franz kiekeben - Blog

ON FINDING JESUS

4/1/2021

I'm here today to announce my conversion to Christianity. For several years now, I've been blogging at Debunking Christianity, and before that at my own site, arguing against what up until recently I saw as irrational beliefs. But last night, God spoke to me, and I am now saved. Praise the Lord!

It's not that I hadn't looked for Jesus before. In fact, I spent several years trying to find Him; I searched high and low, everywhere I went; I went to the famous "Chicken Church" just outside of Tampa (see picture) — after going to a Church's Chicken by mistake (stupid GPS); I looked in lost and found boxes, under the couch cushions, and on every piece of toast I made; I even read The Bible for Dummies from cover to cover. But until yesterday, I had never heard that all I had to do was ask God to reveal Himself, and He would. So I tried it, and much to my surprise, He came into my heart.

At first, I thought it was just heartburn, but then I heard a voice! And this wasn't like most of the voices I hear in my head. This one was deep and well-modulated, more James Earl Jones than Morgan Freeman. So I immediately knew it was God. I fell down on my knees (though, to be perfectly honest, the scotch I was drinking at the time might have had something to do with that) and began speaking in tongues.

After telling me to shut the fuck up, He told me that He loved me, quickly adding, “but I'm not gay — that would be a sin.” Which was a big relief!

So now I'm here to tell all of you to repent, lest you end up in the eternal Hellfire prepared for Satan and his minions, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, followed by (the truly horrible part) dentist appointments to fix those teeth! Forever and ever. Amen.

God bless!

[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

THE PARADOXES OF DENYING INFINITY

3/24/2021

[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

It is common for theists — especially those familiar with the Kalam Cosmological Argument and William Lane Craig's defense of it — to deny the existence of actual infinities. And since the question of infinity recently came up in one of the comment threads at Debunking Christianity, I thought I'd re-publish an old blog post on this, with minor modifications.

It consists of two parts — the main blog post, plus (for those who want to delve a bit deeper into the issue) an addendum on the solution to Zeno's paradox:

Although it may be surprising, no claim I've made has been criticized more by the religious than the claim that there are actual infinities. Every time I so much as mention infinity, someone goes out of their way to "inform" me of the errors of my ways. And yet there appear to be clear cases of infinity all around us. For example, every time you move, you go through an infinite number of subintervals: You first go half of the way, then 3/4 of the way, followed by 7/8, 15/16, and so on, covering what is obviously an infinite series. Nevertheless, you are able to complete the motion.

Using this as an example of an actual infinity raises the question of Zeno's paradox, however, and some of the aforementioned critics have done just that. According to Zeno, since this series of intervals never ends — since there are an actual infinite number of them between any two points A and B — one can never go from A to B.

Now, other than agreeing with Zeno that all motion is an illusion, there are two basic alternatives available to us here. The first is to agree that there are an infinite number of intervals but to claim that we can in fact move across all of them. The other is to deny that there are an infinite number of intervals.

It is often said that an infinite series is one that by definition cannot be completed, since (after all) it has no end. But that isn't the case. Consider the principal claim that the religious finitists (i.e., infinity deniers) insist on making, namely that the past cannot be infinite. They do so by arguing that an infinite series of events could not have already taken place, as that would mean it has been completed. But why can't an infinite series of past events occur given an infinite amount of time? If there is a time for each event, and there are an infinite number of times (or moments), then there can be an infinite number of events. (My favorite example here is one that is credited to Wittgenstein: imagine coming across someone who says “...4, 3, 2, 1, 0. Finished!” and then explains he has been counting backwards from eternity.)

We can resolve Zeno's paradox, it seems to me, once we see how the infinite series that it involves is also one that can be completed. However, the solution is a bit complicated, so I'll leave it to the end of this post. First, I want to consider the other alternative, that of the finitists.

There is more than one way to be a finitist about the number of intervals in a line segment, but the one that appears to be favored by the religious is to argue that the number of subdivisions involved is only potentially, rather than actually, infinite. That is, these individuals claim that there are an infinite number of possible subdivisions in that one could in principle keep dividing a line segment forever. However, since one could never finish the task, there never could be an actual infinite number of intervals there.

