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Atheism vs. Christianity, the Existence of God, and the Biblical Canon
Anybody want a throwback to some old-fashioned culture war? I was thinking about religion recently. I was also reading the State of the Motte thread and somehow wound up in this old thread about atheism.
In it is some interesting commentary on the state of the atheism vs Christianity debate:
I broadly agree with this, but not how you might think. I think that logically, it is probable that God does exist, so I am not an atheist. In particular my favorite argument is the argument from causation. There must be an uncaused cause; this can be identified with God.
However, that's a long way from being a canonical Christian. Consider:
The full lists in Genesis 5 and 11 go on like this, generation by generation. Adding up each father's age at his son's birth gives 1,948 years from Adam to Abram.
Now if you add this up, as a canonical Christian you must believe that from creation of Adam to the birth of Jesus around 4 BC, there were roughly 4000 years. Also, my Genesis is from the Hebrew Torah. The Septuagint gives older ages at fatherhood, so it makes 5500 years. Which is correct?
Unfortunately I don't think any amount of presuppositional logic could get canonical Christians out of this conundrum.
One thing I noticed however is that the source of all Biblical errors-according-to-empirical-science is Hebrew scripture. Almost no errors are in the New Testament outside of the books that go hard on Hebrew Scripture, like Matthew.
If you care about this and having a coherent theology to defend, you may get into New Testament criticism. It's a humanities field with low certainty, so it's possible to hold a lot of positions in it. But one popular idea is that of Markan priority. Mark was an earlier Gospel than Luke and Matthew, which are edits of Mark. You will notice that Luke and Matthew are the most egregious offenders of Hebrew scripture injection. Mark reads very differently. In Mark, Jesus mocks the Sabbath and declares kosher laws void. In Matthew, this is re-written so that he comes to fulfill the law and not abolish it. We are treated to excessive Hebrew genealogies that don't match archeology, quotes from the Torah a lot, and general arguments that he's a Messiah sent by Yahweh because he does all of the things that were prophesied about that Messiah, except, of course, making Judea the king of the world.
There's a lot of fulfillment of those Hebrew prophecies missing in canonical Mark and John (this is important because critics believe these were edited by the Matthew and Luke people later to align them, so they are not even in their original states), but a main one is Jesus's relation to David. In Matthew we are slapped with that genealogy. In Mark we get
In John we get:
Matthew and Luke give mutually exclusive birth narratives that fail historical tests (one claims there was a massacre of 2 year olds, one claims an empire-wide census that isn't recorded anywhere and doesn't fit Herod's dates) that make him born in Bethlehem. But in John and Mark he's just from Nazareth.
So the canon of the bookshelf Bible is extremely hard to defend scientifically, yet the original Gospel seems to be more defensible, as long as you accept that Jesus could do magic.
Another question of coherency is what does Jesus save us from? The canon claims Jesus saves us from ... himself. Yes, in this canon, Jesus is one person of the Trinity, a single being that will torture you if you don't accept his salvation. That's kind of an odd way to behave ... I'm not judging morally since I accept theology is above morality, but it still seems intuitively odd.
This brings me to John 8:44 and its controversy. It says:
I have read that the most natural translation here was,
In this case Jesus is talking to the practicing Jews who do not believe in him. So he is pointing out their father created the devil and is a liar. Which fits the empirical errors in Hebrew scripture noted above.
Alternatively this was declared too supportive of Marcionite and Gnostic heresy so the orthodox reading prevailed:
And this is weakened to mean that the Jews were the children of the devil because, I don't know, they rejected their own Messiah or something, as Matthew and Luke make clear, wherein the Jewish majority oppose Jesus with little motive beyond malice, despite Jesus fulfilling their law exactly as written. What is more likely, Jesus mocked their God and they killed Jesus, or that Jesus proved he was their God and they killed their own God that they worship?
Technically I suppose it doesn't matter how you translate this, the Jews were very devout and are called children of the devil either way. Unless they were having secret black sabbaths, I think this line is pretty clear about what it means for the Hebrew God.
Going back to Salvation, this goes best with the idea that Jesus is saving us from a deity like the Hebrew God, something that created the tarnished world, is wrathful and violent, which kills and writes lies.
Now, is this a crazy reading? Not at all. It's a popular historical reading that lost out but not without a fight. It fits the theology of Marcion and some Gnostic groups, who were declared heretics in the mid-to-late 2nd century by proto-orthodox writers. Before around that point, this idea was more popular. I have a radical, maybe unfounded idea, that this theology even could be the original theology of the Gospels, but this is controversial in the Church and the Academy. In the Church it's obvious why: it's the same Church that called it heresy. In the Academy we have atheists who claim Jesus was an essene or something. I will admit my belief is somewhat loaded on the idea that Jesus actually performed miracles. I lean towards this because I don't have a restricted prior against magic, I think all things are possible for the right being, and I think Jesus was obviously somebody because otherwise we would not have a religion about him, particularly one where he died very quickly, a material failure, with only a handful of followers. Other prophets accumulate riches and a harem.
