In “Hail Mary: Was Virgin Mary Truly the Mother of God’s Son?” I extensively argued that no virgin ever gave birth to God’s son a little over 2,000 years ago, challenging what Christians believe about God, Mary, the Gospels, and their entire faith. In what follows I’ll take up the prosecutor’s task. I aim to present my case against the Christian faith.[1] The faith is based solely on hearsay secondhand testimony at best, circumstantial evidence, red-herring irrelevancies, cultural influences, and anecdotal unconfirmable personal stories of a subjective experience like a dream, vision, or feeling (which is only evidence of a subjective personal experience, nothing more). There is no objective evidence on its behalf, and that should be the end of it. But it’s much worse than that. Not only is the requisite evidence for the extraordinary miraculous claims of the Christian faith abysmally lacking, nothing about its doctrinal beliefs make any sense at all. This case, along with the lack of objective evidence, should be a slam-dunk. The jury of readers should easily produce a verdict of guilty. It’s guilty of being a hoax, a fraud, a delusion. Anyone believing in it is being unreasonable, irrational, and should immediately plead insanity. Let’s then consider some of the key doctrines.
Inspiration
From the outset, it makes no sense to presume that a deity spoke to human authors in light of the evidence from the alleged inspiration that they wrote down. So theologians have had to reinterpret the claim that the Bible is somehow divinely inspired.
There are several Christian theories of what it means to say that the Bible is inspired. First, there is the “dictation” or “mechanical” theory, in which it’s believed that God woodenly dictated the very words to the biblical writers like someone might dictate a letter to a secretary. This is now almost universally rejected by Christians since it’s obvious that each of the biblical writers had a distinct style and vocabulary. Second, there is the “verbal-plenary” theory. It is “verbal” in the sense that the very words in the Bible are God’s, although somehow not dictated by God. It is “plenary” in the sense that it’s believed that the Bible is completely inspired in all of its parts. Some of those who believe in the verbal-plenary theory also believe that the Bible is the “inerrant” word of God, containing no errors at all, despite the empirical evidence showing plenty of contradictions.[2] Others maintain that the Bible may be regarded as their “infallible” rule of faith and practice in all religious and ethical matters, but not in historical and scientific matters. The reason why they exclude historical and scientific errors is obvious—because history and science has shown the Bible to be in error. Third, there is the “illumination” theory, where it’s believed that God “breathed on” or illuminated the biblical writers, who then translated this so-called religious experience into words. Thus, the Bible does not contain the exact words of God; it only contains God’s thoughts as expressed through human beings, and as such, only the main thoughts of the Bible are inspired, leaving plenty of room for human error. This seems incompetent as a revelation. Couldn’t a god do any better than that? Fourth, Karl Barth taught that the Bible is a “witness” to God’s revelation and not God’s revelation itself. God uses the Bible in a unique way when read or proclaimed to speak to people, although God could also use a Russian flute concerto to do so. Given this view, believers can interpret the Bible in any way that they desire—in what’s called eisegesis, not exegesis—since they can simply claim that God led them to their interpretations. Last, liberal Christians have adopted what can be called the “natural” theory, in which biblical writers were only inspired in the sense that a poet is inspired. According to these advocates the spark of divine inspiration that is supposedly in us all burned a little brighter in the lives of the biblical authors, and as such, inspiration refers to the Christian community of faith. Gone is a verifiable revelation altogether.
Trinity
Christian scholars have insurmountable difficulties trying to make sense of the Trinity. There are social Trinitarians and antisocial Trinitarians. Both sides accuse the other side of abandoning the Chalcedon creed, either in the direction of tritheism (i.e., the Godhead is three separate beings forming three separate gods) or in the direction of unitarianism (i.e., denying there are three distinct persons in the Godhead). There are Christians who maintain that the Father eternally created the Son and the Holy Spirit, while others argue that such a view is tantamount to the Son being demoted to a creature. Yet an eternally existing Trinity is inexplicable. It’s hard enough to conceive of one person who is an eternally uncaused God, much less a Godhead composed of three eternally uncaused persons who have always shared a divine nature, who never learned anything new, who never took a risk, who never made a decision, who never disagreed within the Godhead, and who never had a prior moment to freely choose his own nature.
