The Bully’s Lament

Christian Apologist Anthony DeStefano: Atheists to blame for world’s ills

I don’t want to give Anthony DeStefano a dime. Indeed, I only learned who DeStefano was five minutes ago when I saw one of his op-ed columns, with the laborious headline, “Today’s atheists are bullies — and they are doing their best to intimidate the rest of us into silence,” posted on social media. But if I can find a way to access his book, Inside the Atheist Mind: Unmasking the Religion of Those Who Say There is No God,” from which the column is adapted, without paying for it, probably through the library, maybe I will read it and respond here. For now, though, let’s see what DeStefano thinks of me, and presumably, all atheists:

Atheists today are the most arrogant, ignorant and dangerous people on earth.

We’ve all seen how these pompous prigs get offended by the slightest bit of religious imagery in public and mortified if even a whisper of  “Merry Christmas” escapes the lips of some well-meaning but naïve department store clerk during the “holiday season.”

He then cited three examples in which prominent atheist or freethinker organizations, American Atheists, the American Humanist Association and the Freedom from Religion Foundation, exercised their right to free speech and protested potential violations of the separation of church and state. This, of course, is what free and empowered people do in a democracy, but to folks like DeStefano, behavior such as this is arrogant, ignorant, dangerous and pompous. Arrogance and pomposity are pretty close to the same thing, but I guess he was running low on adjectives. In any case, he has more childish insults for us.

Yes, these atheists are loud, nasty, unapologetic and in-your-face.

But while their arrogance is annoying, it’s nothing compared to their ignorance. Atheists believe that the vast majority of human beings from all periods of time and all places on the Earth have been wrong about the thing most important to them. They basically dismiss this vast majority as being either moronic or profoundly naïve. What they don’t seem to know – or won’t admit – is that the greatest contributions to civilization have been made, not by atheists, but by believers.

Here is a real bit of arrogance: Claiming to know what atheists think about believers or presupposing that just because DeStefano has had a certain experience with some nonbelievers, then that must apply to most or all atheists.

I don’t think DeStefano has had many, or any, personal experiences with atheists, outside of what he’s read in books or on websites, and thus, it becomes easy to generalize and demonize a whole group of people when one doesn’t have to be bothered to view them as thoughtful, intelligent and moral human beings.

Both nonbelievers and believers through history have been wrong about a great many things about how the world works. The difference is that intellectually honest people, regardless of whether they are believers or not, must be willing to change their minds if new information comes in that goes against their previously held notions. And people who are serious about searching for truth must search after it no matter where it leads.

For centuries, science has been ever-narrowing the gap in which god and the entirety of the spiritual world resides, and increasingly, we have had fewer and fewer reasons to turn to religion for explanations about the world because the natural explanations are much more rewarding and much more elegant than anything dreamed up in holy books.

It is true, of course, that most major scientific discoveries down through the ages have been made by religious people or at least people who claimed to believe in some kind of deity, but that is only because society and culture has been dominated by religion for millennia. These discoveries were not made because of religion. In some cases, like Darwin’s earth-shattering theory of evolution, they were made in spite of religion.

DeStefano’s claim that the “greatest contributions to civilization” were made by believers is easily refuted. Some contributors to science, culture and art were believers; many were not. To make a blanket statement like that is dishonest. But in many Christian apologetic circles, politically-minded ones even more so, intellectual dishonesty is a virtue.

Yes, the new atheists have an ignorance of history bordering on madness.

Uh huh. Next.

But are they really dangerous, too?

You bet they are. The truth is, the atheist position is incapable of supporting any coherent system of morality other than ruthless social Darwinism. That’s why it has caused more deaths, murders and bloodshed than any other belief system in the history of the world.

Do I really need to elucidate the abject immorality of Christianity again? A couple paragraphs from this post will do to squash any notion that believers, and their god, have any kind of monopoly on morality or ethics:

In real life, people are free — they have freewill — to decline a gift if the giver has, perhaps, overstepped her bounds and maybe was too generous. With Christianity, we must accept the “gift” of eternal life, even though we weren’t consulted about it first, we must fear the one we are commanded to love or face the fire, and good riddance all the while. If we happen to think the four evils of Christianity, vicarious redemption, scapegoating, human sacrifice and compulsory love, are inferior doctrines of previous barbaric epochs and want nothing to do with them, well, we can be damned for that too and shooed off to hell like the carnal garbage that we are.

