Even if the Christian faith ends up being true, there is still no reason thinking people should accept it. We can only accept claims that can be reasonably justified. That means we have to reject a lot of true claims because they have not met their own burden of proof. This is both obvious and noncontroversial. Aliens from space might have abducted someone, but without sufficient evidence commensurate with such a claim there is no reason why anyone should believe the person who asserts it. There are surely cases in which someone murdered another person, but no one suspects he did the evil deed because there is just no evidence to lead anyone to think he did. There are many hundreds of claims that we should never believe, even if they are true. That's the case when it comes to Christianity. Even if it's true, thinking people cannot accept it because it's wildly improbable.
DERIVATIVE BIZARRE BELIEFS
Most Christians have not thought deeply about their faith. Most of them just believe in God and the resurrection of Jesus. Based upon these twin beliefs, they accept the whole Bible, and so ends most of their attempts to understand what they believe. But behind these beliefs are a quagmire of others that can best be described
by an outsider
to be nothing short of bizarre. So in the interests of showing just how preposterous their beliefs are, I'll share some of them here that will seem bizarre precisely because Christians will be unfamiliar with them and the problems they entail.
First, the Trinity. Christian scholars wrestle with trying to make sense of the Trinity. There are social Trinitarians and antisocial Trinitarians. Both sides accuse the other side of abandoning the Chalcedon creed, either in the direction of tritheism (i.e., the Godhead is three separate beings forming three separate Gods), or in the direction of unitarianism (i.e., denying there are three distinct persons in the Godhead). There are Christians who maintain the Father eternally created the Son and the Holy Spirit, while others argue such a view is tantamount to the Son being a creature created ex nihilo (out of nothing). Yet an eternally existing Trinity is inexplicable; there just happened to be three divine beings who all shared the same nature.
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It's hard enough to conceive of one person who is an eternally uncaused God, much less a Godhead composed of three eternally uncaused persons who have always shared a divine nature and who therefore never learned anything new, never took a risk, never made a decision, never disagreed within the Godhead, and never had a prior moment to freely choose his own nature.
This Godhead is also conceived of as a timeless being that was somehow able to create the first moment of time. How a timeless being could actually do this is extremely problematic. How does one make a decision when there is no time in which to make a decision? Even if God's decision to create a first moment of time is an “eternal” one (whatever that's supposed to mean), there is still no temporal gap between his decision to create the first moment of time and the actual first moment of time. Even then, God's first act is located in time—it happens at the first moment of time. In other words, a timeless God could not eternally decide to create something at some “future” time since there is no future time for him. His decision to create would be simultaneous with the act of him creating. Therefore if God created at all, he can
never
be outside of time.
There is also the problem of what it means to say God is a spirit and how a spiritual being can create the physical universe. How does something that is spirit create something material, or interact with it, unless there is some point of contact between them that they both share? For instance, how can God speak audibly and be heard by sound waves to our ears, unless he can move sound waves? Logically they cannot interact, unless they share some kind of quality. Are spirit and matter two poles of the same reality? Then welcome to
panentheism
, or process theology. Are they one and the same? Then welcome to pantheism (all is “spirit”) or metaphysical naturalism (all is matter). If a spiritual God can create this universe, then Christians need to show how it is possible for God to create the physical universe if he is a spirit.
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From here it only gets worse.
We are told that the Logos, the second person of the Trinity, became a man, Jesus. No conception of this God-man in the flesh has yet been able to stand scrutiny. How, for instance, can such a being be 100 percent God and 100 percent man with nothing left over? The Bible itself tells us that ancient superstitious people believed sons of god walked the earth (Acts 14:11–12; 28:6), so why should I believe Jesus was any more a son of God than they were? All attempts to solve this problem have failed. Jesus began to exist while God did not. Jesus had a specific location on earth in a body, while God is everywhere. Jesus died and stayed dead for three days, while God has always been alive. Jesus was not omniscient (Mark 13:32), while God supposedly knows all true propositions. Jesus was tempted to sin, while God cannot be tempted to sin against himself.
But we're not done, for there is a question about when the second person of the trinity became a man. If the eternal Logos was always 100 percent god and 100 percent man before creation and before his birth on earth, then we have the inexplicable problem of an eternally existing human being. How could the Logos be a human being before God created humanity? Humanity then existed as God did: without a beginning. Is a human being therefore divine like God? What, then, is the difference between deity and humanity? If, however, Jesus the God-man was a unique, never-before-existing being who is described in the creeds as being one unified person, then the Logos became forever united with the flesh of the man Jesus in first-century Palestine. So when Jesus died on the cross, why didn't the Logos also cease to exist? Otherwise, what sense can be made of the claim that the Logos was united in the man Jesus? If united as one being then when Jesus died, so also the Logos should have died. Or conversely, if the Logos can't die, then Jesus could not have died.
There is an additional question about where the human side of this God-man is right now. Since the human side of the God-man is believed to be sinless, then the human side of the God-man can't be destroyed by a good God in hell, nor can he be separated from the Logos, since such a being is considered to be one unified person according to the creeds. Theologians have concluded the Trinity now includes an embodied Logos (if he wasn't already embodied before the incarnation). Now we have a Trinity who will forever exist with an embodied human being attached to the Logos, the human side of Jesus. If conceiving the Trinity isn't hard enough to swallow,
picture that three-headed monster
with a
human head
attached to one part of it! Just step back for a moment and ask yourself if this isn't indeed a
very
bizarre set of beliefs.
