1. Rebuttal:
Argument from the Historicity of Jesus
Argument from the Historicity of Jesus
Summary:
The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ is the most attested event in history.
Richard Dawkins, PhD, British evolutionary biologist, 1941-
“There are still some people who are persuaded by scriptural evidence to believe in God. A common argument, attributed among others to C.S. Lewis (who should have known better), states that, since Jesus claimed to be the Son of God, he must have been either right or else insane or a liar: ‘Mad, Bad or God.’ Or, with artless alliteration, ‘Lunatic, Liar or Lord.’ The historical evidence that Jesus claimed any sort of divine status is minimal. But even if that evidence were good, the trilemma on offer would be ludicrously inadequate. A fourth possibility, almost too obvious to need mentioning, is that Jesus was honestly mistaken. Plenty of people are. In any case, as I said, there is no good historical evidence that he ever thought he was divine.
“The fact that something is written down is persuasive to people not used to asking questions like: ‘Who wrote it, and when?’ ‘How did they know what to write?’ ‘Did they, in their time, really mean what we, in our time, understand them to be saying?’ ‘Were they unbiased observers, or did they have an agenda that coloured their writing?’ Ever since the nineteenth century, scholarly theologians have made an overwhelming case that the gospels are not reliable accounts of what happened in the history of the real world. All were written long after the death of Jesus, and also after the epistles of Paul, which mention almost none of the alleged facts of Jesus’ life. All were then copied and recopied, through many different ‘Chinese Whispers generations’ (see Chapter 5) by fallible scribes who, in any case, had their own religious agendas.
“A good example of the colouring by religious agendas is the whole heart-warming legend of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem, followed by Herod’s massacre of the innocents. When the gospels were written, many years after Jesus’ death, nobody knew where he was born. But an Old Testament prophecy (Micah 5:2) had led Jews to expect that the long-awaited Messiah would be born in Bethlehem. In the light of this prophecy, John’s gospel specifically remarks that his followers were surprised that he was not born in Bethlehem: ‘Others said, This is the Christ. But some said, Shall Christ come out of Galilee? Hath not the scripture said, That Christ cometh of the seed of David, and out of the town of Bethlehem, where David was?’
“Matthew and Luke handle the problem differently, by deciding that Jesus must have been born in Bethlehem after all. But they get him there by different routes. Matthew has Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem all along, moving to Nazareth only long after the birth of Jesus, on their return from Egypt where they fled from King Herod and the massacre of the innocents. Luke, by contrast, acknowledges that Mary and Joseph lived in Nazareth before Jesus was born. So how to get them to Bethlehem at the crucial moment, in order to fulfill the prophets? Luke says that, in the time when Cyrenius (Quirinius) was governor of Syria, Caesar Augustus decreed a census for taxation purposes, and everybody had to go ‘to his own city.’ Joseph was ‘of the house and lineage of David’ and therefore he had to go to ‘the city of David, which is called Bethlehem.’ That must have seemed like a good solution. Except that historically it is complete nonsense, as A.N. Wilson in Jesus and Robin Lane Fox in The unauthorized Version (among others) have pointed out. David, if he existed, lived nearly a thousand years before Mary and Joseph. Why on earth would the Romans have required Joseph to go to the city where a remote ancestor had lived a millennium earlier?...
“Moreover, Luke screws up his dating by tactlessly mentioning events that historians are capable of independently checking. There was indeed a census under Governor Quirinius – a local census, not one decreed by Caesar Augustus for the Empire as a whole – but it happened too late: in AD 6, long after Herod’s death. Lane Fox concludes that ‘Luke’s story is historically impossible and internally incoherent,’ but he sympathizes with Luke’s plight and his desire to fulfill the prophecy of Micah.”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p117-119
“Robert Gillooly shows how all the essential features of the Jesus legend, including the star in the east, the virgin birth, the veneration of the baby by kings, the miracles, the execution, the resurrection and the ascension are borrowed – every last one of them – from other religions already in existence in the Mediterranean and Near East region. [Tom] Flynn [Editor of Free Inquiry magazine] suggests that Matthew’s desire to fulfill messianic prophecies (descent from David, birth in Bethlehem) for the benefit of Jewish readers came into headlong collision with Luke’s desire to adapt Christianity for the Gentiles, and hence to press the familiar hot buttons of pagan Hellenistic religions (virgin birth, worship by kings, etc.). The resulting contradictions are glaring, but consistently overlooked by the faithful.”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p119-120
“There are still some people who are persuaded by scriptural evidence to believe in God. A common argument, attributed among others to C.S. Lewis (who should have known better), states that, since Jesus claimed to be the Son of God, he must have been either right or else insane or a liar: ‘Mad, Bad or God.’ Or, with artless alliteration, ‘Lunatic, Liar or Lord.’ The historical evidence that Jesus claimed any sort of divine status is minimal. But even if that evidence were good, the trilemma on offer would be ludicrously inadequate. A fourth possibility, almost too obvious to need mentioning, is that Jesus was honestly mistaken. Plenty of people are. In any case, as I said, there is no good historical evidence that he ever thought he was divine.
“The fact that something is written down is persuasive to people not used to asking questions like: ‘Who wrote it, and when?’ ‘How did they know what to write?’ ‘Did they, in their time, really mean what we, in our time, understand them to be saying?’ ‘Were they unbiased observers, or did they have an agenda that coloured their writing?’ Ever since the nineteenth century, scholarly theologians have made an overwhelming case that the gospels are not reliable accounts of what happened in the history of the real world. All were written long after the death of Jesus, and also after the epistles of Paul, which mention almost none of the alleged facts of Jesus’ life. All were then copied and recopied, through many different ‘Chinese Whispers generations’ (see Chapter 5) by fallible scribes who, in any case, had their own religious agendas.
“A good example of the colouring by religious agendas is the whole heart-warming legend of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem, followed by Herod’s massacre of the innocents. When the gospels were written, many years after Jesus’ death, nobody knew where he was born. But an Old Testament prophecy (Micah 5:2) had led Jews to expect that the long-awaited Messiah would be born in Bethlehem. In the light of this prophecy, John’s gospel specifically remarks that his followers were surprised that he was not born in Bethlehem: ‘Others said, This is the Christ. But some said, Shall Christ come out of Galilee? Hath not the scripture said, That Christ cometh of the seed of David, and out of the town of Bethlehem, where David was?’
“Matthew and Luke handle the problem differently, by deciding that Jesus must have been born in Bethlehem after all. But they get him there by different routes. Matthew has Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem all along, moving to Nazareth only long after the birth of Jesus, on their return from Egypt where they fled from King Herod and the massacre of the innocents. Luke, by contrast, acknowledges that Mary and Joseph lived in Nazareth before Jesus was born. So how to get them to Bethlehem at the crucial moment, in order to fulfill the prophets? Luke says that, in the time when Cyrenius (Quirinius) was governor of Syria, Caesar Augustus decreed a census for taxation purposes, and everybody had to go ‘to his own city.’ Joseph was ‘of the house and lineage of David’ and therefore he had to go to ‘the city of David, which is called Bethlehem.’ That must have seemed like a good solution. Except that historically it is complete nonsense, as A.N. Wilson in Jesus and Robin Lane Fox in The unauthorized Version (among others) have pointed out. David, if he existed, lived nearly a thousand years before Mary and Joseph. Why on earth would the Romans have required Joseph to go to the city where a remote ancestor had lived a millennium earlier?...