Oh, and by the way, since God is omniscient, he knew who would be “saved,” and conversely, he knew the face and lives of each and every person who was going to burn forever — he knew them intimately — yet he chose to put this experiment called earth into motion anyway with the full knowledge that millions would not only suffer ghastly fates in their physical lives but would be tortured forever and ever in everlasting fire, many of whom because of a mere accident of birth. He knew them all intimately, this “good” creation he made, and would watch them fall down to perdition seemingly with indifference.

Atheism has caused more bloodshed than any system in the world. Really? If we’re doing a death total, the God character in the Bible puts Hitler to shame in the sheer number of people that died on his watch. Thankfully, there’s a website for that. Dwindling in Unbelief puts the number of human people God killed, either directly or otherwise, at about 25 million. And this doesn’t begin to account for the vast numbers of believers and nonbelievers alike who were murdered after the events of the Bible for heresy or witchcraft or, you know, for fun, at the hands of believers.

It is true that history has seen its fair share of psychopathic dictators who were not believers, but they reeked havoc on humanity, not because of their atheism, but because they were simply evil people. Atheism doesn’t necessarily make a person good, nor does religion make a person bad. Often, the converse is true, but assuming each is true and then generalizing about each to win an argument is, again, dishonest, and I would wager, decidedly anti-Christian.

The idea that DeStefano would, with a straight face, attempt to suggest a “frightening connection between atheism and death” is laughable. He trots out people like Pol Pot and Stalin to make his case and then tries to argue that Hitler, modern history’s top villain, was, himself, an atheist hellbent on ending “the disease of Christianity,” a quote DeStefano uses with arrogant assertiveness that was probably never even uttered by Hitler. It’s a disputed passage. Hitler’s thoughts about the Jews, and the entire Nazi philosophy related to Jews, was built on the idea that Jews killed Jesus, first and foremost, and that is the bedrock belief of nearly all of the hatred, bigotry, subjugation and violence by Germans and other antisemites against the Jews. Again and again, Hitler referenced “providence” and “God’s will” to assert for himself and for his listeners that he was, indeed, walking a divine path.

Here are a few, of many, examples:

Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord. (Mein Kampf, p. 65)

And the founder of Christianity made no secret indeed of his estimation of the Jewish people. When He found it necessary, He drove those enemies of the human race out of the Temple of God. (Mein Kampf, p. 174)

As Fuehrer of the German people and Chancellor of the Reich, I can thank God at this moment that he has so wonderfully blessed us in our hard struggle for what is our right, and beg Him that we and all other nations may find the right way, so that not only the German people but all Europe may once more be granted the blessing of peace. (Sept. 1, 1939)

I may not be a light of the church, a pulpiteer, but deep down I am a pious man, and believe that whoever fights bravely in defense of the natural laws framed by God and never capitulates will never be deserted by the Lawgiver, but will, in the end, receive the blessings of Providence. (July 5, 1944)

DeStefano goes on to say:

Atheists don’t believe in God, so they don’t believe in any transcendent, objective moral law. Nor do they believe that human beings are made in the image of God, and so they don’t believe humans possess infinite value and dignity. When you put these two beliefs together, you have a deadly recipe that makes killing “problematic” human beings quite easy and defensible.

To suggest that nonbelievers don’t think humans have value and dignity and that killing is somehow defensible in any context is, not just wrong, but embarrassingly short sighted and mean-spirited. And we are supposed to believe that people like DeStefano have the moral high ground?

DeStefano concludes as he began, by calling atheists a well-trod schoolyard name: bullies. To review, in the length of a short op-ed column, DeStefano has called nonbelievers — many of them well-meaning, moral, truthseekers — arrogant, ignorant, dangerous, pompous prigs, loud, nasty, unapologetic, in-your-face, annoying, amoral, ignorance bordering on madness and dangerous (again).

Who is the real bully here?

[Image credit: “Constantine’s Vision” by DeviantArt user Julian-Faylona.]

Response to apologetics VI: conscience and art

So, continuing on, I want to comment briefly on the “Handbook for Christian Apologetics‘” 15th argument for the existence of God, which is from conscience.

