How Christianity looks from an aerial perspective

Many Old Testament stories are not true

• Literally reading the bible indicates the earth is ~6,000 years old
  • In fact, the Earth is ~4.5 billion years old
• Creation story is factually false
  • Animals/humans were not created fully formed, some process of abiogenesis followed by evolution via natural selection created and diversified life on planet earth.
  • Anything that refers to Adam and Eve as the first humans is factually incorrect.
• Flood story is false - I could write a whole post on this
  • Makes no narrative sense - To avoid all the logical problems with the story, it requires copious supernatural intervention, which is unparsimonious and inefficient
  • Makes no observational sense - It has left no trace
• Mass exodus story is false (No plagues, no wandering the desert, etc.)
  • Biblical account of this Israelite exodus from Egypt is the only account of this we have.
  • One would expect 14,000 people wandering in a desert for 40 years to leave a trace.
• Canaanite slaughter is false
  • No archeological evidence of destruction or battles in old Canaanite cities, and positive DNA evidence that the canaanites lived on and in fact passed on their genes to many people living today (This article just came out in Science the last couple days, actually: Source).

Confusion among scholars who devote their lives

• Lots of speculation about the authenticity of the Old and New Testaments
  • Robert Price and many other scholars claim it has been heavily edited and added to over the years as various people wanted to make the stories more cohesive. These people endlessly argue with William Lane Craig and other fundamentalist NT scholars who argue the opposite.
  • I just recently read, “The Case for Christ,” by Lee Strobel, then immediately after I read, “The Case Against the Case for Christ,” by Robert Price. I don’t recommend any of this.
• How is anyone supposed to form an opinion? Lots of educated people have devoted their lives to studying these books and have come to different conclusions. This can be expanded to consider the amount of scholarship going into all the different religions, and yet somehow most people end up thinking that the one religion they grew with is the right one, the only one.

The Biblical narrative makes little theological sense

• God sent himself to earth so he could sacrifice himself to himself to save his own creation from himself.
• The wages of sin is death… why?
• An unsolved “problem of evil”
  • One would expect an infinite God who is both omnipotent (all-powerful), and all-loving to have the ability to make creation that could love and glorify him sufficiently while also avoiding all the pain, hate, suffering, and death we see today.

The Bible is logically untrustworthy

• For a moment, let’s accept that the Bible was perfectly written, has been perfectly assembled, and has been perfectly preserved. We still run into inerrancy problems:
  • Jesus and Paul refer to Adam and a literal first couple. Adam and Eve weren’t real people. Adam is also present in genealogies.
  • Genealogies of Jesus in various gospels don’t agree. In fact there are many books written about the various discrepancies you can find by comparing the gospel accounts.
  • Before you argue, “The Bible agrees on all the ‘important’ things,” consider: there are many interpretations of the same books, which leads to today’s colloquialism, “Every Christian is another Christian’s heretic.” For all intents and purposes therefore, we can not appeal to the Bible as perfect authority because we will always be limited by our own imperfect ability to interpret its meaning. This logical argument alone practically nullifies all statements that begin with: “Because Book chapter:verse says X, Y, and Z...”

Biblical narrative makes little logical sense

• God’s crowning work of creation, humanity, has existed in its current form for about 200,000 years, which is a tiny blip on the timescale of earth’s entire life (~4.5 billion years), even smaller considering the length of time of the universe, 13.8 billion years. He created humans in the last 0.0014% of time, sent Jesus in the last 0.000014% of time. The vast majority of the universe’s history was human-less.
• Of those 200,000 years humanity has existed, it’s only the last 10 - 15 thousand or so for which we have recorded human history and archeological traces, of which only 4 to 6 thousand years record the Old/New testaments. So for 194 to 196 thousand years of human history, there were no Jews, there were no Christians, no modern religions, no one knew about Moses or Egypt, Cain or Abel, Adam or Eve, Jesus or Paul.
  • So if Jesus, the guy who supposedly came to save humanity, came in the last 2,000 years, then he left 198,000 years of humans savior-less?