The problem with this is that it treats the intervals as something created by our actually dividing the line (at least mentally). That is, it assumes that when one is talking about each part of the line in question (its first half, the 1/4 that follows that, and so on), one is talking about parts that have already been marked off from the rest. But that is not what Zeno's paradox is about. The first half, the one fourth that follows that, and all the other intervals that Zeno is referring to are geometrical parts that are present in the line whether anyone takes notice of them or not. In other words, they are already there. It's true that we could never actually mark off all of them, as it would take forever, but that's irrelevant.

A second way of arguing that a line does not contain an infinite number of intervals is to claim that the line is not infinitely divisible, not even potentially — that is, to claim that there are smallest parts that cannot be divided further even in principle. But that too is highly problematic. For then what one is claiming is that there are segments of a line that are not zero sized and yet that have no further parts. But if one of these spatial "atoms" isn't zero sized, that's because there is some distance between one end of it and the other — which in turn means the two ends must be distinct. And that contradicts the claim that it has no parts.

Finitists object to infinity by claiming that it leads to paradoxes. And yet what these examples show is that the rejection of infinity introduces paradoxes as well. One individual I debated online on this topic — a defender of the above potential infinity view — actually maintained that the two halves of a line do not exist until someone divides the line in half. Now, I admit that there are unresolved paradoxes of infinity. Philosophers and mathematicians haven't yet worked out all of the issues on the subject. But I find the existence of infinity paradoxes more acceptable precisely because they involve infinity — a concept that our minds have a hard time grasping. It's very easy for or intuitions to go wrong whenever the infinite is involved. I'm not willing to accept, however, that my intuition that the two halves of a line exist prior to our dividing the line could be wrong!

THE SOLUTION TO ZENO'S PARADOX

It is often claimed that Zeno's paradox is dissolved once we realize that the sum of the infinite series 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + …. is 1. But that would be the solution only if Zeno's claim were that the series does not add up to 1, or that, given that the series is infinite, the distance from A to B must itself be infinite — and that doesn't seem to be what Zeno was claiming. Moreover, even if he was claiming that, it doesn't matter, since we can see a different problem — namely, that in order to reach B (never mind that it is clearly only a finite distance away), one must complete an infinite series. That is what appears impossible.

But it isn't. Above, I claimed that at least some infinite series can in fact be completed. For instance, given an infinite amount of time, an infinite number of events can occur. So some infinite series can be completed given infinite time in which to do so. But in fact it doesn't necessarily take an infinite amount of time. Aristotle pointed out that, obviously, the time it takes to move from A to B can also be divided into its first half, its next fourth, and so on. Thus, there are an infinite number of subintervals of time in which to cover the infinite number of subintervals of length between A and B. The situation is therefore analogous to the one in which an infinite number of events occur in an infinite amount of time: in both cases, there is a time available for each event in question to take place.

Now, this at first may not seem sufficient to solve the paradox. We can imagine Zeno objecting that, just as there is a problem with completing the infinite series of intervals between A and B, there is a problem (given that the span involved contains an infinite number of temporal intervals) with the passage of time from moment T1 to moment T2. But it is easy to answer such an objection. We can begin by noting that the infinite number of subdivisions (whether of temporal or spatial intervals) adds up to the span in question. That is (to consider the spatial case first), we already know that it is the distance between A and B that contains the infinite number of intervals we're discussing. So there is no question about there being a point B, only one about how one can arrive at it. Similarly, we know that it is the span T1 to T2 that has an infinite number of temporal intervals. So once again, there is no question about the existence of T2, only about how it ever can arrive. But now one can see that the above objection really makes no sense. Because for there to be a time T2 is the same thing as for it to eventually arrive! It is incoherent to claim that there is such a time and to also claim that it can never get here. (It would be as incoherent as to claim that there is a point B and to insist that it is nowhere.) Therefore, Zeno cannot reasonably object that it is impossible for the time between T1 and T2 to transpire. It would be like saying that the distance between A and B does not exist.

(I am not, incidentally, claiming that Zeno wouldn't say that. In fact, as a disciple of Parmenides, he would say precisely this about the distance — and might, faced with the above considerations, say the analogous thing regarding the time span. But none of this is relevant to the paradoxes, which take as their starting point the fact that there are distances and durations, before attempting to show that such an assumption creates a problem.)

