An Atheist Reads Mere Christianity

Book Three: Christian Behavior (Ch. 1-6)

Chapter 1: The Three Parts of Morality

Summary:

Lewis begins by saying that even though morals can sometimes seem to stop us from having a good time, in reality they are the rules for running the human machine properly. He then draws a distinction between the concept of moral laws and moral ideals, saying that while moral perfection is an ideal in the sense that it can never be attained, it should not be confused with other things called ideals which are merely objects of fancy. To call a man of upright morals “a man of ideals” is dangerous, Lewis says, because it suggests that the ideal of moral perfection is a matter of personal taste. This, Lewis says, would be a disastrous mistake.
Lewis also cautions against thinking of yourself as someone special for striving to come closer to the moral ideal than others. It is no better to expect congratulations for good morality, Lewis argues, than for getting a sum correct in a math calculation. “It would be idiotic not to try” to do it right all the time, he says. For this reason, he finds “rules” and “obedience” to be better words to use when talking of morality than “ideals” and “idealism.”
Lewis describes two general ways humans go wrong, morally: in their interactions with each other, and in their own minds as the various parts of themselves interact with each other. “. . . think of humanity as a band playing a tune. . . . Each player’s individual instrument must be in tune and also each must come in at the right moment so as to combine with all the others.” (C.S. Lewis, MERE CHRISTIANITY, p. 71)
But what kind of music is the band trying to play? To answer this, Lewis proposes a third function of morality. Besides being a guide for harmony among individuals in a society, and within individuals themselves, it also shows us what life as a whole is all about, directing the tune we play, as it were.
Lewis says modern society usually only pays much attention to the first function, and ignores the other two. “What is the good of drawing up, on paper, rules for social behaviour, if we know that, in fact, our greed, cowardice, ill temper, and self-conceit are going to prevent us from keeping them?” (p. 73)
Lewis stresses that improving society is very important, but ultimately futile if the character of the individuals making up that society is not also improved. “You cannot make men good by law: and without good men you cannot have a good society. That is why we must go on to think of the second thing: of morality inside the individual.” (p. 73)
The third function is also important, Lewis adds, because what one believes about religion — whether or not one believes in immortality, for instance — will affect the tune one plays. Christianity asserts that people live forever, which means, says Lewis, that individuals are ultimately more important than states or civilizations, since these institutions do not live forever. Lewis connects this with the difference between totalitarianism and democracy.
Lewis says it is the third function that brings out the most obvious differences between Christianity and other systems of morality, and that for the rest of the book he will be assuming the Christian point of view, and looking at the world as if Christianity were true.

Analysis:

Yet more of the moral argument. I feel like I’ve been immersed — or perhaps submerged — in the moral argument since I started reading this book, because so far it really is all Lewis has talked about. I find it interesting that Lewis prefers to think of morality in terms of obedience and rules, since as a few of you may have seen, I just posted a new video about the moral argument — I posted it the day before I posted this one, actually. And the main point of that video is that thinking of morality in terms of obedience and rules renders it meaningless. I think we need reasons why we see given things as right or wrong. So I prefer to think of morality in terms of questions and answers.
As for the three functions of morality: I’ll buy that. My quarrel with Lewis here is that he thinks morality is dictated from on-high, which means that God is trying to conduct the tune we play, to borrow Lewis’s metaphor, whereas I think we generate our own morality — as individuals and collectively — and in that way we’re able to play our own tune. And I think if we recognized and accepted what morality really is and where it comes from, it would be easier for us to play a tune that more people would enjoy — does that make any sense, or have I fucked that metaphor to death?

Chapter 2: The ‘Cardinal Virtues’

Summary:

Lewis offers another way of dividing up morality. Rather than the three functions discussed in Chapter 1, morality can be thought of as consisting of seven virtues — four cardinal virtues, which Lewis says all civilized people accept, and three theological virtues, which only Christians care about. For this chapter, Lewis will handle only the four cardinal virtues, which are: prudence, temperance, justice and fortitude.
Prudence, Lewis says, means “taking the trouble to think out what you are doing and what is likely to come of it.” Lewis mentions Christ’s teaching that only those who are like children will enter the kingdom of Heaven. But this only means that God wants us to have a child’s heart, Lewis says. We must still have a grown-up’s head. God loves people without much common sense all the same, but he wants every bit of intelligence and sense we have. “Anyone who is honestly trying to be a Christian will soon find his intelligence being sharpened: one of the reasons it needs no special education to be a Christian is that Christianity is an education itself.” (p. 78) (Maybe that’s how he knows all of these things he’s telling us about God — magic Christian education.)
Temperance means not teetotalism, but taking the proper measure and no more of all pleasures. Temperance also does not mean expecting all others to give up the things you have given up: “An individual Christian may see fit to give up all sorts of things for special reasons — marriage, or meat, or beer, or the cinema, but the moment he starts saying the things are bad in themselves, or looking down his nose at other people who do use them, he has taken the wrong turning.” (pp. 78-79) Lewis dislikes the modern practice of using temperance to refer only to drink, since it allows people to forget that it is possible to be intemperate about lots of other things.
Justice means fairness, honesty and truthfulness, not merely legal justice. And fortitude means two kinds of courage: that which faces danger, and that which guts it out despite pain. Fortitude is necessary, Lewis says, for practicing the other virtues.
Lewis draws a distinction between doing a virtuous action and being a virtuous person. The latter is most important, and consists of not just doing the right things, but doing them for the right reasons. “We might think that God wanted simply obedience to a set of rules: whereas He really wants people of a particular sort.” (p. 80)

Analysis:

Not much to say about this chapter. I agree that doing virtuous actions is different from being a virtuous person. But what Lewis doesn’t say is that being a virtuous person consists, perhaps not entirely but at least primarily, of being a person who does virtuous actions. If you don’t drink or smoke or do drugs or fuck to excess, then whatever is going on in your head, whatever your reasons, to me you are a temperate person. If you treat people fairly, if you stand up for yourself, then you are a person of justice and fortitude. A person who regularly does virtuous actions and tries to avoid doing wicked actions is a virtuous person.
One more quote from Lewis here, which I can’t resist sharing because it jumped right out at me. Right before the quote I read a minute ago about how Christianity is an education that sharpens your intelligence, is this: “If you are thinking of becoming a Christian, I warn you, you are embarking on something which is going to take the whole of you, brains and all.” (p. 78)

Chapter 3: Social Morality

Summary:

Lewis admits that Christ did not come to bring a new morality of how people relate to one another. The Golden Rule was known to be right by most people long before the days of the New Testament.
Lewis also stresses that Christianity does not have any particular political strategy for seeing the Golden Rule implemented in the world. Rather, it is meant for all people, at all times, and therefore such a specific program would not be practical. Lewis believes the church should take a leading role, but by “church” he means not an institution, but the whole of the Christian people.
“And when they say that the Church should give us a lead, they ought to mean that some Christians — those who happen to have the right talents — should be economists and statesmen, and that all economists and statesmen should be Christians, and that their whole efforts in politics and economics should be directed to putting ‘Do as you would be done by’ into action.” (p. 83)
That being said, Lewis says the New Testament does provide a picture of what a fully Christian society would be like. This picture includes principles such as: if a man does not work, he ought not to eat; everyone is to work, and his work is to produce something good; no “silly luxuries” or “sillier advertisements” for those luxuries. In other words, Lewis says, it would be a Leftist society. It would also be a society that insisted on obedience — from children to parents, from wives to husbands (which Lewis admits will be very unpopular). And finally, it would be a cheerful society, with lots of singing and rejoicing and no worry or anxiety.
Lewis doubts many people would like this fully Christian society if they encountered it, though they might be drawn to certain aspects of it. This is because we have all departed from the plan for a truly Christian society.
Lewis takes a paragraph to point out that the ancient Greeks, the ancient Jews, and the Christians of the Middle Ages all agreed that lending money at interest should be forbidden. Lewis notes that this practice, which we call investment, is the basis for our modern economic system, and says that he is not willing to declare whether this is wrong or not. For this we need the Christian economist.
Lewis stresses the importance of Charity — everyone must work, he says, so that everyone will have something to give to those in need. “If our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small.” (p. 86)
Lewis acknowledges that some readers may have been troubled by his statement that a Christian society would be Leftist — some because he didn’t go far enough, some because they felt he had gone much too far. Lewis cautions those readers to leave aside their desire to find vindication for their own views and instead focus on discovering what Christianity really is. “I may repeat ‘Do as you would be done by’ till I am black in the face, but I cannot really carry it out till I love my neighbor as myself: and I cannot learn to love my neighbor as myself till I learn to love God: and I cannot learn to love God except by learning to obey Him.” (p. 87)

Analysis:

Now I have a few things to really sink my teeth into. Lewis describes this fully Christian society, then admits that not everyone’s going to like it. And he explains not everyone liking it by blaming our rebellion, our selfishness, our living apart from God’s plan. But that’s horseshit — the reason this fully Christian society described by Lewis doesn’t sound very nice is because it’s totalitarian. It’s interesting that in Chapter 1 of Book Three Lewis mentions the difference between totalitarianism and democracy. What is he describing here when he talks about this fully Christian society? “no passengers or parasites,” “if man does not work, he ought not to eat,” no “silly luxuries,” no putting on airs, obedience (and, Lewis says, “outward marks of respect”) to “properly appointed magistrates” compelled from everyone, in addition to obedience to parents and husbands. And not only obedience, but good cheer will be compulsory, too! There will be singing and rejoicing, and there will be no worry or anxiety! Is this society to be led by Christ or by Anthony Fremont from The Twilight Zone ?
What is this fully Christian society imagined by Lewis but totalitarian? It’s the most horrific nightmare of a dictatorship that can be conceived. And I detest the prospect of living in such a society not because I’m a free person who wants to live in a free society, but because I’ve departed from God’s plan. It’s my fault. If only I were sufficiently Christian, I could see how God is really offering us a sweet deal by designing this society of compulsory work, obedience, and love for us all to either live in or reject in favor of Hell. No thank you. Fuck Lewis’s fully Christian society, and fuck anyone, god or otherwise, who expects me to jump at the chance to live in it.

Chapter 4: Morality and Psychoanalysis

Summary:

Lewis considers what the Christian idea of a good man is. Before he gets too specific, he turns to the relationship between Christian morality and psychoanalysis. Lewis says that Sigmund Freud should be treated with respect when he is discussing matters in his field, on which he is an expert, although his broader philosophy of the world betrays him as “an amateur” on those matters. Psychoanalysis itself, Lewis says, does not contradict Christianity at all — in fact, it overlaps with Christianity at some points, and Lewis says everyone should know a little something about it.
Lewis describes what is involved in the making of a moral choice: there is the act of choosing, and there are the feelings and impulses which compete with each other in order to allow the choice to be made. These feelings and impulses, Lewis says, are of two types: normal (or natural), those which are common to all people; and unnatural, which result from things that have gone wrong in a person’s subconscious. Examples of natural impulses, Lewis says, would be fear of something truly dangerous, or a man’s desire for a woman; examples of unnatural impulses would be irrational fear of cats or spiders, or “the perverted desire of a man for a man” (p. 89)
Psychoanalysis works to remove the unnatural impulses, to provide better material from which choices can be made. Morality is concerned, then, with the choices themselves. Psychoanalysts can rid the mind of “doo-dahs,” as Lewis calls them, but they can’t repair moral failings. Only morality can help us to make the right choice.
Lewis says that the unnatural impulses are a disease, not a sin, and that God does not judge people for them. Rather, God judges people for moral choices.
Lewis doesn’t like to view morality as God making a bargain with us, to reward us for following his rules or punish us for breaking his rules. Rather, with each moral choice we transform ourselves bit by bit, moving toward harmony with God, or away from God to what Lewis calls “a state of war and hatred with God.” Looking at morality this way helps to explain how Christians can simultaneously believe that sinful thoughts are as bad as sinful actions, and yet accept that murderers can be saved through repentance. “One man may be so placed that his anger sheds the blood of thousands, and another so placed that however angry he gets he will only be laughed at. But the little mark on the soul may be much the same in both.” (p. 93)
Lewis closes the chapter by asserting that the further we go in the right moral direction, the more we grow in knowledge: “Good people know about good and evil; bad people do not know about either.” (p. 93)

Analysis:

Remove the reliance on Christianity, the insistence that Christian morality is the true morality, and there’s not much to argue with here, either. I’m fine with psychoanalysis. I think it helps people, I think it can help to overcome irrational fears and destructive impulses, help people to see the world in a more clear-headed way — good on Lewis for arguing in favor of it. Obviously he wasn’t a Scientologist.
The reference to “the perverted desire of a man for a man” was disappointing, but not atypical for the time in which Lewis was writing, and sadly, not atypical for a Christian of the present time, either.
Lewis’s bit about how God judges us for the moral choices we make, not for the unnatural impulses we’ve accumulated, sounds much more tolerant and humane than many Christians today sound when they talk about people they don’t like, but as I said in the last video, it’s a case where you have to ask the question, “How do you know?” Lewis is speaking with a great deal of intimate knowledge about the mind and will and expectation of this God of his, and I know not all of this shit is in the Bible. Lewis’s version of God, like the God most Christians believe in, I think, comes just as much from the imagination as from the scripture.