Page 75 states,

For if atheists are right, then no objective moral values can exist. Dostoyevsky said, “If God does not exist, everything is permissible.” Atheists may know that some things are not permissible, but they do not know why.” ((http://www.amazon.com/Handbook-Christian-Apologetics-Hundreds-Questions/dp/0830817743/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1281932499&sr=8-1))

Dostoyevsky did not state this, only through his character Smerdyakov, and here is Christopher Hitchens on the matter:

If I cannot definitively prove that the usefulness of religion is in the past, and that its foundational books are transparent fables, and that it is a man-made imposition, and that it has been an enemy of science and inquiry, and that it has subsisted largely on lies and fears, and been the accomplice of ignorance and guilt as well as of slavery, genocide, racism, and tyranny, I can most certainly claim that religion is now fully aware of these criticisms. It is also fully aware of the ever-mounting evidence, concerning the origins of the cosmos and the origin of species, which consign it to marginality if not to irrelevance. I have tried to deal with most faith-based objections as they occur in the unfolding argument, but there is one remaining argument that one may not avoid.

When the worst has been said about the Inquisition and the witch trials and the Crusades and the Islamic imperial conquests and the horrors of the Old Testament, is it not true that secular and atheist regimes have committed crimes and massacres that are, in the scale of things, at least as bad if not worse? And does not the corollary hold, that men freed from religious awe will act in the most unbridled and abandoned manner? Dostoyevsky in his Brothers Karamazov was extremely critical of religion (and lived under a despotism that was sanctified by the church) and he also represented his character Smerdyakov as a vain and credulous and stupid figure, but Smerdyakov’s maxim, that “if there is no God there is no morality,” understandably resonates with those who look back on the Russian Revolution through the prism of the twentieth century. ((http://www.amazon.com/God-Not-Great-Religion-Everything/dp/0446697966/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1281932475&sr=8-1))

To go back to the top, the statement that “if atheists are right, then no objective moral values can exist” is simply wrong.

We can be and are moral beings with or without a god, and as the quote above suggests, oftentimes than not, more so without. I am currently supporting a child in Honduras whom I’ve never met. I am not a believer. So, what does that make me? An ambiguously moral person? A good person but not a spiritual one? Why does one have to be spiritual before he is good? Where are the priorities? Moral values are self-supporting because without them, society fails.

Let’s now take the ridiculous 17th argument, as presented in the book:

There is the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Therefore, there must be a God.

Yes, well again, Dawkins addressed this one as well:

I have given up counting the number of times I receive the more or less truculent challenge: ‘How do you account for Shakespeare, then?’ (Substitute Schubert, Michelangelo, etc. to taste.) The argument will be so familiar, I needn’t document it further. But the logic behind it is never spelled out, and the more you think about it the more vacuous you realize it to be. Obviously Beethoven’s late quartets are sublime. So are Shakespeare’s sonnets. They are sublime if God is there and they are sublime if he isn’t. They do not prove the existence of God; they prove the existence of Beethoven and of Shakespeare.

Thus, the sublimity of artworks or pieces of music proves the existence of their creators alone, not the creator of all.

Response to Apologetics V: consciousness, ontology, etc.

In this installment, we will attempt to cover a lot of ground. In the previous post, I covered miracles and how even supposed first-hand accounts of events in which the natural laws of physics are claimed to have been suspended aren’t necessarily credible even today, much less regarding events so far removed from our day and time, much less still events that were first recorded, some of them orally, and then copied and translated unknown numbers of times by priests and the like down through history.

Today, we will deal with Handbook of Christian Apologetics‘ listed arguments from consciousness, the origin of the idea of God and the ontological argument. Time permitting, I will also cover a couple of the remaining points of the authors’ 20 arguments for the existence of God.

Consciousness

Here are four points which put forth the argument from consciousness.

  1. We experience the universe as intelligible. This intelligibility means that the universe is graspable by intelligence.
  2. Either this intelligible universe and the finite minds so well suited to grasp it are the products of intelligence or both intelligibility and intelligence are the products of blind chance.
  3. Not blind chance.
  4. Therefore this intelligible universe and the finite minds so well suited to grasp it are the products of intelligence.

First, a few comments on this train of thought. Just because we are highly intelligent, conscious beings doesn’t give us license, willy-nilly, to assume an even higher being to explain our intelligence, much less a spiritual one. That’s just spiraling back toward an infinite regress. If monkeys had our intelligence (They clearly don’t), they too would have the capacity to know understand the cosmos, life and death and have some idea of their place in the universe, for they would have our ability to learn and cipher and use telescopes. If we suppose that monkeys are as intelligent as humans currently are (And we were markedly less intelligent near the infancy of our species in Africa), would believers be claiming that monkeys too are divinely gifted with their equally high intelligence? Would man, along with monkeys, be granted the spiritual “gift” of eternal life? Further, who’s to say that we are the only species in the universe intelligent enough to grasp our place in the world? As I’ve said before, given the billions of possible worlds out there, the likelihood is quite high that a more highly evolved species does, in fact, exist.  If so — and Richard Dawkins raises this question as well — would that higher intelligent be worthy of our worship too?