“Moreover, Luke screws up his dating by tactlessly mentioning events that historians are capable of independently checking. There was indeed a census under Governor Quirinius – a local census, not one decreed by Caesar Augustus for the Empire as a whole – but it happened too late: in AD 6, long after Herod’s death. Lane Fox concludes that ‘Luke’s story is historically impossible and internally incoherent,’ but he sympathizes with Luke’s plight and his desire to fulfill the prophecy of Micah.”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p117-119
“Robert Gillooly shows how all the essential features of the Jesus legend, including the star in the east, the virgin birth, the veneration of the baby by kings, the miracles, the execution, the resurrection and the ascension are borrowed – every last one of them – from other religions already in existence in the Mediterranean and Near East region. [Tom] Flynn [Editor of Free Inquiry magazine] suggests that Matthew’s desire to fulfill messianic prophecies (descent from David, birth in Bethlehem) for the benefit of Jewish readers came into headlong collision with Luke’s desire to adapt Christianity for the Gentiles, and hence to press the familiar hot buttons of pagan Hellenistic religions (virgin birth, worship by kings, etc.). The resulting contradictions are glaring, but consistently overlooked by the faithful.”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p119-120
Kai Nielsen, American Professor of Philosophy, 1926-2021
“Jesus, let us suppose–I don’t know much about such things and to be perfectly frank, I’m not terribly interested in them–but let us just suppose it were the case that Jesus was raised from the dead. Suppose you collected the bones, and they together in some way reconstituted the living Jesus. Suppose something like that really happened. Suppose there were good historical evidence for it. I have no idea if there is or isn’t; I suspect for anything like that, there isn’t very good evidence, but let us assume there is. This wouldn’t show there was an infinite intelligible being. It wouldn’t give you any way of being able to detect if there is a God. It would be just that a very strange happening happened, namely, that somebody who died–or certainly appeared to have died–came together again as a living human being. It would not enable you to understand at all what you were talking about concerning an infinite individual. It would just be a very peculiar fact we hadn’t explained and indeed lacked the scientific resources to explain. And the same thing is true of the familiar resurrection story.”
— Kai Nielsen, Does God Exist?, Prometheus Books, 1988 p64
“One thing about the historicity of Jesus. When I bring this out you will see why I’m not much interested in it. What I read in Moreland’s book about his account of the historicity of Jesus is that he shows clearly enough that it wasn’t a myth that the Christian community tried to purvey, rather they were recording what they actually believed happened. As I read that, it seemed a very plausible thing to say, though I don’t know what biblical scholars would say about it. But this shows us nothing at all about Jesus being divine. It only shows us that some people thought he was.”
— Kai Nielsen, Does God Exist?, Prometheus Books, 1988 p66
“Finally, even if there is this historicity side, the point is that there is a historicity side to the other religions too. And if you want to say, ’I’m going to accept my Christian faith on the basis of the revelations in the Bible and so forth,’ then it is natural to ask why the Christian ones rather than Jewish ones or Hindu ones and the like. Putative revelations are plentiful. How do you know that the Christian putative revelations are the genuine ones and not the Hindu ones? If you stick with claims internal to the Christian Bible, you go in a vicious circle. Granting its historicity, Christianity makes a lot of claims that are beyond empirical check... So do all the other religious doctrines. Why the Bible rather than the Koran? Why the Bible rather than the canonical Buddhist texts? Why the Bible rather than the Hindu texts? ... If you look at religion anthropologically, you will see that there are thousands of religions all claiming ’The truth...’
“...And do not say that really they’re all saying the same thing because they are not. Buddhism is very different indeed from Christianity.”
— Kai Nielsen, Does God Exist?, Prometheus Books, 1988 p67
“Jesus, let us suppose–I don’t know much about such things and to be perfectly frank, I’m not terribly interested in them–but let us just suppose it were the case that Jesus was raised from the dead. Suppose you collected the bones, and they together in some way reconstituted the living Jesus. Suppose something like that really happened. Suppose there were good historical evidence for it. I have no idea if there is or isn’t; I suspect for anything like that, there isn’t very good evidence, but let us assume there is. This wouldn’t show there was an infinite intelligible being. It wouldn’t give you any way of being able to detect if there is a God. It would be just that a very strange happening happened, namely, that somebody who died–or certainly appeared to have died–came together again as a living human being. It would not enable you to understand at all what you were talking about concerning an infinite individual. It would just be a very peculiar fact we hadn’t explained and indeed lacked the scientific resources to explain. And the same thing is true of the familiar resurrection story.”
— Kai Nielsen, Does God Exist?, Prometheus Books, 1988 p64
“One thing about the historicity of Jesus. When I bring this out you will see why I’m not much interested in it. What I read in Moreland’s book about his account of the historicity of Jesus is that he shows clearly enough that it wasn’t a myth that the Christian community tried to purvey, rather they were recording what they actually believed happened. As I read that, it seemed a very plausible thing to say, though I don’t know what biblical scholars would say about it. But this shows us nothing at all about Jesus being divine. It only shows us that some people thought he was.”
— Kai Nielsen, Does God Exist?, Prometheus Books, 1988 p66
“Finally, even if there is this historicity side, the point is that there is a historicity side to the other religions too. And if you want to say, ’I’m going to accept my Christian faith on the basis of the revelations in the Bible and so forth,’ then it is natural to ask why the Christian ones rather than Jewish ones or Hindu ones and the like. Putative revelations are plentiful. How do you know that the Christian putative revelations are the genuine ones and not the Hindu ones? If you stick with claims internal to the Christian Bible, you go in a vicious circle. Granting its historicity, Christianity makes a lot of claims that are beyond empirical check... So do all the other religious doctrines. Why the Bible rather than the Koran? Why the Bible rather than the canonical Buddhist texts? Why the Bible rather than the Hindu texts? ... If you look at religion anthropologically, you will see that there are thousands of religions all claiming ’The truth...’
“...And do not say that really they’re all saying the same thing because they are not. Buddhism is very different indeed from Christianity.”
— Kai Nielsen, Does God Exist?, Prometheus Books, 1988 p67
2. Rebuttal:
Argument from the Reliability of the Bible or Other Authority
Argument from the Reliability of the Bible or Other Authority
Summary:
God exists because the Bible, which is inerrant, testifies that God exists.
Thomas Paine, English philosopher, political theorist, & revolutionary, 1737-1809
“It has often been said, that anything may be proved from the Bible, but before anything can be admitted as proved by the Bible, the Bible itself must be proved to be true; for if the Bible be not true, or the truth of it be doubtful, it ceases to have authority, and cannot be admitted as proof of anything.
“It has been the practise of all Christian commentators on the Bible, and of all Christian priests and preachers, to impose the Bible on the world as a mass of truth and as the Word of God; they have disputed and wrangled, and anathematized each other about the supposeable [sic] meaning of particular parts and passages therein; one has said and insisted that such a passage meant such a thing; another that it meant directly the contrary; and a third, that it meant neither one nor the other, but something different from both; and this they have called understanding the Bible...
“Now, instead of wasting their time and heating themselves in fractious disputations about doctrinal points drawn from the Bible, these men ought to know, and if they do not, it is civility to inform them, that the first thing to be understood is whether there is sufficient authority for believing the Bible to be the Word of God or whether there is not.
“There are matters in the book, said to be done by the express command of God, that are as shocking to humanity and to every idea we have of moral justice as anything done by Robespierre, by Carrier, by Joseph le Bon, in France, by the English Government in the East Indies, or by any other assassin in modern times. When we read in the books ascribed to Moses, Joshua, etc., that they (the Israelites) came by stealth upon whole nations of people, who, as history itself shows, had given them no offense; that they put all those nations to the sword; that they spared neither age nor infancy; that they utterly destroyed men, women, and children; that they left not a soul to breathe – expressions that are repeated over and over again in those books, and that, too, with exulting ferocity – are we sure these things are facts? Are we sure that the Creator of man commissioned these things to be done? And are we sure that the books that tell us so were written by His authority?
“It is not the antiquity of a tale that is any evidence of its truth; on the contrary, it is a symptom of its being fabulous; for the more ancient any history pretends to be the more it has the resemblance of a fable. The origin of every nation is buried in fabulous tradition, and that of the Jew is as much to be suspected as any other...
“To believe, therefore, the Bible to be true, we must unbelieve all our belief in the moral justice of God; for wherein could crying or smiling infants offend? And to read the Bible without horror, we must undo everything that is tender, sympathizing and benevolent in the heart of man. Speaking for myself, if I had no other evidence that the bible is fabulous than the sacrifice I must make to believe it to be true, that alone would be sufficient to determine my choice.”
— Thomas Paine, Age of Reason, Citadel Press, New York, 1988 (1794) p103-105
“I know, however, but of one ancient book that authoritatively challenges universal consent and belief, and that is Euclid’s ‘Elements of Geometry’ and the reason is, because it is a book of self-evident demonstration, entirely independent of its author, and of everything relating to time, place and circumstance. The matters contained in that book would have the same authority they now have, had they been written by any other person, or had the work been anonymous, or had the author never been known; for the identical certainty of who was the author makes no part of our belief of the matters contained in the book.