Chapter 5: Sexual Morality

Summary:

Lewis turns now to the Christian virtue of chastity, which is distinct from the social standard of modesty or propriety. While rules of propriety can change with the customs of society, the rule of chastity remains the same for all Christians, at all times. A person may cross the bounds of propriety without necessarily being unchaste — they only violate the rule of chastity if they do so in order to “excite lust in themselves or others”.
Lewis acknowledges that, as standards of propriety relax, younger people see their elders as prudes, and elders see the younger generation as corrupt and improper. Lewis doesn’t think either judgment is fair, and advises: “A real desire to believe all the good you can of others and to make others as comfortable as you can will solve most of the problems.” (p. 95)
Chastity is the most unpopular of all Christian virtues, Lewis says, because there is no getting around it: “Either marriage, with complete faithfulness to your partner, or else total abstinence.” (p. 95)
Lewis says that sex, biologically, exists for procreation, and that if every young man had sex whenever he wanted to, and every sex act produced a baby, then overpopulation would soon be a problem. Appetite, Lewis says, is in excess of function, and therefore must be curbed.
Lewis compares appetite for sex to appetite for food, but claims that the food instinct is not nearly so vulnerable to perversion as the sex instinct. Few people feel compelled to eat things that are not food, but comparatively many feel compelled to engage in “warped” sex behaviors. While Lewis insists that sex and sexual pleasure are not bad in and of themselves, and that Christianity does not hold them to be inherently sinful, he also criticizes what he calls the contemporary propaganda for lust. “Poster after poster, film after film, novel after novel, associate the idea of sexual indulgence with the ideas of health, normality, youth, frankness, and good humour. Now this association is a lie.” (p. 100)
Lewis argues that to surrender to all our sexual desires whenever we feel them would lead to chaos. There must be a set of principles by which we lead our lives and according to which we conduct ourselves. He admits that Christian principles of chastity are stricter than many others, but also reminds us that Christians get help from God in maintaining their chastity. God may not always provide as much help as we would like, and we will fall short occasionally, but when this happens we must pick ourselves up, ask forgiveness, and try again, and this process itself teaches us dependence on God, which is even more important than chastity or the other virtues.
Lewis closes by asserting that, despite his devoting a chapter to the subject, sexuality and chastity are not of central importance to Christianity. “If anyone thinks that Christians regard unchastity as the supreme vice, he is quite wrong. The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronizing and spoiling sport, and back-biting, the pleasures of power, of hatred. . . . This is why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute. But, of course, it is better to be neither.” (pp. 102-103)

Analysis:

Again, especially as seen in that last quote, I’m impressed by the tolerance and compassion and humanity Lewis demonstrates. I wish some more of that had rubbed off on the modern Christian apologists who lean on him so heavily.
But, beyond that accepting attitude (or at least, accepting when compared to the attitude of many judgmental American Christians), this chapter is a load of horseshit. Lewis talks about how sexuality and sexual pleasure are not inherently sinful or bad things, which is good, I’m glad he says that, but then he turns right around and attacks every type of sexual behavior that doesn’t fall within his concept of Christian chastity. And when he does that, whether he means to or not, he is making something dirty and bad out of sexuality, because he is ascribing everything outside of his definition of acceptable to our “warped natures.” “Warped” — there’s a nice word to use when describing anyone who has any type of sex with anyone that is not their heterosexual spouse. I don’t say there shouldn’t be standards, or that everything imaginable should be permitted and celebrated — but between Lewis’s Christian chastity and total permission, there’s a lot of space.

Chapter 6: Christian Marriage

Summary:

Lewis expresses reluctance to deal with the subject of marriage — first, because Christian marriage doctrines are extremely unpopular, and second because, as of this writing, he has never been married himself. Nevertheless, he finds it impossible to treat Christian morals without including marriage.
Lewis describes Christ’s idea of marriage: the man and the woman are seen as a single organism (“one flesh”), made to be compatible in every way, not merely sexually. The attempt to isolate sexual union from the rest of marriage through intercourse outside of marriage is, Lewis says, a “monstrosity.” But: “The Christian attitude does not mean that there is anything wrong about sexual pleasure . . . It means that you must not isolate that pleasure and try to get it by itself, any more than you ought to try to get the pleasures of taste without swallowing and digesting, by chewing things and spitting them out again.” (p. 105)
Marriage ought to be for life, and this is related more closely to the virtue of justice than to chastity, for a marriage is a promise made before God, a promise that reigns in our sexual lust, and a promise that should be kept no matter what. Lewis scoffs at the notion of ending a marriage because the couple has fallen out of love, since this “. . . really leaves no room for marriage as a contract or promise at all.” (p. 107) The promise made when you are in love commits you to remain true to your partner for life, even if you cease to be in love with that partner.
There are good reasons for remaining in marriage for life, even if love is no longer there: raising children, protecting the women, and most importantly to Lewis, because the married couple that has ceased to be “in love” has not necessarily ceased to love each other. This quieter kind of love, he says, is more durable and dependable than the more exciting kind, and it is on this love that the marriage should run.
People get the idea from books that they should expect to remain in love forever, and this just isn’t realistic. “It is simply no good trying to keep any thrill: that is the very worst thing you can do. Let the thrill go — let it die away — go on through that period of death into the quieter interest and happiness that follow — and you will find you are living in a world of new thrills all the time.” (p. 111)
Despite his feelings, Lewis cautions his fellow Christians from trying to impose their beliefs on others through the law: “A great many people seem to think that if you are a Christian yourself you should try to make divorce difficult for everyone. I do not think that. At least I know I should be very angry if the Mohammedans tried to prevent the rest of us from drinking wine. My own view is that the Churches should frankly recognize that the majority of the British people are not Christians and, therefore, cannot be expected to live Christian lives. There ought to be two distinct kinds of marriage: one governed by the State with rules enforced on all citizens, the other governed by the Church with rules enforced by her on her own members.” (p. 112)
Now onto the notion of Christian wives obeying their husbands, which Lewis says is even more unpopular. The man is said to be the head of the marriage, which raises two questions: why must there be a head at all? And why should the head be the man?
To the first question, Lewis answers that since marriage is meant to be permanent, there must be a definite head of the relationship in order to decide the family policy in instances of disagreement between husband and wife.
To the second question, Lewis asks, “Well, firstly, is there any very serious wish that it should be the woman?” (p. 113) and goes on to describe how often a woman will disparage a couple where the wife bosses the man around. From this, Lewis concludes that there is something unnatural about wives ruling over husbands. Secondly, the man ought to be the head because, in dealings with the world beyond the family itself, the man is usually much more just to outsiders than the woman. The woman, Lewis says, is usually fighting for her family against the rest of the world, as the trustee of their interests. It is the man’s job, then, to protect the rest of the world from the zealous “family patriotism” of the wife. To demonstrate this, Lewis asks who you would rather deal with if the dog from next door bit your child — the man of the house, or the lady? “Or, if you are a married woman, let me ask you this question. Much as you admire your husband, would you not say that his chief failing is his tendency not to stick up for his rights and yours against the neighbours as vigorously as you would like? A bit of an Appeaser?” (p. 114)

Analysis:

Jesus Christ! Generalize much? Also, I found this chapter ever so slightly sexist and misogynistic — don’t know if you noticed that as I summarized or not.
Regarding the permanence of marriage — shouldn’t the decision about whether or not to continue a marriage be ultimately left up to the two people in it? Is it really the business of the church, or anyone else outside of the couple, and perhaps their children? What business does the church have in encouraging people to remain in unhappy marriages?
I applaud Lewis’s statement that the church shouldn’t try to impose itself on non-Christians through the law. I’m writing and recording this one day after North Carolina passed an amendment to its state constitution banning anything other than heterosexual marriage from being recognized as a legal union, so I feel the importance and the justice and the fairness of the attitude expressed by Lewis in this chapter very keenly right now. Again, I wish this had rubbed off on the modern Christians who take their cues from Lewis. Maybe they forgot that was in here.
And yet, as I applaud Lewis for that, I must also absolutely reject this condescending, sexist, and insulting justification for the old “wives, obey your husbands” injunction. I recently attended a Christian wedding, and when the preacher got to the part where he told the husband that he was the spiritual leader of the household and it was his job to take care of his wife, and told the bride that it was her job to cooperate with him and support him, it was all I could do not to get up and walk out. Why this sort of thing is not as offensive to us as racial bigotry or anti-gay bigotry, I have no idea. It’s revolting. It’s incredibly offensive. And then this bullshit justification, that the wives are just so devoted to their children that if the husband doesn’t hold them back, look out, world! Could he be more paternalistic and patronizing?
What about the radical notion that the husband and wife are equals? And they resolve conflicts by talking to each other like grown-ups? Lewis says of the need for there to be a head in the marriage, “You cannot have a permanent association without a constitution.” (p. 113) And the constitution of a Christian marriage establishes that the husband should always get his way. And to think that this garbage, this bigoted nonsense, came from the pen of an intelligent and rational man. It’s horrendously offensive. The sooner we rid ourselves of attitudes like these, the better off we’ll be.
Not a very pleasant note to end on . . .

Next time: Book Three: Christian Behavior (Ch. 7-12)

An Atheist Reads Mere Christianity

Book Two: What Christians Believe

Before I begin looking at Book Two, let me go back briefly to something I covered in the previous video. I argued that, for me, it doesn’t make sense to believe in morality as something that exists independently from humanity, since so far as we know humanity is the only example of a moral being. Several of you commented to remind me that there is very interesting evidence to suggest that other animals, most notably great apes, chimpanzees, have some rudimentary concept of morality, as well. I agree with you, and in fact that actually strengthens my objection to Lewis’s assertion that outside observers couldn’t discover human morality merely by watching human behavior, because it dictates what we ought to do, not what we do. But of course, to a large degree it does dictate — or at least strongly affect — what we do, which is how we’ve been able to discern what we think might be moral behavior in other animals. I didn’t mention it last week because the verdict isn’t in yet, and because I’ve most often seen this sort of behavior in chimps and other apes described as premoral, which tells me we don’t think these other animals have attained the same moral awareness, or the same level of moral complexity, as we have. But nevertheless, when I said that human behavior is the only thing we know of to which morality can be applied, I was wrong. I need to amend that: the behavior of moral animals, including humans and quite possibly chimpanzees and other great apes, is the only thing to which morality can be applied.

Also, I said in the previous video that in order for math to exist, you need people to do math. Someone left a comment that it’s better to say that the language of math wouldn’t exist without people doing math, but the mathematical concepts would still be real, whether there were brains capable of perceiving and understanding them or not. And I agree with that, too. So I stand corrected.

Chapter 1: The Rival Conceptions of God

Summary:

Lewis begins by asserting that a Christian need not believe that other religions have got it entirely wrong, merely that when Christianity and another religion differ, Christianity is right and that other faith is wrong. Lewis also refers to his own atheism: “When I was an atheist I had to try to persuade myself that most of the human race have always been wrong about the question that mattered to them most; when I became a Christian, I was able to take a more liberal view.” (C.S. Lewis, MERE CHRISTIANITY, p. 35)
Lewis demonstrates how Christianity and other religions agree by reducing from humanity in general to Christians in particular through a series of divisions. The first division is those who believe in a god or gods (Christians, Jews, Muslims, ancient Greeks and Romans, Hindus, etc.) from atheists. The next division Lewis makes is between Pantheism and the moral God of Christians, Jews and Muslims. Next, but related: those who believe God created the universe, from those who believe God is the universe in some way. In believing that God made the universe, but is not himself contained in every piece of it, Christians are able to explain the condition of the universe as an essentially good world that has gone wrong, which God is now insisting that we put right again.
As to the question of why this world made by a good God has gone wrong, Lewis says, “And for many years I simply refused to listen to the Christian answers to this question, because I kept on feeling ‘whatever you say, and however clever your arguments are, isn’t it much simpler and easier to say that the world was not made by any intelligent power? Aren’t all your arguments simply a complicated attempt to avoid the obvious?’ . . .

“. . . My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?” (p. 38)

Analysis:

Let me just start there at the end, since it ties in with the beginning very nicely. We can see why Lewis spent the first section of Mere Christianity presenting his protracted version of the moral argument. It’s obviously very important to him — in fact, at this point it seems like it was the very thing that turned him into a Christian from an atheist. So let’s start with that quote I just read and then go back and discuss Lewis’s atheism.
Lewis says he used to feel that Christians were just straining to avoid the obvious, because it’s just easier to argue that the world wasn’t made by an intelligent power. While I think that is certainly true, that’s not a very good reason to be an atheist. An atheist who says he doesn’t believe in gods because it’s just easier that way deserves no more respect than a Christian who says he believes in the resurrection of Jesus because he wants to see his dead wife again someday. Both are basing their beliefs about reality on what is preferable to them, not on what they have reason to believe is true. And that’s the key — you must have a reason, a real, compelling reason to believe that something is true. Without at least one such reason — many such reasons would be preferable — I submit not merely that you shouldn’t believe a given claim, but that you won’t believe it. Belief isn’t nearly as voluntary as we make it sound. Most of what we believe, we don’t believe out of choice, but because we’ve been convinced. We believe it because we honestly think that it’s true. I don’t believe the Earth goes around the Sun because I think it’s a nice story, or because it’s easier to believe that than the geocentric model. I believe it because I have good reasons to think that it’s true. So, whether and atheist finds belief in no gods to be easier or not should be irrelevant to his holding of that belief. I’m an atheist — and most atheists I know are atheists — because it is the most sensible position given what we know about the universe. Not because it’s less complicated, not because it’s less philosophically messy — because we think it’s true. Period. How we feel about it, the advantages or disadvantages we find along with it are all separate issues.
Lewis also says that he got hung up on the universe being cruel and unjust, and how he was aware of what cruelty and injustice were in the first place. We discussed morality at length in the previous video, so I’ll just add here that an atheistic universe, as I see it, is neither just nor unjust. It simply is. It’s morally neutral. The universe isn’t cruel. I’m not even comfortable calling it indifferent. It’s simply unaware. It’s not that it doesn’t care about us, it’s that it doesn’t even know we’re here. The universe is not a moral being, therefore our concepts of morality, or cruelty and justice, don’t apply at all.
Now onto Lewis’s atheism. He opens the chapter by saying that an atheist is burdened with having to believe that most of humanity has always been wrong about the existence of gods. Now, as an atheist this is what I believe. But I don’t find it to be a burden at all. In fact, I find it to be a pretty obvious conclusion. My friend Kim has said this to me before, how she finds it difficult to believe that most of humanity has just gotten this so wrong for so long. And other friends of mine who aren’t atheists have said similar things. But why is it so difficult to believe? Humanity, throughout its history, has gotten pretty much everything wrong most of the time. Nothing against humanity — I’m a great fan of our species, actually. It’s just the nature of our existence. We usually get things wrong before we get them right. Before we figured out how the solar system worked, we had that wrong for thousands of years. Before we figured out that our solar system was part of a galaxy, and that our galaxy was only one among billions of others in an unfathomably vast and ancient universe, we had that way wrong, too! Same with the causes of disease, the causes of earthquakes and weather, the nature of light, the way our bodies derive energy from food. And those are things we can see, and study, and gather evidence about, and test and experiment on — is it really that hard to swallow that we’d also be wrong about things for which there is no evidence at all?
Let’s look at this from another angle. Even if you’re not an atheist, I don’t see why it’s such a big hurdle to believe that most of humanity has gotten it wrong about God. Afterall, Lewis’s attempt at pluralism aside, if you’re a Christian, don’t you believe that your God is the only real God? As Richard Dawkins has said, religious people are atheists for every god except theirs. So you already believe that everyone who ever lived who believed in no god, or in a different god than you do had it wrong. I don’t see why it’s such a stretch for people to accept that atheists say, yes, every single person who ever believed in any god was wrong.
Lewis says he was an atheist, but hit a wall when he realized that his morals had to come from somewhere. Lee Strobel, author of The Case for Christ , also claims to be a former atheist. I don’t actually believe Lee Strobel, because he characterizes his atheism in a way that suggests he was never actually an atheist. I don’t believe any of the modern apologists who call themselves former atheists were ever actually atheists — I think they read C.S. Lewis and realized the ability to utter the phrase “When I was an atheist . . .” during sermons was a tool they wanted in their kit. But Lewis isn’t nearly as dishonest or condescending as his modern would-be successors, so fuck it, I’ll take his word for it. He was an atheist, and he was persuaded to become a Christian by the moral argument. It happens.
One more thing, quickly, about the divisions he performs to separate Christians from atheists and then from other believers: notice how the divisions he chooses to make support his argument. He divides in such a way so as to allow him to frame everything according to the moral argument, ending with separating those who believe in a moral god from those who believe in a god who exists beyond morality. He doesn’t divide deists from theists, or  monotheists from polytheists, or anything else. He writes as though this is simply the way these things shake out, but he is very deliberately shaping this presentation to fit his argument.

