Review - 'Who Needs God' - part 5

I’m reviewing a series of six talks called ‘Who Needs God’, by Andy Stanley, senior pastor of North Point Community Church, Atlanta — https://whoneedsgod.com/ — and we’ve reached the fifth talk.

Talk 5: ‘In-Justice For All’

In this fifth talk, Andy discusses the question, How can there be a good God when there is so much injustice in the world? He constructs his own version of theodicy — the attempt to defend God in the face of the existence of evil and suffering.

This is by far the most unsatisfying of the talks so far. It seems to be full of logical fallacies and round-about arguments that do not add up to a convincing case at all. And in the end, it completely ignores the biggest question that his audience would have.

I can’t help but notice that the tone of Andy’s voice and his facial expressions have become somewhat harsher in this talk compared with the previous ones. I wonder whether he senses that his argument is somewhat lacking, or whether he would much rather not have had to deal with this topic at all.

The talk starts with a rather strange ‘footnote’. Andy states that we should beware of using other people’s suffering as an argument against God. This is because, he claims, many people (especially in the developing world) accept suffering as part of life, and even find it to be what he calls ‘a path that leads to God.’ He claims — with unusual passion and more than his usual amount of finger-pointing — that it is insulting to these people to use their suffering as an argument against God. He then generalises this to claim that it is not valid to use anyone else’s suffering in building a case against God. But this is a faulty generalisation. I wonder whether the passion in Andy’s delivery at this point is there to make up for the lack of logic because, even if we discount those who accept suffering in the way Andy has described, that still leaves a good many people for whom suffering really is what the word implies: unwelcome, painful suffering with no apparent purpose. If anything is insulting, surely it is Andy’s argument that is insulting to these people. This footnote does nothing to alter any of the logic for or against the main argument. Even if Andy’s point here were valid, it would still leave a person able to use their own suffering as an argument against God.

Now we reach the main part of this fifth talk. Andy’s argument is that the existence of injustice and suffering in the world is not an argument either for or against the existence of God. He says that using injustice against the existence of God is an emotional argument, but it is not a rational argument.

Andy at this point qualifies the main argument, allowing that the existence of injustice could count as an argument against other versions of God, but not against the Christian God, the God revealed by Jesus. And he claims this is because Christians have never used the absence of injustice as an argument in favour of God. In Andy’s own words, ‘Christians have never made an argument for God’s existence based on a world where bad things never happen to good people.’ Other religions have claimed that God, or the gods, protect good people, but Christianity does not. And therefore it’s not valid to argue against the existence of the Christian God based on a world where bad things do happen to good people. Now correct me if I’m wrong, but this appears to be a logical fallacy. You can skip the next paragraph if you’re already convinced of that!

To show the fallacy in Andy’s argument, let’s set out two statements as follows:

• A: Bad things never happen to good people.
• B: God exists.

Andy’s logic here is that A has never been used as an argument for B, therefore not-A (bad things do happen) cannot be used as an argument against B. But this is not valid. There are three cases in which no-one would use A as an argument for B:

1. A is known to be false;
2. A is known to be true but does not imply B;
3. A is known to be true and does imply B, but no-one has thought of it before.

None of these cases says anything either way about the validity of the claim ‘not-A implies not-B’. That claim would have to be evaluated on its own terms. (In case 3, it would be invalid to claim ‘not-A implies not-B’ based only on ‘A implies B’ — that is the fallacy of denying the antecedent — but it could still be perfectly valid to claim ‘not-A implies not-B’ for other reasons.)

So far, then, Andy has done nothing to disprove the claim that the injustice or suffering experienced by at least some people could be used as an argument against God.

Nevertheless Andy from now on takes as given that injustice can’t be used as an argument against the existence of God, and moves on to consider what else injustice might mean instead. He says, ‘Injustice in the world calls into question the justice of God, not the existence of God.’ In other words, injustice doesn’t preclude the existence of any god, but it might seem to preclude the existence of a good god. Using another of Andy’s quotes, ’It makes more sense to be angry, than atheist. … It makes more sense to be disappointed in God than to completely disbelieve.’ This does make sense. Andy is at this point assuming that the case for the existence of the Christian God is compelling for other reasons, but allowing that the presence of pain and injustice can lead his audience to question the goodness of that God.

At this point Andy seems to almost deliberately confuse his audience by asking, ‘Why do we assume if there is God, God must be good and just?’ Who told us this? After a long diversion in which we wonder if Andy is about to discard this idea like the false foundations of Christianity he has discarded in his earlier talks, he eventually comes round to saying that this idea was introduced by Jesus. Andy claims it was Jesus who was the first to introduce the idea of the ‘justice-and-dignity-for-all version of God’ rather than a God who favoured one nation at the expense of the others. ‘Until Jesus came along there was no concept of a God who loved everybody on the planet.’ But that is to discount the elements of Judaism that were already developing this idea, and that Jesus drew on.

Next Andy contrasts the idea of a God of love and justice with nature and with the process of evolution by natural selection, which is indifferent to justice. Note that Andy is not rejecting science here, he appears to accepts natural selection, and chooses to contrast it with God. Andy says, ‘Nature is not just. … Natural selection knows nothing of justice, love or dignity.’ And quoting Stephen Hawking, ‘we have arrived here because of our aggression.’ Then Andy claims that because nature knows nothing of justice or injustice, without God there would be no such thing as justice; there would be no standard of right or wrong. We would be left with each of us defining right and wrong for ourselves and being in continual conflict with each other. But this is to ignore the work of anthropologies who can explain that what sense of justice we do have is a natural product of our evolution.

