a view of reality that essentially denies the axioms). This tactic thus amounts to question-begging. All the while, the truth of the axiom ‘existence exists’ must be the case in order for Mr. Manata to utter any statements to begin with. If there were no existence, there would be no Mr. Manata and no "Wittgensteinian linguistic analysis" to deepen his confusion. But ironically, Mr. Manata’s very own existence and efforts to destroy rival views merely confirm the Objectivist axioms. So again, we have a jumble of stolen concepts choking a confused mind unable to find his way among the concepts he attempts to apply but which turn out to be too big for him to handle effectively.

Then Mr. Manata stated,

Anyway, resprting to axioms is basically foundationalism.

For one who seems to think himself competent in the ways of “some sort of Wittgensteinian linguistic analysis,” Mr. Manata could make a better effort to clarify what he is trying to say. The series of letters “resprting” does not show up in my dictionary. Perhaps he meant to write “resorting”? Let’s add this correction and see if his statement starts to make any sense:

Anyway, resorting to axioms is basically foundationalism.

Now this is at least a little more coherent, but unfortunately not much more. Mr. Manata does not make himself clear for he does not make his position on the matter explicit, but it appears that he is attempting to use the term ‘foundationalism’ to connote a derogatory position. Foundationalism in philosophy has been contrasted with such notions as ‘contextualism’ and relativism. Perhaps there are other positions against which foundationalism is asserted. But until Mr. Manata isolates his view on this matter and explains a) how “[resorting] to axioms is basically foundationalism” and b) what in tarnation might be wrong with foundationalism as he understands it, this statement, if correctly interpreted from his sloppy writing, appears to have been written with the intention to inflame rather than inform.

Mr. Manata then proceeded to itemize his criticisms, which I will address in the order in which they were given. But before proceeding, I want to point out that, as Leonard Peikoff notes in Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (p. 11), “no argument can coerce a person who chooses to evade” the axioms, and even if I thought this were possible, I would not seek to coerce anyone, even Mr. Manata himself. He is free to evade all he wishes. With that said, I will now go on to interact with his questions and criticisms.

i. If only beliefs that are perceptually self-evident serve as appropriate axioms, then what is the epistemic staus of this belief itself: that only beliefs which are perceptually self-evident can serve as axioms (or, basic beliefs)? Is this belief itself perceptually self-evident. No. So Burner's criteria runs afpul of its own standards. [sic]

This argument, to the extent that it can be taken as an argument, simply misconstrues the position it is attempting to critique. A worldview founded on objective axioms has no need to make the claim that all statements (even those pertaining to the nature of axioms) are axiomatic. The epistemic status of higher level statements is certainly not axiomatic (for they are not conceptually irreducible), and affirming that certain fundamental truths are axiomatic in no way commits one to the claim that higher abstractions and inferences must also be axiomatic. The essence of the issue should be quite easy to understand: we would need to have already formulated the axioms in order to discover their unique nature and understand their special relationship to the rest of one’s knowledge. Statements summarizing the nature of axioms do not themselves have to be perceptually self-evident, and identifying the axioms as such in no way stipulates that statements summarizing what can be discovered about the axioms must also be perceptually self-evident. So there is no internal inconsistency here, no breach of one’s own standards, just a lack of understanding on the part of the critic.

ii. The myth of the given: Sellers argues that this myth consists in thinking that perceptual states such as "this is red," and our powers of sensory discrimination in general, are pure an incorrigable, completely independant of any theoretical contribution or, background beliefs. So, perceptually self-evident claims cannot be foundational since it depends on prior assumptions for its intelligibility. Sellers writes: "For the point is specifically that observational knowledge of any particular fact, e.g., that this is green, presupposes that one knows general facts of the form X is a reliable symptom of Y. And to admit this requires an abandonment of traditional empiricist idea that observational knowledge 'stands on its own feet.'"

