I have hemmed and hawed since the last posting of this series if I should continue. It appears that as of today, 93 people have read the last installment. That is a low number for this blog, yet gives me hope that it is important to someone. Each rambling I do is a risk for me personally, but if this is helpful to someone, the risk is worth it.

As a review, the grand enigma is the fact that we exist. With the smorgasbord of possible philosophical answers to why we exist, all of them have points of absurdity. While I may not have the most elegant discussion on this topic, I promise a level of honesty that would make a theologian blush.

On this journey, we have already passed over two bridges of no return, separating subjective truth from objective truth, and omnism, the belief that all views are right. Going forward we will only look at objective truth and the fact that the possible answers are very distinct one from another and only one could be right, but speaking philosophically, all could be wrong. If you are someone for whom subjective truth is essential, or you are an omnist, and if you have certainty in those views, you may not want to continue this journey. It will be challenging. But think about this, your certainty in those views keeps theism and Christianity out of reach of most rational people.

I think that dependence on subjective truth, e.g. “I know God exist because I feel him in my heart,” is the source of most doubt because the way we are made and the universe is ordered, objective reasoning is the only way we reach any level of certainty, noting that even that certainty is limited. Likewise, I am not certain in what I’m writing here, which gives me great tolerance and respect for those who disagree with me. I write humbly, in other words. For this last point, I will repeat a quote from Aquinas,”

We must love them both, those whose opinions we share and those whose opinions we reject. For both have labored in the search for truth, and both have helped us in finding it. (Summa Theologica)

Most religious people and atheists reach their conclusions for the wrong reason. It is by social coercion not by sound reasoning. With magical thinking, “God called me,” the religious person is self-deceived into a nobler notion of why they believe. The atheist is self-deceived by the feeling of being intellectually superior. Of course, if you make the right conclusion for the wrong reason, it is just as valid.

For the Christian, as I’ve also mentioned before, Aquinas wrote in his Summa Contra Gentiles, Some truths about God exceed all the ability of the human reason. Such is the truth that God is triune. But there are some truths which the natural reason also can reach. Such are that God exists, that He is one, and the like. In fact, such truths about God have been proved demonstratively by the philosophers, guided by the light of the natural reason.

Going forward we will only address that which can be found via natural reasoning, which is a lot. If you believe that only true faith comes via subjective “truth” then at least give credit that reason can get you to the starting place for faith.

I’ve decided, to be fair, to only address the positions I’ve personally held because I know them best. We will start with the absurdities of each, with some rebuttal. Keep in mind, something is absurd only from our perspective. The true answer must be totally sensible, but only appears absurd, while the wrong answers are truly absurd.

The Absurdity of Christianity

Rarely, would you ever find anyone willing to speak of absurdities of their own position because to do so is taboo. However, I must do so in the spirit of honesty. I will play devil’s advocate here, speaking from the perspective of the skeptic. I personally have resolved these issues for myself.

God is Silent

The British philosopher, John Wisdom was the first to tell a parable titled The Invisible Gardener. The story was later modified and used most by the Oxford Philosopher Antony Flew. This parable describes how with each challenge to prove that there is a gardener (metaphor for god) for a patch of plants in the jungle, the believer in that gardener makes excuses. The gardener is invisible. He/she is silent. You can’t feel him/her or smell him/her. He/she can’t be detected by an electric fence and so on. The point being, these excuses make the proof that a gardener doesn’t exist impossible.

It is noteworthy (and was not the reason I chose this parable) Flew was one of the world’s most famous atheist and critic of theism. However, in 2004 he announced, via a rational process, he had changed his mind and became a theist, most notably, a deist.

The essence of the parable is you can’t see, feel, hear, smell, or taste this God. So, for each of the senses, you must make up an excuse for this being. You would think that if it were so important to God that we acknowledge him/her, then certainly, they would make themself visible. Wouldn’t they?