Andy concedes that at this point his audience might have a major question about all of this. But it’s not the question I would expect. His question is, ‘Does God have an answer to all this?’ and he goes on to answer this in the affirmative in the rest of the talk: God will bring justice in the end, through judgment, but has also provided a Saviour. Andy’s final conclusion is that suffering is not an argument against God; it is in fact a reminder that we need God. If we reject God, we reject justice. But he misses the more fundamental question: Why would a God of love and justice create a world based on a process that has no justice in the first place? Why create a world in which suffering is natural? Why create a world that needs a Saviour? This larger question is not only left unanswered, Andy seems to be totally unaware that his audience might even raise it as a question at all!

As well as ignoring this elephant in the room, we should also note that Andy has presented no hard evidence that God will actually bring eventual justice. He has provided no evidence that there will be judgment, apart from one vague mention that Jesus said so, but without using any quotes from the gospels. And he has said nothing about what form that judgment will take. We assume he is referring to the standard Christian doctrines of final judgment and hell, but he doesn’t mention them directly. Nor does he attempt to explain how a future judgment of sin could possibly put right present suffering due to natural diseases. The two don't seem to be related.

Andy’s final point is that our deepest longing for justice is a good match for Christianity, that it proves this all to be true. He says that if we care for justice then we should wish Christianity to be true; we should wish that God will bring justice. But this is a rather weak point. If we care for justice, why should we only wish that God will correct everything one day? Why shouldn’t we wish that the world had been different in the first place? Christianity isn’t really the best match for our deepest longings at all. The Eastern religions actually do a better job of dealing with suffering, by saying that all our experiences are an illusion and giving us tools to cope here and now, than Christianity does by deferring the solution to the future.

Overall, Andy seems to have failed to present a logically consistent argument. If I were to summarise the talk it would go something like this:

• You can’t use other people’s suffering as an argument against God because some people accept suffering as a path that leads them to God.
• Suffering isn’t an argument against God, but it could be an argument against a good God; it could be a reason to be angry with God.
• But were did we get the idea that God must be good? (seeming to argue as though this were false)
• It came from Jesus (so actually it’s true after all).
• Without God, nature has no justice; natural selection is indifferent to justice or injustice.
• But God is just, and will execute judgment to bring justice for all in the end. (implication: our anger against God is not justified after all)
• Injustice and suffering are a reminder that we need God.

But this doesn’t follow a logical flow, and raises new questions that don’t get answers:

• Why would a God concerned for justice create a world whose natural processes are indifferent to justice?
• Why would a good God create a world in which there would be suffering, even if it is only temporary?
• How does the promise of future judgment of sin cancel out present suffering due to natural causes such as disease or disability?

In conclusion, has Andy created a satisfactory theodicy? Has he successfully justified why God allows suffering? No. His definition of the goodness of God is limited to ensuring eventual justice, not preventing suffering. He has left us with a God who is quite happy to create a world based on natural selection, a world in which there is illness and disease, and in which humans are free to inflict suffering on each other. He has even admitted that God foresaw what the world would be like. The promise of eventual justice, for which he has presented no evidence, does nothing to negate present suffering. This talk has been the most unsatisfactory so far. Far from drawing his target audience of sceptics back to Christianity, this has only served to show that Christianity really doesn’t have an answer to the biggest question after all.

Review - 'Who Needs God' - part 4

I’m reviewing a series of six talks called ‘Who Needs God’, by Andy Stanley, senior pastor of North Point Community Church, Atlanta — https://whoneedsgod.com/ — and we’ve reached the fourth talk.

Talk 4: ‘The God of Jesus’

As mentioned last time, Andy starts this talk by reacting to some criticism that he received from more conservative Christians for his earlier talks, condemning him for ‘not believing the Bible’. He defends himself with a summary of his argument so far, which is that, even though he does ‘believe the Bible’, Christianity does not stand or fall on the truth of the whole Bible. Christianity stands on the resurrection of Jesus, which later got written down in what we know now as the New Testament. Once people believed in Jesus and reflected on his life and teaching they found what they believed to be references to Jesus in the Jewish scriptures, our Old Testament, and so even non-Jewish believers became interested in the Jewish scriptures, the end result of which was the compilation of both sets of scriptures into one volume. The point: the Bible came later than Christianity, so it can’t be its foundation. This is all very valid, and would be enough to make a Christian of everyone if the evidence for the resurrection were convincing enough.

Andy at this point picks an example from the Old Testament to illustrate his point about Christian believers’ early interest in the Jewish scriptures — Isaiah 53. But his argument is rather simplistic. He simply says, ‘Does this prophecy sound like Jesus? Yes it does,’ completely discounting the fact that it could easily be referring to anyone suffering torture or nearing death. He cites the case of a Jewish rabbi who admitted that the passage sounds a lot like Jesus, without mentioning that Jewish scholars have dozens of other different interpretations of the passage, many of which don’t even refer to a Messiah figure at all, let alone Jesus.

