(15 votes, average: 4.67 out of 5)
Loading...Yesterday I shared one of the thoughts that crept into and dominated my mind for a few minutes while watching a glorious sunrise from the comforts of a nice chair in front of a big window while drinking a cup of coffee. Here now is my second.
We have some bird feeders out on the deck and I was watching not only the dawning of the day but also the birds coming out to break their fast. Chickadees, Titmice, and Juncos for the most part. They love the seed.
And it occurred to me: these birds have no idea of my existence. If I moved toward them they would instinctively fly away, so they do recognize the reality of threat. But do they understand that I’m a human, that I have a mind with thoughts and organs and limbs that make me function, that I have the abilities to analyze and reason, that I have a career and possessions, that I think about lots of issues both academic and quotidian. Do they have any conception at all of what or who I really am?
Nope. Not a chance. They can’t even be reflective about their own existence.
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What the Robin Knows by Jon Young will have you thinking about birds and the wildlife all around you very differently. Make yourself get through those first chapters.
and, ‘Life on the Edge’ by Macfadden and J Al-Kahalili
Great post! I’m also more inclined to label myself as an agnostic when it comes to a Supreme Being. I also feed birds and enjoy watching Chickadees and others from my window emerging at first light. They seem to watch for me.
Were Luke 1 and 2 added later or are they original. Thanks
It’s debated. The minority view is that they were added later. And that’s what I think.
In sixth grade I had an epiphany. A classmate was upset about her grade, and our teacher responded, “I don’t give grades, I just record what you earned.” That idea never crossed my mind before!
Natural disasters are problematic, but even without them, humans do enough damage ourselves. Many religions/worldviews blame gods or “the system” for our predicament. Even in Genesis, people instinctively shift blame.
Even as an atheist, I think I’d appreciate the core Biblical narrative (though perhaps not every passage): God’s creation isn’t defective; it’s “very good.” He’s a good-shepherd. Sin comes from us. Divine measures like shortening lifespans/floods, sanctifying land, covenants, laws/rituals/prophets/exile slow the spread, but don’t cure corruption. Only divine-intervention can. God lovingly became incarnate to redeem humanity. He desires to dwell within us, empowering us to participate in His kingdom as we hopefully look forward to restoration..Sin/death vanquished.
This doesn’t solve every “but what about…?” question. We can’t be certain it captures the full reality of the human condition. But it’s a compelling story! Like assuming responsibility for my grades is healthier than assuming my teacher was out to get me, it offers starting assumptions that make better sense of life as we try to navigate it.
Here is my question. Given the apocalyptic origin of Christianity, the end is coming, God’s Kingdom for the righteous and destruction for the rest worldwide, isn’t the origin of Christianity the beginning of Christian Nationalism?
Well, we wouldn’t have Christian nationalism without Christianity! (Though we’d have other kinds of nationalism!)
“Nationalism” is a word invented in the 18th century where multi-ethnic empires like Habsburgic Empire, Spanish Empire etc dissolved into nation states. New countries emerged based on the ethnicity of the majority of people. Not caused by religion, but by the politics and by ethnicity. Sometimes the demarcation was not based on ethnicity, but on religion, see Orthodox Serbs versus Catholic Serbs (Croats) versus Muslim Serbs (Bosniaks). Or Muslim Indians (Pakistan) versus Hindu Indians (India). Before 18th century the idea of “nationalism” didn’t existed, as everyone took it for granted that a nation is the same thing with the ethnicity. If you were a Greek in Antiquity, that meant you were a Greek by ethnicity, not just by culture.
The idea that you can become any nation (same host nation) regardless of your race and religion, so well established in modern USA (but not colonial USA), emerged in France and was developed by different parties, like Protestants, Francmasons and the Jewish elite. The later gave rise to Bolshevism that held the same views (it ended in genocide). In USA is preached mostly by Protestants and Liberal (jewish) media.
Thus, your question, is anachronistic and naive, and it is the other way you insinuate it was. Christianity was all-ethnicity welcoming. Judaism was not.
Your reflection on the birds offers a compelling illustration of a broader epistemic issue: if higher-order intelligences existed, the cognitive gap between them and us might be as great as the gap between those birds and you. Contemporary discussions of simulation theory and higher-order-mind models make a similar point — that humans may simply lack the conceptual architecture needed to recognize or interpret evidence of realities operating beyond our cognitive scale.