If you were to include human history and trust the accounts of the Christian Bible and some extra-Biblical historical texts, then there were times when God stepped into the garden with supernatural events, including miracles and the resurrection of Christ. But this requires you to trust the historical record.

My favorite author in the 1970-80s was the theologian/philosopher Francis Schaeffer. He wrote a book to challenge this idea, titled He is There and He is not Silent. His arguments is that while God is not subject to direct observation, the effect of his cause is. In the same way, you can’t see the wind, but you can see trees swaying the breeze, confirming it is a windy day. This evidence is not only visible in the wonders of the created cosmos, but also in intangible concepts such as in morals, metaphysics, and epistemology. You will have to read the book to fully understand. But it still begs the question, if God wants us to know him, why does he seem to be hiding from us?

The Problem of Holy Scriptures

Many sects of Christianity have as a key tenet of their faith, the idea that the Bible is infallible. The Bible doesn’t say that it is, only that it is inspired. Those who believe in the infallibility of the Bible, argue, if you can’t trust every single word, every punctuation, then Christianity falls apart. I don’t believe that.

When you look at the Bible honestly and rationally, the same way you treat any other ancient literary works, there are problems with this concept of inerrancy. The oldest fragment (Papyrus P52) of the New Testament, a small fragment of the book of John, dates to the second century, about one hundred years after it was written. The oldest complete New Testament is the Codex Sinaiticus and dates to about 350 AD, or three hundred years after it was written. (I was very lucky to have seen this manuscript when I was on a field trip with The American University in Cairo to Saint Catherine’s Monastary at the foot of Mount Sinai in 1988). There are about 300,000 variations between the ancient manuscripts and the modern Bible translations. Some of these variations are significant but none of them dispute the fundamentals of Christianity, the major teachings of Christ and the claims of his crucifixion and resurrection. So, here is a problem of logic. If every word of the Bible is perfect, just as God wanted it to be, but it differs from the scriptures that our Christian forefathers had in the first 10 centuries of Christianity (a clear fact), who has the perfect Bible? Personally, I don’t find it essential to consider the Bible perfect and to do so, in my opinion, is a form of idolatry.

A rational conclusion is that you study the Bible just as you do any ancient literary work, and try to find the translation that has the highest fidelity to the original work of the writer.

For those, as mentioned above, who require a perfect present text of the Bible, accepting the idea that the Bible does have some errors, can be devastating to their faith. Bart Ehrman is one of the top experts on New Testament texts. He began his life as a staunch evangelical. He attended a conservative Bible college and graduate school, each claiming the inerrancy of the Bible. However, as he finished his PhD at Princeton, developing an expertise in the original languages of scriptures and reading them for himself, seeing the disparities, he became an atheist. To the rest of us, these errors have no impact.

But the question raised, if there is a God, and that God is the Christian God, and if he inspired the Bible to communicate to humans, why didn’t he protect the integrity of it? If it was his plan to allow time and chance to affect the Bible, why does his people get it wrong on this and many other issues?

The Problem of Evil

This one of the most popular arguments against God, at least a good and omnipotent god, as the Christian claims. It is a simple logic, if God loves us, he wants good for us. If he is omnipotent, he has the power to assure that goodness . . . but doesn’t. Christians usually give absurd answers that require intellectual gymnastics. “What we perceive as evil, is the back side of God’s goodness and we just can’t see it.” Hmm, so someone’s seven-year-old daughter getting shot and killed in a school shooting is somehow God’s goodness’ back side?

I had a friend whose son was killed in a violent death and my friend, being an evangelical, tried to show no sadness because he believed it was God’s plan to take his son to Heaven so he would not be tempted to smoke marijuana. To live consistent with what he believed, he pretended to have no bereavement. Absurd . . . and sad.