Chapter 2: The Invasion

Summary:

Lewis disparages what he calls “Christianity-and-water,” the belief that embraces the idea of a good God and a Heavenly afterlife, and leaves out sin and hell and the devil. He says that asking for a simple religion is silly, since life itself is complicated, and odd. For one example: “For instance, when you have grasped that the earth and the other planets all go round the sun, you would naturally expect that all the planets were made to match — all at equal distances from each other, say, or distances that regularly increased, or all the same size, or else getting bigger or smaller as you go further from the sun. In fact, you find no rhyme or reason (that we can see) about either the sizes or the distances; and some of them have one moon, one has four, one has two, some have none, and one has a ring.” (p. 41)
Reality, in other words, is stranger than we expected. Lewis says the same thing about Christianity — in fact, he says it’s one reason why he believes it, because it is a religion no one could have guessed.
Lewis says only two views can explain the universe as we find it — the Christian view that this is a good world gone wrong, and the Dualist view which holds that two equally powerful forces, one good and one bad, are fighting it out with the universe as their battlefield. Lewis calls Dualism “the manliest and most sensible creed” other than Christianity.
Lewis then dives back into the moral argument to demonstrate the fallacy of Dualism, since if we believe that one of the gods is truly good, and the other is truly evil, we must therefore be appealing to a standard that is higher than either of them in order to determine which is good and which is bad.
Then Lewis goes on, at length, to argue that there couldn’t be a truly bad god anyway, since while it is possible to be good just for the sake of being good, it’s not possible to be bad for badness’s sake. People are bad, Lewis argues, due to sadism or because they are chasing some goal. This means, then, that bad is simply good gone wrong. The Christian model, with the devil being a fallen angel, portraying evil as a rebellion against good, makes more sense in light of this, says Lewis.
Lewis closes the chapter by describing Christianity through a war metaphor: the world is enemy-occupied territory, and going to church is like listening in to the secret radio messages from the good guys, the army of the true king who will someday return to reclaim his land. Lewis then affirms that, yes, he does believe in a literal devil — perhaps not with hoofs and horns, though.

Analysis:

In this chapter we really get a nice, long look at Lewis’s biases, and how the assumptions he makes based on those biases shape his views and his arguments in favor of those views. For instance, he says that the solar system seems odd because we would naturally expect the sizes or the relative distances of planets to match or to follow some pattern. But this seems like something Lewis himself just made up. There’s no reason we should have expected anything like what Lewis describes. At the risk of citing my own bias, when I was a child first learning about astronomy, I never found it odd that the planets were different sizes, or different distances, or had different numbers of moons, etc. It seems to me like saying that a tree is odd because it has branches of different lengths, or at seemingly random locations moving up its trunk. There’s no reason we would expect it to be any different than it is. And actually, we’ve known for hundreds of years that the sizes and distances and motions of the planets are actually governed by some very specific rules, just not the superficial ones Lewis seems to think we should expect.
That’s just the warm-up, though. The biggest display of cognitive bias comes in his handling of dualism. First, let me read this quote to you. He says that Dualism requires that we have one god that is truly good, and one god that is truly bad: “But the moment you say that, you are putting into the universe a third thing in addition to the two Powers: some law or standard or rule of good which one of the powers conforms to and the other fails to conform to. But since the two powers are judged by this standard, then this standard, or the Being who made this standard, is farther back and higher up than either of them, and He will be the real God.” (p. 43) Notice how smoothly he slides from assuming a standard of good, to a being that created that standard, to a God with capitalized pronouns and all? He’s good at this. But he didn’t get it past me.
After that, he gets into this business about how badness can’t exist for its own sake, but only relative to goodness. Lewis says you can be good for goodness’s sake, but you can’t be wicked for wickedness’s sake. There’s no reason to make this assumption. The only way you can say this is if you first establish that good is superior to, rather than equal to and opposite of, evil, and if you then establish certain things as good, rather than morally neutral. Here’s a quote from Lewis to illustrate what I mean, where he’s talking about the bad god of Dualism: “To be bad, he must exist and have intelligence and will. But existence, intelligence and will are in themselves good. Therefore he must be getting them from the Good Power: even to be bad he must borrow or steal from his opponent.” (p. 45) See what he does there? He defines existence, intelligence and will as inherently good. Why? Because that way, when the evil god makes use of them — which he can’t help but do — he’s not being purely evil, but rather putting these good traits to an evil purpose, supporting Lewis’s characterization of evil as subordinate and dependent upon good. But who says existence, and intelligence, and will are good? Why can’t they be morally neutral? Doesn’t it make more sense for them to be neither good nor evil? It’s not as if Lewis is uncomfortable with the idea of moral neutrality, since in the previous section we saw him characterizing human instincts as neither good nor bad. If he’s willing to accept that our sexual drives or our feelings of love or patriotism are neither good nor bad, how is it that he assumes that even more basic and universal traits such as existence, intelligence and will are inherently good, rather than morally neutral? If instincts are neither good nor bad, but only when and how we choose to pursue them, how can we not say the same thing about our intelligence or our will? Doesn’t it follow that it’s how we use our intelligence that is good or bad, not our intelligence itself?

Chapter 3: The Shocking Alternative

Summary:

Lewis begins by asking whether or not the state of the world as enemy-occupied territory is in accordance with the will of God, and what the answer to this question tells us about God.
To explain why God allows evil to exist in the world, Lewis makes the free will argument: God created beings with free will, knowing some of them would use their freedom to commit evil, but also knowing that without free will, true love and happiness would be impossible.
This is also, Lewis supposes, how the devil (or the Dark Power) went wrong. He misused his free will. The sin of Satan, Lewis guesses (for he says no human can give a certain answer), was that he put himself first, he wanted himself to be the center of his life, not God. Worse yet, Satan taught this sin to Adam and Eve (“our remote ancestors”), giving humanity the idea that happiness apart from God was possible, which Lewis calls “hopeless.” And it’s from this hopeless attempt at life apart from God which springs poverty and war and pretty much every other bad thing that has afflicted humanity since anyone can remember.
God created humans as engines designed to run on himself, Lewis says. The problem has been that humans have tried to run their engines without the right fuel. Hence, every great civilization must inevitably fall.
And what does God to about this? According to Lewis, he gives us our sense of right and wrong, he plants dreams of gods dying and returning to life in the myths of other religions throughout history (the “true myth” theory), and he selects the Jews as the people to whom he reveals himself and attempts to teach about his nature and his expectations. Then Jesus shows up, claiming to be God, claiming the power to forgive sins, claiming he would return to judge the world one day. Lewis calls these claims by Jesus, when properly understood, “the most shocking thing that has ever been uttered by human lips.” (More shocking than “And the Oscar goes to: Marisa Tomei”? . . .)
Lewis then talks about Jesus’s claim to be able to forgive sins. He says if anyone other than God claimed the ability to forgive any and all sins, it would be preposterous. It only makes sense if he is the god who made the rules that were being broken in the first place.
The chapter closes with the famous Lewis Trilemma: “I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.” (p. 52)

Analysis:

The free will argument, to me, seems like a nice way for Christians to let God off the hook by blaming themselves — which fits, since I’ve found self-loathing to be a very large part of Christianity wherever I’ve encountered it. It’s always God’s grace and God’s love that is saving us, because we don’t deserve it. We’ve broken the rules and God has every right to just cast us into Hell for that, but he wants to save us because he’s just that good. It’s difficult to imagine a more abject and pernicious form of self-hatred. The free will argument also ignores the suffering and destruction caused by natural disasters, although Lewis applies it to explain the fall of Satan as well as the fall of Man, so maybe we’re meant to believe that earthquakes and hurricanes and such are Satan’s fault?
I made an entire video about the “true myth” theory that Lewis mentions here. All I’ll say about it here is that, again, it increases my respect for Lewis, even though I think the theory itself is horseshit. That’s because, in even taking the time to formulate and make the argument, Lewis is at least acknowledging the fact that the Jesus story is filled with mythic universals, elements that we find in many, many earlier stories which are unanimously considered to be myths by people today. Lewis acknowledges this and attempts to reconcile his Christianity with this fact. That puts him ahead of most other apologists, who mostly just ignore all the similarities between the Jesus story and other myths and hope no one brings it up.
Lewis says it would be preposterous for anyone but God to claim the right to forgive all sins. I say it’s preposterous for God to claim that right, too. Even if I grant the existence of a God who defines our moral laws, and I accept that, say, stealing is a violation of those laws, that still doesn’t give God the right to forgive me of stealing something from someone else, on behalf of the person I’ve stolen from. God can say, “Hey, I know you broke my rule but don’t worry, I forgive you,” but the guy who made up the rule isn’t really the wronged party. Sure, I broke God’s rule, but I didn’t steal from God — I stole from another person. It’s that other person — and only that other person — who can forgive my theft, not God. The fact that God is apparently insisting that he is the wronged party, and not the person who was actually the victim of the crime, makes God seem like kind of a huge dick. Which is perfectly in-character given what we read about him in the Bible.
Finally, we have the famous Lewis Trilemma. This we can dispose of very easily, in two different ways. First, the issue for Lewis is that we cannot accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but not as God. Easy enough, then: I don’t think Jesus was a great moral teacher at all, so I can stop right here. But let’s assume that Jesus was a great moral teacher. Is it impossible to believe that, and reject his claims to be God? Is it true that he must be either God, or a liar or a lunatic? Obviously, my answer to those questions is no. And getting there is relatively easy: we just have to subject the sayings of Jesus to a critical reading. The only source we have about the life of Jesus is the New Testament, and as I discussed in the series about The Case for Christ , that is not a reliable source for facts about Jesus. We know — even Christians are forced to admit — that the gospels are filled with passages that were added much later by early Christians who wanted to shape the portrayal of Jesus for their own purposes. So if someone — say, Thomas Jefferson — wanted to distill the gospels down to only the things which reasonably could have happened, or which a sane and moral Jesus could have said, that seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. It’s also possible to reject Lewis’s trilemma by believing that the Jesus of the gospels is a good moral teacher, but never actually existed — that he was a legend, or so embellished by legend that the man we read about in the New Testament bore little resemblance to the historical man. Lewis rejects atheism for being too simplistic, but as we see, he’s rather fond of reductive, simplistic arguments himself.

Chapter 4: The Perfect Penitent

Summary:

Lewis finds it obvious that Jesus was neither a lunatic nor a fiend, therefore he must accept that he was and is God, regardless of how he might feel about that.
Lewis then cautions us not to confuse theories of how salvation through Christ works with the fact that salvation through Christ has put us right again with God. The thing itself, he says, is more important than what one believes about how it is accomplished.
He compares explaining Christian salvation to explaining an atom to a scientific layman: you are given a model, which allows you to visualize what is going on, but also cautioned that the model has been simplified for you and does not represent reality entirely accurately. The thing itself, Lewis says, cannot be pictured. “We know that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying he disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed.” (p. 55)
Lewis describes the crucifixion not so much as Jesus taking our punishment (which he agrees doesn’t make much sense, since if God was willing to forgive us he might as well just have done so), but as Jesus paying our debt. And in accepting Jesus’s payment of our debt, we are, in effect, laying down our arms and leaving the rebellion in order to rejoin God.
Lewis then describes how difficult it is to willingly and totally submit to God, but how it is possible if God helps us, which he does by putting a little bit of himself into us, like a parent teaching a child to write by allowing the child to follow his hand as he writes, to learn to form the letters.
God became a man, in the person of Jesus, in order that he could understand parts of human experience that he had no knowledge of — suffering and death — so that now he is able to help us to deal with these things ourselves.
Lewis dismisses complaints that Jesus could not have actually suffered and died precisely because he was really God the whole time, and God never really suffers or dies. Lewis counters by claiming that the perfect suffering and death needed to reconcile man with God were only possible because Jesus was God. The advantage of being God is the only thing that allows Christianity to exist, and therefore the only thing that allows God to be of any use to us.

