(1) A thousand years from now, when Jesus still hasn’t returned, believers will finally get the idea that He isn’t coming back.
(2) If there was a loving, caring, personal God who watched over us and had a plan for our life, there wouldn’t be three year olds in cancer wards. That’s not love. Ehrman is correct in pointing out that the problem of suffering poses a huge problem for believers that are willing to be honest with themselves.
What do other bloggers think falsifies or confirms Christianity?
john76 said
(1) A thousand years from now, when Jesus still hasn’t returned, believers will finally get the idea that He isn’t coming back.(2) If there was a loving, caring, personal God who watched over us and had a plan for our life, there wouldn’t be three year olds in cancer wards. That’s not love. Ehrman is correct in pointing out that the problem of suffering poses a huge problem for believers that are willing to be honest with themselves.
What do other bloggers think falsifies or confirms Christianity?
#1 Jesus didn’t say he was coming back. St. Paul may have told that misinformation to put it politely to create Gentile Christianity. Jesus said, it is finished and the world will no longer see me therefore I’m sending you the Comforter-Holy Spirit.
#2 There isn’t a loving, caring, personal God. We have loving, caring, personal spirit guides and ancestors. Please read the first two books by Dr. Michael Newton. The first one is Journey of the Souls: Case Studies of Life between Lives (LBL).
No, no, no. The notion of God is incorrect. That notion is an easy strawman to create agnosticism and atheism. God is good but there is human suffering in the world. Suffering is NOT a problem for religion because religion is a response to the world as we find it. The world creates religion, religion does not create the world. Look at Christianity. A prime example of it is salvation through healing. In this world we find people who need healing. The gift of Christianity, not the flaw, is that it encourages well being where there wasn’t. To minister to the suffering gives Christianity something to do if not a raison d’etre.
What do other bloggers think falsifies or confirms Christianity?
Evolution. How can you reconcile the Abba, the loving Father of the New Testament with the reality of the voracious wasteful process of natural selection? If there was no Fall then what need for Redemption? If no first Adam what need for the second? Paul’s entire argument in Romans completely falls apart. Death didn’t come because of sin; death was inherent in the process from the beginning. No wonder fundamentalists reject evolution. They understand that accepting it undermines everything. So-called Christian “liberals” accept evolution because they can’t deny the evidence and they regard the process of evolution as the way God created life. But they haven’t thought it through. A god who used evolution to create life would not be the loving Abba but an unspeakable monster. Look at how evolution by natural selection actually works.
I’m in the middle of reading After Auschwitz by Richard L. Rubenstein which was mentioned in another post. He is arguing that the Holocaust falsifies Judaism’s beliefs in God and the Chosen People. He doesn’t bring this up but a natural corollary is that the Holocaust also falsifies Christianity. Rubenstein’s argument is that if you believe in a personal god that directs history then there is no getting around that the Holocaust and the death of 6 million Jews is a part of God’s plan which is an idea that Rubenstein will not accept.
Professor Ehrman when discussing why suffering falsifies the belief in God uses natural disasters as his examples to avoid the argument that God allows free will and therefore everything is humanity’s fault. God in the free will argument is just an innocent bystander to suffering.
Richard Rubenstein also brings up what happens when beliefs are falsified. The normal reaction is not to give up the falsified beliefs but rather to reinterpret them in an effort of dissonance reduction. This is the major purpose of theology. The history of Christianity is one of dissonance reduction as Christians first faced the fact that Jesus did not return and now have to face Jesus was not the Son of God.
Most Christian scholarship including critical scholarship is an effort at dissonance reduction. Unity and Diversity in the New Testament: An Inquiry into the Character of Earliest Christianity by James D.G. Dunn as well as the rest of his books are examples of this. Unity and Diversity is critical scholarship whose purpose is to bring the diversity of earliest Christianity into a posited overarching unity found in Jesus. The trinity of Christian scholarship is the uniqueness of monotheism, the uniqueness of Jesus and his teachings and the uniqueness of Christianity.