Again Mr. Manata’s sloppiness needs to be corrected here. The name is Sellars, not “Sellers,” and the ideas which Mr. Manata is repeating here belong specifically to one Wilfrid S. Sellars. There are several problems with Sellars’ argument (or at least with Mr. Manata’s attempt to present it – though it’s not at all clear what the phrase “pure an incorrigable” [sic] is supposed to mean). But nonetheless the error here presents a good opportunity for clarifying an important point about the Objectivist axioms which is often missed by critics. Specifically, the issue here has to do with reducibility as well as the overlooked distinction between perception and conceptualization. The statement “this is red” is not a perceptual state, but a conceptualized identification based on a perceptual state. According to Objectivism, conceptualization must reduce to the perceptual level if it is to be objective and meaningful (since conceptualization is the result of abstracting ultimately from what is perceived). Also, statements like “this is red” and “that is green” are not conceptually irreducible. To be sure, the statement which Sellars proposes as a template for predication – “X is a reliable symptom of Y” – is certainly not conceptually irreducible. Such statements do stand on prior assumptions, but acknowledging this does not in any way imply that perception is not the pre-conceptual foundation to cognition. Objectivism simply makes those fundamental assumptions explicit by rightly identifying them as axiomatic truths – that is, as truths that would have to be true even for one to deny them. Now, the quote that Mr. Manata cites does not indicate what Sellars would propose in place of the “traditional empiricist idea” in question (let alone what he would propose in place of the Objectivist axioms), but this would be interesting to see. If it is thought that conceptual thought does not reduce to the perceptual level, then to what does it reduce (if to anything), and to what is that thought supposed to pertain (if not to things that we perceive)? Since Mr. Manata does not elaborate on these topics, it's hard to rule out the possibility that they matter not to him.

To be sure, before Rand, there were many misunderstandings that persisted in the realm of philosophy about the nature of perception and its role in the cognitive process. Now, however, we have sound theories of perception and concept-formation which integrate to form an objective basis for rational thought. The axioms are crucial to this objective basis, for they identify what makes it possible. Since consciousness is consciousness of something, statements are statements about something. Similarly, attribution of a property to a thing or a class of things is possible because properties are properties of things, of entities. So statements such as “this is red” and “that is green” do in fact require the axioms; if the axioms were not true, there would be nothing either green or red, and there would be no one around to call them such. To suppose that something other than perception must provide the basis of our knowledge is to say that something other than awareness is the faculty which makes knowledge possible. Thus the absurdity of those who contend against the primacy of perception in cognition is exposed.

iii. The regress is not halted: you must justifiedly believe yourself competent to judge whether a belief possesses those features which make it axiomatic. So accepting a certain claim B as basic requires that he also accept another claim K as basic: that B has whatever features needed to make it axiomatic, and not some alternative, as the proper foundation for knowledge. Thus the regress is not halted.

This statement completely misses the point. In order for a person to judge anything, whether it’s his own competence or a job offer, the Objectivist axioms would have to be true: the person doing the judging would have to exist (there’s one axiom), and he would have to be conscious in order to judge (there’s another axiom). Furthermore, to judge anything presupposes differences which can be discriminated, and there wouldn’t be any differences to discriminate if the axiom of identity were not true (so there's a third axiom). Quite simply, judging oneself competent to do anything is not a precondition for the general truths identified by the axioms: the axioms are true whether one judges himself competent or incompetent. That's because truth is objective - that is, truth is the identification of any actual state of affairs that obtains independent of our wishing, ignorance or denial.

Now we must ask: What is metaphysically more basic to any cognitive process than the subject-object relationship which makes cognition possible? A cognitive process is a process by which a conscious subject perceives, identifies and considers any object. The theist of course will want to posit that a deity is responsible for this. But is not the deity itself supposed to be conscious? Of what is it conscious? So the theist is right back to square one again, while Objectivism secures its position with an objective starting point which theism wants to second-guess as it tries to get away with denying it. What theists overlook is the fact that the Objectivist position would have to be true in order for the theist even to question or dispute that position.

iv. How do axiomatic beliefs support non-axiomatic beliefs?

It’s good that Mr. Manata chooses to bring such questions to non-Christians, for his bible nowhere addresses them. So how do the axioms support non-axiomatic knowledge? The axioms provide higher knowledge with the solid conceptual basis needed for building the entire sum of one’s knowledge in hierarchical structure. The axioms identify in the broadest possible terms the context which makes knowledge possible and important to human life and as such they directly identify the very preconditions of intelligibility.