Given that T2 will eventually be here, it follows that there is in fact one temporal interval available for moving across each interval between A and B (all the way to and including B). The fact that both the number of line segments and the number of temporal intervals is infinite is no more problematic than the fact that in a universe without a beginning, the number of past events and the number of past moments are both infinite. In both situations, the availability of a time for each event to occur in is all that is needed to avoid paradox.

One final note: Above, I stated that one could never finish the task of dividing the distance between A and B into an infinite number of intervals. However, in principle, someone could in fact do so — just as we can, and do, go through all of these intervals in moving from A to B. The someone in question would simply need to perform the task at an ever increasing rate — e.g., by making the first division in 30 seconds, the second in 15, the third in 7.5, and so on, so as to complete the task in one minute flat. As Bertrand Russell once said, the impossibility of performing an infinite number of tasks in a finite amount of time is merely “medical.”

MONOLATRY

10/15/2020

[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

It seems obvious that the ancient Israelites were not monotheists, but instead practiced monolatry, the worship of one god combined with a belief in existence of other gods. This is the best explanation of the first commandment's “no other gods before me” as well as of Psalm 86:8's “there is none like you among the gods.” But there are also events described in the Bible that suggest belief in other gods.

One that is particularly interesting is mentioned in the book Bible Prophecy by Tim Callahan:

In 2 Kings 3:27, when Moab is under siege by the Israelites, the king of that city sacrifices his firstborn son to the god Chemosh. As a result, “there came a great wrath upon Israel,” and Moab was spared. Now, why would there be a great wrath upon Israel if the only god in existence were Yahweh? It makes no sense for Yahweh to be angry with the Israelites for what the king of Moab did; if anything, he'd be mad at the king, and give Israel a victory. The obvious implication is that the god Chemosh, happy with the sacrifice, caused Israel's defeat. And yet this account was written by an Israelite, and included in their scriptures. This can only mean that the Israelites believed Chemosh was real. It also implies (even more shockingly) that they believed Chemosh had the power to do something that Yahweh didn't stop — and perhaps was unable to stop.

This is obviously a problem for any fundamentalist who interprets the Bible literally. But it is also a problem for every other modern-day Christian or Jew. Why would the one true God, who didn't want his chosen people to worship other deities, be okay with his followers believing these other deities existed? Worse, why would he allow them to suggest as much in their holy book? Isn't it far more likely that the Israelites were worshipping a false god (just like all the other ancients were), and that the monotheistic God that evolved from that false god is therefore also a fictional entity?

FAITH AND EQUIVOCATION

9/22/2020

[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

Whenever someone is defending faith, or is arguing that faith and reason are compatible, they should be asked which of three common meanings of the term they are thinking of. If the exact meaning of the word isn't made clear, it is almost a given that their claims will deteriorate into a mess of equivocation.

When challenged to provide evidence for the existence of God, most theists reply that their belief is based on faith. This makes it clear that, in this context, “faith” means belief without evidence. This meaning of the word also applies to the claim that faith is needed when the evidence isn't conclusive. Or in other words, when the believer says that reason can only take one so far, and one must make the decision to believe.

The religious often also use this meaning of the word in criticisms of atheists, as when they claim that it takes greater faith to be an atheist, or that atheists believe in materialism on faith. This is when faith is described negatively as “blind faith.” However, when they themselves are accused of believing without evidence, they almost always begin claiming that faith means something like trust instead. They make analogies between having faith in God and someone having faith in their doctor's abilities, or something similar.

Now, one problem with this as an explanation of what is going on when people have religious faith is that trust, when rational, is based on evidence. It is a judgment one makes based on incomplete but hopefully adequate information. But a more serious problem with treating religious faith as if it means trust is that it doesn't make sense when faith is what makes one believe in God. For that faith is itself supposedly faith in God — and obviously one cannot trust God unless one already believes that God exists.

The word is also used in a third sense, to mean a particular doctrine or set of religious beliefs. Now, it should be a simple enough matter to keep this meaning separate from the others, but unfortunately the religious sometimes fail to do even that. For instance, in the introduction to his The Case for Faith, Lee Strobel replies to the claim that faith is believing without evidence by setting out to discover “once and for all whether the Christian faith can stand up to scrutiny.” He doesn't seem to realize that, in defending the Christian doctrine this way, he's not defending believing on faith, but is instead defending believing a particular faith on the basis of evidence. The fact that the word “faith” is used to mean both what one bases one's religious beliefs on, and what the specific contents of those beliefs are, causes Strobel and many others like him to conflate the two ideas. But perhaps this is intentional: For what they want, after all, is to claim both that there is adequate evidence and that one must have faith to believe in God — even though that's a contradiction.