Now, as a link into the main topic of this fourth talk, Andy picks up that not only did the first followers of Jesus use the Jewish scriptures, so did Jesus himself. He says that we must take seriously anything Jesus said, because he predicted his own resurrection, which then came about. In other words, we should take the Old Testament seriously because Jesus did. Nevertheless, Christianity still doesn’t stand or fall on the historical accuracy of the whole of the Old Testament; it stands on the historicity of the resurrection. Andy repeats his earlier claim from talk 3, that the first believers didn’t need faith to believe in the resurrection because they are supposed to have seen Jesus for themselves.

This is the point at which the series of talks takes a new turn, moving from rejecting false foundations, to using the resurrection as the foundation for what comes next. And it is the point after which any sceptic who has not been convinced so far will find nothing further of interest. If Andy had decided to discuss the evidence for the resurrection in more detail, then he might have kept some interest amongst his target audience, who would be interested to know if he has any new evidence, or any new way of presenting it. But he doesn’t. He takes the resurrection as fact from this point onwards, and builds on top of it, and I suspect that like me, this is the point at which his sceptical non-church audience switched off. It’s not enough to leave us with the simplistic statement that the disciples met Jesus on the beach, when the only evidence for that meeting is in the very document that Andy has already admitted was written at least a generation later by those who already believed. This series of talks has done nothing to shift the opinion of any sceptic who finds the evidence for the resurrection unconvincing.

The main point of talk 4 is that if Jesus predicted his own resurrection, which then took place, then we can trust what he says about anything else, including God. In Andy’s own words, ‘when someone predicts their own death … and resurrection, and pulls it off, I go with whatever they say.’

But why does successfully predicting his own resurrection make Jesus a trustworthy source of information about God? I believe here that Andy is relying on some logical steps that he doesn’t directly state. I assume the content of this unstated argument is that the resurrection was an act of God, and therefore it counts as God’s endorsement of Jesus, and therefore we can trust what Jesus said. But there are some unstated assumptions here, and we need to pause and note them.

The first hidden assumption is that the resurrection, if it happened, can only have been brought about by God. But this is only an assumption, and requires a prior belief in God. This looks suspiciously like a circular argument to me. If Andy’s aim is to demonstrate that there is a God, even if it’s not quite the God you were brought up to believe in, he can’t use the existence of God as one of the premises in the argument. Of course, if you already believe in God, then the resurrection of Jesus would most likely be interpreted as an act of God. But if you don’t already believe in God, the resurrection (if you were convinced by the evidence for it) would simply be a mysterious event whose cause needs to be investigated.

The second hidden assumption is that the resurrection, taken to be an act of God, counts as God’s endorsement of everything Jesus had said. But there is no sound reason for taking this logical step. The resurrection, if it took place and was an act of God, could indeed count as God’s endorsement of something about Jesus. For example, it could be seen as God’s approval of Jesus’s moral character. Or it could be seen as God’s approval of at least some of the aims of Jesus’s ministry. Or more specifically it could be seen as God choosing to ‘complete’ the actions Jesus took at the climax of his ministry to bring about the kingdom of God. All these are possible interpretations of the resurrection, but none of them imply that Jesus got everything right. We know Jesus wasn’t right about cosmology — he was a man of his day and believed in a flat earth with heaven physically above it, as did everyone else. So we need some pretty strong reasons to suspend judgment when it comes to his views about God, which were also shaped largely by the beliefs of his day.

So despite Andy’s claim that his version of Christianity doesn’t require a blind step of faith, that is exactly what he is doing here. Firstly in taking the resurrection as fact despite the questionable nature of the evidence, and secondly in assuming this makes Jesus trustworthy in everything he said.

Now we come to the question of what Jesus said about God. As we found in talk 3, Andy places enormous faith in the accuracy of the gospels as eye-witness accounts. He says, ’the gospel writers documented what Jesus said about God,’ and takes this as fact. Given that this is generally disputed, especially with regard to the later gospels, we might expect Andy to start with an example from Mark, the earliest gospel, as a concession to the sceptics, but instead he starts with John, the last of the gospels to be written, and boldly claims, ‘John who was an eyewitness … documented what Jesus said.’ But not even most Christian scholars would claim this; the majority viewpoint is that John was not written by anyone who was there during the ministry of Jesus. So we need to take great care when reading John, to see whether it gives any direct evidence of the teaching of Jesus, or only reflects the views of the later community in which the author lived.

As it happens, the first passage that Andy has picked from John is one of the most theologically developed pieces of writing that can be found anywhere in the gospels, and is radically different from the simple, practical teaching found in the earlier gospels. It’s the place where Jesus says, ‘anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.’ In Andy’s paraphrase, if you want to know what God says, listen to Jesus; if you want to know what God is doing, watch what Jesus is doing. The sceptic would say at this point that this just reads as Jesus deciding for himself how to act as the agent of an invisible God, and then saying that’s what God is like. (This passage also adds nothing to the flow of the argument in this talk as far as I can discern.)

