God's Gravediggers E-Book

Raymond D. Bradley

• Herausgeber: WS
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 506

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Few can offer a more experienced view on religion than Ray Bradley. Having been raised as a 'winner of souls for Christ' in the 1940s, he spent the next 40 years as an atheist professor of philosophy and an outspoken critic /debater of religion.

Revered for his work in logic and his meticulous approach to debate, God's Gravediggers is Bradley's coup de grâce to religion. A career's worth of work on a subject that could hardly be more important. Approaching the moral, logical and scientific arguments - using rich analogies, rational arguments and examples that non-academics would understand - he explores not only whether God exists, but also what damage the concept of God does. A timely book in an age of religious fundamentalism, hatred and conflict.

"Bradley does not gloss over difficult points of logic and reasoning. A pleasure to read."
Professor Graham Oppy, Chair of Council of the Australasian Association of Philosophy

"From a young person's rejection of Christianity, to a mature philosopher's cogent critique of all religions. This compelling defense of atheism is a brilliant read."
Professor Robert Nola, University of Auckland.

"Bradley's forte is logic and he brings that to bear throughout the work. It is well-written and thoroughly absorbing. I have nothing but praise for his project."
Theodore Drange, Professor Emeritus, West Virginia University

Leseprobe

GOD’S GRAVEDIGGERS:

Copyright © 2015 Ockham Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior written permission from the publisher.

Published by Ockham Publishing in the United Kingdom

ISBN 978-1-910780-08-4

In memory of the love of my life

JULIET ANDREA FISHER

(25 October 1941 to 27 August 2015)

PREFACE

1

FROM FUNDAMENTALIST TO FREETHINKER

IT ALL BEGAN WITH SANTA

Fundamentalist Roots

Philosophical Predisposition

The Demand for Evidence as a Basis for Faith

My Pilgrim's Progress

Childhood: a Period of Questioning

Many Santas, Many Religions and Gods

Religious Experiences: Genuine or Spurious?

Formative Reading and Unintended Consequences

The Problem of Evil

Historical Questions Unanswered

Heaven and the Afterlife

God's Foreknowledge and Predestination

Christology

Inerrancy

Predestination and Free Will

Heresy

The Historicity of Jesus

Evil, Free Will, and Responsibility

The Evolution Debate

Flirting with Buddhism, then Deism, then Agnosticism

The Dark Side of Fundamentalism

Book-burning and Beatings

The Delights of being a Freethinker

Maturing as a Freethinking Atheist

A Memorable Debate

Time Out from Interest in Religion

Unabashed Atheism Renewed

2

THE LOGICAL RIVALRY OF THE GODS

CHOICES OF A SPIRITUAL PILGRIM

The Choices of a Spiritual Pilgrim

Betting on the Gods: Pascal's Wager

A Little Logic

The Logical Contrariety of Rival Religions

Hume's Argument from the Contrariety of Religions

The Contrariety of Religions Disputed

The Contrariety Premise Demonstrated

Back to Pascal's Betting Arena

Hume's Thesis: A Proof or a Probability

A Little More Logic

Examples of Hume's Proof or Probability Thesis

The Snarling Logicality is Unavoidable

Guidelines for Prudent Betting

The Improbability of All Religions

The Near-Zero Probability of Any God

Assessing Probabilities Empirically

Assessing Purely A Priori Probabilities

Empirical Estimates of God's Probability

Purely A Priori Estimates of God's Probability

3

WHY GOD DESERVES TO DIE

INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL INDICTMENTS

The Death of the Gods

The gods of Monotheism

The General Concept of God

The Concept of Atheism

Proving a Negative

Naturalism

Supernaturalism

The God of Biblical Revelation

Inerrancy

Figurativism

Van Inwagen's Simplistic Reasoning

Does the Biblical God tell the Truth?

Is the Biblical God Moral?

Diseases and Disasters

War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity

Tortures of Hell

The Old Testament's Moral Primitivism

Moral Primitivism still Prevails among many Believers

4

TRYING TO RESUSCITATE THE GOD CONCEPT

PHILOSOPHICAL ARGUMENTS

Proofs or Rationalizations?

The Ontological Argument

Ontology and Magical Thinking

Anselm's Ontological Argument

Religious Shortcomings

Logical Shortcomings

Conjuring up a Perfect Island

Conjuring up the Devil

Conjuring up the Greatest Prime Number

The Fallacy Exposed

Existence is not a Predicate [Property]

How to Talk about Existence

No Contradiction in Denying that God exists

The Cosmological Argument

A Simple Version of the Cosmological Argument

The Kalam Cosmological Argument

Arguments from Current Scientific Cosmology

Argument for the Impossibility of an Actual Infinite

Interim Conclusion: "Therefore the universe has a cause."

Final conclusion: "The cause of the universe is God."

Arguments from Design

Scientific Credentials of the Theory of Evolution

Behe on Irreducible Complexity

The Improbability of Abiogenesis

The A Priorist's Fallacy

The Argument from Fine-Tuning

Seven Objections to the Fine-Tuning Argument

A Devastating Dilemma for Design Devotees

Creating and Designing an Evil World

Satan's Moral Outrage over his Boss's Creation

The Great Computer Designer versus the Great Hacker.

The Cosmological and Design Arguments for Atheism

5

THE MORAL ARGUMENT FOR ATHEISM

A LOGICAL QUANDARY FOR THEISTS

Dostoyevsky's Claim

The Reference of "God"

The Meaning of "Absolute Morality"

The Plausibility of Moral Realism

Prima Facie Examples of Objective Moral Truths

Reminder on the History of Objectivist Ethics

God's Violations of "Objective" Moral Principles

Wanton Slaughter

Sex Slavery

Enforced Cannibalism

Human Sacrifice

Endless Torture

A Logical Quandary for Bible-Believing Theists

An Inconsistent Quadruple

Trying to Escape from the Logical Straightjacket

What the Bible Actually Says

Re Slaughter of Innocents

Re Giving Captive Virgins to the Troops

Re Causing People to Cannibalize their Relatives

Re Condoning Child Sacrifice

Re the Eternal Torture of Nonbelievers

Comparing God with Satan

Trying to Absolve God of Guilt

Consequences for Theism

The Falsity of Theistic Ethics

A Personal Challenge to Biblical Theists

6

THE LOGIC OF HELL AND DAMNATION

ANOTHER LOGICAL QUANDARY

The Fourth Face of God’s Evil

Treating the Problem Seriously

The Nature of Omni-God

God's Omnipotence

God's Omniscience

God's Omni-Benevolence (Moral Perfection)

The Nature of Hell

What's Hell Like?