Analysis:

Lewis comparing attempts to understand Christian salvation to attempts by scientists to explain atoms to laypersons is really very clever. And his statements that however one understands the how of salvation is less important than the fact of salvation itself — the point isn’t how it works, but that it works — are very ecumenical, and I appreciate that attitude. The problem with all of that, and with everything else he discusses in this chapter — perceiving the crucifixion as the payment of a debt rather than the taking of a punishment, accepting forgiveness and submitting to God with God himself helping us to overcome our selfishness and self-centeredness, how God’s experience as a human allowed him to understand and help us with these things — all of it can be brought crashing to the floor with a single question: how do you know? C.S. Lewis has crafted a really lovely sounding theology here. I would still reject it because, despite how pretty he makes it sound, I find the Christian concept of salvation to be fundamentally immoral — whether we were due a punishment or owed a debt, it was within God’s power to simply forgive us without executing an innocent person in horrific and bloody fashion and then forcing us to choose between affirming that this execution had paid our debt or being tormented forever in Hell. But even if you read Lewis’s explanation of Christian salvation and it sounds good to you, it’s all empty rhetoric if it’s not describing a real thing — and there is not a single reason to believe that it is. Lewis is standing atop the assumption that the New Testament is true and reliable. That’s how he gets the Lord, Lunatic or Liar trilemma, that’s how he gets to “how salvation works isn’t as important as that it works,” that’s how he arrives at every place he goes in this presentation. It all starts with that assumption. And there’s no rational or factual basis for that assumption.

Chapter 5: The Practical Conclusion

Summary:

Lewis compares the life Christians believe is coming to them after this one (perfect happiness in Heaven, thanks to the perfect surrender and humiliation of their perfect God) to the next step in our evolution, whatever comes after man: “In Christ a new kind of man appeared: and the new kind of life which began in Him is to be put into us.” (p. 60)
Lewis describes three things which bring this new Christ-life to us: baptism, belief, and communion. These are not the only things, Lewis says, nor will he say that one is more important than the other two, but all three are present.
Lewis admits that he cannot see why these three things should lead to this new Christ-life: “We have to take reality as it comes to us: there is no good jabbering about what it ought to be like or what we should have expected it to be like.” (p. 61)
So he can’t tell us why things are like this. But he can tell us why he believes they are so: he believes it because Jesus tells us it is so. He finds Jesus trustworthy, therefore he trusts Jesus when he says there is new life in him.
Lewis stresses the importance of trying to emulate Christ, and draws a distinction between Christians and other people trying to be good. Christians, he says, are not good because they wish to please God, or other people; rather, Christians are good because God is making them good through his love for us. When Christians talk about living “in Christ,” they mean that Christ is actually operating through their actions, that all of Christianity is an organ through which Christ acts on the world.
Lewis closes by stressing that a Christian need not feel bad that this new Christ-life is only open to those who have heard of and accepted Christ. Why? “But the truth is God has not told us what His arrangements about the other people are. We do know that no man can be saved except through Christ; we do not know that only those who know Him can be saved through Him.” (p. 64) In the meantime, Christians believe that God has chosen to reveal himself through Christ rather than invading in force, as it were, and revealing himself to everyone at once, because he wants to give people the chance of joining his side freely, before he invades and the ultimate result becomes a foregone conclusion. “Now, today, this moment, is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It will not last for ever. We must take it or leave it.” (p. 65)

Analysis:

How do you know? How do you know? How do you know?
Again, I’m impressed with how ecumenical Lewis is, how he takes care not to push any particular brand of Christianity. At the end there he even seems to leave the door open a crack for universalism — maybe God has a plan to reconcile those people who have never heard of Christ, or have been unable to believe in him, with himself. Though maybe not, since he did disparage believing in Heaven without believing in Hell — Christianity-and-water, remember he called it. Also, he does say that salvation is only possible through Christ, which would leave out those of us who have heard of, and rejected Christ. I know who Christians are talking about when they mention Jesus. I just don’t believe he was who they say he was. And more than that, if I did believe he was who they say he was, I still wouldn’t be a Christian. So I’m fucked every which way. Good thing I have no reason to believe any of it. Lewis’s quote from this last chapter seems an appropriate note to close on, though not in the way Lewis would have hoped, I’m sure: “We have to take reality as it comes to us: there is no good jabbering about what it ought to be like or what we should have expected it to be like.” (p. 61)

Next: Chapters 1-6 of Book Three: Christian Behavior

An Atheist Reads Mere Christianity

Book One: Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe

Chapter 1: The Law of Human Nature

Summary:

Lewis establishes the existence and use of moral standards by referring to the way people talk when they are arguing. They don’t merely complain that a person’s behavior is offensive to them personally; they appeal to a standard of behavior. Taking something that belongs to someone else without permission is not merely inconvenient for the person who has been stolen from — it is wrong.
Humans, unlike animals, quarrel. And to quarrel is to attempt to show the other person that they are wrong and you are right, which means that there must be a mutually agreed-upon definition of what “right” and “wrong” mean.
Unlike physical or chemical laws, Lewis says, humans are free to choose whether or not they wish to obey the law of human nature that tells us what right and wrong are.
Aside from the odd individual here and there who lacks a sense of right and wrong, or whose definitions vary drastically from the consensus, humanity as a whole seems to agree on what constitutes decent behavior, and what is unacceptable. Lewis cites the Nazis as an example, asking how we could condemn and oppose them if there was not a standard of Right of which everyone could agree they had fallen short.
Lewis also points out that these standards have been shared by societies all over the world and throughout history. There have been cultural differences, to be sure, but nothing like what Lewis describes as “a total difference.”
Even those who say they don’t believe in a real Right and Wrong demonstrate that they do actually believe in such things — a promise-breaker will still complain if a promise made to him is broken, for instance. How can one complain about lack of fairness if there is no mutually agreed upon standard of fairness?
So we all seem to believe in a real Right and a real Wrong. But, according to Lewis, none of us are really living up to those standards. We all often fail to behave as we expect others to behave, and when we realize this about ourselves we immediately begin to make excuses for ourselves, which Lewis takes as yet another confirmation that these standards of Right and Wrong are real, since we are anxious to rationalize our failure to behave decently.
Lewis’s point: we all know the Law of Nature, which tells us what is right and wrong, and we all break it.

Analysis:

There isn’t much so far to disagree with here. Lewis is obviously laying the foundation for a Christian argument here, but at this point there’s nothing he has said that an atheist couldn’t agree with — in fact, there’s precious little he’s said so far that I disagree with, really.
Lewis does speak about Right and Wrong as though they are these pre-existing entities, so I disagree with him there. But I don’t think it’s an irreconcilable disagreement. Check this out: “Quarrelling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and Wrong are[.]” (C.S. Lewis, MERE CHRISTIANITY, p. 4) So all we need to have a concept of right and wrong to which we are subject is an agreement about what is right, and what is wrong. Lewis and I agree on that. The only major difference between us at this point is that Lewis thinks these standards we’re agreeing on come from somewhere else, and I think they come from ourselves. Moving on:

Chapter 2: Some Objections

Summary:

Lewis attempts to address the problems that many people have with accepting or understanding his definition of the Law of Human Nature, which determines Right and Wrong.
Lewis argues that our moral sense is separate from our natural instincts, since it is what arbitrates between conflicting instincts and tells us not what we want to do, but what we ought to do.
The Moral Law, as Lewis now begins to call it, is what tells us which of our instincts — for instance, sexual impulse, fighting instinct, mother love, patriotism — we ought to follow at a given time. Therefore the Moral Law cannot be an instinct in and of itself, but rather that which directs us in how we follow those instincts, which are not themselves either good or bad.
Lewis then defends his concept of the Moral Law against the claim that it is the result of education. Lewis argues that decent behavior and standards of morality are learned from parents, but that this does not mean those standards are a human invention. Lewis says the Moral Law should be considered in the same category as mathematics. Morality, like math, is mostly the same no matter where you go, unlike truly social conventions like fashion or traffic laws. Lewis also argues that moral progress is only possible because there is such a thing as Right and Wrong, which determines when the moral standards of one society are better than those of another. To say that one set of morals is better than another, you must measure them both by a standard. This, Lewis says, is Real Morality, the Moral Law.

Analysis:

Again, we more or less agree here. I would say our moral sense, as individuals, as a society, and as a species, is distinct from our instincts. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be a natural part of us, or that it must be eternal, or that it must originate from outside our species.
I also agree with Lewis that morality is like mathematics. In fact, I think that is a great metaphor, though not for the reasons Lewis thinks. Like mathematics, morality provides us with objective standards — or at least, the closest thing to objective standards that we can have — that allow us to make sense of our world. And like mathematics, morality is an abstraction. If we — or some other sentient being — were not here to think about it, it wouldn’t exist. Mathematics is a tool we use to quantify, to explore, to recognize and explain and predict how our universe works — but it’s a tool we invented. In that sense, morality is just the same. For math to exist, you need people to do math. For morality to exist, you need people to define, and ask, and struggle to answer moral questions.

Chapter Three: The Reality of the Law

Summary

Lewis notes that he is not trying to blame people for failing to live up to the standard of morality, only to discover the truth. Since humans are aware of the Moral Law, why do they not follow it?
Lewis compares the Moral Law to laws of nature like gravitation, and notes that these sorts of laws only really describe what nature does — a rock, for instance, may be the wrong shape for a given purpose, but that does not mean there is anything bad about the rock. An object obeys the law of gravity by falling to the ground because that is what it must do, not because it has been ordered to do so. The Law of Decent Behavior is different in that it doesn’t describe what people do, but what people ought to do. Humans are not like other natural objects in this way, Lewis says.
Lewis again stresses that wrong or bad behavior is not defined as that which is inconvenient to an individual, since there are innocent behaviors which cause harm and are not called bad, and there are behaviors that do not cause actual harm but are still called bad (for instance, trying to trip someone but failing). Likewise, good behavior is not defined as the behavior that produces a profit for the person performing it.
Now Lewis turns to address the notion that good behavior is defined not according to what is good for a particular individual, but what is good for the human race as a whole. Lewis claims that this leads to circular reasoning, however: selfishness is bad because it is bad for society, and you should care about what happens to society because it’s bad to be selfish.
It is preferable to simply stop with “men ought to be unselfish,” rather than to explain “men ought to be unselfish because . . .”
The Moral Law, Lewis says, is not a fact about human nature, but it is nonetheless a real thing, something not invented by ourselves. It is evidence, he says, of another kind of reality, something above and beyond the facts of human behavior.

Analysis:

Oh, Jack, I sense us growing apart already . . .
Previously I said that mathematics and morality are abstractions that cannot exist without people. Not everyone thinks this — it’s a practical way of looking at these concepts that not everyone shares. It’s possible to think of math, and morality, and other abstractions, as real and existent independent from the existence of thinking, rational beings like us. Math was always there, it’s just that we had to reach the point where we could recognize it and understand it and use it. Morals were here before we were, we just had to recognize them.
Here’s why I disagree with this: Lewis mentions how the laws of physics are really just descriptions of things that happen, and I think he’s right about that. In this sense, we created the laws of physics because we found that we needed them to explain things we saw happening. This is the same way I feel about mathematics — gravity was already there, objects were still subject to it, but before we were here, those laws, those descriptions of the phenomena of the universe, didn’t exist because we hadn’t come along to create them yet. But morality is different. Morality is concerned with the behavior of morally aware beings, and the only beings we know of with a concept of morality are human beings. As Lewis himself points out, morality doesn’t just describe a phenomenon — it allows us, as sentient minds, to make judgments about the rightness or wrongness of that phenomenon — the phenomenon in question being human behavior, which is the only thing we know of that can be subject to morality. Animal behavior isn’t subject to morality, since animals (so far as we know) aren’t capable of perceiving their behavior in moral terms. Nonliving objects aren’t subject to morality, neither are natural phenomenon like weather or seismic activity or the motion of bodies in space, since these are the result of natural laws — they are what they are and they do what they do because, given the nature of the universe, they can be and do nothing else. The only thing subject to morality, at least in our experience, is human behavior. And human behavior did not exist before humans existed. Now if you want to say math existed before we got here, because there were still numbers even if no one was around to count them, that’s fine. If you want to say the laws of physics existed before we got here, because the planets still moved the same way even if no one was around to notice, that’s fine. I think these things are abstractions invented by humans to help describe, understand and make sense of the world — I find value in them because of that, not in spite of that — but if you want to think of them as real independent of us, that’s fine, because at least the things those abstractions are describing were here long before we were. But how can you say that morality is like mathematics or the laws of physics in this way, when the one and only thing that morality is concerned with could not have existed before we did?
Also, Lewis again mentions that what is moral does not coincide with what is convenient. That’s true. But that doesn’t mean morality must be an independent thing that is real apart from humanity. Human societies throughout history have struggled to find the balance between what was beneficial to individuals, what was beneficial to communities, and what was beneficial to their civilization as a whole. It’s not easy, and different societies have struck different balances, but that balance is the key. No one would want to live in a society that paid no attention to the rights or the needs of the individual, and a society that care only about individuals and nothing for itself as a whole would collapse into chaos.
The point is this: Lewis says, “This Rule of Right and Wrong, or Law of Human Nature, or whatever you call it, must somehow or other be a real thing — a thing that is really there, not made up by ourselves.” (p. 20) But nothing about the way we use morality, or the way morality works, demands that, as I see it. And certainly nothing about it demands that it be the product of something beyond or above our reality.

Chapter 4: What Lies Behind the Law

Summary:

Lewis begins discussing what the existence of the Law of Morality implies about the universe. He describes two views about what the universe is and how it came to be that have been held by humans ever since they have been able to think.
The first is the materialist view: that space and matter just happen to exist, and have always existed, and nobody knows why, and that matter behaving according to natural laws has just happened to result in creatures like us, with our abilities to think and reason.
The second is the religious view: that the universe, along with us, was created by a conscious, discerning mind.
Lewis asserts that both views have been held for as long as there have been people around to hold them, and that the correct view cannot be determined through science, since science is concerned with observing and explaining things, not with determining what, if anything, caused things to exist in the first place.
Lewis describes Man as the one thing in the universe which we know more about than we could learn from external observation, and that is because we don’t merely observe humans — we are humans. If another race were to study humans from the outside, without knowing our languages, they could not discern the Moral Law merely by studying our behavior, since the Moral Law doesn’t determine what we do, but what we ought to do.
Our knowledge of self, our recognition of the Moral Law, Lewis says, is how we know which of the two views (materialist or religious) are correct. Since we know ourselves to be under moral commands to behave in a certain way, we should conclude that there is a commander.
Lewis compares this commander to a mailman, delivering envelopes to each house on a street. Because his envelope always contains a letter, Lewis reasons that the envelopes received by others on his street contain letters, also. Not everyone gets the same letter, but Lewis’s letters tell him to obey the laws of his human nature, while stones have to obey the law of gravity.
Lewis clarifies that he isn’t yet asserting Christian theology, only a Something that guides and directs the universe. Lewis says we must assume this Something is like a mind, because the only thing other than a mind is matter, and you can hardly imagine matter giving instructions.
In a note at the end of the chapter, Lewis mentions the theory of Life-Force, that human evolution and cultural development was guided not by natural forces or by the mind of a god, but by a blind Life-Force. Lewis dismisses this as a wish to have some of the comfort of belief in a god, but without assuming any of the consequences.