The next statement of Jesus that Andy picks, also from John, is ‘God is spirit’. But as Andy explains, this is what Jews had always believed since the establishment of Judaism. So we don’t get anything new from Jesus at this point. Andy then tries to align ‘God is spirit’ — that is, immaterial and timeless — with modern science. He claims that an immaterial, timeless God is exactly what we would expect as the cause behind the big bang, where all the time and material that we know about began. And yet, the founders of Judaism had the same belief in an immaterial God even though they had a very different cosmology. So we can hardly say that ‘God is spirit’ fits with our scientific knowledge any better than it fits with theirs.

Now at last we come to a statement from Jesus found in the earlier gospels and therefore more likely to be authentic: ‘When you pray, say “Father …”’. Andy explains this as Jesus teaching that God is personal — not human or male, because God is spirit, but personal in such a way that ‘father’ is the closest concept within our human experience. But this understanding was not unique to Jesus either. Other Jewish teachers around the same time also referred to God as ‘father’. The reason Andy has included this statement is in order to invite his audience to say ‘Father’ as a simple prayer. This is the most obvious of a number of points in this talk where Andy urges this audience to take a step of faith, rather than using the purely evidence-based approach that he originally promised.

Andy now jumps forward to the first letter of John, and the statement, ‘God is love.’ He claims that this is something the author of the letter learned directly from Jesus (although it’s not a recorded saying of Jesus in the gospels). As we have already mentioned, it’s unlikely that the author of the letters of John was there during the ministry of Jesus so this is most likely a refection of the beliefs of the later church community. Nevertheless, the statement ‘God is love’ is certainly consistent with the teaching of Jesus.

As with the statement, ‘God is spirit’, Andy then tries to make a modern justification for the statement, ‘God is love.’ He uses the concept of light and shade as a metaphor for love and what he calls ‘unlove’. (Andy uses the word 'unlove' not in the dictionary sense of the verb, ‘to cease to love’, but in his own made-up meaning, a noun meaning ‘absence of love’ or maybe 'the opposite of love' — because of this, I will use quote marks for the word every time I quote it.) Andy claims that just as shade does not exist without the sun, so ‘unlove’ cannot exist without love. Love must necessarily pre-exist ‘unlove’. Hence the statement ‘God is love’ must be correct. This is a classic example of a false analogy — taking a metaphor literally and using it to deduce additional facts that are not part of the original metaphor. It’s very poor reasoning. When he extends the argument to also infer that good pre-dates evil, therefore God is good, we know he has taken this too far. In fact, it’s perfectly possible for ‘unlove’ to exist without love first existing. Within the contemporary understanding of evolution and anthropology, love is something that has emerged as a result of evolution, while the previous natural world had no love, only the survival of the fittest. Even if you don’t believe in evolution as fact, you have to accept that this is logically possible; it is possible for a world to exist without love, before love has been introduced to it. Andy’s supposed proof that ‘God is love’ is nothing of the sort.

Let’s take a step back and look back at what Andy has been doing here. For two of the main statements he has quoted from Jesus or from John (‘God is spirit’ and ‘God is love’), Andy has attempted to add his own justification that he thinks should appeal to us today. Why does he think he needs to do this? If it’s true that we can trust everything Jesus said because of the resurrection, then why does Andy need to add his own arguments in support of each point? Why not just give us the evidence for the resurrection and leave us to believe everything Jesus said because of it? The answer is, because the evidence isn't convincing on its own. To put it more generally, what is the need for Christian apologetics if the evidence for Christianity is good enough on its own? In the end, despite his best intentions, Andy is doing what all Christian preachers have done before him, which is to use persuasion to urge his audience to take a step of faith. He is trying to drip-feed his audience with a collection of points from different angles, which he hopes will add up to a case for the trustworthiness of Christianity. But if the evidence itself were persuasive, neither he nor any other preacher would need to do this.

Now we reach the end of this fourth talk. Having made the claim that the gospel of John accurately records the teaching of Jesus, Andy assumes we now agree with him on this without question, and invites us to read the whole of the gospel of John and ask, ‘What do I learn from the Son about the Father?’ Once again, Andy isn’t really doing anything different from what previous pastors and evangelists have done — asking his audience to read the New Testament in isolation, in the hope that they will feel emotionally drawn by it, instead of asking them to go away and research all the evidence, for and against, in an unbiassed way. While the earlier talks promised a new evidence-based approach to Christianity, and made a good start by clearing away some of the old dogmas, by this point we begin to see that in fact Andy is still urging the same old faith-based approach as everyone before him.

The Galilee question

While reviewing Andy Stanley’s set of talks entitled ‘Who Needs God’ – https://whoneedsgod.com/ – I was promted to research the likely reliability, or otherwise, of one of the accounts of Jesus appearing to his disciples after his resurrection.

He summarises the first believers’ testimony very simply as: ‘We saw him killed, then a few days later we had breakfast with him on the beach’ – a reference to the story in John 21 in which Jesus appears to his disciples while they are fishing on Lake Tiberias (another name for Lake Galilee), causes a miraculous catch of fish, and cooks breakfast for them on the shore. Unfortunately for the argument for the resurrection, researching this story quickly leads to uncovering one of the major discrepancies between the gospels when it comes to their resurrection narratives – whether Jesus appeared to his disciples in Jerusalem or in Galilee.