Yet, it is the business of believers to be extremely shallow in their thinking to assume that Earth is the premier, one and only planet with life in the gigantic, unfathomable world beyond our atmosphere.

After presenting the four points, the book then turns again to C.S. Lewis, who, in “Miracles,” puts forth an argument against naturalism, one in which, I must admit, is quite sophisticated … but not impenetrable.

On page 66, the authors say:

If naturalism is true, Lewis argued, then it seems to leave us with no reason for believing it to be true; for all judgments would equally and ultimately be the result of nonrational forces.

Shortly after, the authors say they were “highly tempted” to quote the entire chapter three of Lewis’ book  (We can be grateful they didn’t!), but instead, proceeded to provide a shorter version of the argument against naturalism from H.W.B. Joseph’s  Some Problems in Ethics:”

If thought is laryngeal motion, how should any one think more truly than the wind blows? All movements of bodies are equally necessary, but they cannot be discriminated as true and false. It seems as nonsensicle to call a movement true as a flavour purple or a sound avaricious. … if the principles of scientific [naturalism] … are to stand unchallenged, are themselves no more than happenings in a mind, results of bodily movements; that you or I think them sound, or think them unsound, is but another happening; that we think them no more than another such happening is itself but yet another such. And it may be said of any ground on which we may attempt to stand as true, Labitur at labetur in omne volubilis aevum [“It flows and will flow swirling on forever.]” ((H.W.B. Joseph from “Some Problems in Ethics))

What the authors, Lewis and Joseph are trying to get at here, in quite unnecessarily vague terms, is, if naturalism is true, can our own intelligence be trusted. They obviously conclude that our minds can’t be trusted because there exist numerous objective realities, each one based on the individual mind that discovered them, which, again, if we assume naturalism, are really just human mechanisms with no supernatural charge from a god to give them meaning. Thus, when naturalism fails, as they so readily assume, in comes our intelligent creator to save us from our baffled selves.

Further, the argument attempts to prove that our experience of the universe is intelligible to us because we are, indeed, intelligent, but then the authors attempt to flip over naturalism to make the case that we can’t ultimately know anything because of our limited minds of matter. Evolution by natural selection is not a chance process (point three). It may have been brought about by nonrational forces (something other than a designer), but our ability to grasp the universe is because of our intelligence as a species, not in spite of it. Attempting to negate our own intelligence and throw it heavenward is specious reasoning. Who is to say that the higher intelligence of whom we are attempting to prove the existence, is himself, a product of nonrational forces?

The origin of the idea of God and ontology

I’ll move quickly on these two points, since it relates to a previous post about Aquinas and the idea that we can, indeed, think of a perfectly, perfect being without there actually being one. The authors here present the case of René Descartes, who presented the idea that since we have “ideas of many things,” the ideas (whatever they are) must have either come from an outside source or from within ourselves. We have an idea of an all-perfect, infallible god. Thus, since the idea of such a god couldn’t have come from ourselves, since we are fallible and imperfect, the idea must have come from God. This argument is very closely related to the next, which is the ontological argument. This other wittily phrased “proof” suggests that God exists both in the mind and in reality. From Anselm’s version:

  1. It is greater for a thing to exist in the mind and in reality than in the mind alone (No arguments there).
  2. “God” means “that than which a greater cannot be thought.”
  3. Suppose that God exists in the mind but not in reality.
  4. Then a greater than God could be thought (namely, a being that has all the qualities our thought of God has plus existence).
  5. But this is impossible, for God is “that than which a greater cannot be thought.”
  6. Therefore God exists in the mind and in reality.