“But it is quite otherwise with respect to the books ascribed to Moses, to Joshua, to Samuel, etc.; those are books of testimony, and they testify of things naturally incredible; and, therefore, the whole of our belief as to the authenticity of those books rests, in the first place, upon the certainty that they were written by Moses, Joshua and Samuel; secondly, upon the credit we give to their testimony.
“We may believe the first, that is, we may believe the certainty of the authorship, and yet not the testimony; in the same manner that we may believe that a certain person gave evidence upon a case and yet not believe the evidence that he gave.
“But if it should be found that the books ascribed to Moses, Joshua and Samuel were not written by Moses, Joshua and Samuel, every part of the authority and authenticity of those books is gone at once; for there can be no such thing as forged or invented testimony; neither can there be anonymous testimony, more especially as to things naturally incredible, such as that of talking to God face to face, or that of the sun and moon standing still at the command of a man...
“As to the ancient historians, from Herodotus to Tacitus, we credit them as far as they relate things probable and credible, and no further; for if we do, we must believe the two miracles which Tacitus relates were performed by Vespasian, that of curing a lame man and a blind man in just the same manner as the same things are told of Jesus Christ by his historians. We must also believe the miracle cited by Josephus, that of the sea of Pamphilia opening to let Alexander and his army pass, as is related of the Red Sea in Exodus.
“These miracles are quite as well authenticated as the Bible miracles, and yet we do not believe them; consequently the degree of evidence necessary to establish our belief of things naturally incredible, whether in the Bible or elsewhere, is far greater than that which obtains our belief to natural and probable things; and therefore, the advocates for the Bible have no claim to our belief of the Bible, because that we believe the things stated in other ancient writings; since that we believe the things stated in these writings no further than they are probable and credible, or because they are self-evident, like Euclid; or admire them because they are elegant, like Homer; or approve of them because they are sedate, like Plato; or judicious, like Aristotle.
“Having premised those things, I proceed to examine the authenticity of the Bible, and I begin with what are called the five books of Moses, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. My intention is to show that those books are spurious, and that Moses is not the author of them; and still further, that they were not written in the time of Moses, nor till several hundred years afterward; that they are no other than an attempted history of the life of Moses, and of the times in which he is said to have lived, and also of the times prior thereto, written by some very ignorant and stupid pretenders to authorship several hundred years after the death of Moses, as men now write histories of things that happened, or are supposed to have happened, several hundred or several thousand years ago.
“The evidence that I shall produce in this case is from the books themselves, and I shall confine myself to this evidence only...”
— Thomas Paine, Age of Reason, Citadel Press, New York, 1988 (1794) p105-107
“But granting the grammatical right that Moses might speak of himself in the third person, because any man might speak of himself in that manner, it cannot be admitted as a fact in those books that it is Moses who speaks, without rendering Moses truly ridiculous and absurd. For example, Numbers, chap. xii. ver. 3. Now the man Moses was very meek, above all the men which were upon the face of the earth.
“If Moses said this of himself, instead of being the meekest of men, he was one of the most vain and arrogant of coxcombs; and the advocates for those books may now take which side they please, for both sides are against them; if Moses was not the author, the books are without authority; and if he was the author, the author is without credit, because to boast of meekness is the reverse of meekness, and is a lie in sentiment.”
— Thomas Paine, Age of Reason, Citadel Press, New York, 1988 (1794) p107-108
“After telling that Moses went to the top of Pisgah (and it does not appear from any account that he ever came down again), he tells us that Moses died there in the land of Moab, and that he buried him in a valley in the land of Moab; but as there is no antecedent to the pronoun he, there is no knowing who he was that did bury him. If the writer meant that He (God) buried him, how should he (the writer) know it? or why should we (the readers) believe him? since we know not who the writer was that tells us so, for certainly Moses could not himself tell where he was buried.
“The writer also tells us, that no man knows where the sepulcher of Moses is unto this day, meaning the time in which this writer lived; how then should we know that Moses was buried in a valley in the land of Moab? for as the writer lived long after the time of Moses, as is evident from his using the expression of unto this day, meaning a great length of time after the death of Moses, he certainly was not at his funeral; and on the other hand, it is impossible that Moses himself could say that no man knows where the sepulcher is unto this day...
“This writer has nowhere told us how he came by the speeches which he has put into the mouth of Moses to speak, and therefore we have a right to conclude that he either composed them himself or wrote them from oral tradition...”
— Thomas Paine, Age of Reason, Citadel Press, New York, 1988 (1794) p109-110
“I begin with the book of Genesis. In the 14th chapter of Genesis, the writer gives an account of Lot being taken prisoner in a battle between the four kings against five, and carried off; and that when the account of Lot being taken came to Abraham, he armed all his household and marched to rescue Lot from the captors, and that he pursued them unto Dan (ver. 14)...
“The city now called New York, in America, was originally New Amsterdam; and the town in France, lately called Havre Marat, was before called Havre de Grace. New Amsterdam was changed to New York in the year 1664; Havre de Grace to Havre Marat in the year 1793. Should, therefore, any writing be found, though without date, in which the name of New York should be mentioned, it would be certain evidence that such a writing could not have been written before, but must have been written after New Amsterdam was changed to New York, and consequently, not till after the year 1664, or at least during the course of that year...
“Now I come to the application of those cases, and to show that there was no such place as Dan, till many years after the death of Moses, and consequently that Moses could not be the writer of the book of Genesis, where this account of pursuing them unto Dan is given. The place that is called Dan in the Bible was originally a town of the Gentiles called Laish; and when the tribe of Dan was seized upon this town they changed its name to Dan, in commemoration of Dan, who was the father of that tribe and the great-grandson of Abraham.
“To establish this in proof, it is necessary to refer from Genesis, to the 18th chapter of the book called the book of Judges. It is there said (ver. 27) that they (the Danites) came unto Laish to a people that were quiet and secure, and they smote them with the edge of the sword (the Bible is filled with murder) and burned the city with fire; and they built a city (ver 28.), and dwelt therein, and they called the name of the city Dan, after the name of Dan, their father, howbeit the name of the city was Laish at the first.
“This account of the Danites taking possession of Laish and changing it to Dan is placed in the book of Judges immediately after the death of Samson. The death of Samson is said to have happened 1120 years before Christ, and that of Moses 1451 before Christ; and, therefore, according to the historical arrangement, the place was not called Dan till 331 years after the death of Moses.”
— Thomas Paine, Age of Reason, Citadel Press, New York, 1988 (1794) p111-112
“When a person speaking upon any matter, says, it was before I was married, or before my son was born, or before I went to America, or before I went to France, it is absolutely understood, and intended to be understood, that he had been married, that he has had a son, that he has been in America or been in France. Language does not admit of using this mode of expression in any other sense; and whenever such an expression is found anywhere it can only be understood in the sense in which it only could have been used.
“The passage, therefore, that I have quoted [Gen. 36:31] – ‘that these are the kings that reigned in Edom, before there reigned any king over the children of Israel’ – could only have been written after the first king began to reign over them; and, consequently, that the book of Genesis, so far from having been written by Moses, could not have been written till the time of Saul at least.”
— Thomas Paine, Age of Reason, Citadel Press, New York, 1988 (1794) p113
“Take away from Genesis the belief that Moses was the author, on which only the strange belief that it is the Word of God has stood, and there remains nothing of Genesis but an anonymous book of stories, fables and traditionary or invented absurdities, or of downright lies. The story of Eve and the serpent, and of Noah and his ark, drops to a level with the Arabian tales, without the merit of being entertaining; and the account of men living to eight and nine hundred years becomes as fabulous as the immortality of the giants of the Mythology.”
— Thomas Paine, Age of Reason, Citadel Press, New York, 1988 (1794) p114
“This tale of the sun standing still upon mount Gibeon [Joshua 10], and the moon in the valley of Ajalon, is one of those fables that detects itself. Such a circumstance could not have happened without being known all over the world. One half would have wondered why the sun did not rise, and the other why it did not set; and the tradition of it would be universal, whereas there is not a nation in the world that knows anything about it.”