Indistinguishable from other religions

• It may be true that the majority of people like the narrative given in the Bible more, and they like the idea that salvation is not based on works but on grace through faith, but this doesn’t make it true.
• To determine if Bible actually true, we would need to have it make predictions about reality, and then verify them as objectively as possible, the same way we would for any other religion or truth claim. When applying this test, Christianity is indistinguishable from any other religion. It makes no testable predictions, it avoids falsifiability by appealing to supernatural intervention, and provides answers only for current gaps in human knowledge.

It doesn’t make people better

• Christians that I know are the first to admit that the Christian community at large is full of hypocrites, liars, deceivers, etc.
• There are major new scandals in the community every year.
• Wouldn't you expect God's elect to behave differently than God's damned?

High association with anti-science / irrationalism

• Anti-vaccines, creationism, anti-GMO, government-conspiracy, climate-change deniers, homophobia, etc. These things are associated with conservative Christian evangelicalism, and for good reason. I know many people who are into all of these things. Nature or nurture?

Suspicious memetic viability

• There is a high reward for believing (salvation/heaven/eternal paradise), high punishment for not believing (eternal damnation), the story offers answers to a species that loves knowledge, it offers hope to a species plagued by hopelessness, and is perpetuated by the loved and trusted (parents) to the innocent and impressionable (children), it honors those who “believe without seeing (Source),” it makes “belief” God’s primary concern (Source), and the great commission is to evangelize (Source). To me this seems like a recipe for memetic viability, so it’s no wonder this idea is so pervasive.
• Pascal’s wager, anyone?

Suspicious lack of modern supernatural intervention

• If just one monk, priest, healer, prophet, or prayer would make a testable prediction in a lab with a control group and successfully show that their methods are effective, it would change science forever. This has yet to be done.
  • In fact, it has been tried and the opposite conclusion has been reached. Studies on prayer show that there is no correlation between praying for a sick person, and the rate at which they heal. It seems the extent to which prayer is effective is correlated only with the extent to which the one who prays may have a natural impact on an outcome. (Source)

Suspicious anthropocentrism

• Pursuit of rationality, science, and philosophy has been a constant journey of humility for humans. It used to be thought:
  • We were designed fully-formed by some creator
  • Consciousness was supernatural (God-breathed)
  • All of history was about as old as our own written and oral records indicated
  • Earth was at the center of the universe
  • When this changed, we thought the sun was at the center of the universe
• Now we know:
  • Consciousness and self awareness are natural features of an otherwise arbitrary species on an arbitrary exoplanet around an arbitrary star in an arbitrary arm of an arbitrary spiral galaxy in an arbitrary position in a potentially infinite spacetime.
• In the future we may be able to add to this list even-more-humbling ideas such as:
  • Consciousness and self-awareness are not unique to us in the universe
  • We exist as an instantiation in a quantum multiverse wherein every possible arrangement of particles exists somewhere in spacetime.
  • The laws of physics in our local universe are a working permutation of the many universe-instantiations which all have slightly different fundamental constants of nature.
  • In which case the anthropic principle is sufficient to explain why we exist at all.

Temporally locked narrative

• The sacrificial lamb, the lion of Judah, doves, snakes, golden calfs, giants, nephilim, angels, demons, Satan, hell, pillars of fire, plagues, transubstantiation, trinity, cross, sin-nature, conviction...
• Imagine if humans live another thousand years, what about another 200,000? A million? How relevant will these concepts be when we are a multi-planet, multi-solar-system, gene-enhanced civilization that coexists with alien life, artificial intelligence, and possibly only exists in the silicon integrated-circuits embedded in our vacuum-capable, high-energy radiation protective, space-traveling armor?
  • Disclaimer: I don't claim to have any idea what the future will look like, I just foresee a time when the Bible ceases to make any sense whatsoever… can you imagine it? “Jesus was a man? Like the stupid, fragile ones from our home planet during the pre-upload era?”

Yet here I am

Going to church on Sunday... why? Because I grew up in a Christian family, married a wonderful Christian woman with a Christian family, went to a private Christian high school, a small Christian college, worked at youth group, went on missions trips, and 98% of the people I interact with outside of work on a daily basis are Christian friends and family I grew up with. This whole narrative works well if you don't take the time to read and honestly question it. The community is beautiful and loving and supportive, especially (only?) to those deemed as part of the "in-group" (fellow "Christians").

It seems intellectual honesty is the only reason to leave this cozy closet. Is it worth it?

How’s that for an introductory post?