A Big Name Debate

Enjoy!

-Ben

Lunatic, Liar, Lord, Legend, Logical Leap: What evidence or logic is so compelling that we are willing to believe accounts of Jesus’ miracles? – Guest Post by Thor Odhner

In making my way through Neil’s thorough response to Price’s book and starting to address his arguments individually, I found myself dissatisfied with the discussion, and asking why the whole debate seemed irrelevant to me.  I just don’t feel particularly intrigued by Price’s angle of attack here because it seems to be targeting only a particular subset of Christians – those who believe so strongly in the complete inerrancy of the Bible and the historical reporting of Jesus’ life and works that any compelling evidence that some minute details of the New Testament have been inserted, tampered with, fabricated, etc. would require them to re-examine their entire worldview.

The thing is, many Christians believe that Christ was the son of God, and directs and maintains the gospel through some divine protection so that it is maintained in essence, but that the particular facts and figures of a book that’s been sliced and diced and translated and committee-ized and editorialized throughout history aren’t really all that important.  The religion of my upbringing teaches that both the Old and New Testaments contain an internal sense – the true and direct revelation – that was only fully revealed and documented as of 350 years ago or so.

It would seem, then, that the most important distinction here is, If Jesus existed, was he more than simply human, and did he do things no human can do? This is the only detail of this debate I’m actually interested in discussing.  Why? Because, if the answer is, “No.” then none of the other aspects of this discussion really matter beyond mundane, academic debate, do they?

Now, one very popular line of reason used to discuss the possible ways to regard the Biblical Jesus is the “Lunatic, Liar, or Lord” trilemma popularized by C. S. Lewis and referred to by Neil on this blog at times.  To me, depending on exactly what point you’re trying to make, this reasoning can represent the laziest form of “false trichotomy”.   The explanation for Jesus that I find by far the most probable, the one held by the majority of secular Biblical scholars and historians, and the one held by the Jesus Seminar – that Jesus of the Bible was a legend, whether or not some aspects of the legend are taken from a historical figure – is not represented here.

To me, the “Liar” option is irrelevant, as we have never heard a single word directly from Jesus.  All we know about what he said was recounted by others, and could have been fabricated second hand.  And why does it matter what he said about himself?  If he really DID all of the things that are attributed to him (walking on water, raising the dead) then as far as I’m concerned, the portion of the debate I care about (does that kind of supernatural power exist) is settled.

The “Lunatic” bit is not really too fair either.  That harsh label is not very consistent with how secularists and those with differing religious beliefs view contemporary claims of religious experience.  My grandfather is one of the greatest, most moral men I know.  He is one of my biggest sources of comfort and guidance when I’m grappling with a moral issue.  He’s also been a priest/bishop his entire adult life, describes vividly his relationship and communications with the Lord, and converses regularly with his dead wife.  I assure you, he is not a lunatic.  I don’t think Neil would find him to be a lunatic, even though his claims probably don’t match up with the interpretation of Christianity that Neil subscribes to.  He’s a good human being who has a certain context through which he interprets his internal experiences – that’s pretty normal.

If we can excuse and identify with people who hold such beliefs about their own experiences today, when folks can be expected to know quite a bit about brain chemistry, consciousness, etc. how much more so can we understand and excuse such self-analysis by a figure living in Jesus’ time?

Now, I’m confident that Neil is well aware that this LLL trilemma only even begins to be worth discussing once we have established that Jesus of the Bible really existed, and that he actually taught and said and DID(!) all of the things attributed to him.  This is probably why he’s focusing his attention on the historicity of the New Testament.

This brings me back to my original point… what aspects of the New Testament need to be demonstrated as historically accurate before we can move on to follow-up questions like whether Jesus was truly the Son of God?  Surely, this ALL hinges on the miracles attributed to Jesus.  Take those away, and the story is easily believable, whether or not it’s true.  Sure, there are juicy politics and moral teachings and an interesting plot, but legend or fact, it’s still no more worth focusing on than any other story without those miracles.

So before we can move anywhere else, I propose that the case must be made that:

Based on all evidence and records available, it is more reasonable/logical/prudent to believe that Jesus accomplished the miracles ascribed to him than it is to believe that these claims are mere legend.

So what would it take to convincingly make that case? We are all free to judge the evidence and arguments however we like, so I’ll just speak for myself.

I look around the world today and see many examples of people making extraordinary claims.  There is no shortage of supposed miracle workers.  Ah, but do others testify to the authenticity of these miracles and claim to have witnessed them first hand?  In most cases, yes.  Almost always, there is a lack of determinative evidence one way or the other to verify or falsify the claims.  And remember that in these cases, we’re often only a couple of days, weeks, or years out!  And we have modern science and detection technology and molecular analysis, etc. on our side!  If someone says, “This wine used to be water.” all we can really analyze is whether the substance presented is now wine.  In almost every case, the entire question hinges completely on whether the claims of supposed witnesses, first-hand or otherwise, are enough to persuade us that something extraordinary, and seemingly contradictory to all of our experiences has occurred.

Also, we are usually not simply being asked to believe that something unprecedented occurred; rather than being able to search the universe and look for a way to explain this claimed occurrence, we are additionally asked to believe that this departure from all known experience was and intentional action on the part of a being of superior knowledge and ability to what we have encountered.  The explanation is packaged with the event as one claim.

This is an important distinction.  If an apple were to detach from a tree, but fail to fall to the ground, we would certainly be amazed and shaken to the core, but we’d then set out to look for reasonable explanations and expect to learn something new to incorporate into our understanding of the universe for a more comprehensive picture of how things work.  The claimed event and the claimed explanation (often MORE far-fetched than the claimed event itself) each require consideration and compound the improbability of the claim.

So from what position can we determine that this particular far-fetched story and companion explanation – conveniently tucked in the distant past, with relatively few individuals reported as having ever claimed to be first-hand witnesses, and with the people of that time having hardly a shadow of our current understanding of science, the universe, and what is possible – bears believing over the countless other extraordinary stories we are barraged with every day and dismiss as faulty reporting?

I must say that I have not encountered any evidence or logic that even tickles my curiosity as to whether these claims might be accurate.  I did, however, accept most of these claims as true for most of my life, but that was when my only requirement for belief was, “Might this be true?” and not “Why ought I expect that this is true and not false?” Noting this switch in my own approach, I am not in the least bit surprised or persuaded by the fact that so many still harbor such beliefs.

I’d love to hear anyone’s thoughts, comments, responses, etc.  I’m particularly interested in whether anyone has some communicable logic or evidence that they feel warrants acceptance of these claims that otherwise seem so preposterously far-fetched against the backdrop of our experiences.

Thor

Richard Dawkins Has A New Book!

Hi Folks,

I recommend checking out “The Greatest Show on Earth – The Evidence for Evolution”, by Richard Dawkins.  You can read the first chapter at www.richarddawkins.net.  There is also a 3 minute video you might enjoy watching to get you excited about the book.

Naturally, the book has been banned in Turkey. 

CCD,

Ben

A Somewhat Lengthy Response to The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man – a Guest Post by Christian Advocate, Neil Shenvi

I’ve once again been given the opportunity by Ben to take the podium of this blog.  At his recommendation, I recently read Robert Price’s The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man, a work which attempts to demonstrate that, at best, we can know almost nothing about the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth, if he ever even existed.  I am very thankful for the opportunity that reading this book provided.  It has prodded me to carefully investigate challenging arguments to my faith and as a result has greatly strengthened my confidence in the historicity of the Bible.

Price’s main thesis is that the material found in the four gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) of the New Testament, which contain biographies of Jesus of Nazareth, is almost entirely fictional and bears little if any connection to actual historical events.  The book is arranged into 15 chapters, each of which treats large portions of Jesus’ life and ministry as found in the gospels: his birth and lineage (Chapter 2), his childhood and family (Chapter 3), his relationship to John the Baptist (Chapter 4), his miracles (Chapter 5), his ministry to outcasts (Chapter 6), his twelve disciples (Chapter 7), his teaching on salvation (Chapters 8 and 9), his relationship to Judaism (Chapter 10), his Messiahship (Chapter 11), his arrival in Jerusalem (Chapter 12), his crucifixion (Chapter 13), and his resurrection (Chapter 14).  In the final chapter, he gives a useful summary of the book:

Thus far, we have found a consistent pattern.  We found we were able to identify earlier and later layers of the gospel tradition, places where one oral tradition has superseded another, where one evangelist has edited or censored another’s work… We have arrived at the conclusion that the gospel tradition seems completely unreliable.  That is, most of the saying and stories alike seem to be historically spurious.  If any of them should chance to be genuine, we can no longer tell.  We cannot render their possible authenticity probable, so they fall to the cutting room floor. (p. 349; All quotes and page numbers are from the 2003 edition of the book.)

 In examining the validity of Price’s arguments, I’ll group my discussion of the book into three categories: historical objections, textual objections, and methodological objections.

A few words at the outset.  One of the criticisms that Price frequently levels at evangelical scholars is that they have a clear agenda: their goal is to support a traditional Christian understanding of the authority and inerrancy of the Bible and the historicity of the Biblical narrative (p. 21-22).  As a result, a critical reader should always question the conclusions of Christian writers because of their lack of impartiality.  I agree!  As a Christian who is trusting in Christ alone for his eternal salvation and forgiveness of sins, I certainly have a clear desire to affirm the reliability of the Bible, which renders me biased in my judgments.  However, I disagree that this argument applies only to Christians; it also applies to skeptics.  Can anyone truly be said to be a completely neutral, disinterested observer when it comes to the Bible?  A skeptic has implicitly or explicitly built his whole life on a view of reality which assumes that Jesus is not God, that he does not call us to repent and place our trust in him.  Doesn’t he then also have an inherent bias to find the Bible historically and theologically unreliable?  Nonetheless, I understand Price’s objections, and therefore I’ll try to use explicitly non-Christian scholarly sources when I discuss topics like dating the New Testament documents to avoid the possibility of pro-biblical bias. 