IF THE SHOE WERE ON THE OTHER FOOT

8/27/2020

What Christian wouldn’t be incensed by the following statement, especially if informed that it was made by a professor of philosophy at one of this nation’s venerated institutions of higher learning? The statement, ostensibly an attempt to explain the real reasons underlying the religious beliefs of millions of our fellow citizens, appears to be purposely disrespectful:

“Christian belief,” this professor declared, “does not arise from assessment of evidence, but from stubborn closed-mindedness; it does not have its origin in the desire for knowledge but in arrogance and contempt. Christianity is the suppression of truth by hatred, the outgrowth of small-minded prejudice. In short, it is bigotry that is the mother of belief.”

Even strong atheists might admit that this goes too far. No wonder so many religious individuals feel as if they’re under siege. These days, it really does seem that there’s a war on certain types of belief.

Many among the religious who would be offended by statements like the above are, however, perfectly happy with similar pronouncements provided they come from their own side. They complain about biased professors whose hatred of faith is clearly evident, but in turn ignore — or even applaud — religious intolerance aimed at nonbelievers. As an example, consider the fact that the above statement is in reality a paraphrase, and that the original actually reads as follows:

“Atheism is not the result of objective assessment of evidence, but of stubborn disobedience; it does not arise from the careful application of reason but from willful rebellion. Atheism is the suppression of truth by wickedness, the cognitive consequence of immorality. In short, it is sin that is the mother of unbelief.”

My paraphrase consisted essentially of changing it from a statement about atheism to one about Christianity, along with the replacement of its abusive epithets by reasonably equivalent ones so as to make it all “fit.” The tone in the original is every bit as rude and obnoxious. The only difference is which side it’s on. And yet, this passage is the central thesis of a book that has been praised by many believers.

That book, The Making of an Atheist, by James Spiegel, a philosopher who teaches in a small religious university in Indiana, goes on to say that the atheist has a “depraved mind” that blinds him to God and ethics, [p. 54] and that “precipitated by immoral indulgences,” he “willfully rejects God.” [p. 113] According to Spiegel, atheism “is not at all a consequence of intellectual doubts.” Reason is not involved. “For the atheist,” he says, “the missing ingredient is not evidence but obedience.” [p. 11]

Positive reviews by readers on Amazon praise the work as “thought-provoking,” “impressive,” and “profound,” and suggest that it really explains the mind-set of nonbelievers. What would these people say if the shoe were on the other foot?

[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

IS GOD JUST?

8/18/2020

[Another summer re-run published at Debunking Christianity.]

We nonbelievers claim that a perfectly good, loving being would never have created hell, but according to most Christians we are simply wrong. God is loving, they say, but he is also just — and justice demands that evil-doers be punished. Without hell, after all, where would the Hitlers, Stalins, and Ted Bundys of this world end up? In heaven?

This is a common argument, which means that many must find it persuasive, but my guess is that those who do simply haven't given it sufficient thought. It's very easy to see the flaws in it.

To begin with, hell isn't only for serious evil-doers: standard Christian doctrine maintains that we are all deserving of eternal punishment and that anyone who doesn't accept God's offer of salvation ends up there. A second thing to keep in mind is that even the worst evil-doers aren't necessarily sent to hell — not if at some point they become sincere believers. Ted Bundy, for instance, claimed to have accepted Jesus before being executed, and if that's true then on the standard view he did end up in heaven.

One therefore cannot justify hell on the grounds that evil-doers must be punished. But more importantly, can one still maintain that God is just given this doctrine? Does it make sense that all of us are deserving of eternal punishment, or that those who accept Jesus are forgiven?

Let's begin with why everyone supposedly merits eternal damnation. One common reason offered for this is that God, due to his moral perfection, has standards that are so high that no one is good enough to meet them. Even if you are a saint, you aren't perfect: at the very least, you've probably told a few white lies. And that, the argument goes, makes you bad enough, in God's eyes, to merit the worst form of punishment.