Christian apologists claim “The hypothesis of the resurrection is both verifiable and falsifiable: verifiable through proving the historicity of the empty tomb, the appearances, and the origin of the Christian Way; falsifiable by either disproving the above or providing naturalistic explanations of them. In fact, I should go so far as to say that there is not a single event in the resurrection narratives that is not in principle verifiable or falsifiable.” Josh McDowell, Sean McDowell, Evidence for the Resurrection 120-21 (Regal 2009) (quoting William Lane Craig, Assessing the New Testament Evidence for the Historicity Of the Resurrection of Jesus 418-19 (Edwin Mellen 1989)). If that were true, Dr. Ehrman has already falsified Christianity by providing naturalistic explanations. However, I think Dr. Craig’s original logic is flawed. Providing other explanations does not prove something is false.
Seems to me Stephen is on the right track in his earlier reference to evolution. Despite some apologetic claims for “scientific foreknowledge”, the Old Testament Yahweh is scientifically ignorant on many subjects. That does not disprove Christianity, but it certainly damages the kind of fundamentalist Christianity that Dr. Ehrman and I both dislike.
My approach is not to take Christianity as a starting point and ask whether there are reasons to doubt it, but to start with no assumptions and ask whether it’s necessary that there have been a “Creator.”
I’m an agnostic because I’ve never, as an adult, been convinced by the argument that: (a) the only possible explanation for the existence of the Cosmos is that it owes its existence to an Uncaused Cause; and (b) that Uncaused Cause can only be an omnipotent, omniscient, eternally existing Being, who intentionally created it.
Some people seem to think that explanation is self-evident. But I find it no more plausible than several others, and less plausible than these two:
Possibility #1. The Cosmos itself is an eternally existing Being. So there was no act of creation, no “other” – at least in the sense of any “other” that might exist having been responsible for our existence.
Possibility #2. There is no eternally existing Being, but rather, a literally infinite chain of Causes and Effects.
The idea of anything not having had a “beginning” strains the human mind. But neither an eternally existing (in a sense, living) Cosmos nor an infinite chain of Causes and Effects is less imaginable than a single, eternally existing Creator.
(Other possibilities: an Uncaused Cause that was not a thinking Being, and/or did not create the Cosmos intentionally; or, levels of reality on which the human-conceived notions of Cause and Effect do not apply.)
If one doesn’t believe creation by a divine Being is the only – or even the most likely – explanation for the existence of the Cosmos, there’s no real need to go further in evaluating specific religions. Any claimed “revelations” are either hallucinatory, or come from a source (the Mind of the Cosmos itself?) to which all of us potentially have access…and if that’s the case, there’s no guarantee they’ve been interpreted correctly. If “miracles” really take place, they’re in the category called “paranormal” – Mind possibly influencing Matter, but offering no proof of the miracle worker’s virtue, let alone the involvement of a deity.
People keep saying that Jesus didn’t say he was returning at that time when its pretty clear that is exactly what THAT generation thought as did Paul. Read the relevant passages again and repost any further thoughts please. The comforter was to aid THAT generation to overcome all the persecution and death.
Big BIG problem of course is that because he didn’t return that means that christianity should not be treated any differently than all the other man made religions that come and go.
There had to be something one second BEFORE the big bang and that suggests to me anyhow that something OR someone made that happen. I believe that was the creator and an intelligence and you can call that God or any name that is relevant to one’s own thinking. That means that IF there was an intelligence behind the universe, why would they NOT be interested in it and even intervene if they want to? ALL religions have attempted to create a Deity in THEIR own image and the most ridiculous statement I have ever read and heard is that we are made in God’s image. Do they mean like flesh and blood, farting and ageing and with hair all over our body etc? I don’t think so!
Jesus was just another soothsayer alongide many others who thought he was special even a Son of God. People think as God as a Father and so Jesus as his ONLY eternal Son is just a sensible idea. It isn’t, its appalling. If believers think God is a spirit, then how can a spirit have a son?
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People keep saying that Jesus didn’t say he was returning at that time when its pretty clear that is exactly what THAT generation thought as did Paul. Read the relevant passages again and repost any further thoughts please. The comforter was to aid THAT generation to overcome all the persecution and death.
But there is a difference between what the historical Jesus taught and what his followers came to believe about him after his death. The disciples were responding to Jesus’ death and their visions of him as still alive. I think the historical Jesus was the most surprised messiah there ever was when the nails were hammered in. After the crucifixion the religion of Jesus became a religion about Jesus.