 

I. Historical objections

Price’s main tool in demonstrating the non-historicity of the gospels is the criterion of dissimilarity.  Since I will devote the third section of this essay to his use of this criterion, I will not discuss it here.  Instead in this section I will focus on specific arguments Price makes for the fictional nature of the gospel narratives.  To begin with, I’d like to show that many of Price’s arguments contain factual and historical errors.  I’d then like to give an overview of some of the positive evidence for the historicity of the New Testament that can be found outside of the New Testament in documentary sources and archaeological evidence.  Obviously, this section will be by no means exhaustive, either in its discussion of Price’s arguments or its presentation of the historical evidence. 

There are many different arguments Price uses to dismiss the reliability of the gospels.  One of his more creative ideas is based on the names of individuals in the gospel narratives.  There are four instances where Price characterizes gospel narratives as fictional due to what he believes are highly allegorical names.  In Chapter 5, he states that “we ought to catch the hint that [the story of Jesus raising Jairus’ daughter from the dead] is fictional, as the name ‘Jairus’ means ‘He will awaken’” (p. 152).  He uses similar arguments in Chapter 6:

“Jesus’ second encounter with a tax collector may be no more historical, especially as the name ‘Zacchaeus’ is just too good to be true for this character.  It is based on the Aramaic zakki, ‘to give alms’… Is it a coincidence that Nicodemus (whose name means ‘ruler of the people’) is said in John 3:1 to be ‘a ruler of the Jews’?  Is it a coincidence that Martha, the hostess of Luke 10:38, has a name meaning ‘Lady of the House’?  Is it a coincidence that the tax collector who is about to liquidate his holdings on behalf of the poor is called ‘Zacchaeus’?”(p. 170)

While it is true that the name “Martha” probably has Aramaic origins meaning “mistress”, Price’s other assertions are more questionable.  Nicodemus doesn’t exactly mean “ruler of the people”; it actually means “conqueror” or “victorious among his people” (the name is derived from the roots “nikos” = “victory” and “demos” = “people”).  As for the name “Zacchaeus”, I found no evidence that it is related to the Aramaic “zakki” = “to give alms”.  Instead, “Zacchaeus” is the Greek version of a Hebrew name meaning “pure”.    Simarly, “Jairus” is Hebrew in origin and means “my light”, “to diffuse light” or “God enlightens” rather than “he will awaken”.  Because Price doesn’t cite any of his sources for the etymology of these names, it’s unclear where his information comes from, but based on the sources listed above, it seems that declaring these narratives fictitious based on the names of the characters is unwarranted.

Another fascinating claim made by Price relates to the miraculous catch of fish in John 21.  In this post-Resurrection account, Jesus appears to Peter, John, and several other disciples while they are fishing.  He tells them to cast their net into the water and they pull out 153 fish.  Despite numerous attempts to explain it by Christian commentators, the specification of the precise number of fish seems to have no doctrinal, symbolic, or theological significance whatsoever.  In fact, many apologists have argued that the presence of these insignificant details may actually help to distinguish these stories as eyewitness accounts (see C.S. Lewis’ famous quote about the absence of the “realistic narrative” convention in ancient literature).    Consequently, I was quite shaken to see the very compelling explanation that Price gives for the number of fish:

This [story] has been borrowed from the lore of Pythagoras… The element of counting the fish makes sense only in the Pythagorean original, where the vegetarian sage’s supernormal wisdom enabled him to intuit the exact number.  And the number itself?  It turns out to be one of the ‘triangular’ numbers venerated by the mathematically astute Pythagoreans. (p. 158)

As I said, the plausibility of this argument was quite challenging to me.  However, there is a major problem with it that Price fails to mention.  Although most scholars (that is, non-evangelical scholars) date the Gospel of John to approximately 90 A.D., Price takes the view that it may have been written “in the late second century C.E.” (p. 38).   Although I’ll come back to this issue later, let’s assume Price’s dating for the Gospel of John is correct.   The difficulty of Price’s theory is that the biography of Pythagoras cited as the source of John’s borrowing was written by Iamblichus in 300 A.D.!  In other words, the author of John writing in “200 A.D.” (assuming Price’s dating) borrowed a story from Iamblichus who lived 100 years later.  Price might argue that the story of Pythagoras’ miraculous catch of fish originated with Pythagoras himself in 500 B.C. and that Iamblichus was merely the first to write it down.  But then he would be arguing that John, writing in “200 A.D.” about the events of Jesus’ life in 30 A.D. borrowed his story from oral legends about Pythagoras, who lived in 500 B.C., which were later accurately recorded by Iamblichus in 300 A.D.  Isn’t it far more likely that the Pythagoras story was borrowed from John?

There are numerous other cases where the borrowings that Price cites are substantially anachronistic.  For instance, Price cites several rabbinical works (p. 172-174) to show that the gospels are incorrect in portraying the Pharisees as opposed to Jesus’ association with repentant sinners.  Price argues that, in contradiction to the gospel reports, “rabbinic Judaism venerates holy men who associated with sinners as Jesus is said to have done” (p. 172).  However, the works he cites are Rabbi Zera in Sanhedrin 37  (c. 325 A.D.) and the Aboth of Rabbi Nathan (compiled between 700-900 A.D.), which were written 100 and 600 years after the gospels, respectively.  The rabbinic parallel to Jesus parable of the Prodigal Son cited by Price (p. 174) is from Pesikta Rabbati (c. 845 A.D.) and the parallel to the Workers in the Vineyard (p.174) is from the Jerusalem Talmud (compiled in the 3^rd and 4^th centuries A.D.).  Remember that according to Price’s own dating, the gospels were all written by “the late second century A.D.” (p. 38).  Presumably, Price is not accusing Jesus of some kind of prophetic plagiarism but is instead trying to make the case that the gospel writers borrowed their stories from contemporary rabbis.  However, can we really assert the priority of the rabbinic tradition given that the written records were compiled a minimum of one hundred years after the writing of the gospels (according to Price’s own timeline)?  The most egregious example that I found is in Chapter 7, where we find the following statement:

Again it is no surprise to see this passage [a quote from Yalkut Shimoni] closely paralleling Matthew (16:18), whose special material is decidedly Jewish and probably derivative from that source. (p. 188)

Again, the difficulty with this conclusion is that the source from which Price asserts that Matthew’s work is “probably derivative” is the Yalkut Shimoni  which was written sometime between 1000 and 1200 A.D. (see also the footnote on p. 129 here). 

Despite Price’s focus on textually-based arguments, he does make references to archaeological evidence that contradicts the claims of the New Testament.  For instance, on p. 14 Price remarks that “A major collision between the gospel tradition and archaeology concerns the existence of synagogues and Pharisees in pre-70 C.E. Galilee.  Historical logic implies that there would not have been any, since Pharisees fled to Galilee only after the fall of Jerusalem.”  This statement appears to be erroneous.  There is a several page discussion of the historical evidence for the existence of synagogues in pre-70 A.D. Galilee in Levine’s work The Ancient Synagogue p46-54 including this statement:

Almost a score of synagogues in first-century C.E. Judea are attested, especially in the literary sources… These include references in Josephus’ writings (Tiberias, Dor, Caeserea)… The assumption, then, that there were no synagogue buildings in Galilean towns and villages in the first century appears unwarranted.

In fact, it is possible that the Capernaum synagogue in which Jesus preached has recently been discovered in the foundation wall of a later structure.  Work is ongoing, but the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs website concludes that “the stone floor and the lower-earlier western wall are remains of the synagogue from the time of Jesus described in the New Testament” (see Capernaum – City of Jesus).   It is also not true that “historical logic” implies that there would “not have been any” Pharisees in Galilee (p. 15).  In fact, Josephus makes reference to Pharisees visiting Galilee from Jerusalem during the period in question, and the famous Pharisee Yochanan ben Zakai lived in Galilee in the mid first-century according to the Talmud.  The question currently debated among scholars is not whether there were any Pharisees in Galilee but whether they are as common as the gospels indicate (see Jesus and the Pharisees and also The Historical Jesus in Recent Research p. 482 for a discussion of this issue). 

Because Price’s arguments are mainly textual, meaning that they derive from an examination of biblical documents rather than appeal to external sources, it is easy to come away with the impression that in terms of assessing the accuracy of the biblical record, the biblical text is all we have. That is not quite the case.  In the remainder of this section, I’d like to outline some of the extra-biblical evidence we have for the historicity of the New Testament.

To begin with, let’s examine historical references to Jesus from non-Christian sources roughly contemporary (1^st and 2^nd century AD) with the New Testament sources.  One of the principal sources used by historians of first-century Palestine is the writing of Josephus, a Jewish historian born in 37 A.D.  In The Antiquities we find the following passage (see http://www.sacred-texts.com/jud/josephus/ant-20.htm, Chapter 9):

He [the high priest] convened a meeting of the Sanhedrin and brought before them a man names James, the brother of Jesus, who was called the Christ, and certain others.  He accused them of having transgressed the law and delivered them up to death.

There is another passage in Josephus that goes into much more detail about Jesus, but since that one is disputed I’ll ignore it (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephus_on_Jesus for a lengthy discussion on the question of this second passage’s authenticity).  Next, let’s look at the Roman (non-Christian) historian Tacitus in A.D. 115 (see: http://classics.mit.edu/Tacitus/annals.11.xv.html):

Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace.  Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Pontius Pilate, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked only for the moment, again broke out not only in Judea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome.