But now consider an analogy. Suppose a father finds out his teenage daughter lied about when she returned home from a party: she said she was back by 10 (as she was supposed to have been) even though she didn't actually make it home until 10:15. By the above logic, if this father punished her by chaining her to the basement wall for a week and giving her a hundred lashes a day with a belt, that would show that he has very high moral standards. His standards still wouldn't be as high as God's, of course, for the Lord demands far worse punishment for the girl, but they would nevertheless be much loftier than those of the majority of parents out there.

As to the second question — whether those who accept Jesus's offer of salvation deserve to be forgiven — consider that while Bundy is experiencing eternal bliss, any non-Christian who spent her entire life helping others and doing nothing but good deeds still goes to hell. All I can say is that if you think that's right, you have a very bizarre sense of justice.

The heinousness of this entire doctrine is somewhat mitigated by the (nowadays rather common) claim that hell isn't as terrible as advertised. Maybe it just means annihilation. Or perhaps it means spending eternity apart from God (which, however, is still supposed to be a very undesirable thing). But no matter what one says about it, the basic idea remains entirely unfair. Believing in Christianity — or in Islam, or any other dogma — does not make one the slightest bit more ethical than not believing, and thus cannot be a sound basis for distinguishing those who merit forgiveness from those who do not.

IS THERE EVIDENCE THAT THERE ARE NO GODS?

5/29/2020

I was recently involved in an online discussion in which a reason I hadn't previously seen was offered for preferring negative to positive atheism. (By negative atheism, I mean the mere lack of belief in any gods, and by positive atheism, the belief that there are no gods. And the fact that one usually needs to explain this is one reason I prefer the traditional terminology.)

There are better and worse reasons for being only a negative atheist. But the one that was argued by my opponent in the discussion was pretty weak — and if it is accepted by others who call themselves atheists, they really should be aware of that.

Briefly, my opponent's argument was that one should only believe when there is evidence; that there is no evidence that there are no gods; and therefore that to positively disbelieve in such beings is completely unjustified.

I suspect some might accept this argument as a result of thinking of evidence exclusively as direct evidence. One can have direct evidence that there are horses by, for example, seeing some. But one cannot have direct evidence that there are no unicorns by seeing none. This, however, ignores indirect evidence. And there is plenty of that regarding unicorns.

One is justified in positively disbelieving in unicorns when one knows certain things about this supposed creature — for instance, that the earliest reports of it were based on long-horned animals depicted in profile (and as a result showing only one horn), as well as on descriptions of rhinos to ancient Greeks who had never seen them; that the spiral tusks of narwhals were sometimes found on beaches and thought to be unicorn horns; that no unicorn or unicorn skeleton has ever been found (which would be very unlikely, given that it is supposedly a large animal); and so on. All this points to the unicorn being a mythical creature — and as that is by far the most likely conclusion, it is reasonable to hold that unicorns aren't real.

Similar kinds of things can be said about gods. There is evidence that gods are human inventions, and even reasonable explanations for why human beings invented them. There are things we know about our existence (e.g., that we are evolved, physical entities) that make the existence of beings who are like us in many respects (e.g., having minds much like ours), yet exist in a supernatural realm or have supernatural powers, extremely unlikely at best. There is the fact that no god, and no act of a god, has ever been observed (there are of course supposed exceptions to this, but the best explanations for them do not require positing any deities) — yet for all of the gods that humans have believed in, this absence is as much of a problem as the absence of unicorns is for unicorn belief. Finally (though of course I wouldn't expect people in general to know this), there is the argument which I made in The Truth about God, that on the traditional meaning of “god”, a god must have libertarian free will — which rules out their existence if libertarian free will is impossible because there is no middle ground between the determined and the random.

Now, one does not have to accept any of these points as conclusive. And one might have other reasons for being a negative atheist. But to claim that positive atheists are mistaken because there is no evidence against the existence of gods is unreasonable.

[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

A VISIT TO THE CREATION MUSEUM

4/22/2020

[Since we are all stuck at home right now and cannot visit museums, here is a revised version of a post about my visit to Ken Ham's sad excuse for one. I hope this helps fill a void until you can actually go there and see all of its wonders for yourself.]