Obviously, this word-gamery has summoned the ire and able pens of many a philosopher and thinker, not the least of whom were Immanuel Kant and David Hume. Hume had this to say:

…to reflect on anything simply, and to reflect on it as existent, are nothing different from each other. That idea, when conjoin’d with the idea of any object, makes no addition to it. ((A Treatise of Human Nature, Bk. I, Pt. II, sec. 6))

and Kant, this:

By whatever…predicates we may conceive of a thing…we do not make the least addition to the thing when we further declare that this thing is. Otherwise, it would not be exactly the same thing that exists, but something more than we had thought in the concept; and we could not, therefore, say that the exact object of my concept exists. ((Critique of Pure Reason, translated by N. K. Smith, B 627))

Richard Dawkins also included a section on the ontological argument in his book. I reference him often because he really has covered most of the ground that is, conversely, being covered in this apologetics book. Here is Dawkins on Anselm’s argument:

An odd aspect of Anselm’s argument is that it was originally addressed not to humans but to God himself, in the form of a prayer (you’d think that any entity capable of listening to a prayer would need no convincing of his own existence). It is possible to conceive, Anselm said, of a being than which nothing greater can be conceived. Even an atheist can conceive of such a superlative being, though he would deny its existence in the real world. But, goes the argument, a being that doesn’t exist in the real world is, by that very fact, less than perfect. Therefore we have a contradiction and, hey presto, God exists!

Let me translate this infantile argument into the appropriate language, which is the language of the playground:

‘Bet you I can prove God exists.’
‘Bet you can’t.’
‘Right then, imagine the most perfect perfect perfect thing possible.’
‘Okay, now what?’
‘Now, is that perfect perfect perfect thing real? Does it exist?’
‘No, it’s only in my mind.’
‘But if it was real it would be even more perfect, because a really really perfect thing would have to be better than a silly old imaginary thing. So I’ve proved that God exists. Nur Nurny Nur Nur. All atheists are fools.’

I had my childish wiseacre choose the word ‘fools’ advisedly. Anselm himself quoted the first verse of Psalm 14, ‘The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God,’ and he had the cheek to use the name ‘fool’ (Latin insipiens) for his hypothetical atheist: Hence, even the fool is convinced that something exists in the understanding, at least, than which nothing greater can be conceived. For, when he hears of this, he understands it. And whatever is understood, exists in the understanding. And assuredly that, than which nothing greater can be conceived, cannot exist in the understanding alone. For, suppose it exists in the understanding alone: then it can be conceived to exist in reality; which is greater. ((Richard Dawkins, “The God Delusion,” page 80))

And finally, Norman Malcolm:

The doctrine that existence is a perfection is remarkably queer. It makes sense and is true to say that my future house will be a better one if it is insulated than if it is not insulated; but what could it mean to say that it will be a better house if it exists than if it does not? ((http://www.iep.utm.edu/ont-arg/))

Response to Apologetics II: faith and reason

A couple days ago I began adding some thoughts on whether faith and reason are compatible in light of my recent reading of “Handbook of Christian Apologetics.” In my previous post, I outlined three different kinds of truths that are presented in the book: faith without reason, faith married to reason and reason without faith.

As the authors state, precepts that fall into the faith without reason category are the trinity, the divinity of Christ, the resurrection of Lazarus, etc. These ideas can’t be proven because they violate the laws of nature (i.e., no one so far as we know is divine nor do people come back to life). But it’s here the authors claim that they can present a cumulative argument for these doctrinal concepts by answering all objections to them. And they proceed with the following:

For example, suppose a Unitarian objects to the Trinity because “it splits God into triplets.” We can show that this is a misunderstanding: it does not mean three Gods, but one God in three Persons. Or suppose a logician says it is a contradiction to call anything both one and three. We can reply that God is one nature, not three, and three persons, not one.  This is not a contradiction, any more than we are: we are two natures (spirit and animal, mind and matter, soul and body) but one person.

My inclination is that many of the arguments presented in this book will claim that thinkers down through the ages, in their rebuttals of faith, have simply misunderstood doctrine on these key points. To take up the notion of the trinity briefly, in the first place, the idea that we ourselves consist of even two natures is wildly uncertain, much less that any being can have three, and science and psychology have long-since shown that the thing that some call “the soul” is contained solely within the mind, which makes us who we are. Shut off the brain, and the body is no more. We certainly have very distinct personalities, and we have feelings and memories. But so do dogs and cats. They have a certain and specific essence just like we do; ours is just more complex because our brains are more complex.

Back to the trinity and the business about three persons. From the quote above, we learn that God is both “one nature, not three, and three persons.” But the authors also attempt to substantiate this by saying that, likewise, we have two natures. But God, as they said, just has one. I don’t see how comparing “natures” and “persons” proves anything or answers any objections. There is no getting around the claim that believers still say God consists of three persons. In psychology, we call this dissociative identity disorder.

