Last week, we saw William Lane Craig use his 6 criteria of authentic history to try claim that Jesus really did call himself Messiah. As evidence, Craig cited a number of passages in which Jesus did not, in fact, call himself Messiah. Craig cites stories about other people calling Jesus Messiah, and about Jesus allegedly working miracles allegedly associated with Messiah, but having announced that he was going to show that Jesus claimed to be Messiah, he “met” his burden of proof by providing merely what he calls “good evidence that Jesus did…think he was the Messiah.”

That pretty much sums up Craig’s approach to “authentic” history. He “proves” that Jesus claimed to be Messiah by making guesses about what Jesus might have been thinking. Not surprisingly, his guess is that Jesus must have been thinking exactly what modern-day Christians wish he were thinking. And in Craig’s book, that means it’s a historic fact that Jesus claimed to be Messiah. (You see now why I was a tad skeptical when he introduced the criterion about a claim being coherent with “facts” already established about Jesus.)

In today’s installment, Craig takes his mindreading act a step further: he’s going to tell us what Jesus meant by the the things he (Jesus) might have been thinking.

Before we look at what Craig thinks is the meaning of what Craig thinks Jesus thinks, let’s review for a moment why he (Craig) argues for the primacy of the New Testament documents in determining the authentic history of Jesus.

The church chose only the earliest sources, which were closest to Jesus and the original disciples, to include in the New Testament and left out the later, secondary accounts like the forged apocryphal gospels, which everyone knew were fakes.

Historians and theologians refer to these false writings as “pseudepigrapha,” from the Greek for “falsely attributed.” In other words, these are books attributed to some famous Biblical character, that were actually frauds. They’re not “inspired.” They’re not authentic. They’re fakes, designed to deceive the superstitious and gullible. Nor were pseudepigraphal documents a New-Testament-only phenomenon. Dozens of bogus prophecies and scriptures arose around the periphery of the Old Testament books as well, and were identified as frauds by pre-Christian Jews.

But enough of this tangent. The main thing to remember is that Craig thinks historians should give first place to the New Testament documents, and not to outright frauds. So let’s get back on topic and see how Craig supports his claims for what he thinks Jesus must have meant by the things he didn’t say but must possibly have been thinking.

In claiming to be the Messiah, Jesus has not necessarily said anything superhuman. Scholars typically take the Messiah to be just a human figure. But it must be said that the picture of the Messiah in several pre-Christian Jewish documents is of an extraordinarily exalted figure. In the extrabiblical Psalms of Solomon he is called “the Lord Messiah,” who “will strike the earth with the word of his mouth forever… And he himself [will be] free from sin… and he will not weaken in his days” (17:32-37).

Yup, his first witness is an appeal to Jewish pseudepigrapha. Saw that one coming, did you? But fine, ok, sure, we know this book is one of the fakes Craig warned us about, and that it wasn’t written by Solomon, or anywhere near the time of Solomon. But can’t you see how this passage supports the conclusion Craig wants to reach? Isn’t it obvious that the Spirit of God could move the writers of fake Scriptures, such that here and there individual passages might actually reflect the genuine, true prophecies of God?

Craig’s approach is fairly fascinating because it shows how some Christians—even brilliant and well-educated believers—go about determining historical authenticity for the things that they read. It’s not based on academic, objectively neutral criteria of authenticity. It’s based on how well it reflects what Christians see as being the truth. It’s not a question of “if the shoe fits, wear it.” Any shoe that fits is at least potentially the “right” shoe.

Now think for a moment how careful the church councils were to select canonical Scriptures based on the “authenticity” of the writings. See the problem?

Craig thinks he’s being a good scholar by basing his argument on extrabiblical sources, but what he’s actually revealing is a serious problem in Christian scholarship. He’s documenting how closely the Christian narrative follows uninspired, fraudulent mythologies that were popular among the superstitious and ignorant in the years immediately preceding the rise of Christianity. The unknown authors of the Psalms of Solomon weren’t legitimate prophets, even by generous Judeo-Christian standards. They weren’t inspired. Their writings weren’t Scripture. And yet, they’re a prior source of the legend of “The Messiah.” Jesus the Messiah is the fulfilment of false prophecy. Wow.

Craig doesn’t stop there, though. His next appeal is to Isaiah 9:6.

For a child will be born to us, a son will be given to us;
And the government will rest on His shoulders;
And His name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Eternal Father, Prince of Peace.

In context, this passage is about Israel breaking the “rod of the oppressor” and of a Jewish king setting up an eternal reign of peace and prosperity on the throne of David—a prediction, by the way, that was never fulfilled, since David’s throne failed many centuries ago without producing any eternal Davidic kingdom. In context, it’s a really poor fit for the story of the New Testament gospels (unless you’re the kind of scholar who likes to take things out of context and then cherry-pick only the bits that fit your agenda). But back up a second and look at that verse again. Who exactly is Isaiah expecting?

And His name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Eternal Father, Prince of Peace.

Isaiah 9 isn’t about just any great Messiah arising in “Galilee of the Gentiles.” Isaiah tells us His name: “Almighty God, Eternal Father.” By Trinitarian standards, this is heresy. To fulfil this prophecy, Jesus has to claim to be, not the son of God, but God the Father. And “Counselor” is arguably a reasonable equivalent for the Greek title “paraclete,” which Jesus gave to the Holy Spirit. Seen in this light, it’s quite clear that Isaiah is predicting the incarnation of a non-triune God who is the Son (by virtue of being born), the Spirit (by virtue of his role as “Wonderful Counselor”), and the Father (by explicit name). Three gods, one person.

Is that taking the text beyond what it was meant to say? No more so than Craig’s interpretation. And, contrary to Craig’s fanciful assumptions about what Isaiah might have meant, Isaiah explicitly tells us that the name of the person he’s talking about is “Almighty God, Eternal Father.” As applied to Jesus, that’s emphatically not Trinitarian. And we’re still only on the second paragraph of Craig’s argument for what he thinks Jesus must have meant by the things Jesus might have been thinking about his own Messiahship. The third paragraph takes us back to the pseudepigrapha again.

In the first-century extrabiblical Similitudes of Enoch the Messiah is portrayed as a godlike figure who has existed with the Lord “prior to the creation of the world and for eternity” (1 Enoch 48:6).

Again, Craig gives us historical evidence that Christian doctrine about the Messiah is strongly correlated with popular, uninspired legends. Much like Harold Camping’s followers popularized the idea that the world was going to end in 2011, there was widespread popular belief in a specific sort of Messiah figure tailor-made to the circumstances of the day. And much like Camping and his followers went back to the Scriptures and cherry-picked whatever verses sounded amenable to their agenda, Craig and other Christians go back and cherry-pick whatever passages or fragments of verses seem suitable to Messianic interpretations.

In Matthew 11:10 and Luke 7:27, Jesus Himself identifies John the Baptist as the messenger of Malachi 3:1. So who is to come after the messenger, according to these prophecies? It is the Lord, God Himself!

Let’s go back and check our references here, starting with Matthew 11 and Luke 7.

Matthew’s account ends with the curious disclaimer: “If you are willing to accept it…” One might almost think Jesus had some kind of metaphor in mind, rather than a fulfilment of prophecy, especially considering the theological implications of having Jesus call John the reincarnation of Elijah. But let’s look at these two passages anyway, as Jesus applies the prophecy to John the Baptist. Notice, John is supposed to be the messenger sent ahead of “you.” So who’s “you” in this prophecy? It’s not God, because it’s supposed to be God that’s speaking. Craig’s interpretation of this passage, though, is that “you” refers to God. Perhaps he’s ascribing some kind of anachronistic Trinitarian intention to Malachi? Let’s go back and look up the prophecy in context and see what it says,

“Behold, I am going to send My messenger, and he will clear the way before Me. And the Lord, whom you seek, will suddenly come to His temple; and the messenger of the covenant, in whom you delight, behold, He is coming,” says the LORD of hosts. “But who can endure the day of His coming? And who can stand when He appears? For He is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap. He will sit as a smelter and purifier of silver, and He will purify the sons of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, so that they may present to the LORD offerings in righteousness. Then the offering of Judah and Jerusalem will be pleasing to the LORD as in the days of old and as in former years.