Analysis:

As I’ve already said, I don’t accept that the Law of Morality exists in the way Lewis does, but let’s grant that premise for a moment. I said after the first chapter that there is nothing in Lewis’s assertion that morality exists independently from moral beings that contradicted an atheist worldview. I went into it at length a few minutes ago why I don’t think this is right, but it is certainly possible to postulate independently existing morality without also postulating the existence of a being that Lewis describes as a Power or a Director behind the universe, which is what we today would probably describe as an Intelligent Designer. Lewis, through his mailman metaphor, tells us that he believes the moral law comes from the same place as the physical laws. If he can do that from the religious side, why can’t someone do it from the materialist side? Maybe these pre-existing moral laws are the result of the natural development of the universe, just as the laws of physics. I don’t think gods are necessary to account for the laws of physics, so why should I assume gods are necessary to account for morality?
I’ve spoken about this previously, in a video I made about the Moral Argument, but since Lewis brings it up, let me mention it here, too: Lewis says that his Intelligent Designer must be something like a mind, because the only thing we know of other than a mind is matter, and matter cannot give instructions. Unless said matter is organized in the form of a mind, that is. Our minds are amazing, and one of the most amazing things about them is that they are the products of our brains — they are just as material as every other part of us. Our consciousness, our perception, our sense of morality — it’s all rooted in our physiology.
Also: it’s a minor point, but Lewis talks here and elsewhere in this first section about rocks and so forth being subject to the laws of physics, while humans are subject to moral laws. I think it’s worth pointing out that humans are subject to the laws of physics, too. Our morality is not in place of the laws of physics, but in addition to them. We’re subject to gravity just the same as a stone, and we have just as much of a choice about it.

Chapter 5: We Have Cause to Be Uneasy

Summary:

Lewis address those who might be annoyed to discover, at this point, that he has been building up to a religious message. He says three things to these people:
First, Lewis states that, judging by the present state of the world, humanity has been making some big mistakes and that in order to make real progress toward a better world, we must first go backwards and start again in the right direction.
Second, he says he hasn’t yet gotten to the religious bits. He is still not talking about the God of any specific religion, only the source responsible for the Moral Law. Lewis cites two bits of evidence that we can use to learn about this Someone or Something behind the Moral Law: the universe itself, and the Moral Law. From the first evidence we learn that he was a great artist but also merciless, since the universe is both beautiful and dangerous. From the second bit, we can conclude that he is interested in right conduct, that he values fair play and selflessness and honesty, etc. In other words, God is good — ethically good, Lewis stresses, not good in the sense of being indulgent or sympathetic. Lewis also stresses that his God, at this point, is not personal, merely the force behind the Moral Law.
In this formulation, Lewis calls God both a great comfort and a great terror, since his standard of goodness gives hope and meaning to existence, yet the fact that we have all fallen short of his standard must mean he detests most of what we do.
Third, Lewis denies he was trying to play a trick by taking such a roundabout route to start a discussion about God. He says he was only trying to lay the foundation for a discussion about Christianity, since Christianity doesn’t make any sense until you demonstrate to people why they need the repentance and forgiveness it prescribes in the first place. To accept you have broken the law, you must first realize that the law exists. Lewis says that though he finds Christianity to be a great comfort, one cannot find comfort by seeking it; you can find comfort by seeking the truth, but if you seek comfort you will only find wishful thinking.

Analysis:

Well, on that last point we certainly agree.
On the two kinds of evidence Lewis puts forward that tell us about the Something that is behind the Moral Law: first, he says the universe itself tells us something about this Intelligent Designer. I disagree — the universe can be explained without the assumption of an intelligent designer. In fact, I think the universe makes much more sense, and is much more compelling and beautiful a place, if we take it as we find it, as the result of natural processes, than it would be if we assumed it to be the work of an intelligent designer. Second, Lewis cites the Moral Law as being able to tell us about the Designer, and we’ve been over what I think of his concept of the Moral Law already — I don’t think it exists, but I also think it’s possible to believe it exists without believing there’s an Intelligent Designer behind it.
On his second and third points about what he’s doing by approaching the subject indirectly at first: what we’ve seen in this first book of Mere Christianity is essentially a protracted formulation of the moral argument. Absolute moral standards exist, therefore God, or Something, must exist to have created those standards. William Lane Craig and many other contemporary apologists make this exact same argument. You can see how influential this book is — it’s one of the most important texts of modern Christian apologetics. Modern Christians have not only adopted Lewis’s prominent use of the Moral Argument, but also his approach in getting from secularism to Christianity. You start philosophically, building slowly toward first a general sort of deistic creator god, then to a more specific personal god, and finally to the particular god of Christianity. Craig uses this technique when presenting his arguments in debates as well — he saves the explicit Jesus talk, the stuff about the empty tomb, etc., for last. It’s also the same strategy now employed by advocates of teaching creationism in science class. It’s not any particular god they advocate teaching about, they say, just a god that is responsible for everything. Intelligent Design is the gateway drug that leads (they hope) eventually to Christianity. The difference between modern I.D. advocates and C.S. Lewis is that Lewis freely admits that’s what he’s doing, and even explains why.
I question a lot of Lewis’s facts and reasoning, but I don’t hate this so far. He’s a much better writer than Lee Strobel, which I think probably goes without saying, and a much clearer thinker, if a misguided one. This will be interesting. I hope you stick around for the rest.

Next: Book Two: What Christians Believe

An Atheist Reads The Case for Christ

Conclusion: The Verdict of History — What Does the Evidence Establish — And What Does It Mean Today?

Instead of an anecdote, Strobel opens the chapter by setting the scene for his own conversion in 1981: “My investigation into Jesus was similar to what you’ve just read, except that I primarily studied books and other historical research instead of personally interacting with scholars. I had asked questions and analyzed answers with as much of an open mind as I could muster. Now I had reached critical mass. The evidence was clear. The one remaining issue was what I would do with it.” (Lee Strobel, THE CASE FOR CHRIST, p. 259)

What books did he read, I wonder. How thorough was his research, really? Did he discover and accept the Christian answers to his questions, or did he seek out evidence to the contrary as well? Did he read Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason (after 200 years still the best takedown of the Bible ever written)? Did he read Robert Ingersoll? I’m sure he read C.S. Lewis — did he read Bertrand Russell? He says his investigation was similar to this book — this book where he doesn’t speak to a single scholar who is not a Christian apologist — so I’m going to guess that he didn’t. He says the evidence was clear — well, of course it was. The evidence is clear that the Sun and the Moon and the stars are circling Earth embedded in giant crystal spheres if all you read is Aristotle’s Physics .

Can the Biographies of Jesus Be Trusted?

Strobel says he once thought the gospels were unreliable religious propaganda, but that Craig Blomberg demonstrated that they were eyewitness testimony that accurately described actual events. Blomberg also demonstrated that the gospels were written so early that they could not possibly have been contaminated by legend or folklore. Actually, even Blomberg’s own argument admits (albeit indirectly) that the gospels were not written by eyewitnesses, and that they are in fact hearsay. And the “too early to be legendary” argument is bogus, as we’ve discussed ad nauseum in this series.
Do the Biographies of Jesus Stand Up to Scrutiny?

Strobel says that Blomberg argued persuasively that the gospel writers had reliably preserved an accurate, unbiased history of the life and ministry of Jesus, with the four gospels largely agreeing with each other on the essential facts and only disagreeing on certain details, and that the fact that the church survived in Jerusalem in those early days is proof of the accuracy of the gospels, since any exaggerations or falsehoods about Jesus would have been quickly exposed by people who knew better. The gospels largely agree with each other because two of the three synoptic gospels were cribbed from the other synoptic gospel. And their accurate, unbiased record of the life of Jesus includes such credible details as a miraculous conception and virgin birth (which none of the authors could have witnessed, by the way), miracles, resurrections, divine voices speaking from the sky, and the occasional presence and participation of angels.

Were Jesus’ Biographies Reliably Preserved For Us?

According to Strobel, Bruce Metzger proved that the New Testament has been well preserved and passed down to our present generation, that its oldest manuscripts can be dated very close to the original writings, and that none of the discrepancies among those early manuscripts have any effect on church doctrine. Strobel and Metzger gloss over several significant discrepancies in those early manuscripts, including the missing story of the Agony at Gethsemane, which appears to have been added later, which can be cited to resolve the issue of whether or not Jesus was fully human, which was a controversy among the early church, and therefore does have an effect on church doctrine.

Is There Credible Evidence for Jesus Outside His Biographies?

Edwin Yamauchi says Jesus is better documented than any other ancient religious figure, but the non-Biblical sources for Jesus only confirm what people believed about Jesus, not anything that Jesus actually said or did.

Does Archaeology Confirm or Contradict Jesus’ Biographies?

John McRay claims archaeology strengthens the credibility of the New Testament and that Luke was a reliable historian. But archaeology only confirms the New Testament — when it confirms it — in the incidental details. There is no archaeological evidence for Jesus at all, period, let alone for the miracles, the resurrection, all the claims which compel skepticism.

Is the Jesus of History the Same as the Jesus of Faith?

Strobel reminds us of what Greg Boyd said about the Jesus Seminar, that they’re a minority of scholars on the radical fringe who attract media coverage but whose ideas aren’t really taken seriously. He doesn’t remind us that he allowed the arguments of the Jesus Seminar to be expressed and challenged by one of their most ardent critics, without speaking to a single member of the Seminar itself. He also doesn’t remind us that he fails to even address skeptical arguments about Jesus from those outside the Jesus Seminar.

Was Jesus Really Convinced That He Was the Son of God?

Ben Witherington III demonstrated, says Strobel, that Jesus did actually believe he was the unique Son of God and the Messiah. How was Ben Witherington III able to do this? “By going back to the earliest traditions, which are unquestionably safe from legendary development.” (p. 261) Right. This is also how we know for a fact, unquestionably, that Yogi Pullavar had the power to levitate. He demonstrated it in 1936, in front of witnesses, supposedly levitated for four minutes — no way that could have been a trick or a hoax, no way the people who believe he was literally floating in mid-air could be mistaken, no way the claims of Yogi Pullavar’s powers could have been exaggerated — there just hasn’t been enough time.

Was Jesus Crazy When He Claimed to Be the Son of God?

In this chapter Gary Collins made the Miracle on 34th Street defense of Jesus: Jesus wasn’t crazy when claiming to be the Son of God because he actually was the Son of God. If only there were some reason to believe that, he’d be getting somewhere.

Did Jesus Fulfill the Attributes of God?

D.A. Carson schools Strobel on the intricacies of the Incarnation, how he possessed all the traits of God — omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence, eternality and immutability — but just chose to lay them aside for a few years when he became human. Source? The Bible, natch.

Did Jesus — and Jesus Alone — Match the Identity of the Messiah?

Strobel reminds us of the imaginary odds that someone like Jesus would fulfill all those Old Testament messianic prophecies without actually being the Messiah. He doesn’t remind us that he spent most of the chapter telling us Louis Lapides’s lameass conversion story.

Was Jesus’ Death a Sham and His Resurrection a Hoax?

In this chapter Dr. Alexander Metherell made the stunning announcement that the crucifixion would have killed Jesus, and if he had somehow managed to survive he would have been well beat the fuck up. Dr. Metherell reached this conclusion by examining the medical evidence, which . . . wait, that can’t be right. There is no medical evidence. So what did he examine to reach his . . . oh, that’s right! The Bible.

Was Jesus’ Body Really Absent From His Tomb?

Remember when William Lane Craig argued that the empty tomb was real? Remember when he forgot to mention that no one’s ever found it and that it wouldn’t prove shit if they did? Yeah, me too.

Was Jesus Seen Alive After His Death on the Cross?

In this chapter Gary Habermas claimed that belief in the resurrection and the appearances of Jesus dates back to the very beginning of the church, and that therefore it must be true because otherwise people who knew better would have . . . you know.

Are There Any Supporting Facts That Point to the Resurrection?

J.P. Moreland made the “die for a lie” argument, which I refuted at length in the previous video, and he also threw in some horseshit about the emergence of the church and changes in Jewish social traditions and the appearance of the rites of baptism and communion. Nevermind that the only way we know — or “know” — any of this is through the Bible itself and later church tradition. Doesn’t seem to bother Lee Strobel, but then again he’s a credulous buffoon.

Failing Muller’s Challenge

Strobel, citing what he calls “a study” by A.N. Sherwin-White, claims that more than two generations of time was necessary for legend to develop and contaminate stories based on historical truth. So that’s where this “early equals true” bullshit comes from, eh? A.N. Sherwin-White. We got you, you son of a bitch. So what did Sherwin-White say in this study of his? Did he assert that the gospels were historically reliable because they were written within two generations of the life of Jesus? Did he establish, after careful research and analysis of not only Jesus but other figures whose lives have become the subjects of folklore and exaggeration, a firm and widely applicable principle that legendary development requires a minimum of two generations removal from the actual historical events? Actually, no. There’s a great article about this on the blog Do You Ever Think About Things You Do Think About, titled “The Apologists’ Abuse of A.N. Sherwin-White,” ( http://youcallthisculture.blogspot.com/2007/11/apologists-abuse-of-sherwin-white.html ) that not only clears up what Sherwin-White actually wrote on the subject, but directly addresses The Case for Christ . It turns out when Strobel and others mention Sherwin-White, they’re citing a book he wrote titled Roman Law and Roman Society in the New Testament . Check this out, from the article:

“The part of Sherwin-White’s essay that has attracted the most attention from Christian apologists is his comments on the length of time it takes for mythology to displace historical fact. However, contrary to Craig, Strobel, Geisler and a host of others, he did not attempt to calculate a rate of legendary accumulation that is universally applicable. Nor did he lay out a rule that enables an historian to identify a point before which an oral tradition can still be considered historical. Indeed, Sherwin-White acknowledged that various types of bias can be present both in the original source of the oral tradition and in the writer who finally records it. He merely asserted that ‘historical content is not hopelessly lost’ to the critical historian even after a period of two generations. (RSRLNT p. 191)

[. . .]