On first inspection, the Galilee breakfast in John 21 fits with the narrative presented in Matthew and Mark, in which the angel gives the following instruction to the women at the tomb:

“Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples: ‘He has risen from the dead and is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him.’ Now I have told you.” (Matthew 28:5–7)

“Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter, ‘He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.’” (Mark 16:6–7)

The implication of this instruction is that the disciples won’t see Jesus in Jerusalem. Accordingly, in Matthew, while Jesus himself does appear immediately to the women, it’s in Galilee where Jesus appears to the male disciples and gives them his last instructions:

Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” (Matthew 28:16–20)

However, in Luke, the words of the angel(s) have been subtly altered. They still mention Galilee, but this time it is a reference to the time Jesus was there with the disciples in the past:

“Why are you looking in the place of the dead for someone who is alive? Jesus isn’t here! He has been raised from death. Remember that while he was still in Galilee, he told you, ‘The Son of Man will be handed over to sinners who will nail him to a cross. But three days later he will rise to life.’” Then they remembered what Jesus had said. (Luke 24:5–8)

And so in contrast with Matthew, in the remainder of Luke (and in its second volume, Acts) Jesus appears to his disciples while they are still in Jerusalem, before giving them his final instructions and ascending to heaven from the Mount of Olives just outside the city. There is no return to Galilee; the disciples are instructed to stay in Jerusalem until the day of Pentecost. It seems Luke, generally reckoned to have used Mark as a source, subtly altered the words of the angel because he wanted to place the appearances of Jesus to the disciples in and around Jerusalem instead of in Galilee. If Matthew and Luke cannot agree on where the disciples saw the risen Jesus how can we trust either as composed from eye-witness accounts?

To further complicate things, coming back to John where we started, John 20 has Jesus appearing to his disciples in Jerusalem, but then John 21 includes this breakfast appearance in Galilee. John 21, however, is widely recognised as being a later postscript, the original conclusion being at the end of chapter 20. Maybe the author of the postscript is trying to harmonise both sets of stories from Matthew and Luke, but in doing so he only succeeds in highlighting the discrepancy.

In an attempt to harmonise Matthew and Luke it is claimed that the disciples simply must have travelled to Galilee and then back to Jerusalem again, between Passover and Pentecost, and that Jesus appeared to them in both locations. It just happens that each gospel only records some of these occasions. But if that were the case, why does it also happen that each gospel, as originally written, only selects one of the locations? Even more to the point, why does each gospel structure its narrative to the point of apparently excluding the possibility of appearances in the other location? Matthew excludes the possibility of any Jerusalem appearances by means of the words of the angel, while Luke excludes the possibility of any Galilee appearances by keeping the disciples in Jerusalem until the ascension.

This attempt at harmonisation also has to imagine there were two separate sets of ‘last words’ of Jesus on a mountain – in Galilee recorded by Matthew, and on the Mount of Olives recorded by Luke. This stretches credulity to breaking point.

It seems clear that each author has their own agenda when it comes to their resurrection narrative, to set the focus either on Galilee or on Jerusalem, for theological or political reasons, and that they place this agenda more highly than reporting accurately. We therefore have to conclude that we do not have unspoilt access to any original eye-witness accounts.

Review - 'Who Needs God' - part 3

I’m reviewing a series of six talks called ‘Who Needs God’, by Andy Stanley, senior pastor of North Point Community Church, Atlanta — https://whoneedsgod.com/ — and we’ve reached the third talk.

Talk 3: ‘The Bible Told Me So’

In this third talk, Andy hopes to reach a turning-point in his appeal to those who were brought up in the church but have since left it. To start with, he continues in the same vein as the second talk, carefully (and I think successfully) dismantling some erroneous foundations of Christianity that the church has taught in the past. This helps to continue his argument that many people who have left the church may have left needlessly, because all they have done is to reject a belief in what was in fact the wrong version of Christianity, based on faith rather than evidence. But this third talk is also the first point at which he starts to introduce a positive argument for what he claims is a more authentic version of Christianity, centred on what he claims are more reasonable arguments.

But first, the dismantling of old foundations: Andy quotes the well-known children’s song:

Jesus loves me! This I know,
For the Bible tells me so.

Andy picks this song as a simple example of the erroneous belief that the Bible is the foundation of Christianity. He criticises churches and pastors for preaching a version of Christianity that stands or falls on the reliability of the whole Bible. It’s a version of Christianity that people have only naturally turned away from, once they have found any reason to doubt the accuracy of even just one single part of the Bible. It’s the idea that the whole Bible must be literally true, otherwise the whole of Christianity comes tumbling down like a house of cards.

But in fact, Andy says, Christianity doesn’t exist because of the Bible; it’s the other way around. He laments the fact that the church has over the years got sidelined into defending the accuracy of the Bible as the main way of defending itself. I can’t help but agree that the church seems to have done more to turn people away than attract them by attempting this defence, and I applaud Andy again for addressing the issue so clearly, in a church context, at what has proved to be substantial risk to his own reputation.

Andy goes on to give a very brief history lesson to prove his point. Drawing a timeline on screen, Andy explains that while the events of the life of Jesus and the birth of the church took place in the 1st century, it wasn’t until the 4th century that what now call the New Testament was first brought together in a single volume, and published together with the Jewish scriptures, which then became known as the Old Testament. Prior to that, the New Testament documents were being circulated between churches, copied individually and gradually collected. During this time many non-Jews became converts to Christianity without easy access to the Jewish scriptures, which they knew only from quotations in the new Christian writings. Andy concludes that original Christianity was not based on a belief in either the Old or New Testaments as we know them today. So far, so good. Any scholar investigating the origins of Christianity would agree, and Andy wishes all churches and pastors would acknowledge this.