A Timeless God
This Godhead is also conceived of as a timeless being who was somehow able to create the first moment of time. How a timeless being could actually do this is extremely problematic. How does one make a decision when there is no time in which to make a decision? Even if God’s decision to create a first moment of time is an “eternal” one (whatever that’s supposed to mean), there is still no temporal gap between his decision to create the first moment of time and the actual first moment of time. In other words, a timeless God could not eternally decide to create something at some “future” time since there is no future time for him. His decision to create would be simultaneous with the act of him creating. Therefore, if God created at all, the universe would be eternal, never having had a beginning.
A Non-Personal God
Theists claim that cosmological and teleological arguments for the existence of God necessitate a personal God who can make the decisions to create and design the universe. However, if God’s decisions to create and design the universe are simultaneous with him creating it and designing it, then how is that considered to be a choice at all? One must choose between alternatives. At what prior moment in time did a God contemplate any alternatives? So not only do we have an eternal universe, but we lack a good philosophical argument for a personal God. Either the universe is a brute fact, just like an unexplained Trinitarian creator (which we can dismiss via Ockham’s Razor as an unnecessary hypothesis, especially after Charles Darwin), or the existence of the universe doesn’t necessitate positing a personal God who made the decision to create the universe.
God and Time
Theists believe that a God who inexplicably created time must forever be subject to time in a sequence of events. He cannot become timeless again (if it ever made sense for him to be timeless in the first place), for rendering him so would destroy everything that took place in human history. If God became timeless again, then time itself never existed, and hence neither did we. But who’s to say he won’t become timeless again? If God chose to be timeless again, then no promises would have been made to believers to be in Heaven for eternity, so he would not be breaking any promises by destroying all time.
God as a Spirit
There is also the problem of what it means to say that God is a spirit, and of how a spiritual being can create the physical universe. How does something that is spirit create something material, or interact with it, unless there is some point of contact between them that they both share? For instance, how can God speak audibly and be heard by sound waves to our ears unless he can move sound waves? Conceptually the physical and the spiritual cannot interact unless they share some kind of quality. Are spirit and matter two poles of the same reality? Then welcome to panentheism or process theology. Are they one and the same? Then welcome to pantheism (all is “spirit”) or metaphysical naturalism (all is matter). If a spiritual God can create this universe, then Christians need to show how it is possible for God to create the physical universe as a spirit.
Creation
Why did God ever create anything if he needed nothing, wanted nothing, and was completely and utterly satisfied within his Trinitarian self? Either he was a perfectly happy camper in every way possible, or he was not. If he was perfectly happy there would be no reason to muck it up by creating a world, any kind of world, much less this one. Christians say that God wanted to express his love, but such a want itself was already satisfied between the self-giving love between Trinitarian persons. But just consider this world. How is it a gracious gift to create such a world as ours, knowing in advance that all of this suffering would have to take place, just so a “few” people could be with him in Heaven?[3] Thinking Christians should protest their God for creating this world, even if they themselves were to end up in Heaven. I would think caring people would prefer that their God had never created anything at all than for him to create a world where their friends and family members will wind up in Hell along with billions of others. If I were a selfless, “agape”-loving Christian, I would gladly have preferred nonexistence to the eternal sufferings of so many others in Hell.
If for some inexplicable reason God wanted to create, why didn’t God just create a heavenly world with heavenly bodies in the first place? Theists typically believe that a Heaven awaits faithful believers when they die, where there will be no “death, or mourning or crying or pain” (Revelation 21:4), where believers will have incorruptible bodies (1 Corinthians 15:30ff). In short, believers expect a perfect heavenly existence. Why didn’t God just create such a perfect existence in the first place? If there’s free will in a future Heaven without sin or the temptations of the flesh, then God could’ve created such a world from the very beginning.