Ken Ham's “unnatural history” museum in Petersburg, Kentucky is, as you probably know, devoted to a literal interpretation of the Bible. It claims to present evidence that the earth is about 6000 years old, that dinosaurs coexisted with humans, that there was a worldwide flood around 2350 BCE, and so on.

It is a bizarre experience from the moment you walk in.

One of the first things you come across inside is an animatronic display of a child next to a couple of velociraptors. (Dinosaurs are a big part of the attraction here, starting with the stegosaurus on the parking lot gate: the owners know it's a way to attract kids to the place.)

The velociraptor display is problematic, however, and not just because it's on the scientific level of The Flintstones. You see, according to the information presented in the museum, all creatures were vegetarian prior to the Fall: this means that lions could sleep with lambs and, apparently, children could play with velociraptors. It was the eating of the forbidden fruit that introduced hardship into the world, thereby turning some animals into predators. But of course, there were no children until after the Fall. How, then, could a child have a velociraptor for a pet? (Moreover, the child in this display is clothed, which is something no one would be before the eating of the forbidden fruit. As everyone knows, Adam and Eve started out as nudists.)

Once you get past the velociraptor display, you enter the main exhibits. Here, visitors are first informed that different scientists can view exactly the same data yet come to radically different conclusions: some see fossils and think they are millions of years old, others understand them to have been around no more than a few thousand years; some see the Grand Canyon and think it formed gradually, others see it and conclude it was the result of an immense flood; it all depends on what interpretation you bring to the data. As one sign puts it, “dinosaur fossils don't come with tags.” This is a big part of the museum's message, designed to make ignorant visitors think that the biblical interpretation is at least as valid as the scientific one.

Eventually, the claims go beyond merely leveling the field, and science begins to be presented as inferior to biblical authority. For, given that the empirical evidence is open to more than one interpretation, to truly know the past we need the evidence of one who was there and who wrote it all down. And that someone was of course God. In one of the displays, a boy is shown saying (by means of a speech bubble) that he's never heard any of this stuff in school!

The message that one can either trust fallible human reason or God's infallible word is repeated throughout. (The fact that one has to use fallible human reason to conclude that the Bible is God's word is of course conveniently ignored.)

Ignoring God's word is said to be the cause of the modern world's problems, and this leads to the next section, the “Culture in Crisis” exhibit — a dark, subway-like tunnel in which all the evils of the modern, Darwin-believing world are represented: there is lots of graffiti, and talk of teen pregnancy, infidelity, and abortions.

Visitors then go through a history of the world that takes them from the creation of light through the garden of Eden, the Fall (dramatically described as “the worst day in the history of the universe”), Noah's ark (where you can actually see dinosaurs embarking, as well as a couple of their babies inside — see picture above), the repopulating of the world after the Flood, the Tower of Babel, and finally a film (which I didn't bother to see) about “the last Adam,” Jesus.

Many of the claims made throughout are supported by nothing more than the authority of scripture. For instance, to the question, “did dinosaurs evolve from birds?” the hilarious answer given is that “God made birds on day 5 and land animals on day 6. Dinosaurs are land animals, so they were created the day after birds.” This is something that all those scientists who believe birds are descended from dinosaurs obviously failed to consider!

Other times, though, they try to provide more elaborate explanations. Mostly, these hardly make sense. For instance, the reason they give for why marsupials “were the first mammals buried and preserved after the flood” (for they are found in lower strata) and why, unlike most other mammals, they made it all the way to Australia, is that marsupials, “which have pouches, can nurse their young while moving,” whereas placental mammals, “which nurse their young in the womb, spread out more slowly.”

Often, the claims are just outlandish. My favorite is their suggestion that the super-continent Pangaea broke apart to form today's continents as a result of the Flood. That's some powerful receding water.

The burning question I most wanted answered was why there are no longer any dinosaurs. After all, according to Ham and his people, these creatures were taken aboard the ark, so they didn't all perish in the Flood, as I assumed they would say. One possible answer they give is that people “killed them for food or sport.” (Well, if I remember correctly, Fred Flintstone did use to eat dino burgers.) Another display, however, claims that there might still be dinosaurs around today that no one has yet found.

It must be admitted that the Creation Museum is rather entertaining for nonbelievers. It feels sort of like a cross between the Bible and the old Raquel Welch movie One Million Years B.C. But even though it is funny, it's also sad, especially when one sees the children who are taken there to be misinformed, and who will no doubt become confused when they are taught real science in school. If only they didn't have all those dinosaurs.