Next, there’s Pliny the Younger, a Roman governor who wrote this in his letters to Trajan:

An information was presented to me without any name subscribed, containing a charge against several persons: these, upon examination, denied they were, or ever had been, Christians. They repeated after me an invocation to the gods, and offered religious rites with wine and frankincense before your statue; (which for that purpose I had ordered to be brought together with those of the Gods) and even reviled the name of Christ; whereas there is no forcing, it is said, those who are really Christians, into any of these compliances… They affirmed the whole of their guilt, or their error, was, that they met on a certain stated day before it was light, and addressed themselves in a form of prayer to Christ, as to some god, binding themselves by a solemn oath, not for the purposes of any wicked design, but never to commit any fraud, theft, or adultery; never to falsify their word, nor deny a trust when they should be called upon to deliver it up: after which, it was their custom to separate, and then re-assemble, to eat in common a harmless meal.

There are a few others (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus), but just from these we obtain the following picture of Jesus: He lived in first-century Palestine in Judea during the reign of Pontius Pilate, was called the Christ (the Greek word for ‘Messiah’), was crucified under Pilate, and was worshipped as a god by his followers who continued to grow in number despite his crucifixion.  These accounts also confirm several other details mentioned in the New Testament, such as the name of Jesus’ brother James (Gal. 1:19), the practice of communion (1 Cor. 11:20-29) (or at least a communal fellowship meal, Acts 2:42-47), the refusal of Christians to acknowledge other gods (1 Cor. 10:18-21; Luke 12:8-9), and the moral practices of the early Christians (Gal. 5:19-24).  Although there are obviously a plethora of references to Christ in early extra-biblical Christian writings (Clement, Ignatius, Justin Martyr), some of whom explicitly mention having contact with eyewitnesses of Jesus’ life or the subjects of his healings (Papias quoted by Eusebius), I think these non-Christian sources are the most compelling because the authors had no allegiance to Christianity or any desire to bolster the claims of what they considered a ‘mischievous superstition’.  So far from a lack of corroborative evidence for the existence of Christ, we actually have quite a lot of documentary evidence from both Christian and non-Christian sources.

In addition to the documentary evidence regarding the life of Christ, we also have a massive amount of archaeological evidence confirming numerous central and supporting details in the New Testament narratives.  For instance, archaeologists have found the burial box of the high priest Caiaphas (Matthew 26:57-67), the synagogue at Capernaum (Mark 1:21-28), Jacob’s well (John 4), the pool at Bethesda (John 5:1-14), the pool at Siloam (John 9:1-14), the theater at Ephesus (Acts 19:29), and Herod’s palace at Caesera (Acts 23:33-35).  In Acts, Luke uses the correct regional titles for government officials in Thessalonica (‘politarchs’), Ephesus (‘temple wardens’), Cyprus (‘proconcil’), and Malta (‘the first man of the island’).  Physical evidence such as inscriptions have also confirmed such figures as governor Pontius Pilate, Gallio proconsul of Achaia (Acts 18:12-17), Erastus city treasurer of Corinth (Rom 16:23), and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene (Luke 3:1).  This is only an extremely small fraction of the confirmatory evidence of the historicity of the gospels and the other New Testament documents, as entire books have been written on the subject.  The classic text on the historical reliability of the New Testament is F.F. Bruce’s The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? which is available free online.   A more recent work which focuses on archaeology in particular is John McCray’s Archaeology and the New Testament.

II. Textual objections

In some ways, examining the external historical evidence for Price’s claims is only secondary to our investigation of his book, since his conclusions are based mostly on textual and internal evidence from the documents of the New Testament itself.  Therefore, in this section, I’d like to look at Price’s treatment of the biblical text and determine whether Price’s arguments are based on sound reasoning and a comprehensive treatment of the source materials.

Before going any further, we need to discuss the dating of the documents of the New Testament.  Price’s conclusions about the authorship and dating of the New Testament documents conflict not only with those of evangelical scholars, but with those of most critical (i.e. non-evangelical) scholars as well.  A good reference for readers interested in learning more about critical scholarship of the New Testament can be found in Bart Ehrman’s textbook The New Testament: A historical introduction to the early Christian writings.  Ehrman is a former evangelical Christian and now an agnostic whose recent works include Misquoting Jesus and God’s Problem: how the Bible fails to answer our most important question – why we suffer, so it is probably safe to assume that he does not bring a significant pro-biblical bias to his work.  A comparison of Price’s timeline of New Testament authorship to the timeline in Ehrman’s work (p. 41, The New Testament) or to the one found on Wikipedia’s entry on the New Testament reveals stark differences.  Price proposes the following dates for the final redaction of the gospels: 100-132 A.D. for the Gospel of Mark (p. 33), mid 2^nd-century for the Matthew (p. 33), mid-2^nd century for Luke-Acts (p. 33), and 125-175 A.D. for John (p. 34), although he also states later that “By our evidence, vague as it is, the Gospels might possibly have been written as late as the third century C.E.” (p. 40).  In contrast, the general consensus of critical (non-evangelical) scholarship is: Mark (65-73 A.D.), Matthew (70-100 A.D.), Luke (80-100 A.D.), and John (90-110 A.D.) (evangelicals would probably tend to date the gospels slightly earlier).  Thus Price dates these documents between 50 and 200 years later than the majority of non-evangelical scholars.

Why are these dates important?  Mainly because the earlier the date of authorship, the less feasible are Price’s arguments about legendary accretion and borrowing.  The dating of critical scholars puts the composition of the gospels (to say nothing of the Pauline epistles, which they believe were written between 50-70 A.D.) well within the lifetime of the apostles and other eyewitnesses of the life of Jesus.  As a result, it becomes more difficult to allege as Price does that the gospel writers had no first-hand knowledge of Jesus and fabricated most of the accounts of his life.  All that being said, let’s assume for the sake of argument that Price’s dating assumptions are accurate and simply examine his arguments as they stand in relation to the biblical text.

Again, due to the diversity of arguments that Price presents it is difficult to treat them systematically.  Although I won’t address them in any particular order, I think a clear pattern of exegesis emerges from Price’s treatments of different texts.  Price consistently builds his argument on a small number of passages while passing over other pieces of evidence that might challenge his theories. 

For instance, Price claims that Jesus was not originally thought to be the ‘Son of David’, but that this fact was added later to support his Messianic qualifications.  In Chapter 2, he states that “we can trace a trajectory along which the early Christian belief regarding Jesus’ genealogical credentials evolved” (p. 46).  In other words, Price believes that originally, Christians knew that Jesus was not a descendant of David, and simply rejected the idea that the Messiah would come from David’s house.  Only later, did Luke and Matthew decide to reinsert the idea of Jesus’ descent from David.  Let’s look at the evidence for this claim. 

First, we have the fascinating incident in the Temple from Mark 12:35-37:

And Jesus said, as he taught in the temple, ‘How can the scribes say that the Christ is the Son of David?  David himself said by the Holy Spirit, “The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand, until I put your enemies beneath your feet.’”  David himself calls him ‘Lord,’ so how can he be his son?’” 

Price asserts that this was actually an early apologetic attempt to deny the requirement that the Messiah be a son of David: “whether Christians created or borrowed [this passage], the implications are the same: there was a time when Christians knew quite well that their Christ was not a Davidic descendent and made the best of it” (p.47-48).  But let’s look more closely at Mark 12:35-37.  Let’s imagine that the author’s intent was to undermine the idea of a Davidic messiah.  Does this motive fit the reasoning of the passage?  Absolutely not!  Jesus asks the Pharisees why David calls the Messiah ‘Lord’.  The answer “Because the Messiah is not Davidic” doesn’t make any sense.  Why would David call the non-Davidic Messiah “Lord”?  Would the fact that the Messiah was not a descendent of David explain David’s deference to him?  In fact, the traditional explanation does a much better job fitting the logic of Jesus question: “The Messiah must not only be David’s son, but also David’s Lord.”

There are several other pieces of evidence to refute Price’s hypothesis that the idea of Jesus’ Davidic ancestry was a development that came after Mark.  First, we read in Mark 2:25-28 that when the Pharisees complain that Jesus’ disciples are breaking the Sabbath, he responds “Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need?” (Mark 2:25).  In other words, Jesus compares himself to David and his disciples to David’s companions.  Could this merely be a rhetorical device or merely a reference to the fact that both groups were hungry (p. 257)?  Perhaps.  What about the blind man on the road to Jerusalem:

When [the blind man] heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout, ‘Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!’ Many rebuked him and told him to be quiet, but he shouted all the more, ‘Son of David, have mercy on me!’  Jesus stopped and said, “Call him.” (Mark 10:46-49)

Perhaps this passage only proves that one blind man falsely assumed that Jesus was a Davidic Messiah.  But apparently, the blind man was not the only one who had this idea:

Those who went ahead [of Jesus as he entered Jersualem] and those who followed shouted, “Hosanna!” “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” “Blessed is the coming kingdom of our father David!” “Hosanna in the highest!”” (Mark 11:9-10)

Price states that these acclamations are non-messianic (p. 284, p.293), but this claim strikes me as unlikely given that the people are shouting “Hosanna” = “save”, are quoting Psalm 118 to declare that Jesus “comes in the name of the Lord” and looking forward to the “coming of David’s kingdom” which they expected the Messiah to restore.  Finally, it should be pointed out that the Gospel of Mark, while probably the earliest gospel written, is by no means the earliest book of the New Testament.  For instance, there is (non-evangelical) scholarly consensus that Paul’s letter to the Romans was written between 55 A.D. and 58 A.D., less than thirty years after the crucifixion.  In the introductory verses of that letter, we find the following statement: “Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God— the gospel he promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures regarding his Son, who as to his human nature was a descendant of David” (Rom 1:1-3).