There had to be something one second BEFORE the big bang and that suggests to me anyhow that something OR someone made that happen. I believe that was the creator and an intelligence and you can call that God or any name that is relevant to one’s own thinking. That means that IF there was an intelligence behind the universe, why would they NOT be interested in it and even intervene if they want to? ALL religions have attempted to create a Deity in THEIR own image and the most ridiculous statement I have ever read and heard is that we are made in God’s image. Do they mean like flesh and blood, farting and ageing and with hair all over our body etc? I don’t think so!
But if space and time came into existence at the Big Bang then talk of before is simply meaningless. We don’t know what the ultimate origin of the universe is. The answer to a question whose answer you don’t know is not “insert favorite comforting explanation” but “We don’t know“.
The traditional interpretation of “in god’s image” is that humans possess will and emotion and intellect. But it is useful to remember that in ancient times gods were conceived in much more anthropomorphic terms than the idea most people have now of an intelligent all powerful cloud of gas.
Stephen said
But if space and time came into existence at the Big Bang then talk of before is simply meaningless. We don’t know what the ultimate origin of the universe is. The answer to a question whose answer you don’t know is not “insert favorite comforting explanation” but “We don’t know“.
It is man’s nature to seek order from chaos. As a species we cannot abide not having an explanation for something so we invent explanations. It’s easier to picture a grandfatherly Wizard of Oz pulling the strings and pushing the buttons of the universe (ie., that catch-all it’s-God’s-will) than to simply admit “we don’t know”.
Just a thought about space and time beginning with the Big Bang: There is scientific speculation about something (other than “God”!) having preceded it. One interesting theory is that the Big Bang was actually the eruption of everything that had gone into a supermassive black hole in an older universe. (Of course, the matter that had gone into the black hole would have been transformed into energy.)
We may be living in a “multiverse.” And…way down the road, our galaxy is going to merge with Andromeda, creating a single huge galaxy scientists are calling Milkomeda. Later still, the two (already supermassive) black holes at their centers will merge into one. And ultimately, everything in “Milkomeda” will be sucked into it.
Seems like the perfect recipe for generating a new universe!
Why could there not be time before the big bang? Something MUST have existed prior to it? We may even be part of a billion universes that all collapse eventually and start again? Who created the creator/God is the best question there is but I doubt we will ever find an answer?
I agree that Jesus preaching was about God and after his death, that changed to become about him and why its called the Christian Church of worship. I think Jesus and his Jewish Disciples would be appalled at what happened to the Church which actually is a graven image and against the one and only God of the OT and the ten commandments. The CC made him God or part of the Trinity and yet Jesus replied to the man who called him Good Lord….”Why call me good, only one is good and that is God”
Doesn’t that single statement rule out completely he was God or equal with God and indeed that he was sinless as well?
Maybe I can clarify the time thing?
A baby is born and for him/her time starts then.
The big bang happened at X time and we are 13.8bn years on from that event. ie X + 13.8bn But why couldn’t that just be on a long time line of previous events. a trillion trillion billion years before? X = the unknown start of everything, maybe when the Creator was created and of course what/who created him/her/that?
One thing that we cannot get our heads around is just how big our own universe is when we go on a ficticious journey to the deep space even at the speed of light. These can be seen on Youtube and they really put in perspective just how small and insignificant the planet earth is in the Cosmos. I did think there must be other civilizations out there and some so more advanced that us, they would spot our deep space probes flitting about.
So why didn’t space and time not exist before?
Something just had to start the whole process off and its unimaginable that NOTHING did imho anyway. I am prepared to admit we don’t know. You don’t have to call it/that/him/her the God of any religion and that is where they all are mistaken and people like Dawkins rubbish the veryidea of God because he compares the descriptions in the OT. Christians do it the whole time. They debate the existence of a Creator God and then jump to Jesus as evidence.
MikeyS said
Why could there not be time before the big bang? Something MUST have existed prior to it? We may even be part of a billion universes that all collapse eventually and start again? Who created the creator/God is the best question there is but I doubt we will ever find an answer?I agree that Jesus preaching was about God and after his death, that changed to become about him and why its called the Christian Church of worship. I think Jesus and his Jewish Disciples would be appalled at what happened to the Church which actually is a graven image and against the one and only God of the OT and the ten commandments. The CC made him God or part of the Trinity and yet Jesus replied to the man who called him Good Lord….”Why call me good, only one is good and that is God”
Doesn’t that single statement rule out completely he was God or equal with God and indeed that he was sinless as well?