Who Suffers in the Fires of Hell?

Is the Notion of God Sending People to Hell Logically Coherent?

The Idea of Super-Satan

God's Responsibility for All Evil, including that of Hell

Apologetics: Making Excuses for God

Trying to Absolve God: Plantinga's Free Will Defence

Plantinga's Preliminary Sketch of his Defence

The Parable of Dog Almighty and All-Knowing

Plantinga's Attempt at a Formal Proof

The Failure of Plantinga's Formal Proof Illustrated

A Problem with the Entailment Condition

A Problem with the Consistency Condition

Back to Hell: Craig's Version of Plantinga's Defence

The Failure of Craig's Formal Proof

The Entailment Condition Again

The Consistency Condition Again

The Inconsistency Charges Reiterated

Implications of Perfect Goodness

Implications of the Doctrine of Hell and Damnation

The Inconsistency of these Two Sets of Implications

A Heavenly Refutation of the Free Will Defence

Which Possible Worlds Could God have Created?

The Agreed Meaning of "Possible World"

The Agreed Meaning of "Omnipotent"

Possibility and Feasibility

A Counter-Example: the Feasibility of Heaven

Craig's Counter-Argument Refuted

Free Will, Foreknowledge, and Predestination

Compatibilist versus Incompatibilist Meanings of "Free Will"

Free Will, Predestination, and Being Sent to Hell

Consequences of Being Predestined to Hell

A Logical Quandary for Believers

Caveat re the "Christian" Cross of Contradiction

Conservative Christians

"Liberal" Christians

7

THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF AN AFTERLIFE

THE CHESHIRE CAT FALLACY

Two Main Arguments for Substance Dualism

An Appeal to the Logic of Identity and Difference

An Appeal to the Noncogitative Nature of Matter

A Host of Problems for Substance Dualism

The Inexplicability of Mind-Brain Dependence

The Inexplicability of Mental Causation

The Violation of Scientific Laws

Minds aren't Miracle-Workers

Our Embryological and Developmental Histories

Problems about our Evolutionary Histories

Which Stage of the Soul or Mind Survives?

Presupposing a Category Misallocation

The Fallacy of Reification

Resisting the Reifying Lure of Language

Dualistic Consequences of Reifying Mentalistic Terms

Allocation to Ontological Categories

Locke's Partial Solution to Category Misallocation

Category Mistakes and "the Ghost in the Machine"

To Have a Mind is to have aSetof Mental Properties

Interim Summary

The Emergence of Minds from Incogitative Matter

Refutation by Counter-Examples

The Concept of Emergence Defined

Wrong-Headed Concepts of Emergence

The Ubiquitousness of Emergent Properties

The Metaphysics of Emergent Materialism

Contra Substance Monism

Why Property Dualism is Misconceived

Emergent Properties of Different Kinds

The Hierarchy of Sciences

The Case of Sensory Powers

The Case of Consciousness

The Metaphysical Impossibility of Survival

Mind-Brain Dependence

The Issue of Mental Causation

The Bogeyman of Epiphenomenalism

The Violation of Scientific Laws

Minds as Miracle-Workers

Our Embryological and Developmental Histories

Our Evolutionary Histories

8

GOBBLEDYGOOK GODS

PLAYING HUMPTY DUMPTY WITH WORDS

Paul Tillich

Bishop John Robinson

Bishop John Shelby Spong

Don Cupitt

Three Main Causes of Philosophical Disease

Reification

Lewis Carroll on "Nobody"

Conflating "is"s

Theologian's Muddles about "is"

Playing Humpty Dumpty with Words

Humpty Dumpty and Tillich, et. al.

Advice from both your Mother and Me

Don't Tell Stories Unless they are True

EPILOGUE

MY REVIEW OF LLOYD GEERING'SIN PRAISE OF THE SECULAR

GOD’S GRAVEDIGGERS

WHY NO DEITY EXISTS

PREFACE

Upon reading the title of this book, GOD'S GRAVEDIGGERS: WHY NO DEITY EXISTS, you might find yourself asking, "Which God is he referring to?" If so, then you've already embarked on the sort of questioning that led me when young, from the constraints of fundamentalist Christianity to the joys of being a Freethinker. My own questioning began with puzzles about Santa. How many Santas were there? Were any of them real? If so, which? These questions had parallels in the sphere of religious belief: questions about rival religions and questions about the different gods they worshipped. It was in pursuit of these questions that--motivated by a desire to understand the foundations of my faith--I launched into a study of theology, tangled on the way with a couple of leading Christian intellectuals, and emerged by the age of eighteen as a self-confessed atheist.

Chapter 1, "From Fundamentalist to Freethinker: It All Began with Santa" tells my personal story. It sketches my early encounters with virtually all the issues addressed in the other seven chapters. It sketches the sorts of reasons that eventually led me to conclude that core Christian doctrine was both morally obnoxious and intellectually dangerous, and that supernatural religions more generally deserved to “die” in Nietzsche’s sense.

In Chapter 2, "The Logical Rivalry of the Gods: Choices of a Spiritual Pilgrim", I deal more fully with the issue of why different religions compete with one another, not just on the battlefields, but for the "hearts and minds" of believers over matters of doctrine. I argue that Scottish philosopher, David Hume, was right when he claimed that the distinctive doctrines of different religions also compete with each other logically: that they are, in a strictly logical sense of the word, "contrary" to one another. Taking this occasion to lay the foundations for a better comprehension of the logical issues that are at stake throughout the book, I engage in a couple of "Logical Interludes" that explain some very basic concepts of logic, including modal logic. An understanding of these really helps if you want to wrap your mind around contemporary discussions in Philosophy of Religion. (Don't worry, though. I think you'll find these interludes both comprehensible and helpful.) I show how Hume's analysis supports the conclusion that it is highly probable that no religion, or any evidential claim adduced in its support, is true. And I go on to argue with respect to gods, that there’s a near zero probability that any of them actually exist.

That brings us to Chapters 3 and 4, which lie at the very heart of my book, expanding as they do on my reasons for giving it the title GOD'S GRAVEDIGGERS. If you haven't time to read much else, read these chapters. An overview of the perspective that I eventually came to adopt, these chapters explain why I am an atheist, not a mere agnostic, about the gods: all gods. Thus Chapter 3, "Why God Deserves to Die: Intellectual and Moral Indictments”, concentrates on charges against the biblical god: the god God belief in whom is supposedly common to all three monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

And Chapter 4, “Trying to Resuscitate the God Concept: Philosophical Arguments”, discusses the sanitized God that many philosophers try to erect in place of the ugly gods of traditional theism. I deal with some of the standard arguments such as the ontological, the design, and the cosmological arguments (including the now fashionable fine tuning argument) and show that none of them succeeds in rescuing God from the grave. But issues regarding morality, not just reason, logic, and science, loom particularly large.