— Thomas Paine, Age of Reason, Citadel Press, New York, 1988 (1794) p118
“A distant but general time is also expressed in the 8th chapter [of Joshua], where, after giving an account of the taking of the city of Ai, it is said, ver. 28, ‘And Joshua burned Ai, and made it a heap forever, a desolation unto this day’; and again, ver. 29., where, speaking of the king of Ai, whom Joshua had hanged, and buried at the entering of the gate, it is said, ‘And he raised thereon a great heap of stones, which remaineth unto this day,’ that is, unto the day or time in which the writer of the book of Joshua lived. And again, in the 10th chapter, where, after speaking of the five kings whom Joshua had hanged on five trees, and then thrown in a cave, it is said, ‘And he laid great stones on the cave’s mouth, which remain unto this very day.’...
“Having thus shown from the book of Joshua itself, without any auxiliary evidence whatever, that Joshua is not the author of that book, and that it is anonymous, and consequently without authority, I proceed to the book of Judges.”
— Thomas Paine, Age of Reason, Citadel Press, New York, 1988 (1794) p119-120
“Samuel, in the account given of him, in the first of those books, chap ix [9], is called the seer; and it is by this term that Saul inquires after him, ver. 11, ‘And as they (Saul and his servant) went up the hill to the city, they found young maidens going out to draw water; and they said unto them, Is the seer here?’ Saul then went according to the direction of these maidens, and met Samuel without knowing him, and said unto him, ver. 18, ‘Tell me, I pray thee, where the seer’s house is?’ and Samuel answered Saul and said, I am the seer.’
“As the writer of the book of Samuel relates these questions and answers in the language or manner of speaking used in the time they are said to have been spoken, and as that manner of speaking was out of use when this author wrote, he found it necessary, in order to make the story understood, to explain the terms in which these questions and answers are spoken; and he does this in the 9th verse, when he says ‘Before-time, in Israel, when a man went to inquire of God, thus he spake, Come, and let us go to the seer; for he that is now called a prophet, was before-time called a seer.’
“This proves, as I have before said, that this story of Saul, Samuel and the asses, was an ancient story at the time the book of Samuel was written, and consequently that Samuel did not write it, and that that book is without authenticity.”
— Thomas Paine, Age of Reason, Citadel Press, New York, 1988 (1794) p122
“But if we go further into those books the evidence is still more positive that Samuel is not the writer of them; for they relate things that did not happen till several years after the death of Samuel. Samuel died before Saul; for the 1st Samuel, chap xxviii [28], tells that Saul and the witch of Endor conjured Samuel up after he was dead; yet the history of the matters contained in those books is extended through the remaining part of Saul’s life, and to the latter end of the life of David, who succeeded Saul.
“The account of the death and burial of Samuel (a thing which he could not write himself) is related in the 25th chapter of the first book of Samuel, and the chronology affixed to this chapter makes this to be 1060 years before Christ; yet the history of this first book is brought down to 1056 years before Christ; that is, to the death of Saul, which was not till four years after the death of Samuel.
“The second book of Samuel begins with an account of things that did not happen till four years after Samuel was dead; for it begins with the reign of David, who succeeded Saul, and it goes on to the end of David’s reign, which was forty-three years after the death of Samuel; and, therefore, the books are in themselves positive evidence that they were not written by Samuel.”
— Thomas Paine, Age of Reason, Citadel Press, New York, 1988 (1794) p122-123
“It has often been said, that anything may be proved from the Bible, but before anything can be admitted as proved by the Bible, the Bible itself must be proved to be true; for if the Bible be not true, or the truth of it be doubtful, it ceases to have authority, and cannot be admitted as proof of anything.
“It has been the practise of all Christian commentators on the Bible, and of all Christian priests and preachers, to impose the Bible on the world as a mass of truth and as the Word of God; they have disputed and wrangled, and anathematized each other about the supposeable [sic] meaning of particular parts and passages therein; one has said and insisted that such a passage meant such a thing; another that it meant directly the contrary; and a third, that it meant neither one nor the other, but something different from both; and this they have called understanding the Bible...
“Now, instead of wasting their time and heating themselves in fractious disputations about doctrinal points drawn from the Bible, these men ought to know, and if they do not, it is civility to inform them, that the first thing to be understood is whether there is sufficient authority for believing the Bible to be the Word of God or whether there is not.
“There are matters in the book, said to be done by the express command of God, that are as shocking to humanity and to every idea we have of moral justice as anything done by Robespierre, by Carrier, by Joseph le Bon, in France, by the English Government in the East Indies, or by any other assassin in modern times. When we read in the books ascribed to Moses, Joshua, etc., that they (the Israelites) came by stealth upon whole nations of people, who, as history itself shows, had given them no offense; that they put all those nations to the sword; that they spared neither age nor infancy; that they utterly destroyed men, women, and children; that they left not a soul to breathe – expressions that are repeated over and over again in those books, and that, too, with exulting ferocity – are we sure these things are facts? Are we sure that the Creator of man commissioned these things to be done? And are we sure that the books that tell us so were written by His authority?
“It is not the antiquity of a tale that is any evidence of its truth; on the contrary, it is a symptom of its being fabulous; for the more ancient any history pretends to be the more it has the resemblance of a fable. The origin of every nation is buried in fabulous tradition, and that of the Jew is as much to be suspected as any other...
“To believe, therefore, the Bible to be true, we must unbelieve all our belief in the moral justice of God; for wherein could crying or smiling infants offend? And to read the Bible without horror, we must undo everything that is tender, sympathizing and benevolent in the heart of man. Speaking for myself, if I had no other evidence that the bible is fabulous than the sacrifice I must make to believe it to be true, that alone would be sufficient to determine my choice.”
— Thomas Paine, Age of Reason, Citadel Press, New York, 1988 (1794) p103-105
“I know, however, but of one ancient book that authoritatively challenges universal consent and belief, and that is Euclid’s ‘Elements of Geometry’ and the reason is, because it is a book of self-evident demonstration, entirely independent of its author, and of everything relating to time, place and circumstance. The matters contained in that book would have the same authority they now have, had they been written by any other person, or had the work been anonymous, or had the author never been known; for the identical certainty of who was the author makes no part of our belief of the matters contained in the book.
“But it is quite otherwise with respect to the books ascribed to Moses, to Joshua, to Samuel, etc.; those are books of testimony, and they testify of things naturally incredible; and, therefore, the whole of our belief as to the authenticity of those books rests, in the first place, upon the certainty that they were written by Moses, Joshua and Samuel; secondly, upon the credit we give to their testimony.
“We may believe the first, that is, we may believe the certainty of the authorship, and yet not the testimony; in the same manner that we may believe that a certain person gave evidence upon a case and yet not believe the evidence that he gave.
“But if it should be found that the books ascribed to Moses, Joshua and Samuel were not written by Moses, Joshua and Samuel, every part of the authority and authenticity of those books is gone at once; for there can be no such thing as forged or invented testimony; neither can there be anonymous testimony, more especially as to things naturally incredible, such as that of talking to God face to face, or that of the sun and moon standing still at the command of a man...
“As to the ancient historians, from Herodotus to Tacitus, we credit them as far as they relate things probable and credible, and no further; for if we do, we must believe the two miracles which Tacitus relates were performed by Vespasian, that of curing a lame man and a blind man in just the same manner as the same things are told of Jesus Christ by his historians. We must also believe the miracle cited by Josephus, that of the sea of Pamphilia opening to let Alexander and his army pass, as is related of the Red Sea in Exodus.
“These miracles are quite as well authenticated as the Bible miracles, and yet we do not believe them; consequently the degree of evidence necessary to establish our belief of things naturally incredible, whether in the Bible or elsewhere, is far greater than that which obtains our belief to natural and probable things; and therefore, the advocates for the Bible have no claim to our belief of the Bible, because that we believe the things stated in other ancient writings; since that we believe the things stated in these writings no further than they are probable and credible, or because they are self-evident, like Euclid; or admire them because they are elegant, like Homer; or approve of them because they are sedate, like Plato; or judicious, like Aristotle.