For me, that’s why agnosticism feels not like indecision but like an acknowledgment of structural limits. I’m agnostic about the ultimate nature of reality yet atheist regarding specific theological claims, particularly the Christian God, because those claims exceed what seems epistemically justified.
I appreciate how your post frames this humility so clearly: not as a retreat from knowledge, but as an honest recognition that the universe may hold forms of intelligence or structure we are not equipped to apprehend.
Yup, sounds like we’re on the same page.
Can pantheism be considered an anthropomorphic concept of God?
I think so, because I, an anthropos, would much rather be a Universe
than just a creator and manager of one.
As Neil Degrasse Tyson has opined, we probably don’t even know what questions to ask yet. The thought I keep coming back to is this – what are we on a deep level – the level of the subconscious especially. Many aspects of our surface personalities are understandable by our individual experiences and histories, relationships, etc. However, there seems to be a deeper part of ourselves that we can glimpse only fleetingly through dreams or altered states of consciousness by use of substances, hypnosis, etc. The ancients thought of this as the influence of the divine – visitations by the gods, muses, etc. But whatever this deeper level of ourselves is, it often seems to be a font of wisdom that we usually don’t have access to in our waking state. The subconscious may or may not extend beyond our individual selves, but is perhaps the ultimate mystery of the universe.
I would like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude not just for this piece, but for your dedicated time and career, also to teaching and writing. Your debates helped me seeing things differently.
Your work, especially in the field of New Testament textual criticism and the history of early Christianity, has been fundamental for me.
Your dedication stripping complex topics of myth, and encouraging people to be skeptical and evidence-based is for me, so important. You have taught us how to ask tougher questions and embrace uncertainty with integrity.
Thank you for your brilliant contribution to both the academic and public discourse.
Thanks!!
I agree! 🙂
Nevertheless we can explore our world and draw conclusions from such discoveries. For example is our world something designed and assembled from artificially manufactured parts, or something that has organically developed from simplest components? We can draw logical conclusions from this, or not. Can an external entity intervene in our world? Is an “outside” even possible?
Um, regarding agnosticism versus atheism: atheism as I understand is simply the rejection of belief in all-powerful entities, not the assertion that such powerful beings cannot exist.
I agree 100%. We have to bracket what we don’t know and be open to other cosmological forces with intelligence beyond our human geniuses. And maybe a divine Jesus will come from the clouds, or already has. Maybe prophets gain access to such sources. I don’t rule it out. But on a practical level, I too operate as a materialist. This allows me to not argue with people who have different or esoteric beliefs/communications in/with superhuman beings from different universes, etc
We don’t deal with certainties. We deal with probabilities. And some things are more probable than others. Higher Intelligence could exist but what reason would there be to imagine it is not the result of natural selection, same as us? We don’t know – yet. But if it disturbs the universe, same as us, then it would be subject to verification. Yes, let’s be humble. But not too humble.
Ah! I call it this HARPO PRINCIPLE, named after a large, goofy Labrador Retriever with whom I shared my life (and my pizza!) for an extended period of time. I won’t bother to extrapolate this principle, since you have stated it so well with your birds and coffee.
Agnosticism, for me, is just honesty. I don’t believe that our minds our structured in a way for us to know or understand about “ultimate reality” (whatever that may be). We are human animals, and we have evolved in a way that allows us to deal with our environment. However, by some quirk of evolution, we are able to conceive of the CONCEPT of that “ultimate reality” we cannot access, know, or understand. I believe that every “ultimate reality” construct (such as “God”) should be regarded as a metaphor that points beyond itself to something we cannot possibly comprehend. “So what if I call it “God”? If you don’t like that term, call it something else. But we’ve got to call it SOMETHING if we want to negotiate with it at all.
Have another cup, Bart. I’ll order a pizza.
I WAS ONCE disappointed by Bart’s profession of agnosticism, I am now simply perplexed how often he makes the assertion.
Bart has cited theodicy as a reason. I don’t know his life experience. As one who has buried a daughter at 26 from drug addiction, a brother at 33 from alcoholism, and a close first cousin at 30 from sexual addition, I can fully understand that there may be good reasons why Bart cannot understand why a loving and merciful God may not be operationally available today.
Bart is slightly younger than myself, and unlike him, I did not have the fundamentalist background that he had. Mine was as a conservative, mainstream Lutheran–both college and seminary. Unlike Bart, I did not proceed beyond my MDiv degree.