 “Then I will draw near to you for judgment; and I will be a swift witness against the sorcerers and against the adulterers and against those who swear falsely, and against those who oppress the wage earner in his wages, the widow and theorphan, and those who turn aside the alien and do not fear Me,” says the LORD of hosts. “For I, the LORD, do not change; therefore you, O sons of Jacob, are not consumed.

Holy crap, the Lord is a member of Occupy Wall Street! Well, Occupy Jerusalem anyway. And defending foreigners and welfare recipients? Who knew the Lord was a goddamn liberal?

Sorry, tangent. Let’s look at the first part of this prophecy. Right away, we notice that Jesus changed the pronouns. Malachi has the Lord saying “prepare the way for ME,” but Jesus changes that from first person to second person, “prepare the way for YOU.” It’s as though Jesus saw that applying Malachi 3:1 to John would impute divinity to himself, and so he actually changed the text of the Scripture in order to avoid deifying himself—the exact opposite of the conclusion Craig wants to reach. (And in case you’re wondering, no the pronoun swap did not happen in the LXX version of Malachi either).

More importantly, look at what the prophecy actually predicts. The messenger in verse 1 is preparing the way for the LORD to come in judgment. Verse 1 specifically says that the LORD and the messenger will come to the Temple (which Jesus and John the Baptist did not do). Verse 2 goes on to describe what it will be like when the LORD comes: He will purify the priesthood, with a smelter’s fire, so that the pure remnant can offer pure sacrifices in the Temple. Ever see Christian priests offering animal sacrifices in the Temple that are “pleasing to the LORD as in the days of old and as in former years?” The NT teaching is that Jesus did away with Levitical sacrifices and offerings, not that he restored and purified them.

Even if you postpone the fulfilment of Malachi 3 to some end-times restored-Temple scenario, the fact remains that in the first century, Jesus did not meet the prophetic description of the one who was supposed to come after the messenger. If John the Baptist is the messenger in the first century, and then the Temple is destroyed without ever being purified the way Malachi predicted, and then thousands of years later God somehow builds another Temple and then purges that one (but why would it need purging if God was re-making it?), then that’s fine, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with Jesus being “the Lord” in the first century.

And that’s it. That’s Craig’s argument for what he thinks Jesus meant by the thoughts Jesus might have had (but never actually spoke out loud) about being some kind of Messiah. It’s pure speculation, drawn from popular, non-scriptural messianic legends plus cherry-picked excerpts yanked out of ancient prophecies that really had nothing at all to do with the “fulfilments” Christians attribute to them.

And this counts as valid Christian scholarship, in the exalted theological hallways roamed by such as William Lane Craig. Says something, doesn’t it?

In a study published in 2003 [PDF], psychology researchers Gary Wells and Elizabeth Loftus gave an example of how eyewitness testimony can evolve over time. A young woman was sexually assaulted and her friend was murdered. The young woman, Sherry Gillaspey worked with a police artist to put together a composite sketch of the assailant, and based this sketch, a young man named Thomas Brewster became a “person of interest.”

On December 19, 1984, Gillaspey was shown a photo lineup with Brewster’s photo in it. She could not make a positive identification. One day later, Gillaspey was shown a live lineup in which Brewster appeared. Again, Gillaspey could not make a positive identification… Nearly four years later, in August 1988, detectives again showed Gillaspey a photo lineup with Brewster’s picture in it. Once again she could not make a positive identification.

In 1995, 11 years after the murder, two new detectives were assigned to the case. These detectives brought photos and, after interviewing her with the photos, she signed a statement saying that Brewster was the killer. Six days later, she identified Brewster from a live lineup.

The report goes on to look at details of how the two new detectives, apparently believing or wanting Brewster to be the attacker, subtly guided Gillaspey into “remembering” Brewster as the perpetrator. Initially, the woman did not remember Brewster as being the man who assaulted her and murdered her friend, despite being an eyewitness to the whole thing. Under the influence of the two detectives, however, this “memory” appeared—more than a decade later! Nor is this a rare case. Wells and Loftus cite research documenting at least 80 innocent men in recent years who have been wrongly imprisoned—or executed—based on eyewitness testimony, sometimes involving multiple witnesses. Other research explains how this can happen, as Wells and Loftus summarize:

[D]ecades of research has shown that postevent information, particularly when it is misleading, can also alter recollections of other details about key events. A typical finding is that after receiving new information that is misleading in some way, people make errors when they report what they saw. The new, postevent information is often incorporated into the recollection, supplementing or altering it, sometimes in dramatic ways.

In short, eyewitness testimony is the category of evidence that is THE most likely to be influenced and/or modified in the presence of stress, peer pressure, the power of suggestion, and so on. This is why it is important to make a distinction, in historical research, between “independent” accounts that arise via collaboration in a context of shared religious fervor and perceived persecution, versus accounts that are truly independent (i.e. that arise without any collaboration, religious identification, shared goals, etc., between the parties). It is especially significant, then, that William Lane Craig consistently fails to make any such distinction in his own historical “research.”

Despite laying out six “criteria of authenticity” that professional historians could use to determine the authenticity of individual events in the Gospels, Craig’s “historical” approach ends up being an exercise in repeating the standard, conservative, evangelical Christian interpretation of certain passages. It’s not an unreasonable approach, commercially speaking. After all, he’s writing for standard, conservative, evangelical Christians, so reinforcing what they already believe only helps his fan base. But as historical research it leaves much to be desired. He decorates it with a facade of “historicitithiness” by sprinkling in key words from his six criteria, but it’s the same familiar sermon his audience is used to hearing.

Let’s take a look at the authenticity of three of Jesus’ explicit claims: His claims to be the Messiah, the unique Son of God, and the Son of Man. As we look at each title, I’ll first show by means of the criteria of authenticity that Jesus did make such a claim, and the, second, I’ll discuss the significance of this claim for who Jesus held Himself to be.

“Messiah” comes from a Hebrew word meaning “Anointed.” Anointed, in turn, means “having had some kind of oil brushed, dripped, or poured onto you,” and stems from the practice of using a ritual application of “holy” oil to signify God’s blessing and/or selection of someone or something. Christians have adopted this language and retroactively turned it into what Craig calls “Israel’s ancient hope for a Messiah…sent from God,” which was allegedly “revived” in the decades preceding Jesus.

It’s certainly true that a lot of people in Palestine were hoping God would send them a new king to kick out the Romans and restore them to their “rightful” position of supremacy over everybody else in the entire world. (People haven’t changed much, have they?) And Craig is correct that the Greek language translation of “Messiah” is “Christos,” or Christ, and that the early believers were called “Christians” because they so frequently referred to Jesus as “the Christ.”

The question is: Where did they come up with this idea? If Jesus Himself never claimed to be the Messiah, what would prompt His followers to call Him that? He did not, in fact, reestablish David’s throne in Jerusalem; instead, he was crucified by His enemies. Even the belief that God had raised Him from the dead would not have led His followers to see Him as the Messiah, for there was no connection between resurrection and messiahship. Only if Jesus’ crucifixion was the direct result of His claim to be the Messiah would His resurrection lead His followers to see Him as the risen Messiah.

Not exactly a critical and unbiased account, eh? He’s just finished reporting that there was a strong hope and expectation that God would send them a Messiah of some kind to lead them, and he’s also reporting that at least some people would be willing to accept a Messiah even if he didn’t take the throne or fulfil all the prophecies. Yet, for some reason Craig insists that the only way anyone would call Jesus “Messiah” would be if he were crucified as a direct result of claiming to be Messiah. Considering the number of Messiahs they had back then, it seems like maybe there might be other reasons why they would call him that, don’t you think?