What then was the original basis of Christianity? Andy identifies it as the belief in the resurrection of Jesus. Or rather, as he claims, not a belief but a historical fact. He states quite boldly that the first Christians didn’t have faith in the resurrection; they had seen the risen Jesus, and that didn’t need faith at all. To put it another way, early Christianity wasn’t a religious belief, but the outcome of a historical event. But this is where things get much harder for scholars, and anyone else, to find the truth behind the origins of Christian belief. We are dealing with the largely unknown period between the events of the life of Jesus himself, ending in about 30CE, and the earliest known fragment of a Christian gospel, dated to around 125. The process of uncovering what happened in that period is fraught with difficulty, and prone to subjective interpretation depending on one’s prior faith position.

Andy makes the claim that all the documents that now make up the New Testament were written prior to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70CE. He doesn’t identify his sources for this belief, but he seems to be following the arguments of scholar John A.T. Robinson and apologist William Lane Craig, among others. The main reason both he and they give for this opinion is that the gospels do not refer to the events of 70CE, but Andy fails to address any of the many counter-arguments. He mentions in passing that many scholars date the gospels after 70CE, but fails to admit that these scholars are in fact in the majority. He simply takes the early dating of the gospels as a given, and concludes from this that the four gospels contain eye-witness accounts of the life of Jesus, including therefore the resurrection appearances. But there are many more questions that the conscientious reader will want to investigate before making the same simple conclusion. These questions relate to the nature and purpose of the gospels, as well as their dates. There are many hurdles to overcome before anyone can demonstrate beyond doubt such an unlikely event as the resurrection.

Aside from any argument over the dating of the gospels and whether they contain first-hand testimony, there still remains the question of why Christianity grew after the first generation. It is unlikely that later generations could really be said to have become Christians on the basis of evidence for the resurrection. The first-generation testimony, if it had existed at all, had now vanished, retained only in writings, and the later believers must have had other reasons to join the new religion. The same even applies to first-generation believers who were remote from Jerusalem. Like it not not, Christianity certainly was a religion, with beliefs, rituals, and ecstatic experiences — witness the letters of Paul. It is much more likely that these later generations, especially of non-Jews, were converted by the appeal of the religion, including its ecstatic experiences, rather than by documents, which then casts doubt on the claim that it can only have been the resurrection of Jesus that convinced the first generation too.

Ultimately Andy is right that Christianity doesn’t stand or fall on the reliability of the whole Bible. But it does stand or fall on the dating and nature of the gospels, a topic which is far from resolved, and on gaining an understanding of why people converted to the new religion.

As in the previous talks I congratulate Andy on deconstructing the erroneous foundations of Christianity that the church clings onto, but query whether he has successfully replaced them.

Postscript – into the fourth talk

It’s no surprise that Andy received some backlash from more conservative Christian quarters for this talk, condemning him for ‘not believing the Bible’. It seems some Christians are not amenable to rational argument, and see any attempt to base Christianity on something other than the reliability of the Bible as heresy. As a result, he spent about half of his next, fourth, talk going back over the reasons for giving this series of talks in the first place, and re-iterating why he sees the gospels as evidence for the resurrection firstly, and as scripture only secondarily.

He refers to the first believers’ testimony very simply as: ‘We saw him killed, then a few days later we had breakfast with him on the beach’ – a reference to the story in John 21. Unfortunately for his case, he has picked an example of a supposed resurrection appearance that demonstrates very clearly why these accounts cannot be taken at face value. Researching this event quickly leads to uncovering one of the major discrepancies between the gospels when it comes to their resurrection narratives – the Galilee question – which I’ll write about separately.

Review - 'Who Needs God' - part 2

I’m reviewing a series of six talks called ‘Who Needs God’, by Andy Stanley, senior pastor of North Point Community Church, Atlanta — https://whoneedsgod.com/ — and we’ve reached the second talk.

Talk 2: ‘Gods of the No Testament’

In this talk, Andy says more about why people have left the church, having discarded their former beliefs. In his view, though, they don’t have a reason to be atheists. He says that many of their former beliefs weren’t actually right in the first place. People leaving Christianity have done so because they can no longer believe in versions of God, or of Jesus, that they were being taught. But, he claims, these versions of God and of Jesus weren’t part of Christianity anyway.

In this talk he focuses on these wrong ideas about God, which he calls the ‘somebody-told-you-so’ God. In the next talk he deals with wrong ideas about Jesus, which rather controversially he calls the ‘Bible-tells-me-so’ Jesus.

So what are these wrong ideas about God that people have been taught by their parents, their Sunday-school teachers, or even their pastors — these gods that don’t exist? Andy works his way through six:

1. the bodyguard God — a God who ensures that good things happen to good people. Andy’s argument is that many people have abandoned belief in God because their experience of pain and suffering contradicts this concept of God. (Andy will deal with this area in more detail in a whole talk later in the series.) But, he argues, the idea that bad things never happen to good people isn’t part of the original claims of Christianity; it can’t have been, because Christianity itself started with the crucifixion of a good man, and with the persecution of his early followers. So we can’t use bad things happening to good people as an argument against God.
   