Bart’s beliefs, or unbelief’s, within my theological understanding are quite irrelevant in eternal terms. I look forward to meeting him in the afterlife, where I suspect he will be delightfully surprised. Regardless of “beliefs,” he seems, to me at least, to have thus far lived a life consistent with the teachings of the master prophet Jesus, even if he hasn’t sold all his possessions and given the proceeds to the poor.
I’m so sorry to hear about your losses. Please accept my sincere condolences.
My loss of faith was not about personal disasters or crises. But it also wsa not because of any fundamentalist views I had. I was a fundamentalist only between the ages of 17-22 or so; I wasn’t raised with fundamentalist views, and I was (an increasingly liberal) Christian (with decidely non-fundamentalist views) for about 20 years before leaving the faith alotether (a chunk of that as a Lutheran!).
The reasons I bring it up so much are that people ask me about it all the time, and as a scholar deeply interested in the Christian tradition, I naturally think about it a good bit.
I too hope we meet in the afterlife!
(81) Jesus said, “Let him who has grown rich be king, and let him who possesses power renounce it.”
Jesus
Him
Grown king
Him
Power
Power him king
Grown
Him
Jesus
(30) Jesus said, “Where there are three gods, they are gods. Where there are two or one, I am with him.”
(31) Jesus said, “No prophet is accepted in his own village; no physician heals those who know him.”
(32) Jesus said, “A city being built on a high mountain and fortified cannot fall, nor can it be hidden.”
Jesus There!
Gods!
Gods are one with
Jesus
Prophet in village
Heals know
Know heals
Village in prophet
Jesus
With one are Gods
Gods!
There, Jesus!
‘There must be a god,’ said the goldfish. ‘After all, who else puts the fish food into my bowl?’
Even with all your intelligence, while sitting on your deck, the Earth appears flat, you have never seen it otherwise, and the Sun moves across the sky.
What we actually know, is miniscule, but somehow we still manage to overreach by a factor of hundreds.
As you rightly say, agnosticism is not a position of weakness, but a rational response to what we are.
Dr Ehrman, your reflections on agnosticism are anything but “birdbrained”! This long-time agnostic appreciates the explanation of why agnosticism is the only perspective that passes epistemological muster.
I’m with you in this contemplative journey by the window, Bart. As a humanist freethinker myself (who happens to share a 70th this month…believe it or not, on the 25th!), I agree the search for knowledge does indeed circle back time after time to the Socratic wisdom of “I know I know—mostly—nothing.” Seems simply honest and humble to discover meaning and joy right in the thick mix of our material here and now. Thanks for the images of sitting with thoughts, observing our Carolina bird neighbors, and climbing higher in the Blue Ridge mountains of our active minds. I wish you well in the season and well deserved retirement.
Am reminded of a little poem I wrote in Junior High. Was something like this:
The whirling sphere flies
to a certain point in space.
Guided by human hands,
liable to be displaced.
But I’m glad *I* stand on a
sphere that cannot fall.
Or IS the Earth really
a gigantic basketball?
If a human wants to make his/her existence known to a bird, s/he can usually do so quite effectively. And if the human did make his/her presence known over time, even a bird could come to know quite a bit about that human. (Ask the pigeons my wife feeds regularly in our backyard.) I would think a divine being would find it even easier to make its presence known to us and instruct us in its nature. And so if there is a god, the agnostic can confidently say that it doesn’t want to be found and is very good at playing hide-and-seek.
Like birds, what we humans don’t know vastly exceeds what we know. Likewise, what we don’t perceive vastly exceeds what we perceive.
You mentioned Dec. 10 that as a materialist, you do not believe in a soul. And Dec. 11 you note the possibility that there could be a higher level of being that we are not equipped to perceive.
I concur with the thrust of both posts. And yet….
Some years ago I did a deep dive into UVa’s Division of Perceptual Studies and its rigorously investigated and documented case studies that point to the possibility that reincarnation may be a “thing,” so to speak — at least for some folks.
I don’t believe in god or an afterlife. But there are some really head-scratching cases that lead me to wonder if there’s more to our universe than we know. Maybe what some call a soul is memory that sometimes survives death, at least temporarily? (I have no idea how this could be!) And could whatever mechanism that makes this possible constitute said higher level that we can’t perceive?