“Having premised those things, I proceed to examine the authenticity of the Bible, and I begin with what are called the five books of Moses, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. My intention is to show that those books are spurious, and that Moses is not the author of them; and still further, that they were not written in the time of Moses, nor till several hundred years afterward; that they are no other than an attempted history of the life of Moses, and of the times in which he is said to have lived, and also of the times prior thereto, written by some very ignorant and stupid pretenders to authorship several hundred years after the death of Moses, as men now write histories of things that happened, or are supposed to have happened, several hundred or several thousand years ago.
“The evidence that I shall produce in this case is from the books themselves, and I shall confine myself to this evidence only...”
— Thomas Paine, Age of Reason, Citadel Press, New York, 1988 (1794) p105-107
“But granting the grammatical right that Moses might speak of himself in the third person, because any man might speak of himself in that manner, it cannot be admitted as a fact in those books that it is Moses who speaks, without rendering Moses truly ridiculous and absurd. For example, Numbers, chap. xii. ver. 3. Now the man Moses was very meek, above all the men which were upon the face of the earth.
“If Moses said this of himself, instead of being the meekest of men, he was one of the most vain and arrogant of coxcombs; and the advocates for those books may now take which side they please, for both sides are against them; if Moses was not the author, the books are without authority; and if he was the author, the author is without credit, because to boast of meekness is the reverse of meekness, and is a lie in sentiment.”
— Thomas Paine, Age of Reason, Citadel Press, New York, 1988 (1794) p107-108
“After telling that Moses went to the top of Pisgah (and it does not appear from any account that he ever came down again), he tells us that Moses died there in the land of Moab, and that he buried him in a valley in the land of Moab; but as there is no antecedent to the pronoun he, there is no knowing who he was that did bury him. If the writer meant that He (God) buried him, how should he (the writer) know it? or why should we (the readers) believe him? since we know not who the writer was that tells us so, for certainly Moses could not himself tell where he was buried.
“The writer also tells us, that no man knows where the sepulcher of Moses is unto this day, meaning the time in which this writer lived; how then should we know that Moses was buried in a valley in the land of Moab? for as the writer lived long after the time of Moses, as is evident from his using the expression of unto this day, meaning a great length of time after the death of Moses, he certainly was not at his funeral; and on the other hand, it is impossible that Moses himself could say that no man knows where the sepulcher is unto this day...
“This writer has nowhere told us how he came by the speeches which he has put into the mouth of Moses to speak, and therefore we have a right to conclude that he either composed them himself or wrote them from oral tradition...”
— Thomas Paine, Age of Reason, Citadel Press, New York, 1988 (1794) p109-110
“I begin with the book of Genesis. In the 14th chapter of Genesis, the writer gives an account of Lot being taken prisoner in a battle between the four kings against five, and carried off; and that when the account of Lot being taken came to Abraham, he armed all his household and marched to rescue Lot from the captors, and that he pursued them unto Dan (ver. 14)...
“The city now called New York, in America, was originally New Amsterdam; and the town in France, lately called Havre Marat, was before called Havre de Grace. New Amsterdam was changed to New York in the year 1664; Havre de Grace to Havre Marat in the year 1793. Should, therefore, any writing be found, though without date, in which the name of New York should be mentioned, it would be certain evidence that such a writing could not have been written before, but must have been written after New Amsterdam was changed to New York, and consequently, not till after the year 1664, or at least during the course of that year...
“Now I come to the application of those cases, and to show that there was no such place as Dan, till many years after the death of Moses, and consequently that Moses could not be the writer of the book of Genesis, where this account of pursuing them unto Dan is given. The place that is called Dan in the Bible was originally a town of the Gentiles called Laish; and when the tribe of Dan was seized upon this town they changed its name to Dan, in commemoration of Dan, who was the father of that tribe and the great-grandson of Abraham.
“To establish this in proof, it is necessary to refer from Genesis, to the 18th chapter of the book called the book of Judges. It is there said (ver. 27) that they (the Danites) came unto Laish to a people that were quiet and secure, and they smote them with the edge of the sword (the Bible is filled with murder) and burned the city with fire; and they built a city (ver 28.), and dwelt therein, and they called the name of the city Dan, after the name of Dan, their father, howbeit the name of the city was Laish at the first.
“This account of the Danites taking possession of Laish and changing it to Dan is placed in the book of Judges immediately after the death of Samson. The death of Samson is said to have happened 1120 years before Christ, and that of Moses 1451 before Christ; and, therefore, according to the historical arrangement, the place was not called Dan till 331 years after the death of Moses.”
— Thomas Paine, Age of Reason, Citadel Press, New York, 1988 (1794) p111-112
“When a person speaking upon any matter, says, it was before I was married, or before my son was born, or before I went to America, or before I went to France, it is absolutely understood, and intended to be understood, that he had been married, that he has had a son, that he has been in America or been in France. Language does not admit of using this mode of expression in any other sense; and whenever such an expression is found anywhere it can only be understood in the sense in which it only could have been used.
“The passage, therefore, that I have quoted [Gen. 36:31] – ‘that these are the kings that reigned in Edom, before there reigned any king over the children of Israel’ – could only have been written after the first king began to reign over them; and, consequently, that the book of Genesis, so far from having been written by Moses, could not have been written till the time of Saul at least.”
— Thomas Paine, Age of Reason, Citadel Press, New York, 1988 (1794) p113
“Take away from Genesis the belief that Moses was the author, on which only the strange belief that it is the Word of God has stood, and there remains nothing of Genesis but an anonymous book of stories, fables and traditionary or invented absurdities, or of downright lies. The story of Eve and the serpent, and of Noah and his ark, drops to a level with the Arabian tales, without the merit of being entertaining; and the account of men living to eight and nine hundred years becomes as fabulous as the immortality of the giants of the Mythology.”
— Thomas Paine, Age of Reason, Citadel Press, New York, 1988 (1794) p114
“This tale of the sun standing still upon mount Gibeon [Joshua 10], and the moon in the valley of Ajalon, is one of those fables that detects itself. Such a circumstance could not have happened without being known all over the world. One half would have wondered why the sun did not rise, and the other why it did not set; and the tradition of it would be universal, whereas there is not a nation in the world that knows anything about it.”
— Thomas Paine, Age of Reason, Citadel Press, New York, 1988 (1794) p118
“A distant but general time is also expressed in the 8th chapter [of Joshua], where, after giving an account of the taking of the city of Ai, it is said, ver. 28, ‘And Joshua burned Ai, and made it a heap forever, a desolation unto this day’; and again, ver. 29., where, speaking of the king of Ai, whom Joshua had hanged, and buried at the entering of the gate, it is said, ‘And he raised thereon a great heap of stones, which remaineth unto this day,’ that is, unto the day or time in which the writer of the book of Joshua lived. And again, in the 10th chapter, where, after speaking of the five kings whom Joshua had hanged on five trees, and then thrown in a cave, it is said, ‘And he laid great stones on the cave’s mouth, which remain unto this very day.’...
“Having thus shown from the book of Joshua itself, without any auxiliary evidence whatever, that Joshua is not the author of that book, and that it is anonymous, and consequently without authority, I proceed to the book of Judges.”
— Thomas Paine, Age of Reason, Citadel Press, New York, 1988 (1794) p119-120
“Samuel, in the account given of him, in the first of those books, chap ix [9], is called the seer; and it is by this term that Saul inquires after him, ver. 11, ‘And as they (Saul and his servant) went up the hill to the city, they found young maidens going out to draw water; and they said unto them, Is the seer here?’ Saul then went according to the direction of these maidens, and met Samuel without knowing him, and said unto him, ver. 18, ‘Tell me, I pray thee, where the seer’s house is?’ and Samuel answered Saul and said, I am the seer.’
“As the writer of the book of Samuel relates these questions and answers in the language or manner of speaking used in the time they are said to have been spoken, and as that manner of speaking was out of use when this author wrote, he found it necessary, in order to make the story understood, to explain the terms in which these questions and answers are spoken; and he does this in the 9th verse, when he says ‘Before-time, in Israel, when a man went to inquire of God, thus he spake, Come, and let us go to the seer; for he that is now called a prophet, was before-time called a seer.’
“This proves, as I have before said, that this story of Saul, Samuel and the asses, was an ancient story at the time the book of Samuel was written, and consequently that Samuel did not write it, and that that book is without authenticity.”
