Faith-based Reasoning.

Science-based Reasoning.

Christ.

Here are the notes from my talk for the CFI Panel in Ontario, Canada. Enjoy. My first question is which Christ I’m supposed to talk about tonight. There have been many of them in Judeo-Christian communities. Before Jesus there was King Zerubbabel (6Century BCE). Many others since then have arisen, including Simon bar Kokhba (2Century CE), the Gnostic Christ, down towho lives today in Houston, Texas. If this same discussion were taking place in India we would talk about Krishna, who is regarded as the eighth incarnation of lord Vishnu.I want to raise awareness of the fact that the culturally dominant view of Christ by Christians should not get a free pass to the table merely because it’s held by the majority of people. It must earn its right to be here by showing it has more evidence than other Christ conceptions do. My claim is that all religious conceptions of Christ share something in common with each other. They all share in a faith-based reasoning as opposed to a science-based reasoning. Because of this they cannot convince each other that other Christ conceptions are false. Only if they can find a way to arrive at a consensus between them can we take any of them seriously, regardless of which one is the culturally dominant view. But they cannot do this. The failure of these religionists to settle their disputes shows us the failure of faith-based reasoning. The only way out of such a religious morass is to reject faith-based reasoning in favor of science-based reasoning.1) Faith-based reasoning begins with one’s upbringing, primarily coming from parents, but also from the culture at large. We’re all raised as believers. We initially believe whatever our parents tell us in our respective cultures. Since our parents were never told differently by their parents that there is no Christ they don’t pass that on to their children. For this reason doubt is an adult attitude. It must be learned. 2) Faith-based reasoning begins with a faith position and seeks to confirm it. It reasons from faith rather than to faith and surprise, it finds faith reasonable. But we know from psychological studies that most people who seek to confirm something can find reasons to do so. So there is a good reason to avoid this as much as possible and instead be skeptical of beliefs we prefer to be true. 3) Faith-based reasoning always takes a leap beyond what the probabilities show us. There is no way any reasonable person can conclude any more than what the probabilities show us. Even if the probabilities of something stand at 51% no reasonable person should bridge that gap with a faith that provides certainty. That leap is always epistemologically unjustified.1) Science-based reasoning begins by looking for hard evidence for what to accept as true. Given the fact that various sects of religious faith believe and defend what they were raised to believe, and that most of them are certain about their faith I must demand evidence, hard evidence, positive evidence, before I’ll accept what any of them believe. Until one of them steps up to the plate and offers something more by way of evidence than the other faiths do I cannot believe in any of them for the same reasons. 2) Science-based reasoning has a tried and true method that assumes a natural explanation for every phenomenon. This method has produced the goods down through the centuries. 3) Science-based reasoning only accepts what the probabilities show us. It does not go beyond them.Clearly then, faith-based reasoning should be rejected in favor of science-based reasoning. We need objective evidence, a lot of it, when it comes to extraordinary claims. When applied specifically to the extraordinary Christian claims about Christ I’ll argue they should be rejected because they are not probable at all.The meaning of the word “Christ” is “anointed one,” from the Hebrew word for “Messiah.” Prophets, priests and kings were publicly anointed with oil to their divinely authorized roles. Christians claim that Jesus is uniquely thebecause he fulfilled these three roles perfectly, all wrapped up into one. Christians believe that Jesus is the Christ as God’s incarnate Son on earth who spoke God’s final words to a small group of ancient, pre-scientific Middle Eastern people, who had to die to save the world from sin because God just could not forgive us without it, who arose from the grave but was only seen by a small number of people, some of whom doubted, and who forever rules over the world even though he’s not doing a very good job of this. Now he demands that we believe these extraordinary claims and if we don’t, we’ll be punished in hell when we die.Any questions?Well, I have plenty of them and not enough time. I like to address the larger questions too, because they help us with the proper context when looking into the specifics of any particular extraordinary claim coming from Christian believers.The most important question is this one:Bertrand Russell was asked what he would tell God on judgment day as to why he did not believe. Russell reportedly said: “Not enough evidence, God, not enough evidence.” That’s what I would say, because even if the Christian faith ends up being true after all there is still no reason thinking people should accept it. We can only accept claims that can be reasonably justified. That means we have to reject a lot of true claims because they have not met their own burden of proof. This is both obvious and non-controversial. Aliens from space might have abducted someone, but without sufficient evidence commensurate with that claim there is no reason why anyone should believe the person who asserts it. There are surely cases in which