Who knows? Not me. And I’m content with this uncertainty. It doesn’t lead me to change my atheist-agnostic perspective on the world that I *can* perceive.
Congrats on your retirement!
Our collectiveEgos have taken a battering sinceDescartes stated“I think,therefore I am”400 years ago.OK,I am something,but the next pertinent questions are,what am I?,where am I?,and what am I doing here?
PrevailingWestern thought at that time was that we are the special creations of a specialGod that created this special place for us to fulfill a special purpose.This is a form of what is now called ‘The StrongAnthropicPrinciple’.However, Copernicus,Galileo&Newton told us this place isn’t so special,and then Darwin&Wallace told us we weren’t so special.
Monotheists who worship the ‘GodofAbraham’propose that theirGod has granted us absolute access to reality,so that what our senses tell us about the world is true.However,Science has clearly proven that we have a very limited sensory access to reality,so that our mental representation of the world is personal,not universal.
CosmologistBrianCox proposed that we are just clever apes,on a planet orbiting in the’Goldilocks zone’of a mediocre star in a quiet outer neighbourhood of a mediocre galaxy.The thing that amazes him is that we can know this.However, he is non-committal about whether this form of the ‘WeakAnthropicPrinciple’ confers any sense of meaning or purpose to existence.
CosmologistCarlSagan captured it best when he said,“We are a way for TheCosmos to know itself”.
Listened to your misquoting Jesus episode on the Gospel birth narratives, and I had a couple of questions: 1) it wasn’t recently, but I think I have heard you at least glancingly reference the idea that I guess some scholars have suggested that the birth narrative in Luke might have been a later addition and not actually there. Could you point me some place to read about that? and 2) In just reviewing Matthew v. Luke, for whatever reason for the first time it really struck me that Matthew’s birth narrative is really narrated from Joseph’s point of view (the unnamed angel appears to him to announce the birth, warn him about Herod, etc.; as often as not Mary is referred to as the “mother” of Jesus without a name). Luke’s version, meanwhile, is all about Mary; she is the star so much so that Simeon directly addresses her in chapter 2, and twice we are told Mary “kept” parts of the narrative in her heart, as though she or a cult around her is the source for this material; Joseph is basically an afterthought. Has there been scholarship on this? Can you point me some place?
For an overview of the question of Luke 1-2, jsut do a word search for Luke’s Birth Narrative on teh blog: I devote a couple of posts to it. And yes, it is widely recognized that Matthew emphasizes Joseph’s point of view and Luke Mary’s. If you want a full definitive treatment of these stories, a great place to turn is Raymond Brown’s book, The Birth of the Messiah, which surely you could get a reasonably priced used copy of online.
100% agreed.
Here’s a thought experiment. Suppose a supreme being introduced itself to you. How could you know it was a supreme being?
Miracles? Well, other beings might be able to do those things.
Walk on water? Alter gravity? What if it showed you it can create new universes? As a mortal, we could always ask “But how can I know there aren’t others like you? Or more powerful than you?”
Carl Sagan’s wife once did an interview where she said Carl wasn’t interested in what he could *believe*, he was interested in what he could *know*.
I think that is agnosticism: an embrace of the fact we are mortal and therefore not only don’t know everything, but we CAN’T know everything. Our role is to understand what we can in this universe where everything is temporary. Versus atheism: which is simply “I don’t believe in gods”.
Even though I am also an agnostic atheist, I sometimes have this thought: I watch my dog, who I love very much, and I think that she doesn’t have a clue about all the things I do to take care of her and make sure her health is in excellent condition: the drugs, the specialized foods, the flea and tick collars, the vaccines, the change of direction in our walks to avoid unpleasant confrontations with other dogs or packs etc.
And I’ve thought several times “What if there’s someone else out there who takes care of me in ways I can’t perceive?”.
Neil deGrasse Tyson often poses a thought experiment along these lines: if we’re 1% smarter than chimps (genetically speaking), what if something in the universe exists that’s 1% smarter than us?
We can’t comprehend what that would look like.
To your point, Bart, we can easily look backwards or down, but forwards or up is elusive.