They loom larger still in Chapter 5, "The Moral Argument for Atheism: a Logical Quandary for Theists." My moral argument for atheism is an argument for the nonexistence of any sort of revealed god, such as the Christian God in particular.

Chapter 6, "The Logic of Hell and Damnation: Another Logical Quandary", narrows the focus of moral indictment. It demonstrates that the concept of the Christian God, as characterized by orthodox Christians including leading theologians and philosophers of that faith, is self-contradictory. It leads to the conclusion that the existence of such a god is not just wildly improbable but logically impossible.

That brings us to Chapter 7, "The Impossibility of an Afterlife: The Cheshire Cat Fallacy." I don't deny that it is logically possible that we humans should survive our bodily deaths and go on to an afterlife in a supernatural world. God might not be there, but we might. "Might", in the logical sense, that is. But is there any good reason to suppose that the real world is such a world? I concentrate on rebutting standard philosophical arguments in favour of the idea of survival, and then go on to argue for an ontology--my own version of Emergent Materialism--according to which survival is metaphysically impossible. The existence of a soul or mind after one's body has died, I argue, is as fanciful as Lewis Carroll's idea of the Cheshire Cat's grin existing after its body has gone.

All this stuff about a supernatural world inhabited by God, gods, devils, and the souls of the departed, is anathema to some Christians: not to the conservative majority but to some of a more "liberal" persuasion. The "God" they like to talk about is the god of theologians who belong to the tradition of Paul Tillich: those for whom God is something like "the infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of all being." If you're tempted by this sort of stuff then bear with me while I treat you to another little story from Lewis Carroll: that of Alice and her exchanges with Humpty Dumpty. Hence the title of the final chapter, Chapter 8: "Gobbledygook Gods: Playing Humpty Dumpty with Words." As I see it, the pseudo-theistic "God" of liberals isn't worthy of the name.

This book presents a sustained argument for its conclusion: that belief in God--any god--deserves to die. Its chapters are best read in sequence as many of them presuppose an understanding of what's gone before. Nevertheless, I've tried to make provision for those who will read them out of sequence by incorporating in each just enough repetition to make each chapter comprehensible in isolation from its fellows.

Most chapters evolved from simpler origins. With one exception (Chapter 7) they had their beginnings in oral presentations to live audiences: to undergraduate students; to seminars with colleagues; to public audiences; to conference attendees; to members of the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists; and the like. And despite the fact that they've all undergone substantial revision and expansion since then--sometimes incorporating material from other papers I've written over the years--I've sought throughout to preserve the cadences of ordinary speech rather than adopting the usual scholarly tone characteristic of academic writing. Thus I've aspired to make my arguments stand on their own feet and be accessible to the general reader by virtue of their clarity, conciseness, and cogency. And readability.

In this respect I've been much helped by my late partner, Juliet Fisher, who has a good ear for such matters and who has read, or listened to me read, everything in the book at least a couple of times. So, too, with my son Brett and my brother Murray, both of whom share her critical acumen and have commented on whole chapters of the book in manuscript. Next up in the list of persons I want to thank are three friends at the University of Auckland, philosophers Robert Nola and Fred Kroon and physicist Ron Keam, each of whom has vetted (but is in no way responsible for) what I've written about probability, science, and mathematics. And then there are all those other people who have helped in one way or another: persons who have read parts of what I have written; persons whose positive comments have encouraged me--despite setbacks occasioned by strokes over the past three years--to resume my project and carry it through to completion. Chief among these are Australian philosopher of religion, Graham Oppy, who first prompted me to put together a collection of my writing on religion and then stuck by me during the vicissitudes of finding a publisher; also the American neurophysiologist, Yonatan Fishman, who prompted me to elaborate on some unclear points in Chapter 7. Other names are too numerous to mention, or for me to remember. You will know who you are and I say thanks to you all.

1

FROM FUNDAMENTALIST TO FREETHINKER

IT ALL BEGAN WITH SANTA

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. (St. Paul,I Corinthians 13:11).

In some ways I'm glad that I was brought up as a Christian fundamentalist. Not because fundamentalism gave me moral values that I cherish. On the contrary, many of the values I hold most dear were developed in contradistinction to those found in the Bible. My burning sense of justice, for example, arose out of abhorrence at the behavior of the Old Testament God, and revulsion at the doctrine of hellfire preached by Jesus in the New Testament. And my strong sense of compassion grew from thinking about those who have suffered in this life and who, if Christian doctrine were true, would suffer even more in the next life for the simple sin of non-belief.

Why then my gladness? Because the fundamentalist beliefs of my early years gave me something tough to chew on, something to cut my teeth on intellectually. The gummy mouthings of liberal preachers, dishonestly clothing the wolf of fundamentalism in the softer semantics of liberal theology, was not for me. Their evasive, obfuscating language could never satisfy my passion for truth. At least the fundamentalist sect in which I grew up knew what it stood for: that the Bible was the word of God, that mankind needed to be saved, that God had provided salvation through belief in the "Lord Jesus Christ”, that we'd go to Hell if we didn't believe, and so on.

What I discovered, as my critical powers matured, was that the fundamentalist beliefs of my family and forebears were almost totally without warrant in reason or experience. As I put it when I was about thirty one years old, in my first public debate, I came to the conclusion that many of their beliefs, the beliefs central to traditional Christianity, were both "morally obnoxious" and "intellectually pernicious."

Strong words, those. So I'll say more to justify them in a while. For the present, it is enough to say that I doubt whether I would have come so readily to these conclusions had my starting point been that of an unchallenged, and unchallenging, churchgoer in a more liberal tradition.

Fundamentalist Roots

My starting point, I have said, was that of a Christian fundamentalist. To be more specific, it was that of an earnest young Baptist. Born in Auckland, New Zealand, in December 1930, I was the firstborn in a family of ardent Baptists, with a maternal grandfather--Guy D. Thornton--who was a much-revered Baptist minister and evangelist, with a set of forebears on his side of the family that stretched back to such Christian notables as Robert and Mary Moffat, parents-in-law of the renowned David Livingstone.

One of my earliest memories is of an event that helped shape my childhood. It was Wednesday, 13 June, 1934. I was just over three-and-a-half years old. My parents had been summoned to the deathbed of my grandfather, and I went with them.