It’s not clear which of Craig’s six criteria of authenticity he thinks is satisfied by the above argument, since he does not mention any, but he does try to bring them in to his next argument. Citing Mark 8:27-30, where Peter calls Jesus “the Messiah,” Craig writes:

Is this a historical incident? Well, it would be natural for people of that time to be interested in who Jesus claimed to be. Independent accounts tell us that John the Baptist was confronted with a similar question (Luke 3:15-16; John 1:19-27). No doubt the disciples, who had left their families and jobs to follow Jesus, would have asked themselves whom they were following! Peter’s reply to Jesus’ question is independently confirmed in John 6:69, where Peter says, “We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.”

Recall that Criterion #2 was “Independent, early sources.” That seems to be the target Craig is aiming at, due to his repeated use of “independence.” Yet there’s something odd going on here. First of all, none of the passages involve Jesus claiming to be Messiah. Despite his promise to use the 6 criteria of historical authenticity to prove that Jesus really did claim to be Messiah, Craig is citing 2 passages where John the Baptist says “I am not the Messiah,” and two passages where Peter says Jesus is the Messiah (or something similar).

And even in the latter case, Craig is only assuming that Mark’s account is independent of John’s, and vice-versa. As Wells and Loftus have pointed out, there is a strong tendency to incorporate other people’s stories into your own recollection, even when you were an eyewitness. Merely appearing in different books does not mean that one account could not have influenced the other (or that both accounts might not have been influenced by some common source). And in the case of Luke 3 vs John 1, Craig is assuming that Luke’s account is independent of John’s, even though Luke’s Gospel begins with an explicit declaration that he is reporting other people’s stories.

Obviously, this doesn’t disprove the notion that John the Baptist denied being Messiah, or that Peter believed that Jesus was. That’s not the point, however. The point is that Craig does not have sufficient grounds for his conclusion that either of these things really happened. After all the fuss Craig made about being “neutral” in one’s approach to history, Craig himself is not being neutral. The passages he’s citing contain examples of people jumping to the conclusion that Jesus is Messiah without him ever mentioning any such claim, yet Craig is presenting these as “independent, early sources” showing that Jesus claimed to be Messiah.

Craig’s next example is Matt. 11:2-6 as compared to Luke 7:19-23, where John the Baptist allegedly sends messengers to Jesus to ask him if he’s the Messiah or not.

The criterion of embarrassment supports the historicity of this incident, since John the Baptist seems to be doubting Jesus. The phrase “the one who is to come” harks back to John’s prophecy of “the one who is coming after me,” which is independently recorded in Mark and John (Mark 1:7; John 1:27). Jesus’ answer to John is a blend of prophecies from Isaiah 35:5-6; 26:19; 61:1, the last of which explicitly mentions being God’s Anointed One… Perhaps most remarkably of all, these very signs are listed as signs of the Messiah’s coming in one of the Dead Sea Scrolls from the Jewish sect that lived at Qumran at the time of Jesus (4Q521).

In sum, the criteria of embarrassment, historical fit, and coherence with other authentic material, coupled with its presence in a very early source, give good grounds for seeing this incident as historical.

Once again, we see Craig citing an instance where Jesus does not, in fact, claim to be Messiah, and treating it like evidence for the historicity of Jesus claiming to be Messiah. The standard conservative evangelical Christian interpretation of Jesus’ reply was that he was thinking of himself as Messiah, but he never comes right out and says so. And even then, Christians reach that conclusion by taking snippets of Isaiah out of context and superimposing their own anachronistic interpretations over the actual words of the texts, while ignoring any bits that don’t happen to fit.

In Isaiah 61, for example, the prophet claims to have been anointed by God, which historically is not all that uncommon—lots of people claimed divine anointing. The prophet in Isaiah 61, however, proclaims not just the exaltation of the poor, but also the day of God’s vengeance, neither one of which happened in the first century. Isaiah 35, likewise, says the “signs” will include water springing up in the desert, which also did not happen. Assuming that John the Baptist knew his Old Testament, and assuming that Jesus was indeed trying to direct his attention to those passages, John’s conclusion should be that Jesus was not Messiah, due to his failure to fulfill all the predictions. But that’s not the standard Christian interpretation, so it doesn’t count. Or something.

The criterion of embarrassment is similarly misused. To be a genuine embarrassment to the Gospel, this story would have to reach a conclusion that was somehow wrong by Christian standards. Instead, it vindicates Jesus (which is the whole reason Craig is citing it in the first place). That’s not an embarrassment for the Gospel, that’s support. At worst this story might suggest that John the Baptist somehow forgot his own earlier prophecy about Jesus being the Lamb of God, but that’s not especially embarrassing for Christians.

As for being “a historical fit” and “coherent with other authentic events,” Craig is taking criteria that are really most reliable as negative indicators, and using them as positive indicators. If a report is not a historical fit or if it contradicts authentic events, then we’d be justified in rejecting these stories as authentic. The mere absence of obvious contradictions, however, is no guarantee that the story is necessarily authentic. Sherlock Holmes is a historical fit as well, but that doesn’t mean it’s a true story. Craig is just misusing historical criteria in order to reach a preferred conclusion.

He tries a few more times to make Jesus claim to be Messiah, through his actions if not his words: by riding into Jerusalem on a donkey, by driving moneychangers out of the temple, by the fact that the Sanhedrin asked if he were Messiah at his trial, and by the fact that Pilate had them put “King of the Jews” on his cross. In other words, Craig thoroughly documents that, despite multiple opportunities to do so, and despite strong desires on the part of both his friends and his enemies to have him do so, Jesus never actually came right out and called himself God’s Messiah. From this, Craig concludes that by his six criteria of historical authenticity, Jesus claimed to be God’s Messiah.

So much for neutrality.

William Lane Craig openly admits that he believes in assuming the New Testament is right until proven wrong. For the sake of appearances, though, he proposes a kind of academic neutrality that is at least nominally open to the possibility that individual events recounted in the NT might be true or false, regardless of the reliability of other reported events. Today we’re going to look at the six criteria that he uses to judge the authenticity of individual gospel events. We’ll also look at the seventh criterion, which he seems to avoid mentioning.

I should point out that these six criteria are not Craig’s own invention, but rather are intended to represent the kind of criteria historical scholars typically use to evaluate any historical claim. Craig may have adapted them somewhat to his own purposes, but in general most of them are not too bad. Let’s take Craig’s criteria in the order he presents them.

1. Historical fit: The incident fits in with known historical facts of the time and place.

For example, as Richard Carrier recently pointed out, Matthew and Luke each tie Jesus’ birth to a different date: Matthew has 4BC, prior to the death of Herod the Great, and Luke has 6AD, the year of the first Roman census. Christian apologists ignore the obvious explanation—that Mary was in labor for nine years—and instead try to find some way to make Herod co-governor with Quirinius in 4BC or some such. As Carrier points out in extensive detail, such explanations are not a historical fit, for a number of reasons. The Gospels contradict each other, so just deal.

2. Independent, early sources: The incident is related in multiple sources, which are near to the time when the incident is said to have occurred and which don’t rely on each other or on a common source.

This would be a good criterion, if Craig applied it correctly. Unfortunately, he considers the New Testament authors to be multiple independent sources, despite the fact that they are all passing on the common tradition as taught in the church. Just five pages earlier, he was arguing that the Jewish culture had perfected the art of passing on oral tradition intact, which means that the NT authors were not independent (at least after the initial formative period when the stories stabilized in more or less their present form). An independent source would have to be some non-Christian record, and it would need to say more than just “This is what the Christians tell us they believe.” Unfortunately for Craig, almost none of that has anything at all to do with the historicity of the New Testament.

3. Embarrassment: The incident is awkward or counterproductive for the early Christians.

This is another good criterion, and one that most Christian apologists get wrong. If Christians are going to preach a Messiah who is prophesied to be “the stone that the builders rejected,” then it’s not an embarrassment for Christians to tell stories about the “builders” (i.e. the scribes and chief priests) rejecting him. A genuine embarrassment would have to be something that contradicts the story, not something that reinforces it. For example, if the Christian God is supposed to be the judge of the living and the dead, and Jesus turns around and denies that God is the God of the dead, then that undercuts the gospel and makes salvation and eternal judgment a lie. As such, reports of Jesus saying this are more likely to be true than if he were reported as saying and doing things that only reinforce the gospel.