In the news today, there was an interesting article about whether Science would recognize/identify alien life. The article was still basing life based on chemistry but still reflects how little is known about identifying what life is. I have started looking into the supernatural realm of possible clues of Gods existence and domain. Over the ages, it is really incredible in the number of things once considered supernatural are now considered natural such as thunder being the voice of the gods, and disease and lightning being wrath of god/gods, which are fully explained now,
Since ancient times unexplained phenomena have repeatedly occurred such as lights in sky and water, premonitions, ghosts, ESP etc. There was a tv show call “One Step Beyond” recounting many supernatural phenomena. Just because such phenomena cannot be controlled and replicated on demand by science does not detract from the fact that such phenomena continue manifesting all over the world, culture and ages have and continue to manifest. I find that since it has not been able to be controlled give more credence to the existence of an unknown god/creator. As Paul writes in Romans 1:20 God is revealed by evidence.
Continued next comment
Continuation of previous comment.
What intrigues me with Rom 1:20 is that 40,000-year-old cave art suggests man formulated religious deities in nature. The evidence of belief of some sort of afterlife. There is also argued evidence suggesting a form of belief in an afterlife goes back to neanderthals over 60,000 years ago possibly as far back as 100,000 years in how they buried the dead. My point is that there seems to be an innate belief within all mankind of some sort of God going back to the origin of mankind on earth. There is also some argued evidence that animals such as elephants in how they treat their dead lead to a notion of something beyond physical death. The evidence of a belief in afterlife predates skepticism of afterlife in the historical and anthropological record as well as philosophical record. Epicurus was first stated skeptic also some passages in the Old Testament can be taken of skepticism predating Epicurus.
Although I also do not believe in the Judeo Christine depiction of God, I have this innate sense of a God and afterlife. Therefore, I cannot really call myself an Agnostic.
Be prepared for an earful of comments from “birb” [sic] lovers on the agency and inner life of feathered creatures! They have strong opinions on these matters! I’d recommend sticking with safer topics like Mythicism!
Yeah, been getting some. But, well, neuroscience is neuroscience.
Hi Professor Ehrman,
Your retirement lecture was spot on. I used your textbook (A Brief Introduction to the New Testament) in my NT college course.
Your comments on agnosticism triggered some of the writings in my two books titled Ernie-isms. I suspect they reflect your thinking. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
(#14) Atheism slams and locks the door to the house of supernatural possibility; agnosticism leaves you a key. ~ Ernie Bringas
(#585) The unknowable Mystery: Claiming to know the gods is a sign of blind faith. Knowing that one cannot know the gods is a sign of a good liberal arts education. Knowing that one cannot know the gods, but does not exclude the possibility of the gods, is a sign of wisdom. ~ Ernie Bringas
(#1383) Believer, agnostic, atheist: The Mystery is undefinable no matter what we believe or don’t believe. In this regard, we are all splashing around in an ocean of speculation, and I don’t believe anyone is without a lifejacket (whatever the truth may be). ~ Ernie Bringas
(#266) I no longer believe in God as traditionally framed, but I do believe in the Mystery that can’t be framed. ~ Ernie Bringas
I’m not sure agnosticism provides a key to supernatural possibility so much as a sense that there is not key. And I don’t believe in a Mystery that is outside the realm of matter, myself, frameable or not.
We have a difference of opinion, but I appreciate your thinking. FYI: What I have expressed is my hope, not dogmatic faith. The idea of “certainty” is not in my wheelhouse. Thanks for sharing.
P.S. – I don’t see how you keep up with all these comments (whew). 🙂
I don’t very well. Hard to stay on top of them. But thanks!
I myself was agnostic for the longest time. At least 25 years. I can appreciate people who are and appreciate living in a country where it is allowed and not frowned upon. I’m really thankful for that.
I myself believe in God/a Higher Power because of spiritual experiences. None of this is because of family, friends, community, or anything else. Perhaps it’s even rather the opposite. I guess I could say that I “know” God exists because of these experiences.
You’ve said that you once had a “born again” experience. Was there anything real or spiritual about this experience, or do you think it was all something else or something?
[I’m not trying to convert you or anything, I’m just wondering]
I had lots of spiritual experiences (including speaking in tongues, etc.). I think they were all psychologically driven, not generated by outside spiritual forces.
I grew up from 4th grade in Taiwan-based USA Oriented Publishing House/Church based on Scottish JN Darby. in Freshman Undergrad, I separately baptized in the Holy Spirit & my mentor of the campus ministry [long defunct] said move your tongue [speaking in tongues- praying in language of angels]!
For 30 years, never more than a gargle. {I thought I was praying in tongues, while they sometimes had interpreter} but they seemed to be uttering a distinct foreign language.