For twenty years he had suffered grievously from a tropical disease, chronic bacillary dysentery. Contracted soon after he became the first chaplain of the Anzacs in Cairo in 1914, it was caused by one of those creations--the Shigella bacillus--that God, according to the book of Genesis, thought to be "very good." Now it was taking its final toll. My grandmother, however, explained it differently in her biography of her late husband:

A loving Father was not willing that His child should suffer more, nor was He "willing that he should be so far from Him any longer." [Her italics]1

Before he departed, the good reverend found time to pronounce a benediction over both his grandchildren--my younger cousin Sibyl and me--expressing the hope that we might, if it were the will of God,

“Tread the dark places of the earth to carry to those who sit in darkness the light that was lighting his own feet through the valley of the shadow.”2

He concluded, in my case, by saying that he was "casting [his] mantle over me."

So it was that I felt destined to follow in my grandfather's footsteps. And follow I did. In keeping with the Baptist belief in full immersion, I took the plunge in my early teens, engaging wholeheartedly in scriptural and theological studies and church activities. My mind was filled with reflections on the foundations of my faith. My teenage years were filled with church activities: Baptist Harriers (cross-country running) on Saturday afternoons and the Young People's Social on Saturday night; then, next day, Sunday School or Christian Endeavour before the morning service at 11:00 am; back for Bible Class at 2:00 pm; evening service at 7:00 pm; and the hours in between discussing theological problems on street corners with a handful of friends who also took their faith seriously.

Nor did my holidays afford a break. There were Bible Class camps at various "retreats" around Auckland at which I competed in, and won, several sermonette contests. I'm told that I even "won" several souls for Christ. There were annual Christian Crusader camps out on Ponui Island, during which Dr. Sam Martin preached about the sin of masturbation, which he called "self-abuse," a sin which (by innuendo) he identified with the sin against the Holy Ghost: the sin that will not be forgiven "neither in this world, nor in that which is to come" (Matthew, 12:52). And there were the monthly meetings at the Bible Training Institute of the Young People's Missionary Fellowship, which I had helped found. Even my days at Mt. Albert Grammar School were infused by religion, especially when, at age fifteen, I became Secretary of the Christian Crusaders, the junior version of the Evangelical Union.

My exposure to religious indoctrination was about as total as that of a Muslim child in a madrassa or a Jewish one in a yeshiva. Not much rote-learning, perhaps, but the same suppression of critical examination; the same substitution of faith-based reasoning for evidence-based reasoning and the same elevation of unquestioning faith to a place of paramount virtue.

Yet being exposed to the disease of religion isn’t the same as being infected. And, even from my early childhood, I seemed fairly immune to it. Not that I was untouched. It took years for the scars to fade. My continuing aversion to all forms of faith-based reasoning, those in politics and economics as well as in religion, has its roots in personal experience of the harm I’ve seen it do to others as well as to myself.

Some children seem gifted from birth with artistic, musical, or mathematical abilities. I was not one of those. But I was fortunate enough to have had the sort of mind that couldn’t curb the impulse to question, and the ability, from childhood, to detect ambiguities in words and fallacies in arguments. In short, I was an unpopular possessor of what is popularly called “a critical mind.” That soon marked me out from my peers in the Baptist community, making me a heretic, someone needing religious "re-education" at the hands of pastors and theologians. Parents looked askance and steered their offspring away from close association with me. Only two of my teenage friends stuck with me during that time. But neither of them--so they subsequently said--had the moral courage to follow me into unabashed atheism. Not until decades later. Societal pressures as much as intellectual timidity kept them in the closet of Christian conformity. For years, both preferred to think of themselves as agnostics. As for the rest of the friends of my youth, most of them became deacons, ministers, or missionaries, as did their own offspring in turn.

Does my own resistance to religious indoctrination prove it to be less dangerous than any other disease? Of course not. As with other plagues that have wrought havoc on humans, killing, crippling, or curtailing the development of most who are exposed, there have always been some whose immune systems sooner or later “kick in” and offer them some form of protection. That doesn’t make any plague the less to be feared; so too, with the plague of religion. I escaped the worst of its ravages. But most don’t. A world-wide campaign to eradicate it--along with smallpox, polio, and other scourges--is as desirable as it is unlikely.

Philosophical Predisposition

So how did I manage to break free from the Baptist belief system and emerge as a freethinker? Basically by asking questions and not being satisfied with evasive answers or spurious reasoning. That's a simple way of explaining it. But I can fairly say that from very early on I displayed many of the dispositions that later characterized my career as an academic philosopher. Among other things, I had a desire for conceptual clarity and a nose for the implications of beliefs and for any inconsistencies between them.

My atheism was, so to speak, home grown, not a function of having been seduced away by other skeptics. Because I’d become preoccupied with secular philosophy rather than religion after taking up a career as an academic philosopher in my twenties, I knew little of the writings of agnostics or atheists until my fifties; and that was some thirty-odd years after I'd staked out my own independent rejection of Christianity and all other forms of religion. I was seemingly born with an inability to accept beliefs on faith, an ineluctable determination--of the kind that David Hume extolled--to proportion the strength of my beliefs to the strength of the evidence for them.

The Demand for Evidence as a Basis for Faith

For me when young, there was no escape from the demand for evidence. "Have faith," I was told. "But faith in what?" I wanted to know. "Why have faith in this rather than that unless there's stronger evidence for this rather than that?" "Why should I be a Baptist rather than a Catholic, a Christian rather than a Jew or a Muslim?" These were questions that came to me in early childhood when I first became aware of the diversity of religious faiths and the diversity of sects within each. They couldn't be answered by recourse to faith alone. They required an examination of the credentials of each of the rival faiths and of the beliefs of those who embraced no faith at all.

"But," some would object, "if you turn from theism to atheism, haven't you abandoned one 'ism' for another, one faith for another?"

No. My belief that there is no God, like my belief that there are no fairies, is based on a combination of good reasons: the absence of good evidence for the existence of such entities, together with an abundance of compelling evidence for their nonexistence. I am, as it were, an atheist--not a mere agnostic--about both. Indeed, I'm an atheist about both for many of the same reasons that Christians are atheists--not agnostics--about the whole panoply of heathen gods: Baal, Zeus, Isis, Osiris, and the hundreds of other gods you'll find listed in a good book on comparative religion.

My belief that no such supernatural entities exist, however, isn't an intransigent belief. If the heavens were to open tomorrow and remain open with God revealing Himself to us daily by speaking to all humans and exercising his much vaunted powers and goodness by putting an immediate end to disease, warfare, injustice, and the whole realm of human and animal suffering, I might consider revising my beliefs.