The Scale of the Universe and a Tribal God
When I was in the throes of doubt in the early ’90s, I bought nearly a dozen posters of galaxies, stars, various nebulae, and the solar system itself. I hung them on the walls of my office. I was astounded by our universe and its massive size.[4]
I remember thinking to myself: how could God be omnipresent in such a universe? How could he be a personal agent without a center for his personality? How could he be omniscient, knowing what was going on at the far reaches of it? And how could he be omnipotent, such that he could create and maintain it? I also wondered how he could care about life on this pale blue dot of ours that exists on one spiral arm in the Milky Way Galaxy. It didn’t make any sense.
Nicholas Everitt asked the following important question, given God’s supposed purposes: “What sort of a universe would you expect to find?” He answered it saying:
Traditional theism would lead you to expect human beings to appear fairly soon after the start of the universe. For, given the central role of humanity, what would be the point of a universe which came into existence and then existed for unimaginable aeons without the presence of the very species that supplied its rationale?… Further, you would expect the Earth to be fairly near the centre of the universe if it had one, or at some similarly significant location if it did not have an actual centre. You would expect the total universe to be not many orders of magnitude greater than the size of the earth. The universe would be on a human scale. You would expect that even if there are regions of the created world which are hostile to human life, and which perhaps are incompatible with it, the greater part of the universe would be accessible to human exploration. If this were not so, what would the point be of God creating it?[5]
God’s Foreknowledge
There is an unsolvable mystery concerning how God can foreknow freely willed actions. Several theories on the subject have been suggested:
- Theological Determinism. God decrees everything that happens. He can know the future of every human action since humans don’t have the freedom to do otherwise. Such a theology (as found in Calvinism) creates atheists. More than anything else, this view is what motivates me to attempt to demolish the Christian faith.
- God is Outside Time. If God is outside of time, he would have no problems predicting future human actions, since human actions are not actually in his future. God would merely be seeing the present from his perspective. However, as Stephen T. Davis argues, “We have on hand no acceptable concept of atemporal causation, i.e., of what it is for a timeless cause to produce a temporal effect.”[6] William Hasker asks, “If God is truly timeless so that temporal determinations of ‘before’ and ‘after’ do not apply to him, then how can God act in time, as Scriptures say that he does? How can he know what is occurring on the changing earthly scene? How can he respond when his children turn to him in prayer and obedience?”[7]
- The Inferential View. On this view, God figures out from the range of options which choices we will make, which he can do because he has omniscience. This option actually entails, however, that what we do is somehow “programmed” into us. The determinist claims that it’s all in the genes and environment, so this viewpoint commits the believer to the same position as the determinist.
- The Innate View. This is the belief that God has innate comprehensive knowledge of the future. He just “sees it” because he is omniscient. However, this isn’t an explanation at all, just an unsupported faith-based assertion.
- Middle Knowledge. This is an additional assertion based on the Innate View. William Lane Craig argues that God has Middle Knowledge such that he knows “what every possible creature would do under any possible circumstances,” and he would know this “prior to any determination of the divine will.”[8] But it’s obvious that if Craig’s God has this kind of foreknowledge, he could simply foreknow who would not accept his offered salvation before they were even created, and then never create them in the first place so that “hotel Hell” would never have even one occupant. Why not? I’ll tell you why not. It’s because Craig cannot allow himself to think differently since he already has the Bible answer, and that settles it.
Satan
The highest created being, known as Satan or the Devil, is believed to have led an angelic rebellion against an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, and omnipresent God—and expected to win. This is insane if Satan had a sliver of either intelligence or goodness at all. It makes him out to be suicidal, inexplicably evil, and dumber than a box of rocks. Since the highest creation of such a God could not be suicidal, inexplicably evil, or dumber than a box of rocks, Satan is obviously a mythical creature invented by the ancient superstitious mythical mind. Despite this, the Devil is believed to be on the prowl by meddling in the world without God stopping him, even though God could stop him. Why did God not immediately nullify the consequences of that satanic rebellion, or restrain the activity of his rebellious demons, so that there would be no physical evil and no animal pain?