Another interesting claim involves the Paracletos (Greek for “advocate” or “comforter”) whom Jesus promises to send his disciples after his resurrection.  This figure has traditionally been understood by commentators to be the Holy Spirit.  However, Price believes that the Paracletos mentioned in John “is none other than the gospel writer himself” (p.35; see also p. 236).  Price’s hypothesis is that the author of John fabricated Jesus’ predictions of the coming of the Paracletos so that he could then claim to be its fulfillment.  The text Price cites is:

“I have yet many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.  When the Spirit of Truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak.” John 16:12-13

Given only these verses, Price’s claim this passage was meant to refer (somewhat hyperbolically) to a human prophet is vaguely plausible.  However, if John’s agenda was to claim authority as this “Spirit of Truth”, we would expect that all the references to this figure in the Gospel of John would clearly point to some human, prophetic figure which would be recognizable as John himself.  Yet, in a discourse just prior to the one that Price cites, Jesus explicitly identifies the Paracletos: “But the Counsleor [Gk. Paracletos], the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you” (John 14:25).  Furthermore, in John 14, we find the following statement:

And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counselor [Gk. Paracletos] to be with you forever— the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you. (John 14:16-17)

We see in this verse that the Paracletos, whoever he is, will be with the disciples forever, will not be received or seen by the world, and will dwell with and in the disciples (see also John 7:38-39).  If John intended to set himself up as the coming Paracletos, I question whether he would have set the credentials so high or would have used language which the original hearers would have undoubtedly interpreted to refer to the Holy Spirit or would have explicitly stated otherwise in 14:25.

What about Price’s view of early Christian belief in adoptionism, the idea that Jesus was not originally the Son of God, but became the Son of God either at his baptism or at his resurrection?  For instance, in Chapter 11 he states that in the gospel of Mark, “[Jesus’] sonship was conferred at the baptism” (p. 275).  Only did later tradition (as seen, for instance, in the gospel of John) claim that Jesus was God Himself in human form.  Again, there are several responses to this statement.  First, the earliest documents we have, such as Paul’s letter to the Phillipians indicate that Jesus was viewed as God:

Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus:
 Who, being in very nature God,
      did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,
 but made himself nothing,
      taking the very nature of a servant,
      being made in human likeness.
 And being found in appearance as a man,
      he humbled himself
      and became obedient to death—
         even death on a cross!
Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
      and gave him the name that is above every name,
 that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
      in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,
      to the glory of God the Father. (Phil. 2:5-11)

Ehrman takes the view that this letter was written sometime between 50 – 60 A.D., and, what is more significant, he also believes that in these verses Paul is actually quoting an Christian hymn that originated even earlier (see The New Testament p. 295).  Even if these verses originated with Paul, then Christians were worshipping Jesus as God as early as 60 A.D.  Notice also that these verses explicitly refute adoptionism.  Christ was “in very nature God” but then “made himself nothing…being made in human likeness” Phil. 2:6-7).  In other words, Christ was equal to God prior to his incarnation (“being made in human likeness”) and certainly prior to his baptism.

We can also consider the evidence from within Mark itself against an early belief in adoptionism.  The very first verse in the Gospel of Mark is: “The beginning of the gospel about Jesus Christ, the Son of God” (Mark 1:1).  Although Price doesn’t reference this verse, I suspect that he would argue that the phrase “the Son of God” is a later addition, especially since it doesn’t appear in some manuscripts.  However, most translators include it because it does appear in the earliest manuscripts and because its omission can be explained by a simple error in transcribing a series of very Greek similar letters (see footnote 3 here for a detailed discussion of whether this phrase was contained in the original manuscript).  For the sake of argument, let’s imagine that this phrase was indeed a later addition.  What are the next several verses of Mark’s gospel? 

It is written in Isaiah the prophet:  “I will send my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way”— “a voice of one calling in the desert, ‘Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him.’ (Mark 1:2-3)

The passages that Mark quotes are from the book of Isaiah and from the book of Malachi.  Let’’s take a take look at those verses in context:

“See, I will send my messenger, who will prepare the way before me. Then suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant, whom you desire, will come,” says the LORD Almighty. “But who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears? For he will be like a refiner’s fire or a launderer’s soap. He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver; he will purify the Levites and refine them like gold and silver. Then the LORD will have men who will bring offerings in righteousness, and the offerings of Judah and Jerusalem will be acceptable to the LORD, as in days gone by, as in former years. So I will come near to you for judgment.”  (Mal. 3:1-5)

Notice that the passage that Mark quotes about the coming of Christ is an Old Testament reference to the coming of “the Lord”.  Does this mean God himself?  It would seem so, since it is the Lord who is speaking in this passage and stating that the messenger he sends will prepare the way before him (that is, the Lord himself) as he comes to “his temple” (Mal. 3:1).  This conclusion is made even more clear when God says that in the coming of this figure, “I will come near to you for judgment” (Mal. 3:5).  The next passage is even more explicit:

A voice of one calling: “In the desert prepare the way for the LORD; make straight in the wilderness a highway for our God.  (Is. 40:3)

Again, the way is being prepared for the Lord, literally for “Yahweh” the personal name by which God identified himself to Israel.  These passages, which Mark applies to the coming of Jesus, clearly refer to the coming of the God of Israel to his people.  Thus, it is hard to escape the fact that Mark saw Christ not as merely a man, but as God himself, even in the few verses that take place prior to Jesus’ baptism in Mark 1:9-11.

A fourth major claim that Price makes is that in the earliest accounts, Jesus did not perform miracles.  He bases this argument mainly on Jesus’ statement in Mark 8:12 “Why does this generation ask for a miraculous sign? I tell you the truth, no sign will be given to it” which he refers to numerous times  (p. 132, 133, 146, 160, 161) as a “preemptive denial of all miracles” (p. 146).  He also believes that 1 Cor. 1:22-23 which states that “Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles “comes awfully close to explicitly denying that Jesus did miracles” (p. 132).  Let’s examine the context of these passages more closely.

First, Jesus’ statement in Mark 8:12 is part of the following pericope (Mark 8:11-13):

The Pharisees came and began to question Jesus. To test him, they asked him for a sign from heaven. He sighed deeply and said, “Why does this generation ask for a miraculous sign? I tell you the truth, no sign will be given to it.” Then he left them, got back into the boat and crossed to the other side.

The first thing that is apparent in this passage is that Jesus is responding to the questioning of the Pharisees, who are consistently opposed to Jesus throughout the gospel of Mark.  The word translated as “question” is “suzeteo” which could also be translated as “dispute” or “argue”.  Next, the word translated as “test” is “peirzontev” which is sometimes translated as “tempt” and is the same word that Mark used when Jesus was “being tempted by Satan” (Mark 1:13).  This idea seems to be confirmed by Jesus response: “ to sigh deeply” or more literally “to sigh deeply in his spirit”.  What is it that disturbs Jesus?  The author’s intent is to show that the Pharisees are again approaching Jesus as opponents seeking to discredit him without any real interest in who he is (see Mark 3:6).  What’s more, the Pharisees are asking for a “sign from heaven”, some kind of miraculous display in the skies to prove that Jesus was the Messiah.   Why would this have been so troubling to Jesus?  Let’s consider the broader context of the passage.  Mark places these events between two other stories: the feeding of the four thousand (Mark 8:1-10) and the healing of the blind man at Bethsaida (Mark 8:22-26).  If Jesus is explicitly denying that he performs miracles, it seems odd for Mark to place this statement between two accounts of miracles.  It seems then that Mark is making a clear point.  Feeding the hungry and healing the sick mean nothing to the Pharisees; they want something spectacular.  They do not actually lack evidence, even miraculous evidence, that Jesus is the Messiah; they simply refuse the evidence that is given to them. 

The passage from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians has a similar context.  In 1 Cor. 1:18-25 Paul is rebuking both Jews and non-Jews for forsaking God’s wisdom.  In the case of Jews, this manifests itself in demanding from God miraculous signs without which they refuse to believe in Christ.  In the case of non-Jews, it is the exaltation of their wisdom over God that causes them to reject Christ.  In both cases, it is coming to God in pride rather than in humility that Paul is criticizing.  He does not actually deny doing miracles any more than he denies preaching a message of wisdom (1 Cor. 2:6).  But he says that what he ultimately preaches is Christ crucified, not miraculous signs or human wisdom.  Is this because the early church didn’t experience miracles?  A few chapters later Paul, almost in passing, makes the following statement:

Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it. And in the church God has appointed first of all apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then workers of miracles, also those having gifts of healing, those able to help others, those with gifts of administration, and those speaking in different kinds of tongues. (1 Cor. 12:27-28)

Here Paul identifies the “working of miracles” and “gifts of healing” as two of the gifts imparted by God to the church.  Paul makes numerous references to miracles in his other letters including Romans 15:18-19, Galatians 3:5, and 2 Cor. 12:12.  However, as in the ministry of Jesus, the focus of his message was not on the miracles, but on the forgiveness of sins offered by Christ through his death and resurrection.

Although some of Price’s arguments are plausible given the data he presents, most of them do not agree well with the immediate context of the passage or with the entirety of the document.  Price’s view that traditions about Jesus evolved dramatically from the lifetime of Jesus to the final compilation of the New Testament seems to have very little support.  In particular, the fact that he does not address the Pauline epistles is a very problematic.  Given that most scholars believe that Paul’s letters are actually the earliest Christian documents that we possess, written less than thirty years after Jesus’ death, we should actually begin with them rather than the gospels to get an idea of early Christian theology.  Knowing how accepted this idea is among modern scholars, it is amazing that Price does not address it.  In order for his arguments about the progressive evolution of Christian theology to hold, he must either show that this evolution is indeed reflected in Paul’s letters or assert that Paul’s letters were written well after the gospels.   The fact that he entirely ignores the challenge that the Pauline epistles pose to his arguments is a major problem.