Woody Allen, I’ve heard, would be content if God would reveal himself by making a large deposit in Woody's bank account. That would make me happy of course. But I'd want a lot more evidence than that: a clear and unambiguous display of the supernatural powers that the theist's God is supposed to have, something like the instant transformation of Earth into the Heaven that he could have created in the first place. Maybe then I'd embrace theism once more.

But not before I'd asked him some pretty tough questions. Which theists' God was he? The Judaic God, Yahweh, for whom Moses was chief prophet and Jesus an impostor? The Christian God who supposedly revealed himself two thousand odd years ago to a handful of people in a minor province of the Roman Empire? The Allah of Islam for whom Mohammed was chief prophet?

And if he declared himself the God of the Christians, I'd want to know his doctrinal affiliations. Was I right in supposing him to be the God of the Baptists? If so, why hadn't he made it unequivocally clear to rival Christian sects that we were indeed the true believers? Or was he, in fact, the God of one of these other sects?

I'd want to ask him: "Why did you wait so long to make your existence indisputable, to display your awesome powers, and to deal definitively with the problems of disease, disaster, and suffering, to the solution of which compassionate mortals have dedicated their lives throughout the centuries?" More importantly, I'd want to ask him: "Why did you create such a mess in the first place when you obviously could have placed us immediately in a heavenly world?" And most important of all, I'd want to ask him: "What are you going to do about all those people who never heard the name of your son, Jesus, or who--having heard--found no good reason to believe him to be your son? What are you going to do with apostates like me who, according to your son, are doomed to spend eternity suffering the tortures of the damned?"

I couldn’t then and I can't now, conceive of any satisfactory answers. God might, perhaps, urge me to have faith in his wisdom, justice, and mercy. But these three qualities, together with the epistemological presupposition of faith itself, are precisely what I am calling into question. "Have faith" is the last resort of those who have abandoned reason for an easy way out.

To be sure, religionists often speak of faith as some sort of third way of knowing recourse to which can lead one to truths beyond the reach of human experience and reason. But faith, I came to think, is nothing more than firm or confident belief. And religious faith is usually intransigent belief: closed-minded belief, resolutely impervious to evidence of any kind. That sort of faith compromises intellectual and moral integrity. I wanted nothing to do with it.

My Pilgrim's Progress

In order to tell the story of how I became an atheist, I will depict my early years as ones in which I undertook a journey along a difficult and sometimes daunting path. And I will now revisit certain of its more salient vantage points, commenting on the incidents and episodes that occurred along the way, and pausing to reflect on the vistas that opened up as I journeyed onward. You may, if you wish, think of my journey as a kind of "Pilgrim's Progress," though one that took a different direction John Bunyan's hero.

Childhood: a Period of Questioning

It all began with Santa. In hindsight, I see that it was questions about Santa that primed the pump of critical inquiry for me. Up until the age of six or seven, I believed in Santa just as fervently as I believed in Jesus and the nativity stories. I believed in Heaven as a place from which my grandfather, in the company of God, watched my every move; and I believed in Hell as a place where the bad people go.

If anything, my belief in Santa was even more vivid, and more compelling, than these other beliefs. After all, I'd actually seen and talked to Santa every Christmas when we went to the Farmers Trading Company on Hobson Street. And sometimes I'd seen him, half an hour later, in Milne and Choyce on Queen Street. Santa was out and about in so many shops in Auckland.

But soon I started asking questions. How many Santas were there? If, as my parents explained, the Hobson Street Santa and the Queen Street Santa were only "pretend" Santas, where was the real Santa? Was there, in fact, a real Santa as well as the pretend ones? If so, where did he live? How did he manage to visit all of the children in the world on the very same night? How did he get down our chimney without getting covered with soot, or visit my bedroom without leaving visible footprints? It seemed to me that his ability to do all these extraordinary things made him something of a miracle-worker, a bit like Moses and Jesus.

More worrying were some ethical questions. Why did Santa discriminate so blatantly by giving rich kids things like bicycles when my stocking contained nothing other than trinkets like lead soldiers, a bag of sweets, and a few pieces of fruit? Why did he reward some of the nasty kids that I knew more than he rewarded good little boys like me?

I was troubled even more when I discovered that some of the kids at school didn't believe in Santa anymore. They said it was my parents who'd filled my stocking.

When finally confronted with the whole package of my perplexities, my parents confessed that Santa stories were just pleasant make-believe. But that, too, troubled me. They had misled me, I insisted. So how could I trust the other stories that they told me? And how could I trust my own beliefs if in this instance they had proved to be false? How much of what I believed was myth? How much was based in reality? I resolved never again to believe just on the basis of someone else's say-so. Many of my questions about Santa later found clear parallels in questions about religious matters.

Many Santas, Many Religions and Gods

My questions about how many "Santas" there were, and which if any, was the real one, found an echo in problems about the diversity of religious sects and the question of which, if any, was the true one.

This first thrust itself upon me when I was eight and wanted to play with the Kelly kids who lived just opposite. My mother objected vehemently. They were Roman Catholics, she explained, followers of "the whore of Rome." But, I asked, didn't they believe in Jesus? Weren't they Christians, too? Yes, she replied: they believed in Jesus, and they were Christians alright, but they weren't true Christians.

But if there were true religions and false religions, I reflected, how could I be sure that my one was the true one? If I'd been brought up as one of the Kelly kids, wouldn't I have been a Catholic too? Did I share the beliefs of my parents and grandparents only because I'd been brought up as a Baptist? Might not all the religions I'd heard of be fakes like the different "Santas" I'd seen in the shops? Was there in fact a true religion at all? Or a true God? Might not the Bible stories be just pleasant make-believe, like stories about Santa?

Religious Experiences: Genuine or Spurious?

My childhood reflections on the rivalry between religions had other implications. We born-again Baptists believed we had a special relationship with God. We spoke to him in prayer, and he spoke to us in return, sometimes providing vivid experiences of his presence in our lives. We believed that we were doing God's will. Yet sincere believers of contrary faiths also believed that they were doing God's will. They had religious experiences different from, and sometimes contrary to, ours. I was almost envious, for a time, of the Kelly kids' claim to see visions of the Virgin Mary. Why didn't God reveal himself to Protestants that way? Why were the miracles of Lourdes reserved for Catholics? Were they deluding themselves? Might I not have been deluding myself when, aged fourteen, our minister plunged me under the baptismal waters and I felt the "indwelling of the Holy Spirit"? What with the church choir singing, "Where he leads me I will follow" in tones of deepest solemnity, it was all very moving.