Let me forcefully illustrate this question with an analogy. What would we say if a father did not stop a pack of wolves from running through the open doors of his house when he had the means to stop them, knowing full well that his children and pets inside would be mauled and even killed by them? What could possibly justify this inaction when it’s considered his parental responsibility to protect his children and pets by stopping the wolves dead in their tracks, immediately? What could possibly justify a loving father allowing these wolves to attack his children and his pets? Would anything justify his initial inaction? Then let’s say that father picks up a shotgun and runs upstairs and downstairs killing anything that moves one by one. When the smoke clears, he finds that his cat and dog are dead, along with four of his six children, one of whom will be crippled for life. Is there any reason for praising the father for rescuing these two children when he could have stopped the wolves initially? You be the judge.
Adam and Eve
God is believed to have tested the first pair of humans, who so grievously sinned against God that all of the rest of us are being punished for it (including animals), even though no one but the first human pair deserved any punishment (if anyone deserved it). If it’s argued that all of us deserve to be punished because all of us would have sinned, then the test was a sham, for only if some of us would not have sinned can the test be considered a fair one. But if instead some of us would not have sinned under the same initial test conditions, then there are people who are being punished in today’s world for something that they never would have done.[9]
The Logos
We are told that the Logos, which is the second person of the Trinity, became a man named Jesus. No conception of this God-man in the flesh has yet been able to withstand scrutiny. How can such a being be 100 percent God and 100 percent man, with every essential characteristic of humanity and divinity included? The Bible itself tells us that ancient superstitious people believed sons of God walked the Earth (Acts 14:11‒12; 28:6), so why should I believe that Jesus was any more a son of God than they were? All attempts to solve this problem have failed. Jesus began to exist, while God did not. Jesus had a specific location on Earth in a body, while God is supposedly everywhere. Jesus died and stayed dead for three days, while God didn’t die. Jesus was not omniscient (Mark 13:32), while God supposedly knows all truths. Jesus was tempted to sin, while God cannot be tempted to sin against himself.
An Incarnate God
If the eternal Logos was always 100 percent God and 100 percent man before creation, and before the birth of Jesus on Earth, then we have the inexplicable problem of an eternally existing human being. How could the Logos be a human being before God created the Earth? Humanity would then exist as God did: without a beginning. Is a human being therefore divine like God? What, then, is the difference between divinity and humanity? If, however, the Logos first became a God-man with the birth of Jesus (since Jesus is described in the creeds as being one unified divine/human person), then the Logos became forever united with the flesh of the man Jesus in first-century Palestine. What sense can be made of the claim that the Logos was united in the man Jesus? If united as one being, then when Jesus died, so too the Logos should have died. Or conversely, if the Logos cannot die, then Jesus could not have died.
An Embodied God
There is an additional problem about where the human side of this God-man resides right now. Since the human side of the God-man is believed to be sinless, then the human side of the God-man can’t be destroyed by a good God in Hell, nor can he be separated from the Logos, since such a being is considered to be one unified person according to the creeds. Theologians have concluded that the Trinity now includes an embodied Logos. Now we have a Trinity who will forever exist with an embodied human being attached to the Logos. If conceiving the Trinity isn’t hard enough to swallow, picture that three-headed monster with the human head of Jesus attached to one part of it! Just step back for a moment and ask yourself if this isn’t indeed a very bizarre set of beliefs.
Atonement
When it comes to the reason why the Logos of God came to Earth, it’s puzzling, to say the very least. One way to tell whether a theory is in crisis is to observe how many versions of that theory have been proposed. How did the death of Jesus supposedly atone for sins? There have been a lot of versions of answers proposed by Christians who, for good reasons, have disputed the others. The earliest proposals were the ransom theory and the recapitulation theory. Then came a host of more afterward: St. Anselm’s satisfaction theory, the penal substitutionary theory, the governmental theory, the moral influence theory, and recently the relationship theory. And there are many others.[10]
This problem arises when we ask why Jesus had to suffer on the cross and die. In order for someone to be forgiven, why must there be punishment at all? We know of victims who have forgiven their assailants even though the assailants have never been punished, and we know of other victims who won’t forgive their assailants even after they have been punished. To forgive someone doesn’t require that you must first punish that person. Forgiveness doesn’t really depend upon the remorse of the offender, either, although it does help quite a bit. At this point, it’s not up to the offender at all. It’s the victim who must find a way to forgive. To forgive means bearing the suffering of what that person has done to you without retaliation. If I stole something from you, then forgiveness means bearing the loss even without any recompense. If I slandered you, forgiving means bearing the humiliation without retaliating. If the cross was needed, then how can God really be a forgiving God? Forgiveness doesn’t require punishment. To put it bluntly, if I can’t forgive you for striking me on the chin until I return the blow back to you, or to someone else by proxy, then that’s not forgiveness—that’s retaliation or revenge!