4. Dissimilarity: The incident is unlike earlier Jewish ideas and/or unlike later Christian ideas.

This one’s pretty iffy. Zola Levitt once remarked that Jews have a saying: “two Jews, three opinions.” Even among rabbis, there’s a range of opinion and a number of disagreements. Once you add in the gap between rabbinical beliefs on the one hand, and the mish-mosh of superstitions and heresies that lay believers absorb on the other, it’s pretty hard to objectively determine that certain disagreements are “dissimilar” whereas other disagreements are not. At best, dissimilarity shows only that the person relating the story had a bias in favor of the novel idea. Then again, there is some merit in observing cases where a recorded teaching contradicts subsequent Christian dogma. To the extent that a Biblical record disproves accepted Christian teachings, it’s less likely to be the product of mere orthodox propaganda. Somehow I don’t think Craig is going to present too much of that evidence, though.

5. Semitisms: Traces of Hebrew or Aramaic language (spoken by Jesus’ countrymen) appear in the story.

Linguistic evidence is another good criterion, and it’s one that highlights a singularly remarkable aspect of the Gospel. None of the early documents about Jesus’ life are in his native language. Not one. No manuscripts, and no mention of any early believer so much as hearing about the possible existence of any such document. [Note: no, I stand corrected, as Jayman reminds me in the comments. Eusebius claimed that Papias claimed to have heard of a Hebrew gospel of Matthew (though one might suspect that either Eusebius or Papias was mistaken, given the balance of the evidence).] Imagine if you were researching Mohammed, and discovered that prior to the late 900′s the only records of him—and the Qur’an itself—were all in French. Might raise some eyebrows, eh? I’m still skeptical of the conclusion that Jesus never existed, but if I were to be convinced, I’d find this bit of evidence particularly compelling.

6. Coherence: The incident fits in with facts already established about Jesus.

This one’s the ringer. Call it confirmation bias instead of coherence if you want a more accurate label. Remember, Craig has already admitted that he believes in assuming the NT is true until proven false. Criterion 6 takes standard dogma about Jesus, elevates it to the status of “established fact,” and then uses the stories as evidence confirming the authenticity of each other. Pretty bogus. Internal consistency is necessary in order for the accounts to be true, but it’s not sufficient. This one only works as a negative evidence, using contradictions to prove that at least one of the reports must be false.

So what about the seventh criterion, the one Craig avoids even mentioning? Let me add it to his list.

7. Real-world consistency: The incident is consistent with what we can actually observe in the real world.

Notice the difference between this and #6. Craig only uses the “coherence” criterion to measure the consistency of the stories with one another. That in itself is not a bad criterion, except that Craig is limiting the scope too much. For an alleged historical event to be acceptable as genuinely authentic, it needs to be consistent not only with the facts that Christians accept as “established,” but with the rest of real-world facts as well. The reason we don’t accept Achilles’ invulnerability is because in the real world, there is no river you can dip your baby into that will turn him invulnerable. The same goes for the Gospel as well.

This criterion is conspicuous by its absence, because Craig wants us to assume that miracles are possible by default. He does not want us evaluating miracle stories in the light of what we actually find in the real world. He wants us, in other words, to “keep an open mind”—where “open-minded” means neither more nor less than “gullible.” He wants us to believe what men say, just because they say it, regardless of the internal and external inconsistencies in what they tell us. He has spent this much of the chapter, including his five arguments for assuming that the entire New Testament is true, working towards that end.

What’s remarkable about these criteria is the way they so frequently fail to achieve his goal when applied fairly and objectively to the evidence. Craig therefore follows this discussion with a certain amount of pre-emptive damage control.

Notice a couple of things about these “criteria.” First, they’re all positive signs of historical credibility. Therefore, they can only be used to establish the historicity of some incident, not to deny it. If a story is not embarrassing or dissimiar or found in independent early sources, that obviously doesn’t mean that the incident isn’t historical.

Slick, eh? Craig is lying to us, but he makes it sound as if he’s telling the truth. Not all of the criteria can be used to deny the historical credibility of a report, but some can. For example, if the reported incident is not a historical fit—like the idea of Quirinius being governor in 4BC—then you can indeed use this evidence to disqualify the report as authentic history. And Criterion 6 can only be safely applied as a negative check. Craig, however, gives examples from the three criteria that do fit the conclusion he wants us to draw, and then applies it to the six criteria as a whole. Pretty sneaky. (And why on earth does he have scare quotes around “criteria”?)

The only way you could justifiably use the criteria to deny historical credibility would be by presupposing that the gospels are unreliable until they are proven to be reliable. We’re right back to the burden of proof issue again! If we adopt a position of neutrality in approaching the gospels, then the failure to prove an incident is historical just leaves you in a position of neutrality. You just don’t know whether it’s historical or not.

Agnosticism is the last refuge of the believer, and here we have Craig setting up a defensive position he can fall back to if the contest doesn’t go his way (e.g. if someone happens to notice the missing seventh criterion, and apply it). “We can never know!” is the rallying cry of the faithful, and if you say, “Yes, we can, and here’s how,”—well, I’m sure you all know how that turns out.

Second, the criteria don’t presuppose the general reliability of the gospels. The criteria apply to specific incidents, not to a whole book. So they can be used to detect historical nuggets of information in any source, even the apocryphal gospels or the Qur’an. That means that in order to defend the historical credibility of some event in the life of Jesus, say, His burial, you don’t need to defend the historical credibility of other events like His birth in Bethlehem, His feeding the five thousand, His triumphal entry into Jerusalem, and so on.

Aka the divide-and-conquer approach. If you have a good argument against X, the believer will say that it does not apply to Y and Z, and therefore Y and Z could still be true, and therefore X is probably true as well, because if Y and Z are true, then the gospel writer is reliable and should be taken as truthful by default. Remember, this was one of Craig’s arguments for why we should assume that the NT is always true: because the NT authors are reliable witnesses. The six criteria are just there so Craig can plausibly deny and/or isolate the historical problems with the NT, and hopefully score a debate point or two on allegedly historical grounds.

The rest of the chapter is going to go downhill from here. For all the time he spent setting up these “historical” criteria, he’s not really going to look at the New Testament from a neutral, scholarly stance. Instead, he’s going to set out to prove that Jesus claimed to be God Incarnate, with C. S. Lewis in the background warming up the old “Liar, Lord, or Lunatic” schtick. Serious historical issues aren’t even going to come up.

On the other hand, what he does say should give us the chance to have a little fun, so stay tuned.

Last week we introduced Craig’s list of five reasons why he thinks we ought to accept New Testament accounts as factual history, despite their clear bias and explicit agenda. The middle three turned out to be smoke and mirrors that he mentioned briefly and then dropped, but he spends a bit more time on the first and last reasons, and that’s what we’re going to look at today. Though his goal is to convince us to believe whatever the New Testament writers tell us, what he actually demonstrates is that his own conclusions need to be taken with a very large grain of salt.

Craig’s first argument is that there isn’t enough time to “erase the core historical facts” concerning the events of the first century. Right off the bat he’s putting a spin on the whole debate. To turn the execution of a common faith healer into a miraculous incarnation, atonement, and resurrection, you don’t need to erase the historical record of his life and death, you merely need to embellish it with the supernatural addenda. The Church will have centuries, later on, to locate and destroy the contrary evidence, leaving the embellishments unchallenged as Craig’s “core historical facts.” So he’s off on the wrong foot just in how he chooses to frame the debate.

Meanwhile, here is how he tries to prove his point.

No modern scholar thinks of the gospels as bald-faced lies, the results of a massive conspiracy. The only places you find such conspiracy theories are on atheist Web sites and in sensationalist books and movies… Rather ever since the nineteenth century, skeptical scholars have explained away the gospels as legends. Like stories of Robin Hood or King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, as the stories about Jesus were passed on over the decades, they got muddled and exaggerated and mythologized until the original facts were all but lost…

One of the major problems with the legend hypothesis, however, which is almost never addressed by skeptical critics, is that the time gap between Jesus’ death and the writing of the gospels is just too short for this to have happened.