Theories on the beginning of what we know of as our universe change all the time. As of a few days ago there’s yet another theory opposing the Big Bang. Scientists don’t know. I tend to like the one that there’s a multiverse of 9 dimensional universes and each is only millimeters from the next. If you can conceive of a 9 dimensional structure flattened to a 2D plane then each time one universe scrapes against another it generates a Big Bang for a new universe. The amount of energy required for a multiverse though is inconceivable so who knows… At any rate, however you want to conceptualize it, this is part of why I became agnostic/atheist. The average person (and therefore the average Christian, and maybe I’m being generous here!) can’t conceive of the size of the solar system, let alone conceptualize the size of our universe. I just don’t believe that a Supreme Being who can create something so vast could care one wit about what goes on here on Earth. There must be untold quintillions of planets across the universe with life that must be just as interesting if not more interesting that what goes on here on Earth.
Great topic, guys, and great points of view. Fun to read. Long ago, as i drifted before sem and during from revelatory faiths with a divinely inspired text, the big 3 all went down in my mind, the 3 mideastern “great” religions. I studied Tillich and Whitehead and process theology, and some liberation theology, but mostly just existentialism, theistic and atheistic. All seemed falsifiable. I was a deist (apersonal god from man, though, nothing to pray to, to intervene)for some months or years, back and forth, and after the Christmas tsunami 15 years ago killing 100,000 and then 9/11 read Harris and Dawkins and Dennett and Hitchens and gravitated back towards NO personal god, no way, could care about our insignificant “thinking” species, that maybe ought to go extinct the way we’re killing this planet we naturally rose upon. We take our present place at the top of the food chain as a god-given right to destroy and exploit everything else organic, if not ourselves. Is this some cosmic/universal test of our worthiness? Was there something to Whitehead’s eternal Mind? A tipper of the first domino, or multiverse dominos? Or were the greeks who said it’s all a big circle right, and these linear views of time a mistake? “Time” (whatever that is) will tell…
Rokeister
Richard L. Rubenstein which was mentioned in another post. He is arguing that the Holocaust falsifies Judaism’s beliefs in God and the Chosen People. He doesn’t bring this up but a natural corollary is that the Holocaust also falsifies Christianity.
Steefen
One does not have to leave the first century to find a tribulation that falsifies Judaism’s belief in the God of Israel and the Chosen People. The Jewish Revolt already did that. Jesus has already recognized that Judaism was false and belief in the God of Israel and the that god’s people was a false hope worthy of punishment.
Watch this video, probably in different sittings since it is 2:44 without an intermission.
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Rokeister
Richard Rubenstein also brings up what happens when beliefs are falsified. The normal reaction is not to give up the falsified beliefs but rather to reinterpret them in an effort of dissonance reduction.
Steefen
The Hebrew Bible taught us on at least two occasions, when there are god wars, go for the stronger god. I’m thinking of the altar competition, for one. So, when the Romans put down the Jewish Revolt, Jupiter was their god which defeated the God of Israel notion of god. When beliefs are falsified, sometimes people just go with the winner/victor.
Wilusa said
My approach is not to take Christianity as a starting point and ask whether there are reasons to doubt it, but to start with no assumptions and ask whether it’s necessary that there have been a “Creator.”I’m an agnostic because I’ve never, as an adult, been convinced by the argument that: (a) the only possible explanation for the existence of the Cosmos is that it owes its existence to an Uncaused Cause; and (b) that Uncaused Cause can only be an omnipotent, omniscient, eternally existing Being, who intentionally created it.
Some people seem to think that explanation is self-evident. But I find it no more plausible than several others, and less plausible than these two:
Possibility #1. The Cosmos itself is an eternally existing Being. So there was no act of creation, no “other” – at least in the sense of any “other” that might exist having been responsible for our existence.
Possibility #2. There is no eternally existing Being, but rather, a literally infinite chain of Causes and Effects.
The idea of anything not having had a “beginning” strains the human mind. But neither an eternally existing (in a sense, living) Cosmos nor an infinite chain of Causes and Effects is less imaginable than a single, eternally existing Creator.