After addressing the polytheism of Hindus, which, as he said, isn’t really polytheism, but “just different manifestations or incarnations of the one god,” Richard Dawkins, in his “The God Delusion,” at length addressed the perils of the trinity doctrine in characteristic wittiness:

Christians should warm to such sophistry (masking actual polytheism in a cloak of monotheism). Rivers of medieval ink, not to mention blood, have been squandered over the ‘mystery’ of the trinity, and in suppressing deviations such as the Arian heresy. Arius of Alexandria, in the fourth century AD, denied that Jesus was consubstantial (i.e. of the same substance or essence) with God. What on earth could that possibly mean, you are probably asking? Substance? What ‘substance’? What exactly do you mean by ‘essence’? ‘Very little’ seems the only reasonable reply. Yet the controversy split Christendom down the middle for a century, and the Emperor Constantine ordered that all copies of Arius’s book should be burned. Splitting Christendom by splitting hairs – such has ever been the way of theology.

Do we have one God in three parts, or three Gods in one? The Catholic Encyclopedia clears up the matter for us, in a masterpiece of theological close reasoning: “In the unity of the Godhead there are three Persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, these Three Persons being truly distinct one from another. Thus, in the words of the Athanasian Creed: ‘the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, and yet there are not three Gods but one God.'”

As if that were not clear enough, the Encyclopedia quotes the third-century theologian St Gregory the Miracle Worker: There is therefore nothing created, nothing subject to another in the trinity: nor is there anything that has been added as though it once had not existed, but had entered afterwards: therefore the Father has never been without the Son, nor the Son without the Spirit: and this same trinity is immutable and unalterable forever. Whatever miracles may have earned St Gregory his nickname, they were not miracles of honest lucidity. His words convey the characteristically obscurantist flavour of theology, which – unlike science or most other branches of human scholarship – has not moved on in eighteen centuries.

Plus, merely saying God is three persons doesn’t even make it so, and evidence from the Bible is scant on this point as well.

Former pastor Dan Barker addressed biblical accounts in his book, “Godless,” namely 1 John 5:7, which says:

And there are three that bear witness in heaven, the Father, the Word (Jesus) and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.

Barker noted on page 234 of the paperback edition that

invoking the trinity solves nothing because such an idea is more contradictory than the problem is attempts to solve (and I would add, more complex and reference Occam’s razor, as if an all-powerful, all-knowing being weren’t complex enough!).  (By the way, the text of 1 John 5:7 does not appear in any ancient Greek manuscript. It was added much later by the Catholic Church into the Latin Vulgate. See Misquoting Jesus by Bart Ehrman for documentation of this fraudulent tampering of the bible.)

Here are some more details of the later insertion of the only biblical passage that explicitly links the three entities. Other passages, of source, make reference to them.

Elsewhere, Barker brings to light other problems with trinity, and more generally, the gospel itself. On page 265, he had this to say about Paul’s account of various teachings versus Jesus’:

Paul rarely quotes Jesus, and this is odd since he used many other devices of persuasion to make his points. There are numerous places in the teachings of Paul where he could have and should have invoked the teachings of Jesus, but he ignores them. He contradicts Jesus’ teachings on divorce (1 Corinthians 7:10), allowing for none while Jesus permitted exceptions. Jesus taught a trinitarian baptism (“in the name of the Father, the Son and Holy Ghost), but Paul and his disciples baptized in Jesus’ name only — which makes perfect sense if the concept of the trinity was developed later (emphasis mine). Paul never claims to have met the pre-resurrected Jesus. In fact, one of the most glaring contradictions of the bible appears in two difference accounts of how Paul supposedly met the disembodied Christ for the first time (see Chapter 14).

Thus, through all of this, the authors of the apologetics book have a lot of work ahead of them if they are to adequately, or even minutely, answer all of the objections of the trinity and many other issues of faith. Reason, indeed, would not lead us to assume a trinity, much less a god, at all because both violate the laws of nature, and to begin on the assumption that God exists, as the authors do in Chapter 2, before we even get to the business of answering objections to faith, is begging the question, and not at all reasonable or logical. This is peculiar since earlier in the book, the authors warn of the dangers of question-begging, but appear to commit that very fallaciousness throughout the opening of their book.