The issue of the hierarchical structure of knowledge is of key importance to understanding the nature of the relationship between the axioms and the higher abstractions of a worldview. Peikoff makes the following point in this regard:

Human knowledge is not like a village of squat bungalows, with every room huddling down against the earth’s surface. Rather, it is like a city of towering skyscrapers, with the uppermost story of each building resting on the lower ones, and they on still lower, until one reaches the foundation, where the builder started. The foundation supports the whole structure by virtue of being in contact with solid ground. (Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, p. 130.)

Objectivism can claim certainty for its foundations because those foundations are grounded in the invulnerability of the axioms. To deny the axioms is to deny the reality that gives authority to any truth. In this way such denial is self-refuting. Denial is an action undertaken by a consciousness, and a denial that consists essentially of saying that there is no consciousness is a denial that rules itself out. Similarly, a denial that says there is no existence is a denial that consists essentially of saying the one who's doing the denying does not exist. So denying the axioms does not get someone very far. Indeed, what is he trying to accomplish? Will his denying get him where he wants to go?

v. How does one know what he perceives is the way the world really is? Is there a difference between appearance and reality? Maybe your axioms tell us how we should think in order to be rational, but how do you know your axioms, which are based on perception, marry the world outside you? How does you escape the ego-centric predicament?

It’s unclear what these questions are expected to achieve, if not simply to antagonize. Consider the first question: “How does one know what he perceives is the way the world really is?” Does Mr. Manata truly think it’s possible to perceive things as they are not? Typical examples of what some might call “misperceptions” might include things like so-called ‘optical illusions’, such as a pencil sticking in a glass of water. "The pencil is straight, but look at it when it's dunked in the glass of water! It looks bent! See! The senses can't be accurate!" Well, how did he know that the pencil is straight in the first place? Silly religious fool! He's so quick to discount his own means of knowledge that he doesn't realize that he's discounting his own means of knowledge!

The issue here is not an error in perception. Rather, it is a misidentification of what one perceives. There's a fundamental difference here, since perception is not the same as conceptualization. Of course, we should not expect those who have no native theory of concepts to grasp such distinctions. Rather, it may be the case that such persons are grasping for anything that will open the door to doubts that feed theistic craving.

Perception is not a volitional process. We can focus our perception, and such directing is volitional, but we do not choose to perceive something in place of something that’s really there. We also don't choose how our senses integrate sensory input into perceptions; this is a metaphysical feature of our nature as biological organisms. Mr. Manata seems to be concerned that the axioms might not "marry the outside world." It's not clear what this is meant to say, but apparently the concern is that the axioms have nothing to do with what they're naming. But what is driving this concern? If the axioms are formed on the basis of what we perceive, why wouldn't they have anything to do with what we perceive? Is this a genuine concern on the part of Mr. Manata, or is it just more smoke and mirrors? It's clear that he perceives Objectivism and its axioms to be a threat. And as an apologist for the religious view of the world, he should. What he misses is the fact that his faith-based worldview is no match for a worldview founded on reality and reason.

vi. People disagree about what is perceptually self-evident.

Peikoff deals with this kind of tired, go-nowhere statement very effectively in his book Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (pp. 9-10):

“People disagree about axioms,” we hear. “What is self-evident to one may not be self-evident to another. How then can a man know that his axioms are objectively true? How can he ever be sure he is right?”

This argument starts by accepting the concept of “disagreement,” which it uses to challenge the objectivity of any axioms, including existence, consciousness, and identity. The following condensed dialogue suggests one strategy by which to reveal the argument’s contradictions. The strategy begins with A, the defender of axioms, purporting to reject outright the concept “disagreement.”

A.. “Your objection to the self-evident has no validity. There is no such thing as disagreement. People agree about everything.”
B. “That’s absurd. People disagree constantly, about all kinds of things.”
A. “How can they? There’s nothing to disagree about, no subject matter. After all, nothing exists.”
B. “Nonsense. All kinds of things exist. You know that as well as I do.”
A. “That’s one. You must accept the existence axiom even to utter the term ‘disagreement’. But, to continue, I still claim that disagreement is unreal. How can people disagree, since they are unconscious beings who are unable to hold ideas at all?”
B. “Of course people hold ideas. They are conscious beings – you know that.”
A. “There’s another axiom. But even so, why is disagreement about ideas a problem? Why should it suggest that one or more of the parties is mistaken? Perhaps all of the people who disagree about the very same point are equally, objectively right.”
B. “That’s impossible. If two ideas contradict each other, they can’t both be right. Contradictions can’t exist in reality. After all, things are what they are. A is A.”