The reason why early Christians came to believe that Jesus atoned for sins is simply because they believed in the superstitious magical properties of blood, as we read in Leviticus 17:11: “For the life of a creature is in the blood, and I have given it to you to make atonement for yourselves on the altar; it is the blood that makes atonement for one’s life.” This is something that no reasonable, scientific-minded person can accept, just as surely as Christians do not really drink the blood of Jesus or eat his flesh in communion, either.[11] German scholar Erhard Gerstenberger comments: “This blood gift to Yahweh actually cannot be illuminated logically, for prehistoric notions of faith are resonating in this rite. As is the case among other peoples, blood is considered to be a magical substance efficacious in and of itself. Hence with blood one can expurgate the powers of death and eliminate the stain of sin (cf. Ex. 4:25; 12:17ff., 22f).” He adds: “Both the author of the sacrificial laws and their audience seem to have appropriated without excessive reflection these ancient magical notions concerning the efficacy of blood. Subsequent Jewish and especially Christian theology then developed a broad atonement faith perspective associated with blood symbolism [e.g., I John 1:7—”the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses from all sin].”[12]
Resurrection
Then there is the mysterious problem of a resurrected body. Since Jesus supposedly resurrected, so will the saints. Many human bodies have been eaten by cannibals, bears, sharks, and parasites. Others have been lost at sea or cremated. How can there be a bodily resurrection for these bodies if they no longer exist? If eaten by parasites, are those bodies still human? If decomposed into the ground as fertilizer for weeds, are those bodies still human? Is a resurrected body therefore a replica of the one on Earth? How can it be said that the replica is the same as the original? If the resurrected body is a replica, then what do believers say about a multiple number of replicas being created of someone? Is it possible for a person to be one and the same with a multiple number of replicas in Heaven? Which body of ours is the basis for the replica that gets resurrected—the one we had when we were ten years old, forty years old, or the one we died with while suffering from Alzheimer’s disease? Would we even want a replica body in the resurrection, since most of our bodies are flawed to some degree? And if we are given perfect bodies instead, what does a perfect body look like? Does it even make sense to say resurrected people will all receive perfect bodies? If perfect, will they all look exactly the same? If not, will some of them have imperfections precisely because of these differences? If believers are rewarded differently in Heaven with better, more perfect bodies depending on how they lived their lives, then what becomes of the claim that God in Jesus forgave them for all of their sins? Either he did or he didn’t. So there can’t be different rewards for people in Heaven; otherwise, God doesn’t forgive all sins after all, for the failure to obey God perfectly would be a sin not forgiven, a sin of omission, which is punished with a less perfect body, or a less perfect mansion in the sky.
The Ascension
As the Gospels kept making more and more corporeal claims about Jesus after his resurrection, the question was asked about the body of Jesus: where was it? The objection was that either Jesus did not rise from the dead, or he should be found walking around somewhere and should have to die again. So Luke’s gospel came up with the answer, probably first seen in a dream, a trance, or a vision, something the earliest Church seemed to experience regularly.[13] Early disciples learned a lot from their God subjectively, based on these experiences.[14] Jesus isn’t walking around somewhere, nor will he have to die again, Luke’s gospel tells us. Jesus, with his resurrected body, ascended directly into Heaven. Unfortunately for Christians, if Jesus ascended into Heaven, as we read about in Luke 24:50-53 and Acts 1:9-11, then as Scott McKellar tells us, “In the course of his ascension, at around 15,000 feet, Jesus began to wish he had brought a sweater. At 30,000 feet he felt weak from lack of oxygen. By 100,000 his bodily fluids were boiling away from every orifice. If he ever did return, it would be as a fifty-pound lump of bone and frozen jerky.”[15] This assumes an ancient three-tiered universe that no one can rationally believe today, with Heaven above the Earth and Hell below. Such a view has been utterly shattered by cosmology and geology. But since the bodily resurrection of Jesus and his ascension into Heaven hang together, modern science makes both claims exceedingly improbable to the point of refutation.