— Thomas Paine, Age of Reason, Citadel Press, New York, 1988 (1794) p122
“But if we go further into those books the evidence is still more positive that Samuel is not the writer of them; for they relate things that did not happen till several years after the death of Samuel. Samuel died before Saul; for the 1st Samuel, chap xxviii [28], tells that Saul and the witch of Endor conjured Samuel up after he was dead; yet the history of the matters contained in those books is extended through the remaining part of Saul’s life, and to the latter end of the life of David, who succeeded Saul.
“The account of the death and burial of Samuel (a thing which he could not write himself) is related in the 25th chapter of the first book of Samuel, and the chronology affixed to this chapter makes this to be 1060 years before Christ; yet the history of this first book is brought down to 1056 years before Christ; that is, to the death of Saul, which was not till four years after the death of Samuel.
“The second book of Samuel begins with an account of things that did not happen till four years after Samuel was dead; for it begins with the reign of David, who succeeded Saul, and it goes on to the end of David’s reign, which was forty-three years after the death of Samuel; and, therefore, the books are in themselves positive evidence that they were not written by Samuel.”
— Thomas Paine, Age of Reason, Citadel Press, New York, 1988 (1794) p122-123
Abhijit Naskar, Indian neuroscientist, 1991-
“If to a person religion means reading books and obeying every single word from it without the slightest bit of reasoning, then such perception would only bring destruction upon the person and the world. Also there are people who use the words from those books to justify their own filthy actions. Let’s take a conservative Muslim, for example. Say, the conservative Muslim male Homo sapiens...is found to be beating his wife. Now, if someone says to him ’this is wrong’, he would naturally reply, ’this is a divine thing to do, my book says so.’ Now, if a Christian says ’my book is older, so you should stop obeying your book and start obeying mine,’ there will come the Buddhist, and say, ’my book is much older still, obey mine.’ Then will come the Jew, and say, ’my book is even older, so just follow mine.’ And in the end will come the Hindu and say ’my books are the oldest of all, obey them.’ Therefore referring to books will only make a mess of the human race and tear the species into pieces.”
― Abhijit Naskar, In Search of Divinity: Journey to The Kingdom of Conscience, CreateSpace, 2016
“If to a person religion means reading books and obeying every single word from it without the slightest bit of reasoning, then such perception would only bring destruction upon the person and the world. Also there are people who use the words from those books to justify their own filthy actions. Let’s take a conservative Muslim, for example. Say, the conservative Muslim male Homo sapiens...is found to be beating his wife. Now, if someone says to him ’this is wrong’, he would naturally reply, ’this is a divine thing to do, my book says so.’ Now, if a Christian says ’my book is older, so you should stop obeying your book and start obeying mine,’ there will come the Buddhist, and say, ’my book is much older still, obey mine.’ Then will come the Jew, and say, ’my book is even older, so just follow mine.’ And in the end will come the Hindu and say ’my books are the oldest of all, obey them.’ Therefore referring to books will only make a mess of the human race and tear the species into pieces.”
― Abhijit Naskar, In Search of Divinity: Journey to The Kingdom of Conscience, CreateSpace, 2016
3. Rebuttal:
Argument from Archeological Verification of Biblical Claims
Argument from Archeological Verification of Biblical Claims
Summary:
Some biblical claims can be supported by archeological evidence, therefore, other biblical claims (like the existence of God), must be true.
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4. Rebuttal:
Argument from Internal Consistency of the Bible (or Other Holy Books)
Argument from Internal Consistency of the Bible (or Other Holy Books)
Summary:
The Bible carries a consistent message across 1,600 years and 40 different authors. This is unlikely to have happened by accident.
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5. Rebuttal:
Argument from History
Argument from History
Summary:
The Bible has withstood thousands of years of attempts to eradicate it. Christianity has many barriers to success and longevity, and it would likely have not survived if it were not true.
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6. Rebuttal:
Argument from Reliability of Prophecy
Argument from Reliability of Prophecy
Summary:
Biblical prophecies have accurately come to pass, which proves it is the word of God, which proves God exists.
Bertrand Russell, British philosopher & polymath, 1872-1970
“...I am concerned with Christ as He appears in the Gospels, taking the Gospel narrative as it stands, and there one does find some things that do not seem to be very wise. For one thing, he certainly thought his second coming would occur in clouds of glory before the death of all the people who were living at that time. There are a great many texts that prove that. He says, for instance, ‘Ye shall not have gone over the cities of Israel till the Son of Man be come.’ Then He says: ‘There are some standing here which shall not taste death till the Son of Man comes into His kingdom’; and there are a lot of places where it is quite clear that He believed His second coming would happen during the lifetime of many then living. That was the belief of his earlier followers, and it was the basis of a good deal of His moral teaching. When He said, ‘Take no thought for the morrow,’ and things of that sort, it was very largely because He thought the second coming was going to be very soon, and that all ordinary mundane affairs did not count. I have, as a matter of fact, known some Christians who did believe the second coming was imminent. I knew a parson who frightened his congregation terribly by telling them that the second coming was very imminent indeed, but they were much consoled when they found that he was planting trees in his garden. The early Christians really did believe it, and they did abstain from such things as planting trees in their gardens, because they did accept from Christ the belief that the second coming was imminent. In this respect clearly He was not so wise as some other people have been, and he certainly was not superlatively wise.”
— Bertrand Russell, “Why I Am Not a Christian,” (1927) Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, Touchstone Books, 1957, p16-17
“...I am concerned with Christ as He appears in the Gospels, taking the Gospel narrative as it stands, and there one does find some things that do not seem to be very wise. For one thing, he certainly thought his second coming would occur in clouds of glory before the death of all the people who were living at that time. There are a great many texts that prove that. He says, for instance, ‘Ye shall not have gone over the cities of Israel till the Son of Man be come.’ Then He says: ‘There are some standing here which shall not taste death till the Son of Man comes into His kingdom’; and there are a lot of places where it is quite clear that He believed His second coming would happen during the lifetime of many then living. That was the belief of his earlier followers, and it was the basis of a good deal of His moral teaching. When He said, ‘Take no thought for the morrow,’ and things of that sort, it was very largely because He thought the second coming was going to be very soon, and that all ordinary mundane affairs did not count. I have, as a matter of fact, known some Christians who did believe the second coming was imminent. I knew a parson who frightened his congregation terribly by telling them that the second coming was very imminent indeed, but they were much consoled when they found that he was planting trees in his garden. The early Christians really did believe it, and they did abstain from such things as planting trees in their gardens, because they did accept from Christ the belief that the second coming was imminent. In this respect clearly He was not so wise as some other people have been, and he certainly was not superlatively wise.”
— Bertrand Russell, “Why I Am Not a Christian,” (1927) Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, Touchstone Books, 1957, p16-17
Thomas Paine, English philosopher, political theorist, & revolutionary, 1737-1809
“It has been shown, in a former part of this work, that the original meaning of the words prophet and prophesying has been changed, and that a prophet, in the sense of the word as now used, is a creature of modern invention; and it is owing to this change in the meaning of the words, that the flights and metaphors of the Jewish poets, and phrases and expressions now rendered obscure by our not being acquainted with the local circumstances to which they applied at the time they were used, have been erected into prophecies and made to bend to explanations at the will and whimsical conceits of sectaries, expounders and commentators.
“Everything unintelligible was prophetical, and everything insignificant was typical. A blunder would have served for a prophecy, and a dishclout for a type.
“If by a prophet we are to suppose a man to whom the Almighty communicated some event that would take place in future, either there were such men or there were not. If there were, it is consistent to believe that the event so communicated would be told in terms that could be understood, and not related in such a loose and obscure manner as to be out of the comprehension of those that heard it, and so equivocal as to fit almost any circumstance that might happen afterward. It is conceiving very irreverently of the Almighty to suppose that He would deal in this jesting manner with mankind, yet all the things called prophecies in the book called the Bible come under this description.
“But it is with prophecy as it is with miracles; it could not answer the purpose even if it were real. Those to whom a prophecy should be told, could not tell whether the man prophesied or lied, or whether it had been revealed to him, or whether he conceited it; and if the thing that he prophesied, or intended to prophesy, should happen, or something like it, among the multitude of things that are daily happening, nobody could again know whether he foreknew it, or guessed at it, or whether it was accidental.