someone murdered another person but no one suspects he did the evil deed, because there is just no evidence that leads anyone to think he did. There are many hundreds of claims that we should never believe, even if they are true. That’s the case when it comes to Christianity. Even if it’s true, thinking people cannot accept it because there isn’t enough evidence to believe.The Christian claims are all so very extraordinary, especially when grouped together as a whole, that they seem bizarre to an outsider. Someone not already raised to believe them would find it extremely difficult to even entertain them at all. Since I’m a thinking person I cannot accept just any claim at all. I am right to require reasonable answers to basic questions, and I am right to require sufficient evidence commensurate with the claims being made before I will accept them. I can see no reasonable objection to this requirement at all. Even if there is a god he supposedly created me this way as a thinking person. So the existence of a god changes nothing, for it would be duplicitous and counter-productive of a deity to create me as a thinking person and not also provide me with the answers and the evidence that a thinking person needs to accept the Christian claims. That is why casting a critical thinking non-believer to hell because God just did not provide enough evidence to believe these extraordinary claims is contrary to what we would expect from a good reasonable God, and an additional reason to reject them.Christians must show that the biblically described events actually happened in the past. But this task is fatally hamstrung by virtue of the fact that such efforts are based upon the poor quality of historical evidence that survives from the ancient superstitious past. Usually the farther we go back in the past the harder it is to reconstruct exactly what happened. Many historical reconstructions are weakly justified because that’s the best historians can do with the paucity of evidence for them. Sometimes the evidence leading to a different conclusion has been lost, or destroyed. In most circumstances historians can at best only say what did not happen as they falsify one historical supposition after another.When we factor in claims of miracles in the ancient past it gets even worse. Believers must meet an almost impossible double burden of proof. For a miraculous event must be both very improbable and probable at the same time. In order to argue an event is miraculous the Christian apologist must show that such an event is exceedingly improbable. But then the apologist must turn right around and claim this same exceedingly improbable event took place anyway.In any case in my world miracles do not happen. What world are YOU living in? Christians cannot believe without historical evidence and yet they must approach said evidence from our present day perspective. The only way they can reach their historical conclusions is by assuming what needs to be shown based on their upbringing in a Christian culture and that's it. If in our world miracles do not happen then they did not happen in first century Palestine either. And that should be the end of it. So expecting this kind of solid evidence for miracles in the past is asking more of history than it’s possible to show from historical study. For instance, unlike a person who personally tells us he levitated we cannot interrogate an ancient text that says a certain person levitated.But we’re not done yet. Christians must also show that the doctrines they derive from the supposed biblical events are true. However, this task is fatally hamstrung by virtue of the fact that their interpretations of the Biblical texts are historically situated and culturally conditioned, as is evident from the number of Christianities that have existed and exist today. Lastly, Christians have the task of showing how philosophy can make coherent sense of their doctrines, like Trinitarianism, the incarnation, atonement, personal identity after death, and the goodness of an omnipotent God in the presence of massive ubiquitous human and animal suffering. Accomplishing all of these Herculean tasks is needed to defend what they believe. It cannot be done.Reasonable Christian belief cannot even get off the ground because of the low odds of the historical evidence alone. When it comes to extraordinary miraculous claims, yesterday’s evidence has lost all of its power to convince. For in order to see yesterday’s evidence as convincing evidence for a miracle, we must already believe in an interpretive framework that allows us to see it as such. In the case of Christianity the raw uninterpreted data of the past will not be enough for us to believe a miracle took place without first having a Christian interpretive framework for that raw data. This is circular and a catch-22 for faith.Where does the Christian interpretive framework come from then? It doesn’t come from any “background knowledge” or “priors,” for there are no relevant “priors” prior to establishing the Christian interpretive framework. Christians must first independently establish that the miraculous resurrection of Jesus took place from the uninterpreted raw historical data. Not until then can they place such a miraculous belief into their bag of “priors” in first place! This problem is fatal for anyone who wishes to believe Jesus arose from the dead.We can even grant the existence of Yahweh, or a creator god, along with the possibility of miracles, and it changes very little. For what needs to be shown is that Yahweh did such a miracle here in this particular case, despite the fact that the historical tools we have available to assess whether he did this here in this particular case are