I have no clear answer to this except for reasons that I can understand, there is a good God, who for some reason, restrains his omnipotence for the sake of our freewill. Human freewill and the cause and effect of natural systems (landslides, hurricanes, forest fires, earthquakes, floods, cancer) create real suffering that has no higher purpose. I believe that there is bad luck.

A Bronze Age Fairy Tale – Narrative

The notions of the Christian god first took shape in the late Bronze Age (the time of Abraham and Moses). The world was a totally different place then. There was only the earth with the lights in the night (stars and planets) tiny bodies that floated in our upper atmosphere. Kingdoms were the models that society was familiar with. There was only an elemental understanding of mathematics, and virtually no understanding of science. The world was magical without any explanation.

The following will be hard for you to imagine unless you did not grow up in a Christian culture, the narrative of the Christian story sounds shady, like an medieval fairy tale. Humpy Dumpty falling and breaking and then the King’s men and horses try to put him back together–type of odd. So, Christianity teaches God created the universe just for people. People alone are created like God. God loves people more than any other created thing. God is all powerful so that even the atoms obey him. Yet, people rebelled by eating a magic fruit of knowledge. For that reason, God will throw them into a lake of eternal lava, where they never die but must bear unbearable suffering for all eternity. But then God becomes a half man, half God creature who lives a exemplary life, then was executed, taking the due punishment for the people, but came back to life to conquer death. If you believe in this half man, half God creature, then you will be spared the eternal lake of lava and torture, and you will get to live in bliss, but if you don’t, then the punishment never ends. Why didn’t God create people good and without the temptation of the magic furit that spoiled them?

I won’t try to explain this story in an adult, rational way. It is a stumbling block for many people. My only defense is that all the other answers, pantheism, Islam, and atheism have the same type of absurdities. The true answer will only seem absurd, with truth beyond our understanding.

The Problem of the Unsaintly Saint

The most common reasons that people leave Christianity or never consider it in the first place is what they call “hypocrisy.” I will look at this from a philosophical perspective.

Part of the Christian doctrine is that the Christian has a direct conduit to God and the spirit of God, the Holy Spirit, lives within the Christian believer, making them better people. The Bible describes all the positive behavior traits of someone who has this spirit. However, in reality, it is very different than what is claimed.

In America today, the evangelical is not considered morally superior as they think they are. Many people see them as the most immoral people in our society, full of hate toward people who are not like them. I sometimes agree. In a series of public scandals of Christians in the highest positions confirm this. It is far more than a Christian caught in a lie, but a Christian leader secretly smoking crack and having sex with a male prostitute while preaching against homosexuality from the pulpit. It is the director of a major Christian college having sexual threesomes with students and videotaping it. I could go on and on with these stories. If you have any doubt, do a Google search with “pastor arrested.” It isn’t that pastors are particular morally depraved, but it is an easy search. “Christian arrested,” wouldn’t show up in such a search.

Besides the moral mischief, you would think that a subgroup of people who, uniquely, say they have direct contact with the creator, seem to be the most gullible people in our society. The white evangelicals quickly swore allegiance to Donald Trump, who has a decades-long history of being a con-man, obvious to most people. The same group is the most likely to believe in baseless conspiracy theories. Any time there is a challenge to their ideas by someone with more evidence than they have, they respond with conspiracy theories. Shouldn’t it be that the person with a direct relationship with God be the least vulnerable to both immorality and misinformation?

I do not have a simplistic answer for this problem with Christianity, but only to say that it is the Christian religion, a cultural phenomenon that makes the Christian more vulnerable to moral mischief and being mis-informed. Reason has long been devalued by the Church to increase the power of the Church over the individuals who are discouraged from thinking for themselves. While this has benefited the organized Church for two millennia, it has made the Christian more vulnerable, intellectually. Additionally, the false idea that being a Christian makes someone automatically moral (a central Christian doctrine of sanctification) it makes the Christian more vulnerable because of their denial of their own moral vulnerability.

I will end this section here because this is getting long, but this discussion is far from over.

Mike