At any rate, a year after I came back, I had to change my private mail box. & one of the 1st things that owner had me SGI Chanting- that definitely eased my anxiety. I am grateful that Dr Ehrman said that paraphrasing: People {Jews} & early Christians were multiGods.
I chant but I am still a devoted soul given up Christian [refuse to return to church in USA- totally changed since high school]!
Relief from a chant [no prayer]. But worse from what we proclaimed God, Lord & Saviour! BTW the China that I lived in God did not bless, people had super work ethics coordinated by the govt.
2) My Christianity totally came from Europe-USA! God had not blessed China.
This is fun!
For some reason, the computer keeps telling me that I have 2 more comments remaining. So it seems that right now I can make as many comments as I want! 🙂
Please limit yourself to two a day! thanks.
“So maybe the material world is not all there is. If it is not, I’d have no way of knowing; and if it is … again I’d have no way of knowing. That’s ultimately why I’m an agnostic.”
*sigh*
There is a way to know. The bird that comes to your feeder knows nothing about you, but the bird down the street sees a human come out every morning to feed it. Maybe the human talks to it and they become friends on some level. That bird comes back again and again, not just for the seed but for the mysterious interaction of the human. To say that agnosticism is the only humble position to take is an obstinate stance. It ignores the billions of people who have experiences with God/higher intelligence. It’s insulting really.
I’ve never seen you make a case for why there could be a higher intelligence or discuss the serious science for consciousness existing beyond our brains. I challenge you to make a post about how there could be a higher intelligence without going down the agnostic road of interjecting why you don’t think there is.
Random Thought #1: There’s a lot of increasing buzz going on right now, at least in certain circles, about UAP (Unidentified Aerial or Anomalous Phenomena, formerly just “UFOs”) and even NHI (Non-Human Intelligence, formerly ET or just “aliens”). Your musings about limited human perceptions and even comprehension of higher intelligences nicely reframes how limited our perspectives may be if/when we eventually encounter such possibilities.
Random Thought #2: If God exists, does God ever wonder where He came from, or why He exists, or if there’s Someone or Something even “higher” (superior, prior, even more transcendent, etc.) than He?
I’m not sure what He’s thinking about these days….
Bart, you stole this in an unshameful manner from Terry Davis, didn’t you?
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/10916333-what-s-reality-i-don-t-know-when-my-bird-was-looking
I would add to my exciting discovery that Terry Davis reached the exact opposite conclusion that you insinuated here, given the exact same ideas set. Your obscure conclusion is that God does not exist, despite wiggling it to appear in neutral stance. And that is because “agnostic” doesn’t really mean anything; it’s an artificial invented word by the British philosophers that allowed them to throw in arguments from “the other side” without being accused of hypocrisy. But we left Russell’s Teapot decades ago, we know this is silly. You can only be atheist or theist. You can only believe in God or not. Simple as. Everything else is just muddying the waters in a clumsy British or Jewish way. You give me to me the impression of a man that believes in God, or struggles at times with his existence, however, you push atheism everywhere, so you cannot be forgiven (socially, by the other people, not other way). And furthermore, epistemology is literally based on the axiom that “we CAN know” not that “we can’t really know”. But enough me bashing you.
Merry Christmas.
I’m not sure why you think my conclusion is that God does not exist when I’ve expressly said that my conclusion is that I don’t think we can know if he exists?
(And I regret to say I don’t know about the Terry Davis pices)disabledupes{5940e6dbf3cf95648a02062f53433a69}disabledupes
It’s at that point I realized that you’ve been an atheist for many decades and it’s clearly written in MJ, but I missed it because it was information overload at the time. When I read How Jesus Became God the 2nd time, I finally understood that you believe the disciples hallucinated. And then there’s been times where you’ve said you’re a Christian. Then others will piggy back off of what you say and claim they’re Christians too while at the same time saying they’re atheists. No, you can’t have it both ways!
There’s a lot of atheist underpinnings to biblical scholarship that goes back several centuries, and unless someone wants to go down those rabbit holes, they’ll never know.
Let’s assume Jesus is a divine being or that he rose from the dead or that he is, in fact, God. Where does that leave “critical” scholarship? It’s atheism disguised as education. Metzger had discernment about it all while you embraced it as absolute truth.
I just wish people understood your belief system better and how it influences your work. We don’t give fundamentalists and evangelicals a free pass either.