“Contrary to Strobel’s imagination, the comments in Roman Law and Roman Society in the New Testament do not constitute a ‘study’ and they do not reflect ‘meticulous’ examination. No such study was required to support the rest of the book, which is why Sherwin-White described himself as considering the topic of historicity ‘briefly and very generally.’ (RSRLNT p. 186) Most importantly, Strobel ignores the fact that it still takes critical historical methodology to identify that ‘solid core.’ Sherwin-White did not admit the possibility of accepting the gospels at face value.” (“The Apologists' Abuse of A.N. Sherwin-White,” Do You Ever Think About Things You Do Think About?)

So the argument against the gospels being the result of legend and folklore — the foundation of every argument made by every apologist interviewed in this book — is based on a misinterpretation — perhaps willful, perhaps not — of an author who actually took care to state that he wasn’t intending to establish a principle or to evaluate the historicity of the gospels. The argument isn’t just bullshit — it’s bullshit on top of bullshit. But wait! Strobel’s not done yet. “In light of the convincing facts I had learned during my investigation, in the face of this overwhelming avalanche of evidence in the case for Christ, the great irony was this: it would require much more faith for me to maintain my atheism than to trust in Jesus of Nazareth!” (p. 265) CraniumOnEmpty! You called it. “I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist.” Are there any bullshit Christian clichés we haven’t covered yet?

Implications of the Evidence

Strobel brings back James Dixon, who confessed to a crime he didn’t commit and was eventually found innocent after an investigation, to set up two questions about his own investigation into the Jesus story. First, Has the Collection of Evidence Really Been Thorough? Strobel: “Yes, it has been. I selected experts who could state their position and defend it with historical evidence that I could then test through cross-examination.” (p. 266) But you didn’t interview a single expert who was skeptical of Christian beliefs about Jesus. You interviewed thirteen Christians for this book — no atheists, no agnostics, no Jews, no Muslims. You attacked the Jesus Seminar, but you didn’t have the balls to do it to their face. No, much like only allowing a jury to hear witnesses from the prosecution, your collection of evidence has not been thorough, or honest. Second, Which Explanation Best Fits the Totality of the Evidence? Strobel talks about letting go of his “legend hypothesis” and how his atheism buckled under the weight of historical truth. He says he couldn’t imagine a single explanation that fit the evidence as well as the conclusion that Jesus was the Son of God. Then he goes through the implications of this conclusion. If Jesus was the Son of God, he says, then his teachings are more than good ideas — they’re divine truths that provide a foundation for life. If Jesus is the absolute standard of morality, then he is the basis for choices and decisions and moral judgments. If Jesus was resurrected, then he is alive today to be personally encountered. If Jesus conquered death, then there is eternal life for us, too. If Jesus has divine power, he is able to change and transform those who follow him. If Jesus himself knew pain and suffering, he can comfort those who experience it in their own lives. If Jesus loves us, that means he wants what is best for us, so we should commit ourselves to him. And if Jesus is who he says he is, then “as my Creator, he rightfully deserves my allegiance, obedience, and worship.” (p. 267)

Most of that is just mindless Christian happy talk, but let’s look at two of them. First, the second one, the one about morality: I’ve talked to Christians about this a lot, especially lately in comment threads of other videos. I know you would all be more comfortable if you had an absolute standard of right and wrong to appeal to, if you had some divine authority to decide these things for you, if you didn’t have to actually grapple with difficult moral questions, some of which don’t have nice, neat answers, if morality was like a dictionary you could just pull down from a shelf and consult rather than having to actually use your brain and make these judgments yourself. I know you think that would be nice — but that’s not the world we live in. Christians, you get your morality from the same place Muslims do, which is the same place Jews do, which is the same place Hindus and Buddhists and Wiccans do, which is the same place atheists do — from yourselves, from your culture, from the moral consensus of your species. The difference between you and me is that I don’t pretend my morals come from on-high, or argue that it would be better if they did.

And that last one: If Jesus is who he says he is, he deserves our allegiance, obedience, and worship. Allegiance I’m fine with, though you don’t rightfully deserve allegiance because of how powerful you are, even if you are the all-powerful creator and sustainer of the universe — if you rightfully deserve the allegiance of others, it’s because of your character. Obedience comes as the result of respect, and respect, like loyalty, must be earned. It cannot be demanded, and anyone who demands respect in the manner of the Biblical god is not worthy of it. And worship — the Greek word translated as “worship” in the New Testament is “proskuneo,” which literally means to bow down, to fall on your knees, to prostrate yourself. I’m sorry, but I’m not a slave, I’m not the subject of a king, and I’m not a Trekkie in the presence of William Shatner — I’m a free person, and I don’t prostrate myself before anyone, especially someone who demands it of me.

The Formula of Faith

Strobel talks about taking that experiential step described somewhat vaguely by J.P. Moreland in the last chapter. In order to take this step, Strobel turns to John 1:12: “Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.” (John 1:12) Strobel then describes the mathematical formula for starting a relationship with Jesus: believe + receive = become. Believe that your sins (Strobel claims his were numerous) have separated you from God and that Jesus, and only Jesus, can bridge the gap. Receive the forgiveness and eternal life offered through Jesus by saying a prayer admitting what a piece of shit you are, telling Jesus you’re sorry and asking him, if it’s not too much trouble, to please not send you to Hell to burn forever when you die. Become the sort of person to whom weak, dishonest garbage like this would be convincing.

Reaching Your Own Verdict

Now comes the real hard sell. Strobel turns his attention to you — er, to me — to the reader of the book. He addresses the reader directly, even addressing skeptics for the first time and demonstrating in the process why he usually sticks to preaching to the choir: “Perhaps I didn’t address the objection that’s foremost in your mind. . . . However, I trust that the amount of information reported in these pages will at least have convinced you that it’s reasonable — in fact, imperative — to continue your investigation.

“. . . Use the suggested resources in this book to delve deeper. Study the Bible yourself (one suggestion: THE JOURNEY, a special edition of the Bible that’s designed for people who don’t yet believe it’s the word of God).

“Resolve that you’ll reach a verdict when you’ve gathered a sufficient amount of information . . . You may even want to whisper a prayer to the God who you’re not sure exists, asking him to guide you to the truth about him. And through it all, you’ll have my sincere encouragement as you continue in your spiritual quest.” (pp. 270-271) No adult person should ever allow themselves to be spoken to like this, as though they were a wayward child being corrected by a patient parent. But, it’s nice to know I’ve got Lee Strobel’s encouragement now that I’ve taken his advice and my “spiritual journey” — what an idiotic phrase — has led me to atheism. And Strobel finishes up — the final words of the book — with a quote from C.S. Lewis: “I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic . . . or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.” (C.S. Lewis, MERE CHRISTIANITY) It’s appropriate that Strobel closes by quoting Lewis. As some of you already know, I’m going to continue doing this — examining Christian apologetics from an atheist perspective. Now that the series on The Case for Christ is about to conclude, I’m turning my attention to C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity , and my series on it will pick up right where this one leaves off. So look for that, if this sort of thing interests you. But before I move on to Lewis, let me finish up with Lee Strobel.

Conclusion (Mine):

Were I to take the most charitable position possible after reading this book, were I to accept Strobel’s claims that he was an atheist and that his intention was to present the facts about Jesus to other atheists and skeptics so that they might judge for themselves, were I to ignore the bias and attempts at manipulation, the best I could say for The Case for Christ is that it is a chronicle of its author’s credulity. If this was the evidence and these were the arguments that transformed Strobel from an atheist to a born-again evangelical Christian, I’m afraid it doesn’t say much for him. This past week leading up to shooting this final episode, I’ve been having an exchange with a Christian in the comment section of the previous video in this series. The details of the exchange aren’t important for these purposes — we were arguing over whether or not the growth of the church pre-Constantine was as miraculous and explosive as apologists like Lee Strobel claim it was, and how it could have spread if it was based on false claims, etc., etc. My Christian adversary — and I call him that with all respect — wound up making the same arguments that Strobel makes, that the church’s growth under such unlikely circumstances was remarkable, that the disciples would have had no reason to lie about what they had seen or done. I brought my own counterarguments, as did a few others from the non-Christian side, and finally my Christian adversary said that we were just close-minded, that we’d already made up our minds and we were just dismissing inconvenient facts to hold our comfortable positions. To which I responded, “If I were the type to make up my mind once and ignore all further evidence, I’d still be a Christian.” And my Christian adversary said, “If this kind of weak evidence brought you out of Christianity, you never were one.” And I know that’s a bad argument, someone else pointed out it’s a “no true Scotsman” fallacy, but in this case he’s right. Technically speaking — I tried to be a Christian for half my life, I called myself a Christian, I struggled to believe, but I never actually believed in my heart of hearts, so I suppose I never actually was a Christian. And eventually, very gradually, I was reconciled to that unbelief and I was brought out of Christianity, as it were. But I didn’t reject Christianity initially because I had read The Age of Reason — I didn’t read that until many years later. It wasn’t the arguments against the claims of Christianity that started me on the path to atheism — it was the arguments for those claims, because they never convinced me. They never gave me any reason to believe. Since I started down that path I’ve found the arguments and the evidence against Christianity, and against the existence of gods and the supernatural in general, to be anything but weak. But that wasn’t the kind of evidence that made me doubt my religion, the religion of my parents and my grandparents. It was this kind of weak evidence that brought me out of Christianity, the kind found in The Case for Christ. I’ll see you for the Mere Christianity series. Thanks to all of you for watching. And thanks to the still very much missed faithfightsfact for inspiring me to do this series. Becca, I hope I did okay.

An Atheist Reads The Case for Christ

PART 3: Researching the Resurrection

Chapter 14: The Circumstantial Evidence — Are There Any Supporting Facts That Point to the Resurrection?

The Timothy McVeigh Story

Strobel talks of the lack of eyewitness evidence in the Oklahoma City bombing case — no one saw Timothy McVeigh build the truck bomb, no video footage recorded him parking the truck or leaving the scene before it detonated, etc. — and yet he was convicted of the crime because the prosecutors were able to use circumstantial evidence to construct a case establishing his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
“Eyewitness testimony is called direct evidence because people describe under oath how they personally saw the defendant commit the crime. While this is often compelling, it can sometimes be subject to faded memories, prejudices, and even outright fabrication. In contrast, circumstantial evidence is made up of indirect facts from which inferences can be rationally drawn.” (Lee Strobel, THE CASE FOR CHRIST, pp. 244-245)
“Having already considered the persuasive evidence for the empty tomb, and eyewitness accounts of the risen Jesus, now it was time for me to seek out any circumstantial evidence that might bolster the case for the Resurrection. I knew that if an event as extraordinary as the resurrection of Jesus had really occurred, history would be littered with indirect evidence backing it up.” (p. 245)

The Thirteenth Interview: J. P. Moreland, Ph.D.

J.P. Moreland, Ph.D. Doctorate from University of Southern California, chemistry degree from University of Missouri, master’s degree in theology from Dallas Theological Seminary, professor of philosophy and ethics at Talbot School of Theology. Articles published in AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY, METAPHILOSOPHY, and other journals. Author or editor of books like CHRISTIANITY AND THE NATURE OF SCIENCE, and THE CREATION HYPOTHESIS.
Strobel asks Moreland for five examples of convincing circumstantial evidence that Jesus rose from the dead.
“Moreland listened intently to my question. ‘Five examples?’ he asked. ‘Five things that are not in dispute by anybody?’” (p. 246)