   As far as it goes this is a valid point.
   
   
2. the on-demand God — a God who responds to fair requests the way we would. This is the expectation that God would do for us, at the very least, what we would do for someone else. Some people have decided there is no God because they didn’t receive answers to their prayers. But, Andy claims, this idea too isn’t part of Christianity, so again, you can’t use God not responding the way you expect as an argument against his existence.
   
   While the argument here is valid if it’s true that Christianity doesn’t make this claim about God, Andy fails to mention that there are parts of the Bible, especially the teaching of Jesus, that do appear to give exactly the impression that we can expect God to give us what we ask for.
   
   
3. the boyfriend God — a God whose presence is always felt. Andy says that some people have decided there is no God because they have lost the sense of the presence of God that they used to experience. But, he says, the idea that God’s presence should always be felt is just an idea that somebody told them, not part of Christianity.
   
   Again, this is a valid point.
   
   
4. the guilt God — a God who controls us through guilt and fear. This is the God who says, ‘No you can’t’ to everything, the God who supposedly loves us but who doesn’t really like us. As Andy probably rightly says, of all the gods that don’t exist, this is the hardest one to give up believing in if you were taught about him by your parents or your pastor. But you should.
   
   This is an important point for his Christian audience to hear, although Andy fails to say how he deals with large parts of the Bible, especially the Old Testament, where God is presented exactly like this.
   
   
5. the anti-science God — a God who requires us to ignore the undeniable. People leave religion because the church asks them to close their eyes to undeniable science; it tells them to stop thinking and just believe. But thinking people can’t do this. Andy is bold enough to concede — in fact strongly state — that the ‘Sunday School God’ cannot be reconciled with science. But it’s not true that science and theology have to conflict. Rather, he says, if you find a conflict between science and your theology, it’s your theology that’s wrong.
   
   This argument certainly needs to be heard by Christians. But the unanswered question at this stage in the series is what sort of God is left over once you do eliminate the beliefs that are disproved by science.
   
   
6. the gap God — a God who is the convenient explanation for everything we can’t explain. Believing in this God, Andy says, ultimately undermines faith, because the list of things we can’t explain is getting smaller. If your faith in God is based on the unexplainable, it’s going to crumble when things get explained. Unexplainable is not evidence for God, it is evidence of our ignorance. Here, Andy addresses the Christians in his audience and says the church shouldn’t be afraid of everything being explained, because that does not remove the necessity for someone having created it. Christianity doesn’t rely on there being mystery. He goes as far as to say that the fact that things are explainable, predictable, is evidence for a creator who created but then stopped.
   
   Andy credits Christians with the birth of science due to their belief that God had stopped creating, meaning that the universe should follow fixed laws, in contrast to belief in a pantheon of gods who were continually meddling with the world. But this ignores Greek philosophy in which there was an underlying order to the world that can be studied, despite the gods, and it ignores science in other ancient cultures which had other religious beliefs. It also fails to explain why ancient Jewish culture, which shares the same creation story, didn’t produce science, or why Christianity didn't produce science for many centuries.
   
   That aside, there’s much to commend Andy’s approach here: his realisation that the church has mostly got it wrong in its approach to science is an important message that Christians need to hear. But his side argument that the universe points to a creator is lacking substance. He doesn’t deal with any detail. What sort of God does the Big Bang point to? What sort of God does natural selection point to? There are many unaddressed questions here.
   

To conclude, Andy says that none of these six non-existent gods are evidence for or against anything; they are just unmet childhood expectations. They are elements of a childhood faith that has been undermined by adult questions, and rightly so. He’s not claiming to have presented any evidence for God in this talk, just to have said that anyone who has left Christianity may have done so unnecessarily because they believed in the wrong God in the first place. Having discarded virtually all the popular ideas about God that Christians have been taught, or that non-Christians imagine Christians to believe, at this stage in the series Andy gives hardly any hints about what sort of God he’s left with.

I’m not sure how relevant this talk is to an atheist audience; although on paper his target audience for this series are those who have left the church, it actually seems to be his Christian audience that he is really addressing here, urging them to rethink their faith and discard any childhood ideas about God that don’t fit with the real world. And for this, even if not for everything he’s said, he has my vote so far. It remains to be seen how much of the Christian God can be left after discarding these ideas.

The next talk in the series takes the same approach even further, dealing with Jesus and the Bible in ways that get him into trouble with many other Christian leaders.

Review - ‘Who Needs God’ - part 1

A Christian friend recommended I watch a series of six talks called ‘Who Needs God’, by Andy Stanley, senior pastor of North Point Community Church, Atlanta — https://whoneedsgod.com/

I suppose I belong to the target audience for these talks. Andy’s aim is to convince people who have left the church that they have left for the wrong reasons, people who have found that the faith they were taught as children doesn’t hold up in the outside world, people who, as he puts it, were ‘asking fact-based questions’, but were ‘being given faith-based answers’ by the church or their parents — answers that contradicted what they were learning from science. They are the ‘Nones’, those of no particular faith. ‘Who Needs God’ is his attempt to provide a version of Christianity that is fact-based rather than faith-based, that is compatible with science, and that will draw the ‘Nones’ back to church.