Craig goes on to cite Professor A. N. Sherwin-White, a Greco-Roman historian, as claiming that we can measure the rate at which historical fact is gradually supplanted by legend, which he says takes more than two generations. He arrives at this rate by considering how contemporary reporting of Greco-Roman history changes over time. Prof. Sherwin-White thinks “the skepticism of the radical critics to be quite unjustified” with respect to the gospels. “All historians agree that the gospels were written down and circulated during the first generation after the events, while the eyewitnesses were still alive,” says Craig, and since this is allegedly too short a time for legends to accumulate, the accounts must be reliable.

That’s roughly true, but there’s a loophole there big enough to fly a fleet of 747′s through. Professor Sherwin-White is considering the rate at which changes accumulate in records of secular political events with a substantial tangible impact on the lives of entire nations. Alexander the Great wasn’t just some side-show faith healer doing tricks for the faithful, he conquered stuff. His story is interesting because it gives us insights into the kind of qualities and tactics that make someone successful in real-world competition. There’s an advantage, then, in keeping it real, because if you substitute wishful thinking and deus ex machina for the stuff that really works, Alexander’s story isn’t going to do you much good. Its value is mundane and practical, and it’s therefore naturally resistant to the kind of superstitions and supernatural trappings that eventually grow up around it.

Faith-based ministries are a whole different ball game. The “prophet” isn’t out to conquer people physically, by the threat of the sword. He’s there to conquer people mentally and emotionally, by selling them belief in things that cannot be seen. Or in other words, by selling them the legend. To say that it takes more than two generations for a prophet to impart incredible stories to his followers is like saying a general would need that long to achieve corresponding military victories. In some cases, for some generals, that might be true, but it wasn’t true for Alexander, and there’s no reason a spiritual hero couldn’t be just as exceptional in spreading his own legends.

The key difference here is that in the case of the prophet, the amazing supernatural stories are not an afterthought, they’re the primary product of the ministry, and they are spread to (and by) superstitious people who are willing and even eager to believe them. You can’t approach religious history as though it were military history and expect the same constraints to apply. Belief in the supernatural, coupled with an earnest desire to prove that it’s all true and that one’s own religion is The One True Faith, provides a tremendous acceleration to the whole process. In many cases, it can be virtually instantaneous to the events themselves, as witness the many stories we hear from believers today who superstitiously ascribe supernatural causes to ordinary outcomes.

Look at any of the new religions that sprang up in America in the 1800′s: Mormonism, Christian Science, the Seventh-Day Adventists, etc., etc. Look at Scientology, or ministries like Benny Hinn. The time it takes for believers to embellish their beliefs is measured in seconds, not generations. To have years and even decades, in a superstitious and Messiah-crazy culture, would allow plenty of time for the kind of embellishments we find in the New Testament accounts.

Nor, in fact, are the core historical facts entirely erased. In Matthew’s gospel, for example, he records the existence of widespread reports claiming that disciples took Jesus’ body. Matthew tries to discredit the story by claiming the guards were bribed to spread lies, but in the process he does document that the reports existed. And then there’s this:

This point becomes even more devastating for skepticism when we realize that the gospels themselves use sources that go back even closer to events of Jesus’ life. For example, the story of Jesus’ suffering and death, commonly called the passion story, was probably not originally written by Mark. Rather, Mark used a source for this narrative. Mark is the earliest gospel, and his source must be even earlier still. In fact, Rudolf Pesch, a German expert on Mark, says the passion source must go back to at least AD 37. That’s just seven years after Jesus’ death.

The oldest manuscripts of Mark end at verse 8, with an angel who tells the women that Jesus is “risen,” but without any actual, tangible, physically-resurrected Jesus showing up. Later gospels go out of their way to make Jesus actually show up and prove himself in various ways, but the oldest Gospel manuscripts are like the manuscripts of the oldest epistles, which describe the resurrection as the raising of a spiritual body, in contrast with the “earthly” body that was buried. Thus, we can see the story improve with the re-telling, from one gospel to the next, and from the earlier epistles to the later. Even the Gospel of Mark itself was “improved” by the addition of one or two longer endings designed to add a few “real” appearances of a risen Jesus to the story. The oldest accounts were about a Messiah who was simply gone (presumably to heaven), but within a very short time we find additions designed specifically to refute the idea that he went straight to heaven from the tomb.

Craig, thus, is wrong on several counts: he improperly frames the debate as though legends cannot accumulate without erasing historical fact, he vastly underestimates the rate at which believers embrace stories of the supernatural, and he fails to address the historical facts that were not entirely erased, and that cast doubt on the reliability of the “official” Christian accounts. We could go on, but I don’t want to belabor this too much because we still have one more point to cover.

Craig’s last point is the claim that “The gospel writers have a proven track record of historical reliability.” Notice, he does not claim that they have a proven record of objectivity and accuracy when reporting on their own religious claims. He means they have—or at least one of them has—some kind of general, trivial historical reliability. In other words, historians have been able to verify that certain inconsequential details of the book of Acts are really true.

From the sailings of the Alexandrian [grain] fleet to the coastal terrain of the Mediterranean islands to the peculiar titles of local officials, Luke gets it right.

None of which have anything at all to do with Luke being unbiased and accurate in his reporting of the alleged justifications for his personal religious beliefs. Confirming the incidental details of Luke’s report does lend credence to the claim that he was carefully and reliably reporting his own mundane experiences, as opposed to, say, being a fictional character invented centuries later by some monk with no clue about first century conditions. But that’s a far cry from saying that Luke would never try to sell us a religion that wasn’t really true.

This is an important point, and one that apologists like Craig consistently attempt to obscure rather than address. The sailings of the Alexandrian grain fleet aren’t at issue here. The question is, can we trust Luke (a) to objectively and critically evaluate positive claims made about the religion he has dedicated his life to and (b) to record only those reports that are actually historically true? In other words, should we trust that Luke is not just following Keener’s example (so to speak) in recording whatever stories he can find that seem to support his agenda?

I think not, for a few reasons. One, we know on general principle that no one is completely unbiased. As Prof. Sherwin-White reports, even the more-or-less trusted sources for Greco-Roman history “are usually biased,” and this bias has to be taken into account. But cultural bias is nothing compared to religious bias. The fact that Craig, who shares Luke’s bias, wants us to overlook Luke’s bias, ought to make us doubly suspicious.

As an example of Luke’s bias, consider his uncritical acceptance of the story of Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemene.

And He came out and proceeded as was His custom to the Mount of Olives; and the disciples also followed Him. When He arrived at the place, He said to them, “Pray that you may not enter into temptation.” And He withdrew from them about a stone’s throw, and He knelt down and began to pray, saying, “Father, if You are willing, remove this cup from Me; yet not My will, but Yours be done.”Now an angel from heaven appeared to Him, strengthening Him. And being in agony He was praying very fervently; and His sweat became like drops of blood, falling down upon the ground. When He rose from prayer, He came to the disciples and found them sleeping from sorrow, and said to them, “Why are you sleeping? Get up and pray that you may not enter into temptation.”

According to the story, the disciples have not yet understood that Jesus is to be crucified and to rise from the dead, yet they’re already “exhausted from sorrow.” The author’s hindsight, knowing of Jesus’ imminent death, projects his own sorrowful recollection onto the disciples in the story, who did not yet know that this was the “night before the crucifixion” scene. What’s more, at this point in the story, the disciples know that Jesus has made some powerful and violent enemies, and yet none of them jumps up and says, “Jesus, you’re covered in blood, what happened?” Apologists like to use this story as proof of Luke’s historical reliability, since there’s no way he would know about the rare medical phenomenon that causes bloody sweat under extreme stress, but again, the story shows the disciples behaving as though they’ve memorized the script, and know exactly why Jesus is all bloody.