“A prophet, therefore, is a character useless and unnecessary; and the safe side of the case is to guard against being imposed upon by not giving credit to such relations.
“Upon the whole, mystery, miracle and prophecy are appendages that belong to fabulous and not to true religion. They are the means by which so many Lo, heres! and Lo, theres! have been spread about the world, and religion has been made into a trade. The success of one impostor gave encouragement to another, and the quieting salvo of doing some good by keeping up a pious fraud protected them from remorse.”
— Thomas Paine, Age of Reason, Citadel Press, New York, 1988 (1794) p96-97
“It has been shown, in a former part of this work, that the original meaning of the words prophet and prophesying has been changed, and that a prophet, in the sense of the word as now used, is a creature of modern invention; and it is owing to this change in the meaning of the words, that the flights and metaphors of the Jewish poets, and phrases and expressions now rendered obscure by our not being acquainted with the local circumstances to which they applied at the time they were used, have been erected into prophecies and made to bend to explanations at the will and whimsical conceits of sectaries, expounders and commentators.
“Everything unintelligible was prophetical, and everything insignificant was typical. A blunder would have served for a prophecy, and a dishclout for a type.
“If by a prophet we are to suppose a man to whom the Almighty communicated some event that would take place in future, either there were such men or there were not. If there were, it is consistent to believe that the event so communicated would be told in terms that could be understood, and not related in such a loose and obscure manner as to be out of the comprehension of those that heard it, and so equivocal as to fit almost any circumstance that might happen afterward. It is conceiving very irreverently of the Almighty to suppose that He would deal in this jesting manner with mankind, yet all the things called prophecies in the book called the Bible come under this description.
“But it is with prophecy as it is with miracles; it could not answer the purpose even if it were real. Those to whom a prophecy should be told, could not tell whether the man prophesied or lied, or whether it had been revealed to him, or whether he conceited it; and if the thing that he prophesied, or intended to prophesy, should happen, or something like it, among the multitude of things that are daily happening, nobody could again know whether he foreknew it, or guessed at it, or whether it was accidental.
“A prophet, therefore, is a character useless and unnecessary; and the safe side of the case is to guard against being imposed upon by not giving credit to such relations.
“Upon the whole, mystery, miracle and prophecy are appendages that belong to fabulous and not to true religion. They are the means by which so many Lo, heres! and Lo, theres! have been spread about the world, and religion has been made into a trade. The success of one impostor gave encouragement to another, and the quieting salvo of doing some good by keeping up a pious fraud protected them from remorse.”
— Thomas Paine, Age of Reason, Citadel Press, New York, 1988 (1794) p96-97
7. Rebuttal:
Argument from Common Consent
Argument from Common Consent
Summary:
A. Belief in God is common to most people from most eras.
B. Either all these people are/were wrong, or they aren’t.
C. It is more likely that they are not wrong.
D. Therefore, it is more likely that God exists.
B. Either all these people are/were wrong, or they aren’t.
C. It is more likely that they are not wrong.
D. Therefore, it is more likely that God exists.
John Stuart Mill, English philosopher & political economist, 1806-1873
“As the human intellect, though weak, is not essentially perverted, there is a certain presumption of the truth of any opinion held by many human minds, requiring to be rebutted by assigning some other real or possible cause for its prevalence. And this consideration has a special relevance to the inquiry concerning the foundations of theism, inasmuch as no argument for the truth of theism is more commonly invoked or more confidently relied on, than the general assent of mankind.”
— John Stuart Mill, “Theism,” Three Essays on Religion: Nature, the Utility of religion, and Theism, 1874
“As the human intellect, though weak, is not essentially perverted, there is a certain presumption of the truth of any opinion held by many human minds, requiring to be rebutted by assigning some other real or possible cause for its prevalence. And this consideration has a special relevance to the inquiry concerning the foundations of theism, inasmuch as no argument for the truth of theism is more commonly invoked or more confidently relied on, than the general assent of mankind.”
— John Stuart Mill, “Theism,” Three Essays on Religion: Nature, the Utility of religion, and Theism, 1874
Richard Dawkins, PhD, British evolutionary biologist, 1941-
“...I am one of an increasing number of biologists who see religion as a by-product of something else. More generally, I believe that we who speculate about Darwinian survival value need to ‘think by-product.’ When we ask about the survival value of anything, we may be asking the wrong question... Perhaps the feature we are interested in (religion in this case) doesn’t have a direct survival value of its own, but is a by-product of something else that does...
“Moths fly into the candle flame, and it doesn’t look like an accident. They go out of their way to make a burnt offering of themselves... It isn’t suicide. Apparent suicide emerges as an inadvertent side-effect or by-product of something else...
“Artificial light is a recent arrival on the night scene. Until recently, the only night lights on view were the moon and the stars. They are at optical infinity, so rays coming from them are parallel. This fits them for use as compasses. Insects are known to use celestial objects such as the sun and the moon to steer accurately in a straight line, and they can use the same compass, with reversed sign, for returning home after a foray...
“...A nervous system applying a 30-degree (or any acute angle) rule of thumb to a nearby candle, as though it were the moon at optical infinity, will steer the moth, via a spiral trajectory, into the flame...
“Though fatal in this particular circumstance, the moth’s rule of thumb is still, on average, a good one because, for a moth, sightings of candles are rare compared with sightings of the moon...
“Now, apply the by-product lesson to religious behavior in humans. We observe large numbers of people – in many areas it amounts to 100 per cent – who hold beliefs that flatly contradict demonstrable scientific facts as well as rival religions followed by others. People not only hold these beliefs with passionate certitude, but devote time and resources to costly activities that flow from holding them. They die for them, or kill for them.... Baffled, we ask why. But my point is that we may be asking the wrong question. The religious behavior may be a misfiring, an unfortunate by-product of an underlying psychological propensity which in other circumstances is, or once was, useful. On this view, the propensity that was naturally selected in our ancestors was not religion per se; it had some other benefit, and it only incidentally manifests itself as religious behavior...
“If, then, religion is a by-product of something else, what is that something else?... I shall offer one suggestion by way of illustration, but I must stress that it is only an example of the kind of thing I mean, and I shall come on to parallel suggestions made by others...“My specific hypothesis is about children. More than any other species, we survive by the accumulated experience of previous generations, and that experience needs to be passed on to children for their protection and well-being. Theoretically, children might learn from personal experience not to go too near a cliff edge, not to eat untried red berries, not to swim in crocodile-infested waters. But, to say the least, there will be a selective advantage to child brains that possess the rule of thumb: believe, without question, whatever your grown-ups tell you. Obey your parents; obey the tribal elders, especially when they adopt a solemn, minatory tone. Trust your elders without question...
“...But the flip side of trusting obedience is slavish gullibility. The inevitable by-product is vulnerability to infection by mind viruses... An automatic consequence is that the truster has no way of distinguishing good advice from bad. The child cannot know that ‘Don’t paddle in the crocodile-infested Limpopo’ is good advice but ‘You must sacrifice a goat at the time of the full moon, otherwise the rains will fail’ is at best a waste of time and goats. Both admonitions sound equally trustworthy. Both come from a respected source and are delivered with a solemn earnestness that commands respect and demands obedience. The same goes for propositions about the world, about the cosmos, about mortality, and about human nature. And, very likely, when the child grows up and has children of her own, she will naturally pass the whole lot on to her own children – nonsense as well as sense – using the same infectious gravitas of manner.
“On this model we should expect that, in different geographical regions, different arbitrary beliefs, none of which have any factual basis, will be handed down, to be believed with the same conviction as useful pieces of traditional wisdom such as the belief that manure is good for the crops. We should also expect that superstitions and other non-factual beliefs will locally evolve – change over generations – either by random drift or by some sort of analogue of Darwinian selection, eventually showing a pattern of significant divergence from common ancestry...“But remember, my specific suggestion about the useful gullibility of the child mind is only an example of the kind of thing that might be the analogue of moths navigating by the moon or the stars. The ethologist Robert Hinde, in Why Gods Persist, and the anthropologists Pascal Boyer, in Religion Explained, and Scott Atran, in In Gods We Trust, have independently promoted the general idea of religion as a by-product of normal psychological dispositions – many by-products. I should say, for the anthropologists especially are concerned to emphasize the diversity of the world’s religions as well as what they have in common...”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p200-203, 205-206
“...I am one of an increasing number of biologists who see religion as a by-product of something else. More generally, I believe that we who speculate about Darwinian survival value need to ‘think by-product.’ When we ask about the survival value of anything, we may be asking the wrong question... Perhaps the feature we are interested in (religion in this case) doesn’t have a direct survival value of its own, but is a by-product of something else that does...