Exhibit 1: The Disciples Died for Their Beliefs

Real bad start, considering he just said he was going to give us five examples of things that aren’t in dispute by anybody.
Moreland describes how depressed and discouraged the followers of Jesus were following his crucifixion, since anyone who was crucified was believed to be accursed by God.
“[Moreland:]‘Then, after a short period of time, we see them abandoning their occupations, regathering, and committing themselves to spreading a very specific message — that Jesus Christ was the Messiah of God who died on a cross, returned to life, and was seen alive by them.’” (pp. 246-247)
Source? The Bible.
Moreland describes the hardships faced by the disciples: lack of reliable food and shelter, public ridicule, beatings, imprisonment, and ultimately, torture and execution.
“[Moreland:]‘For what? For good intentions? No, because they were convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that they had seen Jesus Christ alive from the dead. What you can’t explain is how this particular group of men came up with this particular belief without having had an experience of the resurrected Christ. There’s no other adequate explanation.’” (p. 247)
Strobel brings up followers of other religions who have died for their beliefs — Muslims, Mormons, members of the cults of Jim Jones and David Koresh. Moreland insists that there is a difference between the disciples and those other religious followers: the disciples claimed to have personally seen Jesus, witnessed his death, and seen him after his resurrection. If their claims weren’t true, they were dying for something they knew wasn’t true.
“[Moreland:]‘And when you’ve got eleven credible people with no ulterior motives, with nothing to gain and a lot to lose, who all agree they observed something with their own eyes — now you’ve got some difficulty explaining that away.’” (p. 247)
Source for the claim that the disciples were “eleven credible people with no ulterior motives”? The Bible. They never wrote a single word. We have no idea what sort of people they were, or what they saw or thought they saw, or how they died, or even if they actually lived at all, because the only source for the disciples — for their names, for their association with Jesus, for everything about them — is the Bible, which was not written by anyone in their group, and probably not even written by anyone who knew anyone in their group, and church traditions which did not originate for the most part until centuries later.
“I smiled because I had been playing devil’s advocate by raising my objection. Actually, I knew he was right.” (p. 247)
Oh, see there, brothers and sisters? It wasn’t even a real objection. Lee was just playing. There are no real objections.
Strobel says of the disciples: “If they weren’t absolutely certain, they wouldn’t have allowed themselves to be tortured to death for proclaiming that the Resurrection had happened.” (p. 248)
Again, the most powerful and obvious objection to the vaunted “die for a lie” argument is to point out that it is based on assumptions about the disciples that are not supported by reliable history. Before you can ask me why the disciples would die for something they knew to be false, you first have to explain why I should believe the disciples lived and died as the Bible and church tradition describes.
But let’s move beyond that. Let’s grant, for the sake of argument, that the New Testament and the various church traditions that cropped up in subsequent centuries are giving us an accurate account of the lives and deaths of the disciples. Is it really such an open and shut case? Is there no other plausible reason why they might have died without renouncing their Christianity?
The website Debunking Christianity has an excellent article on the “die for a lie” argument (link: ( http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2006/05/die-for-lie-wont-fly.html ) that brings up a very important question that Strobel and Moreland don’t address: what if the disciples were killed because of their Christianity, but weren’t given an opportunity to save themselves by recanting? The article specifically mentions the execution of Peter, which according to tradition took place in the aftermath of the burning of Rome in the year 64. Emperor Nero blamed Christians for setting the fires and initiated a campaign of persecution against them. Peter was killed because he was a Christian, but because his sect had been identified as a threat, not his beliefs . Whether Peter recanted or not would have made no difference, which means that the “die for a lie” argument does not apply to the martyrdom of Peter, who was the most celebrated of the disciples, and whose supposed death — via inverted crucifixion — is the best known among Christians to this day.
It’s a baseless assumption that they would have even had a chance to save themselves by recanting. It’s also a baseless assumption that they would have had recanted to save themselves if given the opportunity. In the last video I mentioned the eleven witnesses of the Book of Mormon. These eleven men signed their names, swearing they had seen and, for eight of them, handled the golden plates from which Joseph Smith claimed he had translated the Book of Mormon. All eleven maintained their testimony for the rest of their lives, even after they fell out with Smith and were excommunicated from the church. Seeing as how Lee Strobel and J.P. Moreland are not Mormons, I assume they agree with me that these eleven men were lying when they said they had seen and held the golden plates. But why would they never recant their lies, even after splitting from Smith’s church? What could they possibly have had to gain?
I might also ask, why did anyone still follow William Miller after the Great Disappointment? Why do people still donate millions of dollars a year to the likes of Benny Hinn or Robert Tilton or Peter Popoff, who have been repeatedly exposed as frauds for decades? Why did people believe Harold Camping when he said the world was going to end last year, despite being wrong about it in the past? Why do some Catholics continue to deny that children were sexually abused by priests? Why do people continue to support politicians who have been revealed as frauds or hypocrites or criminals? Because we all have a powerful capacity for self-delusion, and because the idea of serving a greater good is very, very attractive.
There’s a marvelous scene in Martin Scorsese’s film The Last Temptation of Christ that illustrates what I’m talking about. In the scene, Jesus — who has survived the crucifixion and gone on to marry and have children — encounters the apostle Paul preaching the gospel. And it’s the gospel as we all know it — the crucifixion, the resurrection, plus Paul’s own vision of Christ on the road to Damascus. Jesus watches this and approaches Paul afterwards and interrogates him about his testimony. See, Jesus is alive — he knows Paul is making this up, because he knows he didn’t die on the cross, he wasn’t resurrected, he’s right there! And he tells Paul the truth, he tells him his testimony is wrong, that there was no death on the cross, there was no resurrection, that he’s the real Jesus and he’s here, alive. Jesus threatens to tell everyone the truth if Paul doesn’t stop spreading lies about him. And Paul tells Jesus, very calmly, that he created the truth, because he thought it’s what people needed to hear. “You don’t know how people need God,” he says. “You don’t know how happy he can make them. He can make them happy to die, and they die.” Paul goes on to tell Jesus that he — the real Jesus — isn’t important, because it’s the idea of the Resurrected Jesus that’s going to save the world, and he’s not going to stop spreading the message just because the real Jesus objects. Paul says “Go ahead and tell people the truth. The people who believe me will rise up and kill you.” Before they part, Paul says to Jesus, “I’m very happy I met you, because now I can forget all about you. My Jesus is much more important and much more powerful.”
Now, this is a scene in a film. The scene has no counterpart anywhere in the Bible or Christian tradition, it’s wholly the creation of the novelist Nikos Kazantzakis, the screenwriter Paul Schrader, the director Martin Scorsese and the actors Willem Dafoe and Harry Dean Stanton and the others who made the film. It proves nothing. But does anyone want to argue that human beings in real life aren’t capable of this kind of rationalizing? Most of us can not only imagine it — we’ve been guilty of it ourselves, to one degree or another.
Strobel, of whom the “die for a lie” argument is a particular favorite, acts as though the only possible reason the disciples would have gone to their deaths without recanting their testimony about Jesus is if they knew it was the truth. But I can think of a few reasons why they might die for a lie. If they believed, as Paul believes in that scene I just described, that their lie was serving a greater good, I think they might. If they believed the teachings of Jesus were valid and beneficial, if they believed others would be helped by believing in the promises of Jesus, even though the disciples themselves knew those promises to be false, I think they might. If they wanted to spare their families and friends the embarrassment and disillusionment of learning that the leader to whom they’d devoted their lives had been a false prophet, I think they might. It’s not difficult to imagine possible motives, other than the actual resurrection of Jesus, for the disciples to choose to die for their beliefs rather than expose them as false.
And, having said all that, it’s also possible that the disciples did actually recant. But seeing as how the only source for information about the disciples is the church that has venerated them for 2,000 years, how would we ever know about it?

Exhibit 2: The Conversion of Skeptics

Moreland cites the conversion of “hardened skeptics who didn’t believe in Jesus before his crucifixion” — skeptics like James the brother of Jesus, and Paul, and . . . and that’s it. Two conversions.
Moreland tells Strobel that the gospels establish that Jesus’s family was embarrassed by his ministry. Josephus later reports that James became the leader of the church in Jerusalem and was stoned to death for his beliefs. Moreland says the only explanation is that James encountered the resurrected Christ and was converted.
Or he converted and refused to recant for one of the reasons I just discussed, or none of this actually happened. Josephus, as Edwin Yamauchi admits in chapter 4 of this very book, is filled with interpolations added by early Christians to strengthen their own claims.
As for Paul, everyone agrees that Paul never actually encountered Jesus while he was alive. Paul’s own testimony is that he had a vision of Jesus. Now, according to his own testimony Paul was familiar with Christians and their beliefs. He was a Pharisee, he persecuted and executed Christians, one can assume he encountered them and heard from them first-hand what they believed about Jesus. So even if we take Paul at his word and accept that his “road to Damascus experience” actually occurred, all it proves is that Paul saw a vision of Jesus that compelled him to have a change of heart. It doesn’t prove that Jesus actually appeared to Paul, it doesn’t prove Jesus rose from the dead, it doesn’t prove that anything Jesus taught or anyone taught about Jesus was true.
Strobel compares the conversion of Paul to the revelation of Muhammad, and asks why those who take Paul at face value shouldn’t also believe Muhammad. Moreland argues that Muhammad’s experience took place in a cave and that there are no eyewitnesses to verify this. Paul, and other early Christians, on the other hand, claimed to have seen Jesus during public events that others witnessed, and also to have performed miracles in Jesus’s name.
Who were the witnesses to Paul’s encounter with the risen Christ? When did this take place? Who were the witnesses to the other post-resurrection appearances? What were their names? When did these appearances take place? Why does Moreland say these post-resurrection conversions had witnesses? Because the Bible says they did. And yet we don’t have names, we don’t have dates, we have very few specifics of location — the origin of the Book of Mormon is far better attested by eyewitnesses than any of this, and yet Strobel and Moreland aren’t Mormons — they reject that much more recent and specific eyewitness testimony, yet they affirm this. I wonder why that is.

Exhibit 3: Changes to Key Social Structures

Moreland talks about the strong sense of identity and continuity in Jewish culture that allowed the Jews to survive as a separate people for hundreds of years. And yet, despite how precious their religious beliefs and cultural institutions were to them, Jesus somehow convinced many Jews to give up or significantly alter these established structures in order to follow his teachings.
“[Moreland:]‘But five weeks after [Jesus is] crucified, over ten thousand Jews are following him and claiming that he is the initiator of a new religion.” (p. 250)
Source for these claims? How do we know ten thousand Jews were following Jesus five weeks after the crucifixion?
Moreland ticks off five Jewish social structures or traditions that were altered or abandoned altogether by Jews who converted to Christianity: the annual atoning animal sacrifice, the strict obeying of Mosaic Law, keeping the Sabbath on Saturday, worshiping a God who was a single person rather than a trinity, and the concept of the Messiah as a political leader who would initiate immediate changes such as overthrowing Roman rule.
Why else would ten thousand Jews be willing to change or forsake their cherished traditions so quickly, Moreland argues, unless they had seen Jesus risen from the dead?
So ten thousand people — which is a lot of people now, and was a stupendous number of people 2,000 years ago — personally saw Jesus after his death. And these encounters were of a sort that allowed these ten thousand people to be sure that the person they were seeing was, in fact, the same man who had been crucified and buried. They weren’t ten thousand people who believed Jesus had risen from the dead, or who thought they had seen Jesus risen from the dead, or who had been convinced by someone else’s testimony that Jesus had risen from the dead — Moreland is claiming that all ten thousand of them saw Jesus risen from the dead for themselves. Ten thousand people. Why, then, is there nothing about this in history? Why does this sound so much like something somebody made the fuck up? Ten thousand people see a man who has returned from the grave, and we read nothing about it outside church scripture and tradition but a few reports of some related hearsay written decades later? I call bullshit.
Like the conversions of skeptics, the changes in social structures by Jews converting to Christianity only proves that they changed their social structures. It proves nothing about Jesus or the resurrection.

Exhibit 4: Communion and Baptism

Moreland cites the emergence of the rites of communion and baptism as evidence for Jesus’s resurrection, since without the resurrection early Christians would have no reason to celebrate Jesus’s death on the cross via communion, or begin baptizing members in the name of “the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” thus elevating Jesus to the status of God.
Same argument as the last two exhibits: the emergence of these new rites only proves what people believed , not what was true.
Also, Strobel asks Moreland how we know baptism and communion were initiated by the church to honor Jesus and not merely adopted from other religions. What’s Moreland’s response? That there were no other religions with such rites to borrow from, that baptism was taken from Jewish customs, and “[Moreland:]‘. . . third, these two sacraments can be dated back to the very earliest Christian community — too early for the influence of any other religions to creep into their understanding of what Jesus’ death meant.’” (pp. 253-254)
It’s the only argument they have.

Exhibit 5: The Emergence of the Church

Finally, Moreland talks about the emergence of the church, which he describes as a major cultural shift. And historians naturally look for events to explain major cultural shifts in history. If not for the resurrection of Jesus, how could Christianity have grown from an obscure sect to the dominant religion in the Roman Empire?
One might ask a similar question about the spread of Islam, or Mormonism, or Scientology, or any movement that grew despite adversity to eventually find success from humble beginnings.
Again, for what feels like the twentieth time here, this doesn’t demonstrate the truth of what people believed, only that they believed it. Moreland quotes C.F.D. Moule, who wondered rhetorically what secular historians would use to fill the “hole the size and shape of the Resurrection” torn in history by the emergence of Christianity. Well, I’m no historian, but how about the belief in the Resurrection? All the emergence of the church proves is that people believed in its claims. It doesn’t mean the message was true — it means the message was compelling to enough of the people who heard it to drive the expansion of the church.
“. . . the willingness of the disciples to die for what they experienced; the revolutionized lives of skeptics like James and Saul; the radical changes in social structures cherished by Jews for centuries; the sudden appearance of Communion and baptism; and the amazing emergence and growth of the church.

“Given all five uncontested facts, I had to agree with Moreland that the Resurrection, and only the Resurrection, makes sense of them all.” (pp. 254-255)
How dishonest or deranged must you be to claim that these five facts are uncontested?

Taking the Final Step

Moreland offers Strobel one more category of evidence: the Christian experience of people encountering Jesus personally, and reporting that he has changed their lives. Moreland then describes his own conversion experience as a chemistry student in 1968, how he examined the evidence for Christ and concluded that it must be true.
Strobel protests that other religions furnish their followers with life changing experiences, as well, so Moreland revises: don’t just blindly trust experience; rather, follow the evidence. But if the evidence leads you to believe that Jesus truly was resurrected, subject it to an experiential test.
What the fuck is he talking about?
“[Moreland:]‘The experiential test is, “He’s still alive, and I can find out by relating to him.”’” (p. 256)
. . . What the fuck is he talking about?

Next: Conclusion: The Verdict of History — What Does the Evidence Establish — And What Does It Mean Today?

An Atheist Reads The Case for Christ

PART 3: Researching the Resurrection

Chapter 13: The Evidence of the Appearances — Was Jesus Seen Alive After His Death on the Cross?

The Addie Mae Collins Story

Strobel begins by talking about Addie Mae Collins, one of the four little girls killed in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. Thirty-five years later Addie Mae’s grave was opened so that her sisters could have her reburied in a nicer cemetery, and they discovered that her body was missing. This was a shock to the family, and there was an immediate investigation into what had happened. Many theories were suggested, including that the tombstone had been placed on the wrong plot.
“Yet in the midst of determining what happened, one explanation was never proposed: Nobody suggested that young Addie Mae had been resurrected to walk the earth again. Why? Because by itself an empty grave does not a resurrection make.” (Lee Strobel, THE CASE FOR CHRIST, p. 225)
Would it be unduly naturalistic of me to insist that an empty grave combined with ancient hearsay reporting that its occupant was magically appearing to people does not a resurrection make, either?

The Twelfth Interview: Gary Habermas, Ph.D, D.D.