Granted, you could say that the disciples failed to react to Jesus’ bleeding because it was too dark out, so they couldn’t see it. But in that case, whose “eyewitness” testimony is Luke reporting when he claims that Jesus was bleeding in the first place? You can’t be an eyewitness of something if it’s too dark for you to see it. Craig’s claims notwithstanding, we’re not dealing with an unbiased historian documenting factual eyewitness testimony. “Sweat like blood” is an embellishment. The grain fleets of Alexandria don’t matter one way or another; Luke has no reason to seek questionable accounts of how and when they sail. But the “suffering Savior” is an important emotional element of Luke’s agenda, so he reports this story as historical fact despite its obvious anachronisms and inconsistencies.

Bottom line, it’s not that Luke is an unbiased and reliable historian, it’s that Craig shares Luke’s bias, and is therefore unable to perceive it. He finds Luke trustworthy, not because Luke represents an objective and critical cross-examination of the evidence, but simply because he wants Luke to be right. He wants Jesus to be God. And he wants us to put our faith in this man Luke so that we, too, can become convinced that everything Luke says about Jesus is true.

The historical documents we have about Jesus are all biased and credulous, with progressive “improvements” over time. To blindly put our trust in what these men have written is to mistake gullibility for a virtue.

Christianity is, above all else, a story. We don’t see God showing up in real life. Jesus doesn’t go to church on Sunday. Miracles like healing someone born blind, or resurrecting someone who died three days ago, only happen in the tales told from the pulpit and in ancient parchments. The heart of the Gospel is the story of the Gospel, and if there are any doubts about the story, then Christianity itself is in danger of being reduced to a pleasant (or not-so-pleasant) myth.

Starting in Chapter 8, William Lane Craig takes on the task of trying to make the Gospel sound like history. It’s not an easy task, but Craig has thousands of years of pro-Christian scholarship to call on, as well as an equal or greater volume of traditional apologetics. The classic problem, of course, is that the primary historical evidence is highly biased: the documents that survive were mostly written by men who wrote for the explicit purpose of persuading people that Jesus was the Christ. What’s more, we know historically that the early Christians went out of their way to destroy any evidence and/or testimony that was contrary to the message they wanted to preach, even from non-Christian sources, so we don’t have much in the way of balance. The deck is stacked in Craig’s favor, and now he’s ready to deal out the cards.

He begins by suggesting that the Gospel is helped, rather than hindered, by modern scholarship. Speaking of questions like “How do we know that what the apostles wrote was accurate?” and “How do we know they didn’t embellish things, or report hearsay, or just make things up?” he writes:

Well, up until the modern era these sorts of questions were basically unanswerable. But with the rise of textual criticism and the modern study of history, historians began to develop the tools to unlock these questions. Today Jesus is no longer just a figure in a stained-glass window, but a real, flesh-and-blood person of history, just like Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great, whose life can be investigated by the standard methods of history.

That’s not necessarily a good thing, at least for Christian apologists! And in fact, Craig is already off the mark just a bit, because we do have a way to judge whether or not the stories of men are reliable stories. Truth is consistent with itself. If we want to know whether the Gospels are true, we need to ask, “Are these stories consistent with themselves? Are they consistent with the real world we see all around us?” While modern scholarship does help, there has long been fairly conclusive evidence that the Bible is a myth (or rather, a not-entirely-harmonious collection of myths) that ought to be taken with a big grain of salt, just from the internal and external contradictions.

Craig prefers to take a more optimistic view, however. In his opening paragraphs, he boasts:

Little did I realize [in the 1970's] that a veritable revolution in New Testament scholarship was transpiring that would soon reverse such skepticism and establish the gospels as historically credible sources for the life and claims of Jesus. Radical critics will get a free pass from the press today for their sensational assertions, but they are being increasingly marginalized within the academy, as scholarship has come to a new appreciation of the historical reliability of the New Testament documents.

Take that, skeptics! Now to be fair, I think Craig does have a partial point. Some critics have gone too far in suggesting that Jesus himself never existed. That strikes me as a silly notion: obviously somebody had to originally invent this stuff at some point, and why would that man’s name be any less likely to be “Jesus”? (Cf. today’s post at Alethian Worldview.) The problem for Christianity is not proving that there once was a religious figure whose name was Jesus, the problem is the things men claim about him.

Getting back to the historical question of the Gospel’s accuracy, then, Craig begins by considering all the sources we have for information about Jesus.

Jesus of Nazareth is referred to in a range of ancient sources inside and outside the New Testament, including Christian, Roman, and Jewish sources…

The most important of these historical sources have been collected into the New Testament.

Oops, there’s Craig’s bias showing through. The Gospel is a story, and the “New Testament” is the official Catholic version of that story, selected centuries later by theologians (not historians) for the express purpose of promoting the official version. Right from the start, Craig tries to implant the idea that the New Testament is somehow more authoritative and trustworthy, even though we know they’re unashamedly biased. Naturally, he follows the traditional apologetic for the canon of Scripture.

The church chose only the earliest sources, which were closest to Jesus and the original disciples, to include in the New Testament and left out the later, secondary accounts like the forged apocryphal gospels, which everyone knew were fakes. So from the very nature of the case, the best historical sources were included in the New Testament.

And how do we know that the bishops chose only the good books, and rejected only the fakes? Well, because they told us so themselves. Plus they burned a bunch of books so that we wouldn’t need to bother comparing them to the official accounts. It wouldn’t do to leave behind evidence that might show, say, that the Gospels of Peter and of Thomas actually had historical antecedents dating back before the Gospel of John. Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t, but we won’t know now because early Christians were very good at wiping out any evidence not in their favor.

But we should just take their word for it anyway. They claim to have picked all the right books and to have rejected all the “fakes,” and therefore their testimony establishes the New Testament as the most reliable historical evidence we have about the life of Jesus. That’s what Craig would have us believe anyway, though he more or less glosses over that part. He barely mentions this as a given, and then immediately blows the dog whistle of “evil liberal scholarship.”

People who insist on evidence taken only from writings outside the New Testament don’t understand what they’re asking us to do. They’re demanding that we ignore the earliest, primary sources about Jesus in favor of sources that are later, secondary, and less reliable, which is just crazy as historical methodology.

This is important because all of the radical reconstructions of the historical Jesus in the news today are based on later writings outside the New Testament, in particular the so-called apocryphal gospels…[which] began to appear in the second half of the second century after Christ. Revisionists claim that these extrabiblical writings are the key to correctly reconstructing the historical Jesus.

Notice the prejudice: these aren’t historians, they’re “revisionists” and “radicals” who insist on ignoring primary sources in favor of a “crazy” methodology. There’s no mention of the unique problems that arise when you try to rediscover history after the thorough and systematic destruction of all evidence outside the officially-sanctioned narrative. There’s no hint that we might be able to uncover traces of earlier histories through an examination of the few non-canonical works that did survive, no mention of the possibility that these later works might be based on earlier manuscripts that have since been (*ahem*) “lost.”

Craig spends several paragraphs painting critical scholars as dishonest, agenda-driven revisionists trying to “dupe” you into rejecting the New Testament. Despite his glowing endorsement of New Testament scholarship at the beginning of the chapter, he doesn’t think much of scholars who fail to restrict themselves to the official accounts. There have been those in the skeptical community who have defended Craig and argued that he is not dishonest at heart, just very committed to his beliefs. Craig himself makes no such allowances for New Testament critics, though. They’re all a bunch of con men out to make a buck at the expense of your immortal soul.

Craig’s next maneuver is to invoke the principle of “innocent until proven guilty” in order to claim that the burden of proof is on the skeptic. This is a classic debate strategy: if you have the evidence to back up your claim, then you want the burden of proof, because this will give you the opportunity to present your evidence. Craig, however, can’t back up his claims, since the Gospel talks about things that are entirely unlike anything we see in real life. Therefore his goal is to push the burden of proof onto his opponents.