(Other possibilities: an Uncaused Cause that was not a thinking Being, and/or did not create the Cosmos intentionally; or, levels of reality on which the human-conceived notions of Cause and Effect do not apply.)
If one doesn’t believe creation by a divine Being is the only – or even the most likely – explanation for the existence of the Cosmos, there’s no real need to go further in evaluating specific religions. Any claimed “revelations” are either hallucinatory, or come from a source (the Mind of the Cosmos itself?) to which all of us potentially have access…and if that’s the case, there’s no guarantee they’ve been interpreted correctly. If “miracles” really take place, they’re in the category called “paranormal” – Mind possibly influencing Matter, but offering no proof of the miracle worker’s virtue, let alone the involvement of a deity.
The Sun was created by a nebula that dissipated–the Creator that comes in and goes out of existence. We do not know there is a Creator still around to believe in and worship. Sure, there are different nebulae in the Milky Way but there is not one Nebula-Creator around which to build a monotheistic belief system.
Our planet was Created by our Star-Sun.
We know how Stars are created.
How are galaxies created? Are they created by a Creator entity with personhood?
I can say the Solar System Astrological Matrix has personhood because if you consult it, it knows each and every one of us.
Does the Galaxy-Creator know each and every one of the stars in the Milky Way?
I’d say no. In the case of human beings known by the Solar System, Astrological Matrix God Level, the Solar System still exists and has not dissipated as the Star-Creator-Nebula has dissipated. Yes, the galaxy of stars still exists but the Star Creators dissipate. (And stars die also.)
We have 5000 years of written history that shows humans were and still are superstitious at the core. Religion will do over the next 1000 years what it has done from it’s conception, reinvent it’s self to appeal to that superstitious nature.
Rejection of “God” means an acceptance of your own mortality and taking responsibility for your own actions. This concept is still too daunting for “millions” of people.
My son and daughter 18yrs and 16yrs old respectively have been brought up free from “Religious Dogma”. They have been brought up to understand “Human Rights” and “Laws of the land”. They have been protected from the physical violence I experienced in the “Catholic” system and the sexual predators my self and my brothers were exposed to in the “Pentecostal” system. (Sexual predictors should note that a quiet nature does not equate to a submissive nature. Explaining why a 15 yr old boy felt in necessary to break 2 of your fingers and give you a bloody nose can be both problematic and traumatizing).
I am not out to covert the world to atheism and for those who must have religion in their lives I would advise looking at the history of the organization they are apart of or thinking of joining. In the case of the “Catholic” or younger organizations like “The Watchtower” or “Mormons” all are riddled with cases of physical, mental and sexual abuse. All have financial gains put in front of Congregational needs. That to my mind is the biggest case against “Religion” and “God” you can make.
When you put the “Historical” evidence of religious organizations along side the work of scholars such as Prof. Ehrman … you had better be able to make a better case than pointing to a few out of context biblical passages when bringing your religious beliefs to my front door.
@manx
Good topic and great responses. Throughout history each race of humanity has tried to answer the unanswerable… Why are we here, how did we get here, and what happens after we die? Each civilization has come up with their own set of beliefs and their own God or Gods in an effort to answer these questions. In short, God didn’t create man… man created God. I know Christians who “know” without a shadow of a doubt that God is real. I know Catholics who “know” that their church is the true church, and I know Mormons who “know” that their church is the true church. Halfway around the world, there are Muslims who “know”, Hindu’s who “know”… etc. That, for me, is what falsifies religion as a whole… the diversity of it. Nobody “knows”. They may think they know based on what they’ve been taught. As science advances, there becomes less and less need to have a deity in order to explain where we came from. Will science ever fully explain it? Who knows. But it certainly makes more sense to me than the idea of a single being who created everything and specifically put us on this planet for a purpose.
Chrystal said
In short, God didn’t create man… man created God.
You are in error. Look at the timeline of species. A notion of God that God is the creator of Life on Earth is above your criticism chronologically because Homo sapiens sapiens are not the first created species.
Steefen said
Chrystal said
In short, God didn’t create man… man created God.You are in error. Look at the timeline of species. A notion of God that God is the creator of Life on Earth is above your criticism chronologically because Homo sapiens sapiens are not the first created species.
You misunderstand, Steefen. Chrystal was talking about science, not myth.
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