I will stop here, but I thought this could be a fun discussion to be had, because I think it deals with the main adversary of atheism from a different perspective. Also, if you can convince me that the canon is untarnished, I will convert to Catholicism or a similar branch. I originally got into this because I was born secular and was memed into looking for a Church, but this forces me into a predicament in the world of schism. Which Church? The only proper way is to get into theology if I'm serious about it. And this is what I think so far. My priors haven't converged.
This is certainly an argument for something, but not an argument for a vaguely Christian god in particular.
Suppose that I concede that the primary reason God might have for creating the Sol system is humanity, rather than dolphins or the rings of Saturn or ASI or mold. Our observable universe contains about 10 to the power of 24 stars, and from what we can tell intelligent life is not very common. If God has created the universe it looks like they have also taken care not to allow any other intelligent life to thrive in our neighborhood, so if they care about us they have probably placed us in our own sandbox universe, just like we might prefer to cultivate some bacteria in some otherwise sterile petri dish. On priors, if I assume that God has created the universe with any one particular solar system in mind, the odds are 1:1e24 against us being the reason for it.
Of course, it is likewise a very far inference step from "the creator created the universe for humans" to "he is an intelligent entity which feels empathy for humans". Nor is it clear that he is on top of the creator hierarchy. Even we have the ability to simulate minds. We might just be the homework assignment of a homework assignment of the beings the first cause genuinely cares about.
Then biggest argument against God being a Christian God is from the theodicy problem in particular. Presumably, creating a universe which evolved hominids which would eventually keep the Sabbath and stone sodomites took a lot of fine-tuning on God's part, either from setting the starting conditions just right or by actively messing with creation (like the Bible asserts he does all the time). And yet that same loving God could not be bothered to mess with plant biology a bit to ensure that genes for oxaloacetase would not spread, thereby preventing most kidney stones? Creation seems mostly indifferent to our plights and joys, it seems reasonable to conclude that this is due to the creator is indifferent.
I do not know how this is any different from any other argument such as that God created vast oceans, deserts and sky that are uninhabitable by humans.
What is the basis of your assumption. In this hypothetical you assume captial G "God" who is literally in a completely different realm. Were you not supposed to do at least a little bit of steelmanning? If so, then just for a moment accept existence of Christian God and what it means. What makes you think that you should judge God and his reasons in this specific scenario?
This is the very same problem as described before. Theodicy was explained by God in Old Testament when he answered laments of Job in a very simple terms in Job [38:4]
This is similar to the previous argument: if you want to really steelman the Christian position, then this answer makes sense. The God is the yardstick of what is good and bad. Simple as that.
Moreover, I thhink that theodicy is much more devastating to other positions such as secular materialism: we are all just bunch of atoms or fluctuations of universal wavefunction which has teleological endpoint in heat death of the universe. Nothing has any meaning - there is no good or evil, all is just motion. Genocide, torture of children or any other moral considerations are meaningless movements of matter not dissimilar to how cosmid dust is consumed in eternal coldness of black holes in this monadic impersonal "god" of the atheistics materialistic universe.
It is no "explanation", it is literally a horrific nightmare. And not even the worst ones compared to various simulation theorems, rationalist AI basilisks or quantum immortality where untold Googleplex's of people are literally trapped in some hellish alternative universes. To me it is all just an edgy rebellion, showing of how cool and indifferent you are.
Moreover the whole theodicy is pure argument of incredulity - just because you as a finite person cannot fathom of something, it does not man it does not exist. Second moreover, this is exactly described in Christian paradigm as the ultimate sin of pride, where you as a finite human feel justified judging the god and deciding that a literal hell reality is somehow a better solution and grounding to your existence. What a farce.
Again, this is insufficient steelman or outright strawman of the Christian cosmology. God created things as good, the things like diseases, kidney stones, parasites or even death itself are result of The Fall. There is a concept in Catholicism called pecatorum mundi, where rebellion against God and his laws has direct consequences for the whole world. On day-to-day level let's say an alcoholic mother damages her child with Alcoholic Fetal Syndrome, through pride causes wars to environmental catastrophes. Adam's sin had similar effect on whole creation.
Again - think what you will about it, but if you steelman Christian cosmology it makes sense, the suffering and death exists as a result of the fall, but rejoice the God's plan is to abolish all that. As opposed to secular atheist humanist message that all that suffering is actually according to natural cruel nature of the cold monadic materialist universe which is completely indifferent toward suffering and anything does not have any meaning anyways, as it all ends up in some hellish eschaton of Heat Death or alternatively some cosmic quantum fluctuation apocalypse or whatnot. Secular materialistic atheist ranting about injustice is literal old man shaking fists against clouds of indifferent Atheistic Monad who does not give a single fuck about any of that and crushes pulverizes him to elemental fields no matter what. In a sense Camus got the endpoint of this secular "theodicy" correct in saying that There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide - a statement that he came to understand after he realized that even rebellion about the cosmos is useless and farcical. What an amazing paradigm to live by.
And again, the point is that you as a human are not the judge, you are not a minigod who puts God on trial for his sins. That is complete misunderstanding of Christianity, where you put God inside the universe as some Star Trek Q being or whatnot. Absolutely botched theology.
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