Notice, too, the false dichotomy Craig presents: either the New Testament is reliable, or it is unreliable. Not, “is the NT biased or unbiased?”—obviously it’s heavily biased, and that means we have to consider the reliability of the Bible in the context of the writers’ agenda. Where historical facts are irrelevant to their goal of promoting Christianity, we have no reason to assume the text is unreliable. When it comes to the unique claims that they appeal to as proof of their faith, though, a healthy skepticism is warranted. Indeed, under the circumstances it would be sheer gullibility to assume that their accounts, in such cases, were objective, unbiased, and accurate.

Craig, however, wants to make it an all-or-nothing, one-assumption-fits-all dichotomy, and he offers five arguments why we should assume that the gospels are accurate until proven otherwise.

1. There was insufficient time for legendary influences to erase the core historical facts.
2. The gospels are not analogous to folk tales or contemporary “urban legends.”
3. The Jewish transmission of sacred traditions was highly developed and reliable.
4. There were significant restraints on the embellishment of traditions about Jesus, such as the presence of eyewitnesses and the apostles’ supervision.
5. The gospel writers have a proven track record of historical reliability.

Notice that none of these 5 excuses actually address the problem of bias in the gospels, and in fact, many of them actually seem likely to maximize the effectiveness of the bias. Next week, we’ll look at points 1 and 5, since Craig picks these two to elaborate on, so in the meantime, let’s just look at the middle three.

Craig denies that the gospels are analogous to modern urban legends, on the grounds that urban legends “rarely concern actual historical individuals and are thus not like the gospel narratives.” In other words, by carefully selecting certain specific characteristics about urban legends and the gospels, he can think of one way in which the gospels are not like urban legends. That’s not the same as proving that the two are never alike, however. Elvis Presley was a real person. Can you think of any urban legends about him? What were the names of the two disciples who allegedly walked to Emmaus with Jesus, without recognizing him, shortly after his death?

But let’s not get distracted here. The identity of the characters is irrelevant; the real significance of urban legends is the psychosocial mechanism that allows such legends to arise and become widespread. Why do so many people believe that Obama was born in Kenya? Why do people believe that vaccines cause autism? The important thing is that the success of the legend is proportional to how sensational it is and how willingly people believe it. That’s a serious issue for the Gospel, which is a sensational story that people are eager to believe, and is thus very similar to urban legends.

Look at point 3, that “Jewish transmission of sacred traditions was reliable.” That would be great if Moses had written the New Testament. But he didn’t. Jewish traditions don’t apply to the gospels because the gospels were not part of Jewish sacred tradition. Even if you say that Christian stories later became a sacred tradition, that doesn’t cover the initial development of the tradition. Point 3 might explain, for example, why one gospel has Mary meeting a risen Jesus in the cemetery, while another has her telling the disciples she doesn’t know what happened to his body. Later traditions faithfully pass on the contradiction between the two gospel stories, but the stories themselves developed in an unreliable way that allowed contradictions to arise in the first place.

Point 4, that the apostles or eyewitnesses resisted all attempts to embellish the gospel, is pure fantasy. There is no evidence of the apostles ever attempting to shut down any claims or arguments that made the Gospel look better, and in fact there is some evidence to the contrary, like the blind man Jesus allegedly healed outside Jericho, who later became two blind men. Craig is simply assuming that believers would never embellish or allow others to embellish the facts, but when we look at real Christians in the real world, we see that this is not the case.

In the end, Craig himself is a demonstration of why we should not naively assume that everything in the Bible is necessarily true. Believers do not give us unbiased accuracy in their reporting. Craig omits important and relevant information about the historical issues involved, he slanders NT critics as con men and revisionists, he distorts the facts and distracts us with irrelevancies. And he does it because it’s to his advantage to do so—the Gospel is the kind of story that benefits more from a biased and distorted look at history than from a balanced and impartial consideration of the evidence.

That in itself tells us all we really need to know.

It’s testimony time! Before we get to William Lane Craig and his story of how God uniquely blessed him, I’d like to tell a joke. It seems a hunter was out in the woods one day and came across a bullseye painted on a tree, with a single arrow dead center in the middle of it. The bullseye was rather small, and even the tree itself was not too large, so the hunter was impressed. As he continued through the woods, he found more and more of these small bullseyes, each with a single arrow in the dead center. “Clearly,” he thought, “I’ve stumbled onto the domain of a master archer. I must find him and see if he can teach me to shoot as well as he.”

After some searching, he came upon a young man with a bow, a quiver of arrows, small pail of red paint, and a brush. “Are you the one that’s been shooting all those bullseyes?” asked the hunter. “I am,” replied the youth. “Such skill in one so young!” declared the hunter, “Will you teach me?” “Surely,” the youth replied. And with that he set down his paint and brush, pulled out an arrow, drew back his bow, and shot it into a thickly-wooded part of the forest, where it struck a tree. He then took his paint and brush and painted a neat bullseye all around where the arrow had landed.

And now, at the risk of incurring some serious déjà vu, let’s look at how God’s answers to Craig’s prayers have been so remarkably on target.

In “A Philosopher’s Journey of Faith, Part One,” Craig shared how a businessman with connections to his wife’s family had graciously volunteered to fund Craig’s post-graduate training. In Part Two, he shares how things went as his schoolwork drew to a close.

As Jan and I were nearing the completion of my doctoral studies in philosophy at the University of Birmingham in England, our future path was again unclear to us. I had sent out a number of applications for teaching positions in philosophy at American universities but had received no bites. We didn’t know what to do or where to go.

I’ll summarize the next part of the story, but I wanted to quote this part to highlight the fact that Craig is actually pursuing several different options at this point. Do you think it occurred to him that perhaps he ought to pray about his future? It would be pretty odd if he did not, given his character, beliefs, and ambitions. And yet no mention is made of asking God to bless any of these applications and grant him a position as a philosophy professor at a university. He wants God to do something, but he’s not painting any bullseyes on any particular tree, at least as far as he tells us today. Coincidence? Let’s see how the story develops.

His wife asked him what he’d like to do, and he mentioned a German theologian he’d like to study under. Immediately God went to work and looked up all the grants and fellowships, and found two that—I’m sorry, I misread my notes, it was his wife that got busy and found the two fellowships. One was a grant offered by a German agency to come study at German universities, which was nice but too small to cover their living expenses. The second, however, was a real plum, as they say: in addition to funding his research, it also paid for four months of language training, followed by help with housing, a travel allowance, pocket money, and even a cruise on the Rhine! The sponsor, Humboldt-Stiftung, was seeking to promote research by foreign scientists and scholars at German institutions, as part of a program to improve Germany’s postwar cultural image.

At this point, Craig begins telling us about how he wanted that fellowship, and how hard he prayed for it, and how unlikely it seemed to him that his application would be given the same consideration as the applications of physicists and biologists and other scientific scholars. He makes no mention of having any similar hopes and desires for the other options he was exploring, nor does he try to make it sound implausible that an American university would hire a new philosophy professor from the doctoral program of a prestigious theological school. Only this story gets the dramatic build-up—the tiny bullseye painted on the slender tree. Can you guess why?

In true dramatic fashion, he leaves the story hanging at this point. The foundation offering the grant would need 9 months to evaluate it, and meanwhile they needed a place to live and some way to feed themselves. His wife expressed a desire to learn to speak French, so they applied to a missionary school in France. The program, however, was only offered to missionaries, and was more than they could afford, and they were initially turned down. Craig wrote back to them, though, and expressed his desire to “serve the Lord” in some way, even though he wasn’t officially sponsored by any missionary board.

Meanwhile, things weren’t going too well. “Time passed,” writes Craig, “and none of my other efforts to find a job had materialized. We had shipped all of our belongings back to my parents’ home in Illinois. In one week we had to move out of our house in Birmingham, and we had nowhere to go.” Good thing he’d kept his paintbrush in the bucket, and left the trees alone, eh? But then the missionary school wrote back and said they could attend, and could pay whatever they could afford, and they’d trust the Lord to provide the rest. Woohoo! Let me grab my brush and… there, bullseye! They were off to France. I’ll let Craig tell the next part.