[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD, AGAIN

3/26/2020

"In around 2020, a severe pneumonia-like illness will spread throughout the globe, attacking the lungs and the bronchial tubes and resisting all known treatments."

Those are the words of psychic Sylvia Browne in her 2008 book End of Days: Predictions and Prophecies about the End of the World, which which rose to the number two position on Amazon's non-fiction chart after Kim Kardashian tweeted about this. For the naive, the accuracy of Browne's prediction seems impressive. But of course it really isn't.

To begin with, the fact that she stated something that turned out more-or-less right is easy to explain: That there will be a widespread virus, and that it will cause “pneumonia-like” symptoms (why not simply “pneumonia”?) are both fairly safe guesses as to what could happen in a given year – even though one is of course still likely to be wrong when making such a prediction. In this case, Browne just got lucky. But she also made far more incorrect than correct predictions. Kardashian's tweet includes the above picture of the relevant page in Browne's book, and there one can also read that another epidemic would take place in 2010, this one involving a flesh-eating disease transmitted by mites that came from exotic birds. You probably don't remember that epidemic, since it never happened.

Some of the other things Browne incorrectly predicted were that by 2010, a DNA database of every newborn on earth would have been created, that by 2014 microchips would be implanted in people's brains to “override” such conditions as schizophrenia, and that by 2020 no one would be blind or deaf, and many births would take place in “gravity-rigged birthing chambers” (whatever that means). The funniest one I've come across is her claim that fertility rates would drop as end times approached because “fewer and fewer spirits will choose to reincarnate and be around when life on Earth ceases to exist. The fewer the spirits wanting to come here, the fewer the fetuses they’ll need to occupy.”

One prediction that is safe to make is that whenever there is a pandemic, it will bring out the crazy in people. Browne's book isn't popular right now just because of this one prediction; it is popular because it is about the end times. She is being read because people think that they will find information there about the coming apocalypse. And as one might expect, quite a few other charlatans are referring to the current crisis as a sign that the end is near.

Anyone listening to these charlatans should keep in mind that the track record for such predictions isn't exactly good.

[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

CAN ONE ACTUALLY BELIEVE IN CHRISTIANITY?

3/4/2020

In one of the essays in Loftus's anthology The Case Against Miracles, Robert Price raises an issue that is commonly ignored. Price's essay, “Jesus Christ: Docetic Demigod”, concerns the miracles of the Incarnation and of the Virgin Birth, and is well worth reading for the many additional points it makes (as is the rest of the anthology). Here, however, I'm just going to discuss that one issue, for it is something that puts the very idea of Christian belief in doubt.

Price asks whether it is possible to “believe what you cannot understand.”

Consider the doctrine of the Trinity. It does not mean that there are three gods, nor does it mean that there is one God who “reveals himself in different forms,” for those, he points out, are both considered heresies (Tritheism and Modalism respectively). Or consider what is claimed regarding the Incarnation — namely, that Jesus is 100% God and 100% human. It is impossible to make sense of such a thing. After all, it is a logical contradiction. But then what is it that the Christian is supposed to believe?

Some might reply that one can believe each side of these claims separately. There is no inherent difficulty in believing that Jesus is wholly human, nor is there one in believing that he's wholly God. Similarly, one can believe that there is only one God, and one can believe that what we call “God” consists of three distinct persons. Nor does it seem impossible to believe some of these things at one time and some at another (so that one moment I might believe Jesus is entirely human and another that he's entirely divine). But that doesn't solve the problem. For it remains the case that one cannot believe the two sides of the contradictions simultaneously. To do so, one would have to make sense of them — and that, of course, isn't possible.

So-called true believers are more likely to appeal to mystery at this point. The human mind just cannot understand these things, they might say, but that doesn't mean they aren't true. And yet this, once again, won't do. For hidden in that defense is the claim that something is true — namely, the thing that we cannot understand. But what is that something? If we cannot even make sense of it, what are we actually claiming is true?

What Christian doctrine asks one to believe are words that, taken as a whole, fail to be meaningful. The doctrine is therefore literally unbelievable.

[Originally published as a guest-post on the A Tippling Philosopher blog at Patheos.]