Heaven and Hell
We’re also told by Christian theologians that sinners who are sent to Hell will retain their free will. They have a great difficulty in thinking a good God would punish people so cruelly unless sinners continue to rebel. Then these same Christians will turn around and claim that the saved who enter Heaven will have their free will taken away, in order to guarantee that there will be no future rebellion in Heaven. If free will is such a great gift, why reward people by taking it away from them and punish people by having them retain it? That makes no sense. If that’s the kind of people that God eventually wants in Heaven, then why even bother creating this world in the first place?
Punishment for Sin
We are to believe that sinners will be blindsided by an eternal punishment in Hell, which is Christianity’s most damnable doctrine. Modern societies use humane punishments rather than the barbaric ones of the past, which were the basis for their conceptions of God’s punishments. People do not really know that their choices will send them to an eternal punishment in Hell. For to the degree that we knew this, we wouldn’t sin. The probability that we would not “sin” is inversely proportional to the evidence that there is an eternal punishment in Hell when we die (i.e., the more evidence that there is a Hell, then the less we would “sin”), and there just isn’t enough of it to make us refrain from doing so, as the whole world proves daily.
There are tasks the Christian God gave his followers that don’t make any sense, given that God could do them better.
The Task of Evangelism
If God supposedly gave up Jesus to die on the cross for our sins, which is the greater deed by far, then why does he rely on his disciples to reach nonbelievers with the gospel of salvation, which represents the lesser deeds? Isn’t that backward for an intelligent being? It would be like preparing an extravagant delicious banquet, with enough food to feed all the starving people in a refugee camp, but not caring enough to send out workers to tell them about it, or hiring incompetent workers that he knows won’t tell them. God supposedly gave the task of evangelism to Christians, which is their most important task of them all. They are still sinners on this side of Heaven, lacking complete sanctification, and consequently they are lazy, self-absorbed, greedy, lying, lustful, fallible, ignorant, finite human beings. Most Christians who attend church services are much more interested in networking with others, finding a mate, being entertained, or learning lessons from pop-psychology on how to be a good person (because for some reason they need reminding weekly), than in reaching out to people who, according to their own theology, are headed straight for an eternal, conscious, torturous Hell. We’re told that the Holy Spirit is helping Christians do their job by motivating and illuminating them to do their work. We see no objective evidence of this faith claim.
Compared with an all-knowing God, even the best Christian defenders are bumbling idiots and incompetent fools. Compared with an all-loving God, even the best Christian defenders are utterly self-centered and completely unconcerned that people are going to Hell. Compared with an all-powerful God, even the best Christian defenders are totally lacking any energy to help people believe. Surely it stands to reason that many people have not accepted Jesus as their savior because Christian defenders lacked the motivation, the energy, and the necessary smarts to do so.
Christians who lacked the smarts haven’t even known where to look for the needed evidence to believe, much less found that evidence. This doesn’t make any sense at all, especially if there’s a flaming Hell to pay for those who are not convinced to believe and be saved. Surely a God like the one that Christians believe in could have been more concerned for the lost than hiring the Church to do this most important job. If Christians have been incompetent with this task, then God was incompetent in hiring them to do it. God should have cared for the lost more than that. As the CEO of his corporation, God’s hiring practices are a failure. God should fire Christians and do the work him/herself.[16] No, perhaps better yet, God the Father and the Son should fire the Holy Spirit!