inadequate for the task. After all, Jews do not believe Jesus arose from the dead even though they believe in Yahweh and miracles, because they don’t think the there is sufficient evidence to believe.All we have is hearsay testimonial evidence coming from the ancient superstitious past containing inconsistencies and improbabilities on behalf of the resurrection of Jesus. We do not know who wrote the gospels. We do know they were written decades and more after the alleged facts supposedly occurred. How reliable of a testimony can that be? We also know there were many forgeries written by Christians, some of them accepted into the canonical New Testament. We cannot say all four canonical gospels are genuine. We cannot say they represent four separate testimonies since later canonical gospels borrowed from and expanded on the gospel of Mark, a gospel where the resurrected Jesus does not appear to the disciples at all? We can’t even say all the characters in them are real people. Much less we can’t claim to know what they actually said and did. We cannot interview them, or the gospel writers themselves. And even if we were to grant that the gospel writers reported some things correctly there are things we simply cannot believe. After all we’re told that at the death of Jesus the tombs of the saints opened and they walked around Jerusalem (Matthew 27:52-53). Why should we believe anything they said at that point? There is a reason why hearsay evidence is not admissible in court. It cannot be substantiated. This is even more exacerbated of a problem when it comes to the ancient superstitious past.The tools of the historian are inadequate for the task of detecting miracles. The historian must be skeptical, must seek independent corroboration, must assume a natural cause for events in history, and must never claim more than the evidence allows. Historianshistorians cannot use faith to establish their historical reconstructions, otherwise they could be easily duped by claims that witches flew through the night, or that a statue of Mary actually weeps, or that the sun really did stop dead in its tracks for Joshua. But the historian can say what probably did not happen.It sure seems that if God exists he planted contrary evidence in the New Testament itself to make us doubt. We know there was no Star of Bethlehem that somehow moved over the manger of Jesus. We know there was no world-wide census at the time Jesus was supposedly born. There are good reasons to think King Herod did not massacre all boys under the age of two. There are some really good reasons to think the prophecies about Jesus are all concocted. Why should we believe the miraculous claims in the texts when there are historical claims in them that we know did not happen?Why are there even genealogies in the Gospels? If Jesus’ royal lineage is to be traced back through Mary, as it’s claimed Luke does, then Mary was just the receptacle of God’s seed, contributing nothing. And if that’s so, how can Jesus legitimately be of the Davidic lineage? However, if Jesus’ royal lineage is to be traced back through Joseph, as it’s claimed Matthew does, and if Joseph was not the father, then we have the same problem. In either case, how can Jesus legitimately be of the Davidic lineage? On this problem, according to Paul Kurtz, “the Gospels are impaled on an irreconcilable contradiction.The idea of a virgin birth was a common notion among some other ancient groups, including the Greeks and Romans. Many famous people and mythical heroes were said, by one group or another, to have been born of a virgin. Among them were Julius Caesar, Augustus, Alexander the Great, Plato, some of the Egyptian Pharaohs, the Buddha, Mithra, and Hercules.There were also savior-gods, like Krishna, Osiris, Dionysus, and Tammuz, who were born of virgins and known to the Gospel writers centuries before. They also did miracles. Most of them were crucified, and they also arose from the dead. Justin Martyr was a second-century Christian apologist who tried to convince the pagans of his day of the truth of Christianity. In his First Apology Justin Martyr wrote, “And when we say also that the Word, who is the first-birth of God, was produced without sexual union, and that he, Jesus Christ, our teacher, was crucified and died, and rose again, and ascended into heaven, we propound nothing different from what you believe regarding those whom you esteem sons of Jupiter. For you know how many sons your esteemed writers ascribed to Jupiter: Mercury…Bacchus . . . Hercules; and the sons of Leda. And what kind of deeds are recorded of each of these reputed sons of Jupiter, it is needless to tell to those who already know.We’re told that the people on the island of Malta believed of Paul was a god (Acts 28:6), and the people of Lystra believed both Paul and Barnabas were gods who came down to them in human form (Acts 14:11). If the people in that ancient era could so easily believe such things then what confidence should we have when we’re told Jesus is the son of God? Many important people in the ancient world were regarded as such.Paul the apostle claims to have been converted on the Damascus Road but when he told King Agrippa his story he said what he really experienced was just a vision (Acts 26:19). A vision is not considered an event in space and time.It’s claimed that Christ is our savior since he died for us. But isn’t it obvious there is no connection between punishment and forgiveness? And if Jesus satisfied God’s wrath for our sins then as the 2person of the trinity who or what can satisfy his wrath against our sins?There is no Christ. Only we human beings can save ourselves. And this can only take place with science based-reasoning.