Gary Habermas, Ph.D, D.D., doctorate from Michigan State University, doctor of divinity degree from Emmanuel College in Oxford, England, author of THE RESURRECTION OF JESUS: A RATIONAL INQUIRY and other books, contributor to the book JESUS UNDER FIRE, and author of articles published in FAITH AND PHILOSOPHY and other journals.
“Habermas — bearded, straight-talking, rough-hewn — is also a fighter, an academic pit bull who looks more like a nightclub bouncer than an ivory tower intellectual.” (p. 226)
Again with the anti-intellectualism! “It’s okay to believe this guy, because he’s not one of those godless elitists like the ones that are probably teaching your children!” Give it a fucking rest, man.
Strobel hypes Habermas as a debater, mentioning a 1987 debate with Antony Flew where four of five judges decided that Habermas had won the debate by presenting compelling evidence for the resurrection of Jesus.
Well, sounds like we’re in for some very impressive and compelling evidence then, eh? Hope everyone’s wearing their baptismal gowns, because you’re gonna want to go out and get sprinkled as soon as this is over, sounds like.
Habermas teaches at Liberty University, by the way.

“Dead People Don’t Do That”

Habermas admits that there were no witnesses to the resurrection — on other words, no one actually saw Jesus sit up in the tomb. But this doesn’t harm his case, he says, because:
“[Habermas:]‘We don’t see dinosaurs; we study fossils. We may not know how a disease originates, but we study its symptoms. Maybe nobody witnesses a crime, but police piece together the evidence after the fact.’” (p. 228)
Habermas says witnesses to the resurrection aren’t needed to establish the resurrection, because if you can establish that Jesus was dead, and then was seen alive after his death, you’ve established the resurrection. Two things. First, people reporting that they saw Jesus alive after his death does not establish that Jesus was alive. It established that people saw, or thought they saw, or claimed they saw, Jesus after he died. So it’s much more difficult to establish that Jesus actually appeared alive after his death than Habermas is making it out to be.
Second, fossils, disease symptoms and crime scenes are examples of physical evidence. There is no physical evidence for Jesus at all, so this is what is known in philosophical circles as a “shit analogy.” We know about dinosaurs because we have physical evidence we can examine, not because it’s written by an anonymous author in a book that other essentially anonymous people saw some dinosaurs a long, long time ago.
At this point they go into a lengthy discussion about the creed Paul shares in I Corinthians 15:3-8. A lot of this is very close to what Strobel and William Lane Craig talked about in the previous chapter, and basically it all boil down to this: Paul says he encountered Jesus after his death, and Paul also says Jesus appeared to Peter and the rest of the Twelve, then to five hundred witnesses, then to James and then to the rest of the apostles.
“[T]his is incredibly influential testimony that Jesus did appear alive after his death. Here were names of specific individuals and groups of people who saw him, written at a time when people could still check them out if they wanted confirmation.” (p. 229)
Oliver Cowdery, Martin Harris, David Whitmer. Those three men signed a statement declaring that in the summer of 1830 they saw the golden plates from which was taken the Book of Mormon. They testified they were shown these plates by an angel. They maintained this testimony for the rest of their lives, even after they broke with Joseph Smith and were excommunicated from his church.
Christian Whitmer, Jacob Whitmer, Peter Whitmer Jr., John Whitmer, Hiram Page, Joseph Smith, Sr., Hyrum Smith, Samuel Harrison Smith. Those eight men signed a similar statement around the same time testifying that they had been shown the golden plates by Joseph Smith himself, and had handled the plates for themselves. Like the three witnesses, these eight men eventually had a falling out with Joseph Smith and were kicked out of the church, but also like the three witnesses, they maintained their testimony about seeing and holding the golden plates for the rest of their lives.
These eleven people — we have their names, we have their signed statements, they lived not two thousand years ago but less than two hundred years ago — make the Book of Mormon and its divine origin far, far, far better attested than the Bible. Eleven people signed their names saying they saw the golden plates! Why would they do that if it wasn’t the truth? What other explanation could there be? Why aren’t we all Mormons?

“Convince Me It’s a Creed”

Strobel asks why Habermas and others are certain I Corinthians 15:3-8 is a creed Paul is passing along rather than something he’s just making up. Habermas says: first, Paul says it’s a creed that he’s passing on. Second, its style (particularly its use of parallelism) indicates that it was a creed. Third, it refers to Peter as “Cephas,” which was his Aramaic name, indicating an early origin. Fourth, it doesn’t match the style or vocabulary of the rest of Paul’s writing. Fifth, it does match the style and vocabulary of Aramaic and Hebrew styles of narration.
Then, inevitably I supposed, they start talking about how old the creed it. Habermas argues that it must go back at least to the year 51, since Paul says he shared the creed with the church at Corinth, and might even date to within two years of the resurrection.
“[Habermas:]‘So this is incredibly early material — primitive, unadorned testimony to the fact that Jesus appeared alive to skeptics like Paul and James, as well as to Peter and the rest of the disciples.’” (p. 230)
Wrong — it’s testimony to the claim that Jesus appeared alive, not the fact .
And, here again, for what feels like the eight millionth time in the book, we have the “early equals true” argument. The creed goes back to a few years after the resurrection, therefore it must be true, it can’t possibly be the result of legend or fabrication, even though it attests to something that we all know and understand to be impossible, namely the return of a person to life from death. Without this argument, and the related argument that anything untrue would have been weeded out of the story by people hearing it at the time, Christian apologetics is nowhere. The entire enterprise is standing on clay feet.
They go on discussing this creed some more, with Habermas’s argument boiling down to “it’s a creed and its claims are true because Paul says so.” He brings up Paul’s claim to have personally encountered Jesus, which Habermas says makes it eyewitness testimony, and he also says that Paul says his message is the same as James and Peter, who were eyewitnesses to the life of Jesus — again, Paul says. Paul says. Paul says. The fact that Paul says it does not make it true. Paul claims the bright light and the voice he heard on the road to Damascus was Jesus speaking to him — why is Paul such a reliable source?

The Mystery of the Five Hundred

Strobel mentions that Paul, in I Corinthians 15, is the only source — inside or outside of the Bible — for the claim that Jesus appeared to five hundred witnesses at once following his death. He asks Habermas if this doesn’t cast some doubt on Paul as a source.
“[Habermas:]‘Well, it’s just plain silliness to say this casts doubt on Paul. . . . I mean, give me a break! First, even though it’s only reported in one source, it just so happens to be the earliest and best-authenticated passage of all! That counts for something.” (p. 231) Many of the earliest witnesses to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, got the facts of those events totally wrong. Earliest source does not always mean best source.
Then he makes the self-correcting argument, saying that if Paul hadn’t really known Jesus appeared to five hundred people, he would never have said so, since others could easily have checked that out. But Paul never mentions who these people are, or even specifics on when or where this appearance to the five hundred took place, so . . . how would people at the time have been able to check this out, exactly?
Strobel asks where this encounter with the five hundred would even have taken place.
“‘Well, the Galilean countryside,’ Habermas speculated. ‘If Jesus could feed five thousand, he could preach to five hundred.’” (p. 232)
A few lines later, Habermas says that the five hundred was a local story that probably would have been forgotten within a few years, and also says that the five hundred isn’t even very important evidence, anyway. Once again, evidence that can be undermined doesn’t really matter that much anyway. You cast doubt on the appearance to the five hundred and Habermas responds with “Well, who cares about the five hundred?”
Let me talk for a second about these numbers — five hundred brethren, four thousand, five thousand people who Jesus supposedly fed with loaves and fishes. Even if we make the extraordinary and unwarranted concession that the gospels and the letters of Paul come to us through reliable sources, these numbers are absolutely meaningless. How do we know — how did the gospel writers know, how did Paul know — that there were four thousand, or five thousand, or five hundred people there? I was at the Reason Rally in Washington, D.C., a few weeks before I’m shooting this. There were between 20,000 and 30,000 people there, according to reports. Now, I was there. I was in the crowd, I was there from early in the morning watching people arrive. If you told me there were one thousand people there, I’d have my doubts. I know there were more than one thousand people there. But if you told me there were 10,000 rather than 20- or 30,000? I’d probably buy that. Similarly, if you told me there were 50,000, I’d buy that, too — because I can’t tell the difference when the numbers get that big! I look around and all I see is a sea of people. And unless you are very practiced in making these kind of crowd estimates, and willing to accept a significant margin for error, that’s all you see, too. Why does anyone treat these claims of crowd sizes in the Bible — four thousand, five thousand, five hundred — as anything other than conjecture?

The Testimony of the Gospels

Okay, enough with that fucking creed.
Habermas talks about the descriptions of the appearances in the gospels. Jesus appeared separately to Mary Magdalene, to Cleopas, to the disciples, to ten apostles, to Thomas and other apostles, to seven apostles, to the disciples again, and to the apostles on the Mount of Olives at the ascension.
Strobel describes this as “a wealth of sightings of Jesus.” He says these aren’t fleeting glimpses of Jesus, but multiple, lengthy appearances where people saw and interacted with Jesus. Strobel asks Habermas if there is any corroboration for these appearances outside the gospels.
“‘Just look at Acts,’ replied Habermas.” (p. 235)
The Bible. This is literally all the evidence there is . The evidence of the appearances? It’s all right there, nowhere else.

Mark’s Missing Conclusion

Strobel asks Habermas if he’s bothered by the conclusion of many scholars that the Gospel of Mark actually ends with the discovery of the empty tomb, and all descriptions of things that happened subsequently were added later by another author.
“[Habermas:]‘Even if Mark does end there . . . you still have him reporting that the tomb is empty, and a young man proclaiming “He is risen!” and telling the women that there will be appearances. So you have, first, a proclamation that the Resurrection has occurred, and second, a prediction that appearances will follow.’” (p. 236)
Understand what Habermas is saying: He’s saying even if the stories of the appearances in Mark — the oldest gospel — were added later, it doesn’t matter, because Mark, before the added portion, proclaims the Resurrection and predicts appearances.
Now, try to follow me here, see if you can understand my problem with this: Mark, the first gospel, the source for the other two synoptic gospels, ends with “He is risen!” and the prediction of appearances. The gospels of Matthew and Luke, which came later and were based on Mark, contain references to specific appearances, as predicted in Mark. Does that not seem a bit suspicious? They actually address this question in the next section:

Are There Any Alternatives?

“Without question, the amount of testimony and corroboration of Jesus’ post-Resurrection appearances is staggering. To put it into perspective, if you were to call each one of the witnesses to a court of law to be cross-examined for just fifteen minutes each, and you went around the clock without a break, it would take you from breakfast on Monday until dinner on Friday to hear them all. After listening to 129 straight hours of testimony, who could possibly walk away unconvinced?” (p. 237)
Nice slide there, Lee, but we don’t have 129 straight hours of eyewitness testimony establishing the post-Resurrection appearances of Jesus. We have the New Testament. And that’s it.
Possibility 1: The Appearances Are Legendary Strobel actually brings up the fact that the number of appearances reported grows with each subsequent gospel, from none in Mark (assuming the added ending), to more in Matthew and Luke, and the most of all reported in John. Habermas argues that this doesn’t suggest the appearances are legendary, because the mere fact the reports of the appearances grow over time establishes that the legends are based on something factual, and that something must have happened to compel the apostles to begin preaching about the Resurrection. Habermas also cites I Corinthians 15 again, and Acts, as earlier sources for the appearances than the gospels.
So even if Elvis wasn’t actually at the Burger King in Kalamazoo, the fact that Louise Welling saw him at the supermarket in Vicksburg means that he was alive?
By the way, that argument basically renders the entire chapter up to this point totally irrelevant, since the specific appearances are less important than the fact that people believed, generally speaking, that there were appearances.
Habermas also asks, “what about the empty tomb?” And I respond with, “What the fuck about the empty tomb?” Give me a good argument for the existence of the empty tomb, then we’ll talk about what it means.
Possibility 2: The Appearances Were Hallucinations Habermas goes over why the appearances couldn’t have been hallucinations: Jesus appeared to multiple people, the disciples were fearful following the crucifixion and not expecting to see Jesus again and therefore in no right mind to be hallucinating about him, hallucinations are rare, hallucinations don’t account for the interactions with Jesus reported — none of which is relevant, because the New Testament is the only source for the appearances! You say they weren’t hallucinations? Fine! I don’t need them to be. I don’t even need to go that far, because the New Testament is all you’ve got.
Habermas similarly rejects the argument that the appearances were the result of groupthink, that they believed Jesus had returned to life because they wanted to believe it. Habermas claims this doesn’t account for why so many of the disciples were willing to die rather than recant their beliefs, or for how skeptics like James and Paul were persuaded. Again, how do we know skeptics were persuaded? How do we know the disciples were martyred? Church tradition, and the New Testament. Before we talk about why these things would have happened if not for the Resurrection, we need to talk about why I should believe these things even happened.

“No Rational Doubt”

Strobel reiterates his claim that Jesus died, rose again, and appeared to the disciples, based on the arguments made in this and the previous two chapters of the book. He quotes Michael Green, who said that there can be no rational doubt that the appearances occurred, and called the post-Resurrection appearances of Jesus “as well authenticated as anything in antiquity.” Sometimes people say silly things.
Then Strobel asks Habermas about the importance of the Resurrection. And appeal to emotion in three, two, one . . .

The Resurrection of Debbie

Habermas relates the story of the death of his wife Debbie from stomach cancer in 1995. He talks about what an awful time it was, and how his students would call him to cheer him up by saying “At a time like this, aren’t you glad about the Resurrection?” Remember, he works at Liberty University; students there are mostly evangelical Christians who consider “aren’t you glad about the Resurrection?” to be a totally appropriate thing to say to a man whose wife is wasting away from a terminal disease. Illustrating a major difference between him and myself, Habermas says these calls from his students actually worked, and made him feel better. That was his reaction. My reaction would have been something more along the lines of “Hey, kid, go fuck yourself,” but again, that’s me.
Habermas says that if God raised Jesus from the dead, that means that he raised Debbie from the dead, too.
“[Habermas:]‘It was a horribly emotional time for me, but I couldn’t get around the fact that the Resurrection is the answer for her suffering. . . . Losing my wife was the most painful experience I’ve ever had to face, but if the Resurrection could get me through that, it can get me through anything. . . . That’s not some sermon. I believe that with all my heart. If there’s a resurrection, there’s a heaven. If Jesus was raised, Debbie was raised. And I will be someday, too. Then I’ll see them both.’” (p. 242)
Nice to see such an objective perspective on the subject, isn’t it?

Next: Chapter 14: The Circumstantial Evidence — Are There Any Supporting Facts That Point to the Resurrection?