Consider what kind of evidence could possibly convince you if a trusted friend said that last week he met a person in India who was God incarnate. I daresay nothing would convince you of this. Think about it. Now, when it comes to Jesus, we don't personally know anyone who claims to have met him, nor do we know the authors of the Gospels, nor can we adequately judge their honesty (honest writing can easily be faked). But we do know these authors lived in an era when people believed sons of gods walked the earth and that they had virgin births. So if we wouldn't believe such an extraordinary claim today, how much more should we not believe one in the superstitious era of the first-century CE? Since this is obviously the case, Christians don't believe because of the evidence. No. Rather, they believe because they were raised to believe in a Christian culture, and now they defend what they prefer to be true.
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Stepping forward a bit, there is the question of a resurrected body for believers. Many human bodies have been eaten by cannibals, bears, sharks, and parasites. Others have been lost at sea or cremated. How can there be a bodily resurrection for these bodies if they no longer exist? If eaten by parasites, are those bodies still human? If decomposed into the ground as fertilizer for weeds, are those bodies still human? Is a resurrected body therefore a replica of the one on earth? How can it be said the replica is the same as the original? If the resurrected body is a replica, then what do believers say about such a replica being created
before
we die, or even a multiple number of them? Is it possible for a person to be one and the same with a multiple number of persons in heaven? Which body of ours is the basis for the replica one that gets resurrected—the one we had when we were ten years old, forty years old, or the one we died with while suffering from Alzheimer's disease? Would we even want a replica body in the resurrection since most of our bodies are flawed to some degree? And if we are instead given perfect bodies, then what does a perfect body look like? Does it even make sense to say resurrected people will all receive perfect bodies? If perfect, will they all look exactly the same—or not, and if not, will some of them have imperfections precisely because of these differences? If believers are rewarded differently in heaven with better, more perfect bodies depending on how they lived their lives, then what becomes of the claim that God in Jesus forgave them for all their sins? Either he did or he didn't. There can therefore be no different rewards for people in heaven; otherwise, God doesn't forgive all sins after all, for the failure to obey God perfectly would be a sin not forgiven, a sin of omission, which is punished with a less perfect body or a less perfect mansion in the sky.
We're also told by Christian apologists that sinners who are sent to hell will retain their free will. They have a great difficulty in thinking a good God would punish people so cruelly unless sinners continue to rebel (and rightly so). But then these same apologists will turn around and claim the saved who enter heaven will have their free will taken away, in order to guarantee there will be no future rebellion in heaven. Hey, why not? But if free will is such a great gift, why reward people by taking it away from them and punish people by having them retain it? That makes little sense to me. If that's the kind of people God eventually wants in heaven, then why even bother creating this world in the first place? Why not skip a step and just create people in heaven without any free will?
Then finally the God who created time must forever be subject to time in a sequence of events. He cannot become timeless again (if it ever made sense for him to be timeless in the first place), for to do so would destroy everything that took place in human history. If God became timeless again then time itself never existed, and hence neither did we.
So in the end an inexplicably triune, timeless God will forever exist inside time with a human being connected at the hip to the Logos in a heaven where the saved are not free to disobey him and the damned in hell are free to obey but never change their rebellious ways, even knowing that their ways put them there in the first place. Why does this not sound like an utterly absurd myth?
A one-worded question cries out to be answered:
Why?
Why did a completely fulfilled, triune supreme being, who neither needed nor wanted anything, bother creating at all? Why would he do it knowing this world would have so much ubiquitous suffering in it and knowing he would inexplicably have to suffer an atoning death on the cross for us? He knew billions of people would suffer eternally for his decision. For Christians to respond that God did this because it was his gift of grace utterly misses the point of the question. How is it a gracious gift to create such a world, knowing in advance that all this suffering would have to take place, just so that people who no longer have free will could be with him in heaven? If this is actually what God did, then thinking Christians themselves should all rise up and demand an answer for why God created this world at all. If I was a Christian, I would protest God for creating this world even if I were to end up in heaven. I would rather that God never created anything at all than for him to create this world if my friends and family members were to wind up in hell, along with billions of other people. If I were a selfless, “agape” loving Christian, I would gladly have preferred nonexistence to an enslaved existence in heaven for me and along with it the eternal sufferings of so many others in hell.
Who in their right mind would embrace Christianity if he or she heard about all these and all the other weird beliefs when first being challenged to believe? Very, very few people. In their book
Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior
, Ori and Rom Brafman document that human beings have irrational biases that blind us to all evidence that contradicts our initial assessment of a person or situation. In order to counteract these biases, they suggest asking a simple question: “If I were just arriving on the scene and were given the choice to either jump into this project as it stands now or pass on it, would I choose to jump in?”
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Similarly, believers must ask themselves if they knew what they know now, would they ever make the decision to convert in the first place? What evidence was initially presented? Usually none at all. Usually what produces a conversion to faith is the gospel story itself and the divine hope and love it promises. There is no discussion about how Jesus was 100 percent God and 100 percent man, or how the death of Jesus atones for sins, or even what to think about the millions of people who will wind up in hell. So, if you were arriving on the scene when you were first presented the gospel, would you believe, knowing what you do now? That's a great question to ask!
DEFENDING THE FAITH MAKES
BRILLIANT PEOPLE LOOK STUPID
If Christianity is wildly improbable, then defending it can make even brilliant people look stupid. I mean no offense here. In fact, I think it takes a great deal of intelligence to defend Christian theism, because Christianity cannot be defended without a great deal of mental contortionism. To see this, we'll just look briefly at three arguments by the three men admired most by evangelicals in our generation: Alvin Plantinga, William Lane Craig, and Richard G. Swinburne.