Then I learned how, throughout history, competing armies--often fired up by religious conviction--would both claim to be fighting "in the name of God." And I heard, during World War II, that many German Christians believed God was fighting on their side, not ours. It seemed to me that only the most churlish believers could claim that their own religious experiences alone were genuine. Could it be that none were?

I came to question the status of religious experiences for other reasons as well. Evangelical crusades sometimes took place in the Auckland Town Hall, and I would be there in the midst of the massed choir arrayed behind the evangelist, sounds from the massive pipe organ reverberating through our bodies. Each night I watched the newly converted--often in paroxysms of guilt and grief--as they "gave themselves to Jesus" and were shepherded off into the wings for counseling. I could hardly doubt their sincerity. Or could I? What was I to think when some reappeared the next night, to be converted again, and sometimes still a third time? How much store could be placed in the intensity of such religious enthusiasm? I was embarrassed; then uneasy; then skeptical of the evidential worth of subjective experiences like these, including my own.

Formative Reading and Unintended Consequences

One of the consequences of my parents' religious exclusivism was that I spent most of my early years up to the age of twelve as a relatively solitary child. There weren't enough "suitable" children for me to play with. So I spent much of my spare time reading. And most of the books I read were religious ones.

One of the earliest was Bible Stories for Children. It retold, in simple terms, stories from both the Old and New Testaments. Adam and Eve, Noah and the great flood, Moses and the wicked Pharaoh, David and Goliath, Jonah in the belly of the "great fish", Mary and Joseph going down to Egypt, the three Wise Men, the Nativity, scenes from the adult life and miracles of Jesus, St. Paul's shipwreck. They all featured in the text, and many in the colorful pictures. It sparked my desire to know more.

That's one reason why I turned to the Holy Bible itself: the unvarnished and unexpurgated King James Version. Another reason was that my parents had enrolled me in both the Auckland Sunday School Union and the Scripture Union, both organizations whose examinations on selected biblical passages I sat successfully at frequent intervals, thereby accumulating quite a nice little library of novels by approved Christian authors.

One of my book prizes, Twelve Brave Boys, left a special mark on me. It was filled with adventure. But, some of the stories conspired with the sense of mission spawned by my grandfather's deathbed consecration to make me feel that I was indeed one of God's chosen, like some of the brave boys who had dedicated their lives to His service.

Another book that left its mark, one from my parents' library rather than chosen from the Scripture Union Bookshop, was John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress. I struggled with the difficult prose, and found its archaic worldview difficult to understand. But it encouraged me to think that, no matter what difficulties I might be encountering in understanding my faith, I--with help from on high--would win through in the end. I certainly did not envisage that my own intellectual pilgrimage would lead me away from "the faith of my fathers" rather than towards its reaffirmation.

My acquaintance with nonreligious literature was limited. But I took special pleasure from Arthur Mee's Children's Encyclopedia, spending countless hours poring over its contents.

I turned, also, to my own grandfather's writings and my grandmother's posthumous biography of his life. Guy Thornton wrote several books: The Wowser (a semiautobiographical novel drawing upon his experiences among the loggers in the center of the North Island), Out to Win (a book on soul-winning), and the autobiographical With the Anzacs in Cairo: The Tale of a Great Fight. All three were effusions of the evangelical certitude that had characterized most of his adult life. It wasn't until I read my grandmother's biography of her late husband that I made a salutary discovery: at one point he had struggled with the notion that God could send people to Hell, and had even gone so far as to avow atheism, albeit only briefly.

Much of my reading had consequences that my parents surely did not intend. From Bible Stories for Children I garnered the impression that these stories were akin to the stories of Hans Christian Anderson and various other fairy tales. The illustrations looked similar. There was an air of fantasy about them; and they differed, it seemed to me, only insofar as I was told that the Bible stories were supposedly true, while the others were not.

My studies of the Holy Bible itself sowed the seeds of a different disquiet. I didn't confine myself to the sanitized selections that had been prescribed for examination. I would read on, and on, often until late at night. And what I found was often deeply disturbing.

If God were a god of love, why did he punish Adam and Eve and all their descendants so severely? Why did he drown everyone except Noah and his family in apparent violation of his own commandment not to kill? Why did he "harden" the Pharaoh's heart every time that the Pharaoh relented and wanted to let the children of Israel go? I had hundreds of questions. I wanted answers but received none other than words to the effect that "God knows best."

The Problem of Evil

The so-called "problem of evil" began to rear its head, in various guises. Why did a perfectly good, all-powerful, and all-knowing God create a world full of so many natural disasters and suffering? Why did he knowingly create humans like Adam and Eve--or the Devil, for that matter--knowing that they would sin? And--worse still--why was the Bible full of stories of his own evil deeds, ranging from repeated genocide to sending unbelievers to suffer eternally in hellfire? The problem of God's own evil deeds troubled me even more than the problems of natural and moral evil.

Bunyan's ThePilgrim's Progress posed another sort of problem. I found his personification of various abstract concepts in such figures as those of Mr. Obstinate, Mr. Pliable, and Mr. Legality, troubling, even though I eventually came to understand their role as a literary device in his allegory. I started to become suspicious of what philosophers call reification: treating the name of an abstraction as if it were the name of some real entity. This suspicion subsequently rendered much of Plato's philosophy foreign to my own way of thinking and came to fruition when, in my later years as an academic philosopher, I eventually got around to thinking carefully about abstract nouns such as "the mind," "intelligence," "consciousness," and the like, and came to the conclusion that they aren't names of substantial entities that we possess in addition to our physical bodies. Rather, they refer to properties of living organisms. As I explain in Chapter 6, I eventually came to think that my mind, intelligence, or consciousness can no more be detached from, or survive, the death of my body than can the smile of the Lewis Carroll's Cheshire Cat once its body has disappeared. To think otherwise is to indulge in the fallacy of reification and live in the fantasy land of Alice. So much for the soul and the prospects of its immortality.

Arthur Mee's Children's Encyclopedia opened my eyes to a vast domain of information. Starting with religious subjects, I eventually branched out into other areas. It was then, I think, that my passion for knowledge commenced. I was fascinated by the grand sweep of human history, by accounts of ancient civilizations, and by the discoveries that then-modern science was making about the structure of the universe. Much of what I learned fell outside, and was clearly incompatible with, the worldview encompassed by the Bible and the time it envisaged as having passed since the Creation in about 4004 B.C.E.