In general, I think that Price is not letting the documents speak for themselves, but rather is looking in the documents for evidence to support his overarching theories of the early Christian movement.  To understand in part where this tendency comes from, it is helpful to examine Price’s methodological approach to the New Testament, which I will do in the next section.

III. Methodological objections

In his Introduction, Price outlines the criterion which will guide his analysis of the Biblical text for the remainder of the book: the criterion of dissimilarity.  I’d first like to point out that most critical (non-evangelical) scholars use several other criteria, which are defined well in this the essay “A Historical Study of Jesus of Nazareth” by James McGrath a non-evangelical, critical scholar himself).  One of the facts that McGrath notes in his essay is that scholars recognize these conditions as sufficient but not necessary.  What does that mean?  It means that these criteria tell you when a saying is more likely to be historical (if you agree with the premises of critical scholarship), but that they cannot definitively tell you that a saying is unhistorical.  They all have limitations that will fail to “pick up” authentic sayings and actions of Jesus.  McGrath emphasizes that these criteria must be used together since they each have significant weaknesses.  In contrast, Price relies almost entirely on the criterion of dissimilarity.  In this section, let’s examine that criterion and determine whether it is reliable as a historical tool.

The criterion of dissimilarity states that if a saying of Jesus resembles either 1^st century Judaism or the teaching of the early church, then “the historian has no right to accept [it] as authentically dominical (i.e. coming from the Lord, Dominus, Jesus)” (p. 16).  Throughout his book, Price draws parallels between the gospel narratives and other stories, culled from the surrounding Hellenistic culture, contemporary Judaism and the Old Testament, and sources as remote as 5^th century B.C. India (p. 156) and 19^th century A.D. China (p. 143). He uses these parallels to dismiss the authenticity of the gospel accounts since, by the criterion of dissimilarity, anything which finds a parallel in other ancient literature or mythology cannot be declared to be authentic.  Since this is the criteria that Price uses almost exclusively in his book, I’d like to point out how problematic it is. 

Let’s imagine that I wanted to study the life and work of Charles Darwin.  But imagine that all of Darwin’s own writings, lectures, and correspondence had been lost so that the only source material I had was secondary, that is, material that had been written by others about Darwin or about his work.  If we were to apply the criterion of dissimilarity to this venture, it would dictate that we reject as inauthentic any teaching of Darwin that resembled either 19^th century naturalism or modern evolutionary theory.  Clearly, modern biologists have a great incentive to lend authority to their theories by claiming their origin from an illustrious scientist like Darwin.  Similarly, 19^th century followers of Darwin would naturally attribute major scientific discoveries of the age to their revered hero. 

So we would set out to reconstruct the life and works of Darwin, removing the later legendary accretions of naturalism, biology, and evolution.  How close would we come to anything approximating the life and works of the historical Darwin?  Not close at all.  Our view would be completely warped by our assumptions.  On the other hand, what if we treated the source material as generally reliable, even if we didn’t have complete certainty of its thoroughgoing accuracy?  Then we would probably arrive at a generally accurate picture of Darwin, his theories, and his life in general.  I think this example demonstrates the woeful inadequacy of the criterion of dissimilarity as the sole means for determining historicity.  In his essay, McGrath comes to the same conclusion about the criterion of dissimilarity, that “on its own this criterion will at best give us an unbalanced and lopsided portrait of the historical Jesus… [It is] unthinkable that Jesus completely differed from John the Baptist and Judaism in general, and that none of his followers sought to preserve at least some of his actual emphasis and teaching” (“A Historical Study of Jesus of Nazareth”). 

A similar response can be made to Price’s criticism of “harmonization” of the gospel narratives, which means an attempt to fit together the various perspectives offered by the gospel writers to construct a coherent narrative (p. 26; 38).  Imagine that you took my wife and me into separate rooms and asked us both to write a one-page account of our wedding day.  Although you would find that the accounts agreed on all major facts (we were married in Princeton, New Jersey in June of 2002, our reception was held at the Nassau Inn, etc…) there would certainly be many details included by Christina that I would omit, and many details that I would include that Christina would omit due to our different opinions as to the relative importance of different events.  For example, I would certainly state how beautiful Christina looked when she walked down the aisle, but I doubt she would mention that fact in her narrative.  There might also be a few instances where our accounts appeared to be contradictory.  If Christina writes that we took pictures in front of McCosh Hall, and I write that we took pictures in front of Firestone Library, perhaps we took pictures in both places.  Or perhaps those buildings are near one another on Princeton’s campus.  If the gospels are even remotely accurate and can be traced in any way to actual eyewitness accounts, it is very likely that they will include differences in both emphasis and content.  To write off all harmonization as a willful attempt to evade contradiction therefore seems to be unjustified on purely historical grounds.

Even if we were to accept Price’s use of the criterion of dissimilarity, which I believe is extremely problematic, there are other difficulties with his arguments.  In the first section of this essay, I’ve already discussed how many of the Hellenistic parallels that Price cites are substantially anachronistic; they are drawn from sources written well after the gospels even according to Price’s dating.  But even in the cases where the borrowing is at least chronologically possible, I question not only whether the borrowing could feasibly have occurred, but even whether there is any real parallel at all.  The danger of looking for parallels so carefully is that it is very easy to find them whether or not they exist.  To prove my point, let me reproduce a passage from Greek mythology in which Price sees a “startlingly close” parallel to a New Testament story:

Sostrata, a woman of Pherae, was pregnant with worms.  Being in a very bad way, she was carried into the Temple and slept there.  But when she saw no distinct dream she let herself be carried back home.  Then, however, near a place called Kornoi, a man of fine appearance seemed to come upon her and her companions.  When he had learned from them about their bad luck, he asked them to set down on the ground the litter in which they were carrying Sostrata.  Then he cut open her abdomen and took out a great quantity of worms – two wash basis full.  After having stitched her belly up again and made the woman well, Asclepius revealed to her his presence and enjoined her to send thank-offering for her treatment to Epidaurus.

I ask the reader whether they can determine which New Testament passage Price claims is “startlingly close” to this narrative so that he can conclude that “no one could give a good reason for maintaining that one is fiction and the other is history” (p. 339).   Is it Mark 5:24-34? Or Luke 24:13-32? Or Matthew 8:1-4? or John 5:1-13?  In fact, a case could very plausibly be made that all of these passages are parallels of the Asclepius story.  Or none of them.  Or only one of them.  And that is precisely the problem.  If we look closely enough at any two documents, we can construct any number of parallel passages; unfortunately that tells us more about our creativity than about dependencies in the source material. 

Again, consider Price’s treatment of the healing of the paralytic in Mark 2:1-12, which, to use Price’s own summary of the incident, “is the wonderful story of the paralyzed man whose friends, unable to press to the front of the crowd, instead hoist him by ropes in front of Jesus.  Their dogged efforts attest their faith, and Jesus rewards their outrageous behavior by forgiving their friend’s sin” (p. 149).  This story, says Price, “seems to be based on another story, one from 2 Kings 1:2-17a” in which, again using Price’s summary, “’the Israelite king fell through the lattice in his upper chamber in Samaria and lay sick’.  He sends messengers to inquire of the oracle of the god Baal-zebub (“Lord of Flies”). .. Will he recover?  Yahve… sends Elijah to intercept the emissaries.  He tells them not to bother going any further.  He can tell them right now… that Ahaziah is doomed because of his lack of faith (p. 149).” Can we honestly claim that these two stories are somehow related, even using Price’s own summary of the stories?  In fact, Price states that the stories are not actually parallels, but actually anti-parallels: “The Markan story is a happy reversal of this one [in 1 Kings]” (p. 149).  Given such latitude in our definition of “similarity”, I wonder if there are any two stories in any two books that we won’t find ultimately derive from each other and are therefore inauthentic.  (If anyone is interested, here are some Old and New Testament passages that Price believes are sources and derivatives with a few extras thrown in.  I’ve included them in chronological order, and I’m curious to see if an observer who hasn’t read Price’s book can match them up: Ex. 18:13-26, Num 11:26-29, Num 15:32-36, Jdg. 7:5-6, 2 Sam 15:24-16:14, 1 Ki 13:1-6, Esth. 5:1-2, Job 41:1-4, Jer. 17:19-27, Mark 3:1-5, Mark 3:19-21, 3:31-35, Mark 9:38-40, Mark 14:32-51, Matt. 12:40, John 3:16-21, John 9:1-12, Acts 14:8-13).

In summary, aside from the problems that I discussed in the first two sections, I believe that Price’s scholarship is hindered at the outset by his methodological assumptions.  It seems clear that we would not attempt to apply the methods used by Price to any other historical figure and expect to obtain an accurate picture of his or her life.  What is more, the signal-to-noise ratio in Price’s deconstruction of literary parallels seems unacceptably high.  If such a critical hermeneutic were applied to documents in general, I question whether the blandest piece of reportage in the Des Moines Register would pass as authentic. 

Conclusions

In conclusion, I believe that the thoroughgoing skepticism with which Price views the New Testament documents is not a consequence of historical or textual evidence.  There are massive amounts of documentary and archeological evidence which lend support to both the major facts of Jesus’ life and minor historical details of the gospel narratives.  The majority of scholars, evangelical and non-evangelical, believe that the New Testament documents were composed within the lifetime of the apostles, Jesus’ closest followers, and eyewitnesses to the events of his life.   The text of the New Testament, when examined closely, is not a collection of irreconcilably incongruous fragments, but is a remarkably coherent picture of the teachings and actions of Jesus of Nazareth and the beliefs and practices of the early church.  In contrast to Price’s claim that there is almost nothing we can know about the historical Jesus, there appears to be an abundance of information recorded for us in the pages of the New Testament.