Here’s the thing Bart—you don’t believe there’s a God while also saying it’s not possible to know if there’s a God just means you’re an atheist. The whole “agnostic atheist” jargon is bs that puts people in confusion by thinking you have some kind of openness to there being a God when in reality, there isn’t. If you were truly open to the idea, you would have written about it on your blog at some point through the years.
When someone introduced me to Misquoting Jesus, he also sent me a video clip of you being interviewed by Steven Colbert. That combination made me think you were open. For one, MJ was new information so I was trying to wrap my head around it. Then, in the interview, Colbert asked you if you thought there was a God, and you said, “I don’t know.” I interpreted that as you being open. There’s another video where you say, “How the hell should I know, I don’t know!” Again, the interpretation is that you’re open on some level.
Fast forward several years, I read MJ and How Jesus Became God a 2nd time….
I like the analogy and an excellent account of the why (for me) agnosticism is the most logical and coherent argument. One reservation would be the use of the word ‘exist’. God, Allah, Yahweh et al must exist in some mode of reasoning otherwise people would not be able to refer to them. Category errors are easily made.
Not sure what you mean. Are you saying that unicorns exist because people refer to them? OK, fair enough: they exist in peoples minds.
Agreed, there is the problem of what we are to say about the existence of fictitious things such unicorns and abstract objects, such as numbers. However existence isn’t something
we can describe objects by. It isn’t what something is, and it isn’t what something has. ‘Exists’ does not work as a predicate.
For example:
1. God is omniscient
2. God is omnipotent
3. God is existing
Is the third one like the first two?
It is not possible for there to be non-existent objects.
So “to exist” is not some action or quality or feature something has, that you can add to describe a subject. It isn’t like other verbs or verb phrases.
One can have a belief in God but existence? No
You don’t think you can ask if God exists? Do you think you can ask if extraterrestial life exists? Or whether baseball bats exist? Or if an eternal place of punishment exists?
I suppose you wouldn’t say “God is existing” (or baseball bats are existing) mainly because it sounds weird (redundant, since “to be” as a copulative presupposes existence). You would say “God exists.” (And on the flip side you wouldn’t say “God omnipotents”)
The reason why I raised this issue was because the question “Does God exist?” is commonly heard. Semantically ‘existence’ is not a predicate, it doesn’t add to the concept of God; it doesn’t provide any ideas about God’s qualities or properties. So the idea of God (whatever that means to the person asking the question or giving an answer) is the same whether He exists or not. Asking “Does God exist?” only posits or actualizes ‘God’. God, like an extraterrestrial, a unicorn or the colour blue, is an object (He can’t be anything else) it does not provide a description.
For example I can assert that ‘the extraterrestrial is kind’, it adds ‘kindness’ to the concept of the extraterrestrial. But an ‘existing extraterrestrial’ doesn’t add a property to the idea of the extraterrestrial (be it the one that was recovered in Roswell, for the sake of argument let’s pretend it really happened, or the one in ET the movie).
I think this is important because people do enquire if God exists. And unless it is qualified by a meaningful predicate it leads to confusion to what is meant by the concept, the qualities, of God.
No, it’s not a predicate; but it’s syntactically as saying Does John run. If he does, then technically a runner. If God does exist then he’s technically an … exister. Like unicorns.
Of the passages in the Bible that were probably added later, are there any whose writing styles or other clues suggest that they were added later BY THE ORIGINAL AUTHOR?
There are debates about this. But since one of the best pieces of evidence for an “interpolation” is a change of writing style, I’d say usually the answer is probably nbo.
I think the bird-human analogy is false because of two things: 1) the bird knows the human is there. If a human comes near it will flee. 2) it’s a category error. A “ god” is not simply a higher power. A god is a concept developed by humans to explain unexplained natural phenomena.
I am sure we will find greater powers to us in the universe. That does not make them gods. They will be material, biological. We will be able to study them.
1. If a divine comes anywhere me I’m gettin’ outta there too. My point is that the bird does not actually have any concept of who I am (my loves/hates/desires/abilities/history/knowledge/etc), only that I”m a threat. 2. I’m asking if there is a higher power, not if there is a concept of a higher power.
I sometimes in jest tell people I am an apathagnostic. (apathy plus agnosticism) I don’t know and I don’t care. But in reality if I didn’t care I wouldn’t be so addicted to your blog!
Exactly!