Historical Questions Unanswered

I wanted to put the Bible stories into historical perspective. When exactly did Moses live? I knew something of the history of Egypt and the scores of pharaohs who'd ruled that ancient land. They were usually referred to by name. But the books of Genesis and Exodus usually talked only about "Pharaoh." Which one, I asked. No one of my acquaintance seemed to know.

Again, I wanted to know more about the life and times of Jesus. When exactly did he live? And what else was going on at the time? No answers were forthcoming. Precise dates were given for countless other historical figures such as Julius Caesar. Though strangely, not for the Son of God.

It began to dawn on me that most biblical events were recounted in a curiously ahistorical way. Why? The question stuck with me and was reawakened years later, in my early teens, when I came across George Bernard Shaw's preface to his Androcles and the Lion and then Albert Schweitzer's TheQuest of the Historical Jesus.3 Only then did I realize that there was a serious issue here: one of which I'd had still earlier inklings when I'd thought of the tales in Bible Stories for Children as somehow akin to fairy stories, or (at the very least) to the ahistorical tales of King Arthur, for whom also I could find no dates.

Until then, I had shared the standard assumption that Jesus had been born at the beginning of 1 C.E. For wasn't that the year that was supposed (by us in the West, anyway) to be the turning point of human history: the year in which God came down to Earth? It took me years to discover just how questionable this presupposition is.

Heaven and the Afterlife

At about the same time, when I was ten or eleven, I was starting to discern other deep difficulties lurking within my Christian faith. One night, after being tucked into bed and saying my prayers, I asked my mother what Heaven was really like. I simply wanted a concrete understanding of all the Heaven-talk to which I was accustomed. Where was Heaven located? Since Jesus had ascended to it, in which direction did he go? How fast? What would its streets look like when we got there? What would we eat, and do all day? She didn't know, of course, or even pretend to. We would just have to wait until we got there.

Stymied on that one, I ventured to ask what God himself was like. I got the standard answer about the divine attributes. God could do anything, she began. God also knew everything. And . . .

God's Foreknowledge and Predestination

We didn't proceed further, to God's perfect goodness, because the concept of omniscience seized my attention. What exactly did his knowledge include? Did he know where my father had been all day? Did he know what I had been doing all day? "Yes, dear: God knows all that," she answered. At that point my mind kicked into gear. If God knew all that, did he also know what I would do tomorrow? "Yes dear, he knows all that." My head spun. If he knew what I was going to do tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that... then surely I couldn't do anything tomorrow or at any other time, other than what he already knew I would do.

I had tried to flesh out, in concrete detail, exactly what it means to say that God knows everything. And the implications, when I thought about them, were profoundly disturbing. I checked on the Bible and found again passages such as Romans 8:29: "For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate..." I had hit upon the theological problem of free will, God's foreknowledge, predestination; a problem that, in its more philosophical guise of free will and determinism, I was eventually to address in my Ph.D. thesis Free Will and Logic.

At the time, however, the impact of this "discovery" about God's nature was visceral as well as intellectual. For weeks afterwards I wandered about like a zombie, feeling as if I were a mere puppet, or at least God's plaything. A case of post-traumatic automatism, perhaps?

It was the problem of predestination that first prompted me, when eleven or twelve years old, to start reading the three-volume work that grandfather Thornton had bequeathed to me: A. H. Strong's Systematic Theology (published in 1907)4. One of the foundational works of fundamentalist Christianity, I consulted it frequently over the ensuing years. Yet it opened my mind to still more problems.

Christology

I discovered, for instance, that the prevailing Christology (theory about Christ's nature) among the early Christians, commencing in about 70 C.E. and continuing in pockets around Europe for a thousand years or so, was that of the Docetists, a form of Gnosticism. They claimed that Christ was a mere apparition, not a person of flesh and blood. It was Docetism, I subsequently learned, that prevailed prior to both the composition and circulation of the incarnation stories of the Gospels, and prior by nearly three centuries to the orthodox doctrine eventually promulgated at Chalcedon in 451 C.E. I wondered how the Docetists could have thought Jesus to be a ghostly apparition if he had indeed walked and talked among them. And I wondered why it took so long for the supposedly "correct" doctrine to prevail. Why couldn't God have made the "true" doctrine so indisputably clear at the outset that none of the heresies that tore the Church apart for several centuries could have arisen?

Inerrancy

I discovered, too, that there were several rival accounts of what it meant to say that the Bible was the "word of God," and read with increasing skepticism Strong's defense of the doctrine that in all matters to do with science, history, and morality, the Bible is inerrant. It didn't require much logical acumen on my part to discern the circularity of Strong's argument that the scriptures must be without error since they report that Jesus himself had accepted them (those of the Jewish scripture that is) as true.

As for Strong's attempts to explain away any apparent errors by providing face-saving interpretations, I wondered why God would leave so much room for contrary construals of his words. Didn't God mean what he had so clearly said? Or didn't he know how to say what he really did mean? I could not help but wonder at the presumptuousness of those who put their own words into God's mouth, as if he couldn't speak for himself. For it seemed to me, that here was the source of most of the doctrinal rivalry that had bedeviled the history of Christianity.

Predestination and Free Will

As for the doctrine of predestination, I pored over Strong's unsuccessful attempt to reconcile it with the concept of free will, underlining over a hundred passages and writing twenty-odd comments in the margin of Volume I, Chapter 3, on "The Decrees of God." Twice, I was so outraged by his arguments that I simply wrote the expletive "Bosh!" in the margin.

Worse still, when I turned to the Bible itself, I found not a trace of the idea that human beings--as opposed to God himself--possessed genuine free will. Rather, it was God himself who took responsibility for assigning each of us to one or other of two camps: that of the elect who would, by virtue of his grace (and “not of anything in ourselves”), join him in Heaven; and on the other hand, that of the reprobates who were foreordained to damnation in Hell. And the Westminster Confession, which Strong himself (strangely) endorsed, put it clearly enough: "God did from all eternity, by the most just and holy counsel of his own will, freely and unchangeably ordain whatever comes to pass." No obfuscatory mincing of words there.

Until near the end of my twelfth year most of my doubts churned within the confines of my own mind. Only occasionally had I ventured to voice them to anyone else: my mother. Hers was a fairly simple and unsophisticated faith, certainly not versed in the theological doctrines that I was wrestling with. Sadly, in the close confines of our kitchen, and because of pressure from my persistence, our exchanges grew increasingly disputatious, confrontational, and even violent.