Existence, consciousness, identity are presupposed by every statement and by very concept, including that of “disagreement.” (They are presupposed even by invalid concepts, such as “ghost” or “analytic” truth.) In the act of voicing his objection, therefore, the objector has conceded the case. In any act of challenging or denying the three axioms, a man reaffirms them, no matter what the particular content of his challenge. The axioms are invulnerable.

Mr. Manata’s goal in vi. was to bring the axioms into dispute by declaring that people disagree about axioms. But, as Peikoff points out, just by acknowledging that there are people who can disagree about anything, Mr. Manata only succeeds in affirming the truth of the axioms while seeking to deny them. As Peikoff succinctly puts it, "The axioms are invulnerable."

vii. Why trust your axioms? Maybe it's just perceptually self-evident to you.

Having run out of objections which can be groomed to appear substantial, Mr. Manata is now obviously grasping for anything that can be turned into a weapon against the axioms. But as before, he seems oblivious to the fact that he must assume their truth even to dispute them. To say "maybe it's just perceptually self-evident to you" concedes the truth of the axioms: something would have to exist for the terms in such a statement to be meaningful, and someone would have to be conscious in order to utter them. Man has no choice about what is fundamentally true; this much is for certain. Wishing does not make something true (unless of course you’re Geusha ;). The most fundamental choice we have is to think, or to evade thinking. If we choose to think, then we are already affirming the truth of the axioms implicitly, whether we consciously realize it or not. In order to think, we must first exist (there’s the first axiom), we also must be conscious (there’s the second axiom), and our consciousness must have the kind of nature that enables cognitive processing (there’s the third axiom). In fact, in order for thinking even to be an option, the axioms must be true, since thinking, even as a potential, is a conscious activity. And if there were no consciousness (a supposition entailed by any rejection of the axioms), then thinking could not be considered an option (since there would be no consciousness to do the thinking and since consideration of options is a conscious activity as well).

To assert this all a matter of “trust” is to commit the fallacy of the stolen concept: these facts must be true long before we even get to the question of trusting someone or something. Since trust is a conscious activity, the axioms would have to already be true in order for us even to form the concept, let alone probe questions concerning what should or should not be trusted. In sum, the truth of the axioms does not depend on anyone's trust in them. They are true whether we trust them or not, which simply means that trust is irrelevant to their truth. They don't stop being true simply because someone chooses to distrust them.

viii. (If you says you knows that his perception is true for everone) How do you know this, then how do you know what you just said, ad infinitum. That is, how do you escape infintie regress? [sic]

Questions about truth only become an issue when considering statements about things, and even then only if we do so honestly. We do not say that a rock is either true or false, but we can say that a statement about the rock is either true or false. We can say, for instance, that the rock sitting in the garden came from a nearby construction site. This may or may not be true, and such claims are open to investigation. But the rock itself is neither true nor untrue, it simply is.

Now, the concept ‘perception’ refers to an autonomic physical activity of a biological organism. Perception can no more be “wrong” or “untrue” than a heartbeat or digestion. We would not say that hair growth is untrue, would we? Why then would we say that perceiving an object is untrue? Where did the critic of the primacy of perception get the concepts ‘true’ and ‘untrue’? To what do they refer? Indeed, if one is not perceiving something, he’s not conscious, for perception is the means by which biological organisms are conscious. To be conscious is to be conscious of something. If someone says that he is aware of an object but that the body’s perceptual faculty is not involved in making that awareness possible, can he identify the means by which he has this awareness? Perhaps he just has “faith” – that is, he feels it in some non-sensory manner. In other words, he appeals to nonsense.

ix. Just assert me that your view is axiomatic (dogmatism).