I should say from the outset that I don’t believe he has succeeded. Despite his claims, the talks do in fact hinge on certain assumptions that are very much faith-based. These talks were after all given as a series of sermons in church, albeit with the intention that non-church people would watch them online as well. The very fact that Andy remains a pastor shows that his version of Christianity still needs faith to believe it; he still needs to teach people its doctrines, to immerse them in its ideas, to keep them from abandoning it. His real audience in this series of talks is just as much his church members, who need their faith constantly topped up, as it is the ‘Nones’.

I should also say, though, that I would recommend every Christian should watch ‘Who Needs God’, especially talks 1-3. Andy does a great job of demolishing, one by one, many false ideas that the church has held onto by default over the years. Many of his points in the first half of the series, which have got him into trouble with more conservative pastors and organisations, are spot on, and no Christian should be allowed to remain a Christian without having faced up to them.

So, onto the detail. ‘Who Needs God’ is a series of six 40- to 45-minute talks. I’ll cover the first now, and hope to review the others in future posts.

Talk 1: ‘Atheism 2.0’

In this, the first of six talks, Andy Stanley says what he believes to be the main reason many people who were brought up in the church no longer consider themselves Christians. They have left, not because atheism is attractive, but because religion has become less attractive. They wouldn’t necessarily call themselves atheists, they just have no particular faith. They are the ‘Nones’, the non-affiliated. The religion and the God that these people were presented with as children have lost their attraction. If atheism were attractive, people would be leaving all religions, but this is something specific to Christianity, and Andy claims it’s the church’s fault for presenting the wrong version of Christianity. This is a bold claim, offering the promise of an alternative version that will draw people back again.

But before Andy offers that alternative version, he takes a detour to discus atheism. He does this to set out what he believes is the other choice that the ‘Nones’ have ultimately, if they don’t come back to Christianity. He describes six ‘uncomfortable things’ you have to accept if you’re an atheist, using a lot of quotes from atheist authors as he goes:

1. If there’s no God, there’s no mind. He quotes Christopher Hitchens: ‘I don’t have a body, I am a body’. If the mind is a product of biology, then we can’t exist without our bodies.
2. The illusion of free-will. He quotes both Sam Harris and Stephen Hawking here, to make the point that science claims everything is determined by physics and there is no room for choice.
3. The illusion of value. Science doesn’t confer value on anything. If there’s no God, then there is no actual value to anything, only what we ascribe. Justice is just determined by what we want.
4. Something came from nothing. The universe didn’t exist, then it did, but no-one has explained it yet. He quotes Richard Dawkins: ‘Cosmology is waiting on its Darwin.’
5. Life from no life. Life arose spontaneously, but this hasn’t been explained either.
6. Natural selection is responsible for all life after the first life, and it’s a purposeless process (even though it’s difficult not to speak of it as though it is a purposeful power).

For all these points, Andy says that for all he knows, they might be scientifically correct (he jokes, ‘I have a masters in Theology, not Biology!’), but he does his best to make them sound uncomfortable to his audience. On a couple of points, he seems to stray into the so-called ‘God of the gaps’ argument — that something unexplained by science might require a God — an idea which is repeatedly disproved by new discoveries. But it seems his main aim in this part of the talk has not been to argue logically against atheism, so much as to make an emotional appeal against it. If you were brought up with faith, then he hopes you still have an emotional link with it, and you will feel uncomfortable with the conclusions of science. I don’t really see how this fits with his stated intention to provide fact-based answers instead of faith-based ones. I sense a bit of emotional manipulation going on. These points would certainly not serve in any way to convince someone brought up as an atheist to doubt their position. They’d just think, ‘Yes, I accept those things, so what?’

It’s the Christian audience that I think would most benefit from looking at these six points. They should ask honestly, ‘If these things are true, what does that say about my faith?’ I congratulate Andy for bringing them up in a church context. I just hope he gives his church members enough emotional space to consider them honestly.

The ‘Old Atheists’

We hear a lot about the ‘New Atheists’—Dawkins, Hitchens, et al—but let’s not forget the previous thinkers who came to the same conclusion.

Through another blog I’ve recently discovered the writings of Robert Green Ingersoll, 19th century American lawyer and orator. Here are a few quotes:

Each nation has created a god, and the god has always resembled his creators. He hated and loved what they hated and loved, and he was invariably found on the side of those in power.

The doctrine that future happiness depends upon belief is monstrous. It is the infamy of infamies.

In nearly all the theologies, mythologies and religions, the devils have been much more humane and merciful than the gods. No devil ever gave one of his generals an order to kill children and to rip open the bodies of pregnant women. Such barbarities were always ordered by the good gods.

The facts and forces governing thought are as absolute as those governing the motions of the planets. A poem is produced by the forces of nature, and is as necessarily and naturally produced as mountains and seas. You will seek in vain for a thought in man's brain without its efficient cause. Every mental operation is the necessary result of certain facts and conditions. Mental phenomena are considered more complicated than those of matter, and consequently more mysterious. Being more mysterious, they are considered better evidence of the existence of a god. No one infers a god from the simple, from the known, from what is understood, but from the complex, from the unknown, and, incomprehensible. Our ignorance is God; what we know is science.

If these take your fancy, his full works can be read and downloaded for free at the Gutenberg Project.