Despite the overwhelming evidence in its favor, I don’t want to give the impression that there are absolutely no remaining questions regarding the historical content of the New Testament.  There are a few problems for which there is no clear, obvious answer.  For instance, the question of the census of Quirinius has plagued biblical scholars for hundreds of years.  Though there are plausible, reasonable explanations for these issues (see a discussion of the census here and here), there is certainly not a consensus.  I can think of several other details, such as Herod’s massacre of the children in Bethlehem recorded in Matthew 2:16-18, or the hour of the crucifixion in John 19:14, that are sometimes cited as insurmountable problems.  However, I think that there are several important things to keep in mind.  

The first is that we have very limited archaeological data for the history of 1^st century Palestine.  For instance, despite the fact that the existence of Pontius Pilate as governor of Judea has been attested by numerous documents and has never been doubted, the first physical evidence for his existence was not discovered until 1961!  Therefore it would be extremely unwise to take the absence of physical evidence for some particular detail as an indication of its unreliability.  Second, there have been several purported biblical errors that have been resolved either by subsequent archaeological discoveries, such as the existence of Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene (recorded in Luke 3:1), or by a more careful reading of the text.  Consequently, we should be hesitant in assuming that our current understanding of an inconsistency will not be later resolved.  Finally, I can say confidently that the evidence for the general historical reliability for the New Testament is absolutely overwhelming.  Remember that the vast majority of narrative statements in the New Testament such as “Jesus stepped into a boat, crossed over and came to his own town” (Matthew 9:1) or “On the next Sabbath almost the whole cite gathered to hear the word of the Lord” (Acts 13:44) are not the kind of things that we should expect to have any historical record of apart from the New Testament narratives themselves.  It’s very unlikely that we’ll ever dig up the boat that Jesus used or a video tape of the Sabbath service in Antioch.  Of the remaining statements for which we might have some expectation for independent confirmation, we find that the New Testament is remarkably accurate.  Given that we have a massive amount of substantiating evidence, at the very least, we should be willing to take the biblical records at face value as a generally reliable account of the life of Jesus and the history of the early church.

Then where does the doctrine of biblical inerrancy come in?  Why do I believe that the Bible is the inspired Word of God?  I can’t speak for others, but for me, it works like this: based on the arguments I presented above, the New Testament appears to be a reasonably accurate historical document.  Therefore, I can read its accounts of the life of Jesus as a generally accurate picture of the teachings and deeds of a real, historical person.  When I read this account, I find a Person like no one I’ve ever encountered.  On the one hand, his life is one of absolute compassion, gentleness, and love.  He cares for the sick. He is compassionate to prostitutes, widows and lepers.  Most of all, he is a friend of sinners and turns away no one who comes to him.  On the other hand (or even on the same hand), this Person is utterly terrifying.  His goodness is absolute and complete.  He doesn’t allow me to make excuses.  He condemns my sin, my pride, my self-righteousness, and my failure to live a life of love for God and love for my fellow man.  By his very goodness, he holds a mirror up to my own life, full of denials, pettiness, and self-glorification.  And yet he calls me: “Come to me, all you who are heavy laden and I will give you rest for your souls.  Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart.  For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”  The story of this historical person is the story of sacrifice: God made him sin who knew no sin, so that we might become the righteousness of God.  On the cross, Jesus took the punishment that we deserve, so that we could have the acceptance that he deserved.  God raised him up from the dead to declare that the payment was made in full and that all who receive him can receive forgiveness of sins and new life.  So I put my faith in this person and surrender my life to his lordship.

As his follower, what is one of the things I notice about Jesus?  It is that his teaching, his actions, and his very life are steeped in the Bible.  He and his earliest followers treated the Scriptures as the Word of God, God’s authoritative message to humanity.  He viewed it as utterly trustworthy, and saw in its teaching a revelation of God’s goodness, holiness, and saving purposes.  Given this fact, and as his disciple, I’m willing to trust in the Bible as Jesus did. 

For non-Christians, I don’t think that the first question I would settle is whether the Bible is inerrant.  The first question I would settle is: “Who is this Jesus?”  If I am convinced that the Bible is generally trustworthy, then I need to honestly read it and decide what it says about God, about man, and about the work of Christ.  The Bible confronts us with the inescapable person of Jesus.  If we let it speak to us, we will find him and find all good things in him.

Additional information:

For readers interested in an accessible (i.e. non-scholarly) book about the reliability of the New Testament accounts of the life of Jesus Christ, I recommend Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ.  See also The Rest of the Story on infidels.org for good review of Strobel’s book by atheist Jeffrey Jay Lowder.

Does the fact that I like this make me the world’s biggest dork?

CCD,

Ben

Bill O’Reilly is a F*cking Idiot. How Ya Like Them Apples?

CCD,

Ben

Beliefs and Facts Processed the SAME WAY by our Brains. Read that again if you need to…

http://www.newsweek.com/id/216551

Check out the link.  Good old Sammy Boy strikes again.

CCD,

Ben

Guest Post – A Rational Vision of God within the Universe – by Kent Rogers

This is a guest post by Kent Rogers, the co-founder of The Loving Arms Mission.  The Loving Arms Mission provides a loving home for 20 abandoned, orphaned and runaway children in Katmandu, Nepal. The 20 children live in two adjacent houses, cared for by a full time “mom and dad” who are absolutely committed to them. Each house has both a US and a Nepalese parent. The children now attend school, eat healthy and nutritious meals and have warm beds to sleep in.  Many thanks to Kent for his thoughtful contribution to the blog.  Enjoy! 

“Everybody has faith in something and that is their god.

We all give our lives over to the service of something which might as well be called our personal god. It might be money, it might be power, it might by their own intellect, it might be an idol or the idea of god offered them by their parents. We cannot escape worshipping a god. By worshipping a god I don’t mean literally bowing down, but giving over our energies and efforts into the service of an ideal or goal. Our god is our goal in life.

Whatever it is that we put our faith in comes to rule over our thoughts and over our actions. Even an atheist has faith in that he or she lives life in pursuit of some goal or based on an ideal of some kind. The individual who has faith in rationality searches for truth in all thoughts and activities. She will not believe that which does not make sense. He will not simply follow the lead of others. One who worships money will do whatever he/she can to obtain money. One who worships “fun” will pursue fun at any cost. One who adores self will promote self-security, self interests and self pleasure at all costs.

Faith is the single most powerful element of human consciousness, able to override all other desires and instincts including sex drive, hunger, thirst and even survival. A change in faith equates a change in the entire person. Thus, we the wise choose faith with utmost care and thought. Simply believing what others believe is insufficient cause. Simply believing what we’ve been told to believe or out of fear of not believing is not enough to enter us into a good faith.

Into what shall we invest our faith? What shall we make to be our god?

Here, we see a universe, grand and beautiful and mysterious. For the sake of this article I lay down the idea that God created the universe until it becomes a choice more rational that to believe the universe arose from a non-Divine source. Therefore, we begin by assuming that everything in the universe arises from the universe itself. Natural causes lead to natural effects in sequence forever. As for the inception of the universe, we will leave that question alone for now.

The human is the result of evolution. The sun is the result of gravity in conjunction with nuclear fusion and fission, etc. Everything has its cause and is explained by that cause. One thing that exists within the universe is the idea of God. God, if nothing more than the musing of an overly-imaginative ape does exist as such. The idea of God is an undeniable reality of the universe. And it is a very powerful idea in the realm of human thought, behavior and society. It is likely the single most powerful concept in shaping human life.

Since we have assumed that the universe is a closed system and thus all that arises within the universe arises from the universe, we must assume that the idea of God has arisen from the universe itself. Thus the idea of God is a recapitulation of something that pre-exists human minds. The idea of God is a translation or reflection of something that exists within the universe itself. Or it arises as the mental collection of separate otherwise non-related entities within the universe. Regardless, the universe has produced this thing within human minds known as the idea of God. There is something that humans receive from the universe which is best described by many as Divine and as transcendent of the universe or any of its parts.

It could be that the idea of God is drafted as a fulfillment of insecurity or human need. It could be that the idea of God is an explanation of beauty and order. It could be that the idea of God is an explanation for the unknown or for existence itself. Or it could be that the idea of God is a means humans have come upon which leads to social order. It is a means to organizing ourselves.

However, as functions of a closed universe, human beings are likewise held within the closed universe. We must therefore admit that all human ingenuity and endeavor is actually just the fall out of the universe itself. The universe itself has produced the idea of God. And because this idea of God has genuine altering affects on all aspects of human life, it is a real entity, even if nothing more than an idea.

But an idea is no less real than any other aspect of the universe. An idea is just as real as a flower, or as the sun, or as anything else in the universe. An idea, in fact, is more real than many other things because it has such large effects on reality. Ideas have transformed the earth at the hand of humankind in countless ways, in massive ways.

A house is an entity which does not exist in nature outside of human construction. It arises from human needs from warmth, protection from animals and rain etc. With time houses have become more and more elaborate with indoor plumbing, heating, electricity etc. But it is not humans who have invented houses. The needs of humans, which are functions of the universe (according to our scientific lens) have created the house via human beings. The house, therefore, predates the human building of the house. It was destined to be created by cause and effect chain reactions within natural order.

So too with the God idea. So too with the idea of a pink elephant—something that does not exist. But the difference between the pink elephant idea and the idea of God is that the God idea is universal in all ancient tribes and all modern societies and it is extremely potent. As of yet, the pink elephant idea has not caught on large-scale nor has it had much impact. God, as well as the pink-elephant ideas are both functions of the universe. The measure of their importance and reality is in their scale and impact.