To recognize that one’s view is founded on the basis of undeniable axioms is not to declare his view in toto is summarily axiomatic. Axioms provide objective grounding to an entire conceptual hierarchy: while the total architecture of the context of knowledge is supported on the firm basis of axioms, we do not claim that all the concepts and affirmations that inform the entire structure of that hierarchy are axiomatic. Properly formed non-axiomatic abstractions are formed on the basis of the axioms, and ultimately reduce to the axioms as well. For instance, I hold to the view that man has the right to exist for his own sake, i.e., that he does not need to seek permission from anyone, either real or imagined, to live. But I do not declare this view as an axiom. Indeed, Objectivism is extremely careful about what it calls an axiom. An axiom has the following qualities:

It names a perceptually self-evident fact
Its truth not inferred from prior truths
Its truth conceptually irreducible
Its truth is implicit in all perception
Its truth is implicit in all knowledge and any statement
Its truth must be assumed even in denying it

Consider the axiom of existence: the concept ‘existence’ refers generally to anything and everything that exists. We know that things exist because we have awareness of them, and that awareness is possible by means of perceptual integration of sensory input. By saying ‘existence exists’, the Objectivist is simply affirming that there is a reality, for reality is the realm of existence. He does not infer this truth from prior truths, for there could be no truths prior to the fact that there is a reality. To what would those allegedly “prior truths” refer? To something other than reality? To non-reality? The unreal is unreal, so originating claims on the basis of something other than reality could not lead to truth. Thus beginning with non-reality (or non-existence, as religionists do) is futile. Also, the concept ‘existence’ is conceptually irreducible; it is not defined in terms of prior concepts (again, to what would those prior concepts refer if not to things that exist?), but is defined ostensively, that is, by pointing to reality. Moreover, the concept ‘existence’ is implicit in all perception, since perception is perception of something (i.e., of something that exists) by someone (i.e., by a conscious subject which also exists). Likewise, since objective knowledge is grounded ultimately on what is perceived, the concept ‘existence’ is implicit in any knowledge claim, any inference, any generalization, any conclusion, since knowledge is knowledge of something. And lastly, as we saw above, the truth of the existence axiom must be assumed even in an attempt to deny its truth.

x. Or, repeat what you've already said, i.e., that it's perceptually self-evident (circularism).

Repeating a truth does not make that truth “circular,” if by this one means the fallacy of circular reasoning. They are true whether one repeats them or not. Furthermore, as pointed out above, the axioms are not inferred from prior truths; on the contrary, they are the truths on which all other truths stand. The axioms would have to be true for anything else to be true, since the concept ‘truth’ refers to statements which accurately identify some actual state of affairs. That is, statements that are true are statements that accurately identify reality (the realm of existence). So there's no instance of fallacious reasoning undergirding the axioms since they do not derive their truth from prior argument. Indeed, if the axioms were not true, there would be nothing to argue about and no one to assemble any arguments.

xi. How do we learn of these axioms?

By discovering them. As adults this requires the process of conceptual reduction, which involves systematically breaking our concepts down to their most fundamental assumptions, and checking to see if we've hit bottom, so to speak. The truth of the axioms is already implicit in our first perceptual experiences, since the axioms identify what we directly perceive. So long as we are conscious of anything, the axioms are present. In fact, the axioms are implicit in all perception, since perception is the fundamental, pre-conceptual awareness of some object by some conscious subject. Perception is perception of something, so the only validation that the axioms require is the relationship between a knowing subject and the objects it perceives.

But identifying these truths as axioms does require a hierarchy of knowledge which is consistent with those truths and which is enables a serious thinker to consider the question: What is fundamental to the knowledge I know? Unless one introspects honestly on the nature and source of his knowledge, however, it's probable that he will misconstrue the nature of his own mind as he misconstrues the nature and source of knowledge. The result of such misconstrual is religion.

To conclude, we should not miss the fact that the problem for Mr. Manata on this topic is that he does not understand how the human mind forms concepts from perceptions. And he doesn’t understand this because his worldview does not explain how the mind forms concepts to begin with. Essentially, he does not understand the relationship between the conceptual and the perceptual, and how the perceptual holds epistemological primacy over the conceptual. This is going to be extremely difficult for Mr. Manata to grasp because he has chosen to commit himself to a worldview which holds that the subject of consciousness holds metaphysical primacy over its objects rather than the other way around, even though he must assume the very opposite in order to think and act. It is here where the ultimate problem lies: the willful devotion to a position which is ultimately subjective in nature – that is, a view of the world which grants metaphysical primacy to the subject of consciousness over its objects. So long as a mind remains committed to such a distorted and distorting view of the world, he will not be able to deal with these issues honestly.

by Dawson Bethrick

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