What would convince you?
A few years ago, a visitor to our home expressed surprise at seeing a copy of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion lying around. My response was that I find it helpful to know what those I might disagree with are actually saying.
In the same spirit, I present here the key points in this 2013 essay by Daniel Bastion. These twenty reasons for not taking Christianity seriously have garnered high praise from sceptics such as John Loftus (‘Read ’em and weep Christians’) and David Madison (‘Bastian’s essay is indeed essential homework. Study it carefully, ponder all of the issues he describes in detail.’).
1. ‘If evolution were false.’ The problems, for Bastion, are the evolution is unguided (we ourselves are an ‘evolutionary accident’) and wasteful (with so many billions of years to produce human existence, so much pain and death as necessary to natural selection, and so many imperfections of design). So much for the delusional, conceited notion that there is some agency out there that harbours concern for our species.
2. ‘If God appeared to me or made its presence known to me.’ The Bible is full of stories of appearances of Yahweh (to Moses, for example), and of the resurrected Jesus. A god who was interested in our affairs and our destiny could easily appear to each of us and convince us of his existence. But we have only silence.
3. ‘If we were not made of “star stuff.”’ If human beings had cosmic and spiritual significance, we would be made of matter radically different to other species, and, indeed to everything else in the universe. Such discontinuity might at least point in the general direction of theism.
4. ‘If a natural disaster were stopped in its tracks.’ A god who could part the Red Sea, or cause bears to maul Elisha’s antagonizers, should be capable of stopping a tsunami or a hurricane in its tracks. In such cases God, is he exists, would have to be judged a guilty bystander.
5. ‘If the efficacy of prayer could be conclusively demonstrated as superior to modern medical remedies.’ But studies of the efficacy of prayer have simply confirmed the null hypothesis.
6. ‘If we were to observe a true medical miracle.‘ The regrowth of an amputated limb, or the resurrection of a dead child, would do nicely.
7. ‘If miracles like the ones crowding the Bible had occurred since the arrival of video cameras and modern methods of recording and preservation.’ Consider the miraculous claims made in the Bible – a God who takes up residence in a burning bush, fire raining down from heaven, walking on water, turning water into wine. Then consider the absence of such claims just as soon as we have the technology to record them.
8. ‘If we found two cultures who had independently received an identical revelation.’ If one religion were true, then we would expect to encounter evidence of the same god, the same scriptures, and so on, in disparate and unrelated cultures. But we do not. On the contrary, which god one believes in is dependent on the culture into which one happens to have been born. If there was one god, we would expect to see much more consensus among religious people.
9. ‘If divine messages were embedded within our mathematical or physical laws.’ Why wouldn’t a divine being leave, for example, a discernable pattern in pi that would only make sense in the context of one form of religion or another?
10. ‘If there were not 10,000 different genetic disorders.’ Why would a god allow the huge amount of suffering entailed? Why doesn’t he (or she or it) tidy up some of the rogue DNA implicated in these disorders?
11. ‘If the infant mortality rate (IMR) dropped faster than could be accounted for by scientific advances.’ Medical advances have led to dramatic falls in infant mortality rates. It would be good evidence of a loving God if a sudden large drop were to occur that couldn’t be explained by improvements in healthcare.
12. ‘If the people of one religion experienced dramatically less suffering relative to all others.’ You would expect a divine being to favour those who are faithful to him/her/it. But,
‘while men and women of faith are thanking God for parking spots and promotions, some several dozen children will have perished in misery, most likely from overwhelmingly Christian countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Yahweh is portrayed in the Bible as the Ultimate Provider, showering manna from the sky to nourish the Israelites in time of need. Once again, we see this deity has apparently grown more callous with time.’
Actually, it is largely secular societies, Norway, Sweden, Australia, Canada, and the Netherlands, for instance, who enjoy the best quality of life. Religious countries, in contrast, consistently score lower in this regard.
13. ‘If we did not have such a somber record of mass extinctions.’ Something like 99.99% of all species are extinct. How this be consistent with the existence of a benevolent deity?
14. ‘If our own species had not been jerked to the precipice of extinction multiple times in our relatively brief time on this planet.’ Our distant ancestors lived short, burdensome lives. Our species has been on the brink of extinction several times, due to volcanic eruptions, epidemics, and suchlike. How can we infer the existence of a benevolent Creator from such a brutal creation?
15. ‘If the Bible were non-discrepant, free of error, and internally consistent.’ If the Creator of the universe chose to inspire some writings, we would reasonably expect those writings to attain to a level of perfection not seen in merely human literature. But neither the Bible nor any other religous text passes this test.
16. ‘If the Bible, or any purported holy text, contained prescient moral and scientific truths.’ The Bible contains nothing on ‘slavery, the status of women, penalties for various innocuous (and imaginary) crimes, and the treatment of unbelievers’ that transcends its Bronze Age context.
Similarly, the Bible, being a prescientific text, lacks any insight into what we now know about biology, physics, astronomy, cosmology, genetics, subatomic particles, and so on. If it did, we could more readily infer a divine origin.
17. ‘If the biblical texts were purely preserved.’ What would be the piont of having a ‘perfect’ text that has been imperfectly preserved> But we have no autograph of any of the biblical texts. What we have are copies of copies, with hundreds of thousands of variants, some significant ‘(the alternate endings for Mark’s gospel, the Johanine Comma, the silencing and disesteeming of women in Paul’s epistles’), some less so.
18. ‘If we had a more reliable historical record of the life and deeds of Jesus.’ Neither Jesus nor any of his disciples (who were probably illiterate) left us any writings of their own. What we have, in the gospels, are anonymous accounts by Greek-speaking (not Aramaic) persons several decades after Jesus’ death. And the gospels are primarily theological, not historical, in nature. Furthermore, we would expect many of the miracles recorded in the gospels to be exteranlly attested if they actually happened. (Mark’s supernatural darkness at the time of Jesus’ death, Matthew’s rock-splitting and tomb-emptying earthquake, and Paul’s more than five hundred witnesses to the resurrection, for example. Even other NT writers do not mention these).
The only extrabiblical references we have to Jesus outside the NT are from Josephus and Tacitus, and neither mention any of the miracles reported in the gospels.
None of this is to deny the existence of Jesus as a historical figure. But it is to suggest that the story was posthumously embellished by his followers.
19. ‘If Christianity were not so divided and had not repeatedly found itself on the wrong side of history, all the while citing divine revelation.’ We would expect God’s own people – Christians, say – to have a direct line to God on morality and other matters. But they exhibit less unity in this regard than non-religious people. Moreover, they are in hopeless disagreement on issues of doctrine; witness the 41,000 denominations and splinter sects.
20. But all of the foregoing is beside the point. A god – if there is a god – should have realised what criteria we would require in order to enter into a relationship with him. And, if he cared about us, he should spared no effort in satisfying those criteria. He should have met our demands. If god is there, why has he made it so difficult to detect him/her/it?
‘A god that has made itself impossible to detect — that, indeed, has ostensibly crafted a universe using processes indistinguishable from nature itself — and neglected to act on our behalf when and where such intercession was most desperately needed, undercuts our expectations of a cosmos governed by a benevolent watchman.’
To conclude:
‘I challenge my Christian friends to compile a similar list. If practicing theists were genuinely concerned with the truth of their beliefs, they should be able to replicate this exercise. What array of facts, happenings, or circumstances might it take to convince a theist of the truth of atheism?’