So the question can’t be does God exist. As an idea, God most definitely exists. And since the universe is the source of all ideas in a closed system, we must say that pre-existing the God-idea, there was and are structures within the universe which cause the God-idea to arise.

The question then is what is the nature of that which gives rise to the God idea? Is it Divine, or is it non-Divine? Is it of the universe, or is it transcendent of the universe? The idea itself insists that it is Divine and transcendent of the universe. Those who don’t believe in the idea would say that the idea is a misinterpretation of reality, much as the idea that the sun revolves around the earth is a misinterpretation of reality.

So our real quest is to find out where the God idea comes from. Before we can search for a source to the idea of God, we must define the idea of God. The only Divine power I am interested in is also the one that is commonly accepted–that God is Divine Love, Divine Wisdom and Divine Power. So it is for this definition of God that I will search. I search for this definition of God because a dedication of one’s life to the purposes of love, that is, the wellbeing of all, leads to good ends.

Let us attempt to determine if love is an illusion, a function of the universe, or the Author of the universe. If we find that love is the Author, than we must say that there is a God and God is Love and Love is Divine and Love created the universe. It is more real than physical reality. That is the real point of this essay: is Love a more real entity than physical reality and so the cause of the physical universe; or is it merely a sensation created by physical reality.

Let’s look at the universe.

From the tiniest fraction of a second after the birth of the universe until the present moment, we see the same pattern of organization repeated over and over again, forming a long chain, each link depending upon the former with human consciousness as the pinnacle result that we are yet aware of.

Quark joining to quark to form proton; proton joining neutrons electrons and other protons to form hydrogen and helium; hydrogen and helium joining to form massive balls of nuclear fusion and fission some of which would become supernovas and serve to join together subatomic particles in such a way as to give birth to the more massive elements. These would coalesce and join together to create worlds. On one such world, earth, life began. In each step, we see smaller, less meaningful entities joining together to become more meaningful, substantial and influential unities.

Amino acids are often called the building blocks of life. There are twenty of these non-living chemical compounds that unite in various ways to form the many hundreds of thousands of different proteins that are needed for life to exist. These proteins don’t occur outside of living things. On average a protein involves a chain of about 200 amino acids joined together in a unique and necessary order. There is no particular known reason why amino acids would become assembled in any specific order at all. The odds of a specific protein of 200 amino acids long coming into being spontaneously is 1 in a number that has 10260 zeros trailing it. That’s worse odds than you have winning the Pennsylvania lottery—a lot worse. In fact, as Bill Bryson points out, there aren’t enough atoms in the universe to express the odds. In the lottery of life, therefore, to win, you’d have to do better than picking the one winning atom from all the atoms in the entire universe. Actually, the odds of life are worse, much, much worse. Those odds are for the creation of just one protein, and as mentioned, life requires many hundreds of thousands of such proteins. Some proteins involve strings of over 1000 amino acids, thus making the odds of our existence again significantly worse yet.

Some have suggested, chiefly Richard Dawkins, a loud proponent of atheism and a genetic biologist, that these proteins didn’t assemble instantaneously, but evolved. Maybe a string of, say, ten amino acids formed and replicated for some time before becoming slowly more complicated. This would mean that each smaller piece of the whole protein was in and of itself useful and also replicated for long periods of time. This seems strange since, if these smaller pieces were useful in some capacity, why would they not still exist alongside the much longer proteins we see today? Bacteria, bugs and some plants are relatively primitive members of the evolutionary chain, but they are still around. Why don’t we see the simple proteins still around?

But perhaps these proteins did evolve. Regardless of how they came to be, proteins are still incomprehensibly unlikely. But before we even get to the unlikely probability of the specific make up of a protein, we must realize that the union of amino acids to form proteins is also inexplicable. It shouldn’t have happened at all. Amino acids as monomers have never been observed to join together and form polymer proteins.

Despite all odds, and I do mean all, life began. And again we see the same pattern which we have seen repeated from the beginning of time—union of less meaningful pieces to create a more meaningful whole.

And when it comes to biology, we’ve just begun. Proteins are not alive. Nor are they able to reproduce themselves. Without DNA the proteins that sustain life would go extinct. But DNA has no purpose in and of itself. It too is not alive. There is nothing about the chemical sequence of DNA that makes it especially adapted to survival in the sea of chemicals that make up physical reality. In fact, DNA is supremely elegant and unlikely. It is hard not to reach the conclusion that DNA exists for the sake of reproducing proteins. But when we begin to use terms like “for the sake of” we are implying purpose. I have up until now worked hard to avoid implying purpose within natural reality, but the facts all but force oner to use the language of purpose. DNA exists for the purpose of reproducing proteins.

And even this is not the full story. The relationship between protein and DNA require a third partner, RNA. Without RNA, no reproduction of protein can occur. The higher the number of components that cooperate for a single purpose, the more difficult it is to assume random cause. And remember the three components we are speaking of are entirely unlikely in and of themselves.

Yet DNA, RNA and proteins can’t cooperate to make life except within a protective home, a cell. The components of the cell are uncountable. There is an estimated 100 million protein molecules alone in each cell. And each component and each organelle is wondrous in itself. And yet none are alive in and of themselves, but only sustain life when together. Each aspect of a cell only has meaning in relation to every other aspect of a cell. Why, though, would non-living chemicals have any desire of any kind at all. Why would they want to coalesce into something? Why would they assemble? Why would they want to participate as non-living members in the formation of a life-form? Obviously, they wouldn’t. And if we assume that they in fact do not desire anything, how and why did non-living material assemble into such unimaginably unlikely complex relationships to form the container for life? In the words of the humorous and eloquent Bill Bryson, the formation of a cell “is rather as if all the ingredients in your kitchen somehow got together and baked themselves into a cake—but a cake that could moreover divide when necessary to produce more cakes.” I would add the point that this cake has consciousness.

Throughout the entire history of the universe we see the same pattern on all levels: lesser entities assembling together in such a way as to be more meaningful than any of the constituent parts. What better definition for love can there be? Individuals joining together with others to become something more real and meaningful and useful and lovely and beautiful than before. That is Love and that is what we see throughout all levels of the universe throughout the entire history of the universe.

But the assembly of lesser and less meaningful parts into a more meaningful whole is suddenly much more astounding when non-living matter comes to house or embody life. But the story has just begun. The very basic bacteria cells that first manifested as life would in turn undergo some amazing transformations and unions to create much greater beings. All animal cells are actually the necessary union of two dissimilar life-forms. Within our every cell and each cell of all animals live mitochondria which are very tiny independent life forms with unrelated genetic makeup. Without this endosymbiotic relationship we would not exist. Plants also rely on the existence of chloroplasts within their cells and which are basically foreign life-forms. And without plants, we would not exist for lack of oxygen. And without animals, plants would also come to extinction for lack of carbon dioxide. Thus there is an inextricable web of reality–independent and lesser things joining together to form more real and more meaningful unions. In a word: love.

And mitochondria containing cells began to join together. I hardly need to direct attention to the awesome construction of the human body. Take any organ in isolation and you will see unfathomable order (and that which we cannot see within the cell is equally unfathomable). And each of these organs work only in union with one another to form you, to support you. And what exactly are “you?” We humans don’t feel to be a gathering of cells or even organs. Our consciousness seems to have very little to do with all the component pieces. We certainly aren’t aware of what is happening to individual cells. And we are, most of the time, vastly ignorant of the state of even our large members, the organs. We have no sensation of the workings of the kidneys, the liver, the pancreas or the gall bladder to name a few. We sometimes notice the stomach and intestines when they are distressed in some way. We can easily notice the heart and lungs, but not from within them. Rather we observe them from a third party perspective. Even the seat of our consciousness, the brain, spins away without us knowing first hand anything about how it works at all. We don’t even have sense-nerves in the brain. More on consciousness later. The point is that something grander as well as distinctly and fundamentally other than the constituent parts is created by their assembly—consciousness.

Yet here we are, consciousness riding within a vehicle composed of ten trillion endosymbiotic cells each in itself made out of precise and purposeful assemblies of non-living chemicals. Think of it this way, the atoms were doing fine without us. They were existing. The chemical compounds were likewise in no fear of losing their lives. And yet they assembled to form life. And these unicellular bacteria were doing fine for millions of years. Nevertheless they assembled to form much more meaningful beings, including you. There are observable mechanisms to explain some of the steps in this process. For example, gravity and nuclear fusion are responsible for the creation of chemical compounds and evolution explains the successively more complex rise of life. But there are still huge gaps in our understanding of how a singularity at the beginning of the universe bothered to evolve into you (among other things).

Even if we were able to fill in all these massive gaps, a nagging question still begs to be answered: why? If there is no purpose or direction or meaningful current underlying natural reality, why do things occur the way they do? Why survival? Why would a gene want to reproduce itself? Why does a lion protect her young? Why did the chemicals get together and form a cell? Why does gravity exist as a uniting force? And most significantly, why do we see the same pattern repeated over and over again on all levels of reality, repeated over and over again throughout the history of the entire universe: independent components assembling to create more meaningful, more powerful, more interactive, more alive entities? We have observed the mechanisms of some aspects of this pattern but science has yet to explain why these mechanisms exist as they do.

My point is that even if science could explain every last mechanism of the progression of reality from the singularity to the existence of human consciousness (which it is vastly distant from doing) it still could not explain away the possibility of God. Knowing how something works in no way explains why it exists or why it works the way it does.