The Task of Apologetics
Why should Christians have to defend the Christian faith at all? In the first place, God should have left little to defend by providing the needed objective evidence, some of which several of us have suggested as reasonable.[17] God should also have communicated better. If there is any miscommunication in a company—the kind that can bring a company to a halt, the kind that can lead people to do different things by pulling in different directions, the kind that that can cause a lack of overall purpose, the kind that gets workers in fights—then the buck clearly stops with the CEO. God is the ultimate CEO, so God is to blame for the Christian Church, if they cannot adequately defend the truth and goodness of Christianity and the Church. I call this the problem of divine miscommunication. It’s a most serious one for a God worthy of the attributes ascribed to a deity who is also believed to have revealed the Bible.[18]
The God who needs defending is one who has made it exceedingly difficult to do so. As I have written elsewhere, if God had provided a sufficient amount of evidence for his faith, there would be no other apologetical method than evidentialism, which requires sufficient objective evidence.[19] The very fact that 80% of Christian apologists reject the requirement for sufficient objective evidence, is evidence, all on its own, that even the best of the best apologists don’t think that God did his best.
Notes
[1] More detailed discussion of most of what follows can be found in my Why I Became an Atheist (2008), The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails (2010), The End of Christianity (2011), and How to Defend the Christian Faith (2015).
[2] See John W. Loftus, Why I Became an Atheist (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2008), pp. 365-369.
[4] Loftus, “Does the Scale of the Universe Undercut the Belief in a Tribal Deity?” (February 12, 2014). Debunking Christianity blog. <https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2021/04/doubting-thomas-tells-us-all-we-need-to.html>. See also Loftus, “Pete Edwards of Durham University on the Scale of the Universe” (February 10, 2013). Debunking Christianity blog. <https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2013/02/pete-edwards-of-durham-university-on.html>.
[5] Nicholas Everitt, The Non-Existence of God (New York, NY: Routledge, 2003), pp. 215-216.
[6] Stephen T. Davis, Logic and the Nature of God (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1983), pp. 8-24.
[7] William Hasker in Clark Pinnock, The Openness of God: A Biblical Challenge to the Traditional Understanding of God (Grand Rapids, MI: InterVarsity Press Academic, 1994), p. 128.
[8] William Lane Craig in Clark Pinnock, Grace of God and the Will of Man (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Publishing Group, 1989), pp. 141-164.
[9] Evangelicals are now discussing the historicity of Adam and Eve. See the contributions by Denis O. Lamoureux, John H. Walton, C. John Collins, William D. Barrick, Gregory A. Boyd, and Philip G. Ryken to Four Views on the Historical Adam (2013) and William Lane Craig’s In Quest of the Historical Adam (2021).
[10] Two debate books on this issue are The Nature of the Atonement: Four Views (2006), featuring Gregory A. Boyd, Joel B. Green, Bruce R. Reichenbach, and Thomas R. Schreiner, and Five Views on the Extent of the Atonement (2019), featuring Andrew Louth, Matthew Levering, Michael Horton, Fred Sanders, and Tom Greggs.
[11] John 6:52-55; 1 Corinthians 11:23-27.
[12] Erhard Gerstenberger, Leviticus: A Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), pp. 59-60
[13] Acts 2:17-18; 1 Corinthians 12; 2 Corinthians 12:1-7.
[14] A Roman centurion named Cornelius had a vision in Acts 10:1-7. Peter the Apostle responded to Cornelius based on a trance in Acts 10:9-34. In Galatians 1:11-12 Paul claims that he learned the gospel message itself from visions, including the Lord’s Supper (in 1 Corinthians 11:23-25). We also find seven letters dictated to the churches by God via visions in chapters 2-3 of the Book of Revelation.
[15] Quoted by David Madison, “What to Do About Your Dead-Again Jesus?” (August 23, 2019). Debunking Christianity blog. <https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2019/08/what-to-do-about-your-dead-again-jesus.html>.
[16] I’ve argued that God could’ve done all the work himself in Loftus, How to Defend the Christian Faith: Advice from an Atheist (Durham, NC: Pitchstone Publishing, 2015), pp. 20-35. The fact that God didn’t do differently, when s/he could have done so with much better results, doesn’t make any sense.
[17] See Loftus, What Would Convince Atheists to Become Christians? The Definitive Answers!” (April 4, 2017). Debunking Christianity blog. <https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2017/04/what-would-convince-atheists-to-become.html>.
[18] I wrote about this problem in chapter 7 of The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2010).
[19] On this, see Loftus, The Case Against Miracles (United States: Hypatia Press, 2019), chapter 6.
References
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