But then we moved house twice more, first to one part of Mt. Albert then to another, and I found a wider arena for discussion. A few friends attending Bible Class with me at the Mt. Albert Baptist Church were also interested in my quest for understanding. Like me, they thought that St. Augustine's motto "Faith in search of understanding" put the cart before the horse. For us, understanding was a prerequisite of faith. We wanted to understand, for instance, what sort of experience counted as being "born again." If one had been born again, could one subsequently fall from grace and be damned? What of the comforting doctrine "Once saved, always saved"? What was the point of being a minister or missionary if everyone to whom you preach is already predestined to either salvation or damnation?

Our deliberations took place in Bible Class, on street corners, and in my closest friend's basement. They were delicious days in which we experienced the exhilaration of thinking for ourselves outside of the boundaries of orthodox dogma.

But the path of free inquiry seldom runs smooth. News of the difficult questions that I and my closest friends were raising in Bible Class had consequences. My parents wanted higher authorities to deal with my friends and me lest our heretical tendencies spread to others.

Heresy

When I was about fifteen, the church set up a monthly "Brains Trust." We'd submit questions, and they'd reply without granting an opportunity for subsequent debate. A couple of us soon learned to preempt their puerile answers by couching our questions in more complex form. One that I remember submitting--in writing--went something like this:

My question is Q. You might want to answer A, or B, or perhaps even C. But if you answer A, then you've got to deal with problems 1, 2, and 3. And if you answer B, then you're faced with problems 4 and 5. While if you answer C, then...

And so on. They rejected the last question I had sent to them. It was over three-and-a-half pages long. Our Brains Trust sessions soon came to an end.

Next I was referred to a couple of "experts" for counseling. My parents had long insisted that there were Christian believers aplenty who were much cleverer than I. And I could not but agree.

First, I spent an evening with the President of the Baptist Theological College, but he gave up on me before 9 pm. Then came a day in the Titirangi home of the redoubtable Dr. E. M. Blaiklock, Professor and Head of Classics at the University of Auckland, a friend of my father, "Uncle Ted" to me from childhood, and an occasional lay preacher at the church. As a youth of fifteen, I held him in awe, so prepared thoughtfully for the occasion.

The Historicity of Jesus

Our daylong discussions ranged over a host of topics. One had to do with the historicity of Jesus. He had recently delivered a sermon in which he had brought the full weight of his classical scholarship to bear on an attempt to prove that Jesus had in fact lived about 2,000 years ago. Most of the congregation was incensed. Why belabor the obvious, the unquestionable presupposition of our faith? But I had been fascinated. And so I took up the question again.

By that time my own little quest for the historical Jesus had yielded a seeming inconsistency in the Gospels' accounts of the date of his birth. Matthew 2:1 said that he was born "in the days of Herod the king." And since Herod had died in 4 B.C.E. that meant that my old assumption of a birth at the beginning of 1 C.E. had to be wrong.

Worse was to come. For Luke 2:1-2 said that he was born "when Cyrenius [otherwise known as Quirinius] was governor of Syria." But that, so far as I could discover, was in 6 C.E. Blaiklock's proposed solution was to claim that Cyrenius had been governor once before, during the period 6-4 B.C.E. That seemed good enough at the time, so we moved on to other matters.

Only decades later did I discover the truth.

First, I discovered that Blaiklock's proposed reconciliation of the two Gospel accounts was spurious. Both he and I had failed to take account of Luke 2:1. For there we find that the governorship of Cyrenius during which Jesus was supposed to be born, was concurrent with the period during which Augustus Caesar issued a decree "that all the world should be taxed." But that was during Cyrenius's second term, i.e., during or after 6 C.E. The inconsistency with Matthew 2:1 is every bit as real as I had first thought it to be. So the Gospel accounts certainly can't be relied upon.

Second, I learned that independent historical evidence of Jesus' very existence, let alone his alleged date of birth, simply does not exist. In his book Jesus Christ:Man or Myth5 published many years afterward, Blaiklock confessed: "Jesus is authenticated in no other way, outside the gospels, save by [first century] Josephus and a sentence in a Roman historian [first century, Tacitus]"

But he didn't do justice to the fact that most New Testament scholars regard the passages in Josephus as interpolations originating in the fourth century. Some scholars think that they came from the hand of fourth century Bishop Eusebius, who is also suspected of forging a purported letter from Jesus to someone named Abgarus. In any case, the passages were unknown to much earlier Christian apologists, such as the third century Origen. Origen had gone so far as to chide Josephus for not even mentioning Jesus.

As for the Roman historian, Tacitus, it should be noted that the "one sentence" Blaiklock refers to was written around 116 C.E. and that, in the view of many scholars, it amounts only to a report of what was being said by Christian missionaries at that time.

Little wonder that when, in Appendix 2 of Jesus Christ:Man or Myth, the good professor gave a list of important dates of the period, he was able to be specific about many other figures, but not about Jesus. The year 5 B.C.E, he said, was the year in which Seneca was born. But it was only the "presumed" date of the nativity. And, further betraying his uncertainty, he described 29 C.E. as the "presumed" date of the crucifixion. He could confidently give dates of publication for many of the most important writings of the first century, but none for the Gospels.

So when, if at all, did the incarnation occur? The Gospels, full of inconsistencies, absurdities, factual error, and evangelizing propaganda, are historically unreliable. And secular history of the time knows nothing of such a supposedly momentous event, or of others reported in the Gospels. The fact is that Blaiklock didn't know, and neither does anyone else know for certain, when--or even if--God (or the Holy Ghost or Jesus the Christ) visited this insignificant planet of ours (all in order, supposedly, to save a few of the "elect" from his own unseemly vengeance).

Evil, Free Will, and Responsibility

We spent most of the day, however, on the issues that troubled me most: the problems of moral and natural evil; the problem of hellfire and damnation; the problem of particularity (why God would announce his plan for universal salvation to only a handful of people, at only one time and place); questions about the doctrine of salvation and why God would demand the blood-sacrifice of his son in order to atone for the sins of his creatures; questions about how creatures created without flaw--Satan, Adam and Eve--could fall from grace; why, according to the doctrine of original sin, God would impute sin to all of Adam and Eve's descendants; and so on.

Questions about free will and responsibility predominated. Not only in connection with the doctrine of predestination, but in other contexts as well. It had become clear to me by then that, although there was some sense in which I did in fact sometimes act "of my own free will" and was responsible for the actions I then performed, there was also some "deeper" sense in which I was neither free nor responsible. I couldn't see why the buck should stop with me. After all, I didn't choose who I was going to be: who my parents were, for example, or what kind of soul I had (if I had one). How then could I be ultimately responsible for what I was, and therefore did? It was these deeper senses of "free" and "responsible" that were threatened by the doctrine of predestination, for--according to that doctrine--it was God who was ultimately responsible for my free acts and for my final fate.