There is a strange twist in the thinking of many people which results in a unseen double standard. Let me illustrate this twist of thought in an example. Let’s imagine a person asks, “Why does an apple fall?” Most people would reply, “Gravity.” But the fact is, the answer, ‘Gravity’ is not really an explanation at all. Gravity is just a word we use to describe something we don’t at all understand. We know what gravity does and have written mathematical laws that predict its activity. But who is prepared to say why gravity attracts or why it exists in the first place. Why does gravity exist? The naturalist says that to cite God as cause of anything is a cop out. But careful analysis reveals that it is no more a cop-out than to cite gravity as a cause.

Science is great at explaining how things work. But we sometimes are fooled into thinking that science answers the question of cause. It does not. It is my belief that cause cannot be understood by the scientific rational way of using consciousness. Cause can only be understood in terms of purpose and value within that which is and how it works. As soon as we begin to consider the intrinsic value in something, we are assuming a purpose. As soon as we presume purpose, we presume intelligent direction. We are now no longer in the arena of science, but in the arena of religion.

Fred Hoyle, an early molecular biologist, once noted that the random creation of even a single protein would be like a tornado flying through a junkyard and spontaneously assembling a jumbo jet. It is sobering to realize that his analogy refers to one tiny step in a long and complicated chain of very unlikely events. His implication is that God exists.

Let’s look at an automobile. An alien might be able to come down and explain how each part works and fits together. They could figure out that a car is useful in moving from one place to another with speed. But they could not explain how the automobile came to be or why. They could not if they were very dull, that is. It takes very little imagination to assume that the car was created by an intelligent being for the purpose of carrying that being from one place to another. After all, the controls are all collected into one place in front of a seat.

Richard Dawkins countered Hoyles point by saying that to assume that there is therefore an intelligent creator leaves us with an even more unlikely event. To have created, the creator would have to be more complex and intelligent than the creation. So to explain the creator’s existence we have to explain how something even more complex and intelligent than creation came to be.

The extra terrestrials would have to explain not how the car came to be, but how humans came to be—a much more difficult task as we have just seen. Dawkins’ point is that saying God created everything leaves a mystery—the mystery of how God came to be.

This is true, but it does not negate the fact of undeniable and beautiful order all throughout the natural universe; an order which binds simple and less meaningful things into communities which give rise to more meaningful and vital things. Nor does the argument negate the fact that it is more likely that the universe and life were created by intelligence than by randomness. Even the arena in which random events could have occurred are governed by very elegant laws of design. Just because we can’t explain the nature and origin of an author doesn’t dismiss the fact that all evidence points to the fact of an author. Just because the aliens can’t explain how humans came to exist doesn’t negate the fact that humans did indeed create the car.

Another problem with Dawkins’ logic is that it is bound within space-time, God by definition, is outside of space-time. Let us for a moment imagine that there is a Divine outside of time-space reality and who causes time-space reality in terms of being and nature. An analogy helps us to see how this might function. Let us imagine God as a sphere and space-time reality as a two dimensional plane. The sphere cannot be contained by the plane, but a two dimensional plane can exist within the sphere. Let us imagine that the sphere desires to reveal its entire being within the context of the plane and so therefore moves through the plane from one end of its being to the other. Yet because the plane (space-time) is created in and of the sphere (God) the plane only exists inside the sphere and conscious entities observing reality within the plane would exist only within the sphere’s sequential cross sections. The order or nature or intelligence of the sphere would be manifested as spontaneous orderly patterns within the plane. We can think of the successive cross sections of a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of a brain—patterns emerge and change in related ways. If we played a video of the cross-sections to an unknowing individual he would assume that the one cross section caused the subsequent one in terms of pattern. But the truth is that while each cross section is related to the previous and the subsequent, no one cross section “causes’ any other.

These conscious entities within our cross section of the sphere would observe their reality as having suddenly appeared as a tiny point out of nothingness. This point would for unexplainable reasons suddenly and rapidly expand. From within the plane, they would notice spontaneous patters and order arising from unknown sources. They would also presume a cause and effect relationship of one moment, or cross-section to the next. They could not help assuming such relationships. They would even be able to predict some of the grosser aspects of the future due to repeated patterns observed in the past. They could discern all of this, but they cannot understand the idea of sphere because it transcends the limitations of their consciousness and senses. But they may be able to guess that there is something beyond their vision of reality that is creating and ordering their reality. Sounds not unlike our understanding of our universe—a singularity, an unimaginable inflation or great expansion, the arise of pattern and order as if out of nothing and for no reason. And the speculation of a God, an intelligent being not bound by our space-time limitations, inferred not only by the order within the universe, but the fact of existence itself.

Again, the atheist will then say, who made the sphere. My point in this analogy is not to prove God, but to illustrate how very likely it is that our senses and forms of logic are greatly limited and confounded by the dimensions of space-time itself. We would be very arrogant to assume there was nothing beyond what the mind and senses can ascertain. And all of this is to say that it is not irrational to assume a reality transcendent and entirely more real and for lack of a better word, Divine, than natural reality. It is not, therefore, irrational to assume a holiness in the moments, events and entities of time-space reality in that they are containers and expressions of the Prime Cause which is not a cause within time and space but transcendent of time and space. We are not talking about a first moment or cause in time. We are talking about a reality outside of time and space which is re-presented in a very limited translation within space-time as space-time. To repeat, it is not irrational to believe in the Divine.

One might proclaim that there could be an even more real, intelligent entity beyond God which has causal relationship to God in a way analogous to the one I propose between God and space-time. Fair enough; we are left with the possibility of an infinite regression of more and more real entities, each caused in turn by the former. I am reminded of some Hindu paintings I have seen where the monstrous face of certain deities is repeated in all directions infinitely outward like a peacock’s tail. I am also reminded of the fact that many modern theoretical physicists wonder if there aren’t many universes which are like membranes. When these membranes contact one another, yet another universe is created—cosmic procreation if you will.

However, the argument I have presented is still valid. Within the infinite regression of universes, we again see an overarching pattern, mirrored again and again in each subsequent version of reality. This pattern of patterns remains the same. This proves that the pattern is more real than any one version of the universe. The overarching pattern of patterns within the universe(s) has a simple and elegant explanation—that pattern pre-exists the universe(s). It preexists not in terms of time, for it makes no sense for something to pre-exist space-time in time. Rather it preexists space time in terms of fundamental reality. The pattern we see in the universe(s)–lesser entities binding to create more real and functional unities–is more real than the vehicles that house the pattern. We can truthfully say this because the pattern’s dominion is evidenced within the universes and unexplained by the universe(s) themselves. The infinite regression of universes is therefore passive and the pattern is active. The pattern is Love. Love is Real. Love is Divine. Love is God. Love gives rise to intelligence and life and consciousness. Therefore Love is intelligent, conscious and living beyond space and time. Love is God and God is Love; and this is not a meaningless cloud, but order and meaning and intelligence and consciousness and life Itself. I assert this from the fact that all of these attributes arise from the pattern which is a description of love. And since the human is the most conscious and marvelously made creature we know of as of yet, we can best know God as Human, the eternal Human Being from which humanity springs.

So what have we seen:

1. All have faith in something.

2. The idea of God exists as a function of some reality in the universe.

3. The fruit of faith in Divine Love is good—individuals working to promote the health and wellbeing of all.

4. There is a repeating, fractal order throughout the entire universe of lesser components joining together to become more and more meaningful, real, alive, conscious, orderly and beautiful unities.

5. This underlying order of the universe is a repeating image or description of Love.

6. The likelihood of random events to produce life is none. It is impossible.

7. Through analogy (sphere and plane) it is easy to see how a non-time-space reality could cause and transcend time-space reality in which our intellects are bound.

8. It is therefore logical to assume that time-space bound logic is limited.

9. Uniting all of the above observations together, it is very rational to assume there is a God, a Divine Author of reality and life and that God’s nature is Divine Love.

There is a certain point where true rationality realizes that it is inadequate, that it is but a servant and that Love is the true and good Master. The difference between an individual who believes in the Divine and one who does not believe is not rationality as many would propone. It is not irrational to believe that rationality is a useful but limited tool; that there is reality beyond rational understanding.

A believer of the type I am speaking of and of which I am one, views reality as exceedingly precious, as holy. We see reality as wondrous, grand and mysterious. We believe she is bigger than ourselves and bigger even than the questions we can pose. We see her not so much as something to understand as something to revere, to love. We see her as something to honor and praise. We see her this way because we see that reality is beautiful, awesome, vibrant, radiant and full of life. We treat her not as something on which to experiment, but as something to adore. We treat her not as something to harness and possess, but an a living being in which God is seen.

This is not to say that experiment and spirit of discovery characterized by science does not have its place. But one can trace a myriad problems facing our earth to the spirit of discovery wedded to selfish desire: gaping holes in the ozone layer; an atmosphere filled with lead, that was not there 80 years ago; an ocean absent of 80% of the fish that once flourished there; nuclear war-heads; global warming; the massive destruction of Brazil’s forests, the list goes on and on. Without machines and science, none of these problems and pending disasters would be ours to face. And yet, science is not the problem. Selfishness is the problem. One might make a list of all the evils created by religion—wars and oppression and torture. But again, these really aren’t caused by a belief in the Divine Love. They are caused by the human selfishness latching on to the idea of God for the sake of obtaining Divine power for its self. Neither science nor religion are to blame for our problems and evils. Our only true enemy is the sense of self.

Science and a sense of the sacred are actually a perfect pair. Sense of the sacred will prevent us from using the powerful tools of science to destroy and will channel them to heal and promote well-being.”

Let’s hear some comments! 

CCD,

Ben

Dan Dennett on Religion

It’s a long one, but well worth watching.  Dan Dennett takes his time and explains his doubts meticulously.

CCD,

Ben

The End Scene from ‘Religulous’

I felt like throwing some pepper in the gumbo this morning.

CCD,

Ben