“Moths fly into the candle flame, and it doesn’t look like an accident. They go out of their way to make a burnt offering of themselves... It isn’t suicide. Apparent suicide emerges as an inadvertent side-effect or by-product of something else...
“Artificial light is a recent arrival on the night scene. Until recently, the only night lights on view were the moon and the stars. They are at optical infinity, so rays coming from them are parallel. This fits them for use as compasses. Insects are known to use celestial objects such as the sun and the moon to steer accurately in a straight line, and they can use the same compass, with reversed sign, for returning home after a foray...
“...A nervous system applying a 30-degree (or any acute angle) rule of thumb to a nearby candle, as though it were the moon at optical infinity, will steer the moth, via a spiral trajectory, into the flame...
“Though fatal in this particular circumstance, the moth’s rule of thumb is still, on average, a good one because, for a moth, sightings of candles are rare compared with sightings of the moon...
“Now, apply the by-product lesson to religious behavior in humans. We observe large numbers of people – in many areas it amounts to 100 per cent – who hold beliefs that flatly contradict demonstrable scientific facts as well as rival religions followed by others. People not only hold these beliefs with passionate certitude, but devote time and resources to costly activities that flow from holding them. They die for them, or kill for them.... Baffled, we ask why. But my point is that we may be asking the wrong question. The religious behavior may be a misfiring, an unfortunate by-product of an underlying psychological propensity which in other circumstances is, or once was, useful. On this view, the propensity that was naturally selected in our ancestors was not religion per se; it had some other benefit, and it only incidentally manifests itself as religious behavior...
“If, then, religion is a by-product of something else, what is that something else?... I shall offer one suggestion by way of illustration, but I must stress that it is only an example of the kind of thing I mean, and I shall come on to parallel suggestions made by others...“My specific hypothesis is about children. More than any other species, we survive by the accumulated experience of previous generations, and that experience needs to be passed on to children for their protection and well-being. Theoretically, children might learn from personal experience not to go too near a cliff edge, not to eat untried red berries, not to swim in crocodile-infested waters. But, to say the least, there will be a selective advantage to child brains that possess the rule of thumb: believe, without question, whatever your grown-ups tell you. Obey your parents; obey the tribal elders, especially when they adopt a solemn, minatory tone. Trust your elders without question...
“...But the flip side of trusting obedience is slavish gullibility. The inevitable by-product is vulnerability to infection by mind viruses... An automatic consequence is that the truster has no way of distinguishing good advice from bad. The child cannot know that ‘Don’t paddle in the crocodile-infested Limpopo’ is good advice but ‘You must sacrifice a goat at the time of the full moon, otherwise the rains will fail’ is at best a waste of time and goats. Both admonitions sound equally trustworthy. Both come from a respected source and are delivered with a solemn earnestness that commands respect and demands obedience. The same goes for propositions about the world, about the cosmos, about mortality, and about human nature. And, very likely, when the child grows up and has children of her own, she will naturally pass the whole lot on to her own children – nonsense as well as sense – using the same infectious gravitas of manner.
“On this model we should expect that, in different geographical regions, different arbitrary beliefs, none of which have any factual basis, will be handed down, to be believed with the same conviction as useful pieces of traditional wisdom such as the belief that manure is good for the crops. We should also expect that superstitions and other non-factual beliefs will locally evolve – change over generations – either by random drift or by some sort of analogue of Darwinian selection, eventually showing a pattern of significant divergence from common ancestry...“But remember, my specific suggestion about the useful gullibility of the child mind is only an example of the kind of thing that might be the analogue of moths navigating by the moon or the stars. The ethologist Robert Hinde, in Why Gods Persist, and the anthropologists Pascal Boyer, in Religion Explained, and Scott Atran, in In Gods We Trust, have independently promoted the general idea of religion as a by-product of normal psychological dispositions – many by-products. I should say, for the anthropologists especially are concerned to emphasize the diversity of the world’s religions as well as what they have in common...”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p200-203, 205-206
8. Rebuttal:
Argument from Tradition
Argument from Tradition
Summary:
God exists because people in the past have always believed God exists.
Robert Ingersoll, American lawyer & orator, 1833-1899
“Heredity is on the side of superstition. All our ignorance pleads for the old. In most men there is a feeling that their ancestors were exceedingly good and brave and wise, and that in all things pertaining to religion their conclusions should be followed. They believe that their fathers and mothers were of the best, and that that which satisfied them should satisfy their children. With a feeling of reverence they say that the religion of their mother is good enough and pure enough and reasonable enough for them. In this way the love of parents and the reverence for ancestors have unconsciously bribed the reason and put out, or rendered exceedingly dum, the eyes of the mind...
“Yet it will hardly do to say that the religion of my mother is good enough for me, any more than to say the geology or the astronomy of the philosophy of my mother is good enough for me. Every human being is entitled to the best he can obtain; and if there has been the slightest improvement on the religion of the mother, the son is entitled to that improvement, and he should not deprive himself of that advantage by the mistaken idea that he owes it to his mother to perpetuate, in a reverential way, her ignorant mistakes.
“If we are to follow the religion of our fathers and mothers, our fathers and mothers should have followed the religion of theirs. Had this been done, there could have been no improvement in the world of thought. The first religion would have been the last, and the child would have died as ignorant as the mother. Progress would have been impossible, and on the graves of ancestors would have been sacrificed the intelligence of mankind.”
— Robert Ingersoll, Why Am I an Agnostic?, Anodos Books, 2019 (1900) p8-7
“Heredity is on the side of superstition. All our ignorance pleads for the old. In most men there is a feeling that their ancestors were exceedingly good and brave and wise, and that in all things pertaining to religion their conclusions should be followed. They believe that their fathers and mothers were of the best, and that that which satisfied them should satisfy their children. With a feeling of reverence they say that the religion of their mother is good enough and pure enough and reasonable enough for them. In this way the love of parents and the reverence for ancestors have unconsciously bribed the reason and put out, or rendered exceedingly dum, the eyes of the mind...
“Yet it will hardly do to say that the religion of my mother is good enough for me, any more than to say the geology or the astronomy of the philosophy of my mother is good enough for me. Every human being is entitled to the best he can obtain; and if there has been the slightest improvement on the religion of the mother, the son is entitled to that improvement, and he should not deprive himself of that advantage by the mistaken idea that he owes it to his mother to perpetuate, in a reverential way, her ignorant mistakes.
“If we are to follow the religion of our fathers and mothers, our fathers and mothers should have followed the religion of theirs. Had this been done, there could have been no improvement in the world of thought. The first religion would have been the last, and the child would have died as ignorant as the mother. Progress would have been impossible, and on the graves of ancestors would have been sacrificed the intelligence of mankind.”
— Robert Ingersoll, Why Am I an Agnostic?, Anodos Books, 2019 (1900) p8-7
Bertrand Russell, British philosopher & polymath, 1872-1970
“With very few exceptions, the religion which a man accepts is that of the community in which he lives, which makes it obvious that the influence of environment is what has led him to accept the religion in question.”
— Bertrand Russell, “Preface,” Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, Touchstone Books, 1957 pv
“A good world needs knowledge, kindness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless outlook and a free intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time toward a past that is dead, which we trust will be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create.”
— Bertrand Russell, “Why I Am Not a Christian,” (1927) Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, Touchstone Books, 1957, p23
“With very few exceptions, the religion which a man accepts is that of the community in which he lives, which makes it obvious that the influence of environment is what has led him to accept the religion in question.”
— Bertrand Russell, “Preface,” Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, Touchstone Books, 1957 pv
“A good world needs knowledge, kindness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless outlook and a free intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time toward a past that is dead, which we trust will be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create.”
— Bertrand Russell, “Why I Am Not a Christian,” (1927) Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, Touchstone Books, 1957, p23