Our French language training was to end in August, and as of July we still hadn’t heard a decision from the Humboldt-Stiftung. We were getting nervous. (Jan has since formulated a saying that aptly describes our lives: “The Lord is almost always late!”) Then one day we received a letter from the Humboldt-Stiftung.

You can guess what it said, so I’ll spare you the little melodrama about having to use a French/German dictionary to find out he’d been accepted. But I wanted to focus just for a moment on the parenthetical remark above, about how the Lord is “almost always late.” It seems to me this explains a lot about miracles.

Look at what it’s saying: God is “late.” What does that mean? It means there’s something you want, and you’re not getting it, and you’re feeling frustrated and anxious. That’s the emotional state you’re in when you experience a “miracle.” You’ve been under stress for a while, because you haven’t got something important that you need or want, and then when you get it, hooray, God finally delivered. Why isn’t God ever on time? Because if you try for something, and obtain it without any trouble or delay, where’s the stress? The ultimate outcome is the same either way, but when God is “late,” it feels more like a miracle, because of your emotional state. So it’s really your emotion, rather than any overt action on God’s part, that leads you to conclude a miracle has occurred. But we’re getting a little ahead of our story.

So Craig gets his fellowship, and goes off to study theology with Wolfhart Pannenberg, and surprise, surprise, some of the theological texts are in French. Apparently there were Christians in France at some point or another, and even though Craig had no idea that studying in Europe might involve reading more than German and English, the Lord knew that he was going to need French, and that’s why He made Mrs. Craig suddenly want to study French, and why He hypnotized the administrators at the missionary school and forced them to admit a pair of non-missionaries who could not pay their full bill. And fortunately, as the Lord well knew, no significant theological works have ever been written in Spanish, Italian, or Latin, so really, German, French and English were all he needed.

Yeah, that’s just a bit snarky, I know, but there’s a certain narcissism in this particular interlude that’s a bit annoying. “I’m William Lane Craig, and I’m so important to God that He meddled in the lives and business affairs of His own servants, and even of my wife, just to make sure that I wouldn’t embarrass myself in front of my teacher by admitting that I did not speak French.” “I’m William Lane Craig, and I’m so important to God that He got me a cushy, expensive grant so that I could pursue my heart’s desire while millions of His children cry out to Him in poverty and hunger and suffering, and hear only stony silence in reply.”

I don’t want to go too far down that tangent, but it does seem to explain why Craig is so generous in his offhand dismissal of the suffering God allows. Why should he care? The “suffering” God has permitted in his life apparently consists of having to wait for people to hand him large wads of cash. Oh the pain.

But enough of that. The real lesson here, I think, is the insight Craig inadvertently gives us into the anatomy of a miracle. It’s retroactive: you don’t paint the bullseye until you see where the arrow hits. Had his life story gone differently, like if he’d gotten a faculty position right out of grad school, he’d have painted a different set of bullseyes, and we’d have heard about how much he wanted to teach at that school, and all the reasons why his acceptance was delayed and seemed unlikely, and then poof, God intervenes—in some way which Craig never quite describes—and he gets it. The key part of the miracle (besides the emotional state) is in not painting the bullseye too soon.

Of course, if you do paint a bullseye and then God misses the target, it’s not that God really missed, it’s that you painted the wrong bullseye! That’s called “testing God,” or at least, that’s what you call it if it turns out not to happen. Everything is retroactive. You see what happens first, then you announce what the target was. That’s why God will relieve Craig’s suffering and give him his heart’s desire, but He won’t feed the starving, or heal the sick, or defend the weak. Craig is in a privileged position, materially speaking, and therefore he naturally gets the benefits, with or without God’s help. But the underprivileged? Well, not many good things happen to them, so there’s not much God can take credit for. Even God can’t make the paint-the-bullseye-later trick work when you’re in a desert and there’s no trees for your arrow to hit.

Next week, we return to the apologetics content and Craig’s arguments for the historicity of Jesus. Stay tuned.

William Lane Craig deals with the problem of suffering by assuming that it’s not really an intellectual problem, since he can imagine the possibility that God might be working under some set of unknown constraints. He may not have any grounds (other than wishful thinking) for supposing this to be true, but as long as he can claim that atheists are unable to prove the contrary, he considers the intellectual argument a non-problem for God.

That leaves what he calls “the emotional problem of suffering.” It’s a bit misnamed, because the problem isn’t our response to suffering. Suffering is evil, and people should have a negative reaction to it. When you see one person suffering, and you know that someone else can help them and simply refuses to do so, without any justification for their refusal, then moral outrage is an entirely appropriate. When Craig tells us that God has the power to relieve suffering, and deliberately chooses not to help, and when he defends this behavior by the excuse that we can’t know for certain that God does not have some secret justification, then that’s Craig’s problem, not ours.

Craig doesn’t really offer a good response to that. Instead, he presents us with a choice selection of emotional rationalizations for suffering. And to be fair, these are not uniquely Christian rationalizations, except to the extent that they apply Christian labels to the higher power or powers that are supposed to be punishing us and/or preparing us for some higher calling. What’s interesting is that Craig declares that “the emotional problem” of suffering is more significant than “the intellectual problem,” and needs a correspondingly more significant answer. But if that’s the case, why does he give it such poor ones?

Craig’s first answer to the emotional problem of suffering is that Jesus knows what suffering feels like.

On the cross Christ endured a suffering beyond all understanding. He bore the punishment for the sins of the whole world. None of us can comprehend that suffering. Though He was innocent, He voluntarily underwent incomprehensible suffering for us. And why?—because He loves us so much. How can we reject Him who gave up everything for us?

Notice, this has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with why suffering needs to exist in the first place. Craig is not addressing the inconsistency between God’s alleged love and His failure to relieve suffering. The “problem” he’s addressing is that we don’t like to suffer. That’s what he thinks is the real problem here, and his answer is that we should feel better about our own sufferings if we know that Jesus has been through worse.

But don’t think about it too much. Just feel. Never mind that it sounds seriously psychotic for a man to “prove” his love by arranging for his own grisly, gory murder—especially coupled with the threat that he will inflict endless torture on those who fail to love him in return. Never mind the fact that, as the sole, sovereign, self-existent Being, God could have arranged it so nobody ever had to suffer at all. Don’t even think about it. Just feel.

Ok, we can think about it a little, if we like. And while you’re thinking about it, did you notice how Craig embellished the Gospel a little bit there? If you read the Gospel stories, you might notice that Jesus’ sufferings, while extreme, are sadly not all that rare. Yes, he was brutally beaten, flogged, and nailed to a cross. For a little less than a day, he experienced horrific suffering, followed by an unexpectedly quick death. That is bad, but it’s not going to be in the top ten lists of the worst suffering ever experienced by mortal man. I doubt it would make the top million. It was horrible, excruciating and inexcusable, but it hardly qualifies him as the one who understands all sufferings because he has experienced the ultimate.

To make up for that, Craig does what a lot of other Christians do: he “improves” the Gospel by imagining that Jesus suffered more than just physical pain. Instead of taking “he bore our sins” as a metaphor, they imagine that God literally transferred all sins, past, present, and future, onto or into Jesus. And apparently that’s supposed to hurt. It’s completely extrabiblical, and it doesn’t really make much sense—a sin is a behavior, not a tangible object that you can pick up and move from one person to another. But then again, it doesn’t have to make any sense, because this is the emotional rationalization for suffering, not the intellectual one. Just imagine Jesus experiencing unimaginable suffering from having imaginary sin-thingies dropped on him, and feel how much he must love you. And then shut up and suffer yourself.

When God asks us to undergo suffering that seems unmerited, pointless, and unnecessary, meditation on the cross of Christ can help to give us the strength and courage needed to bear the cross we are asked to carry.

Ironically, Craig is encouraging believers to console themselves during unmerited, pointless, and unnecessary suffering by meditating on the death of Christ, which, by implication, was also unmerited, pointless, and unnecessary. Because if it wasn’t, then why would his suffering have anything to do with our own?

But of course the weasel word here is “seems.” Suffering may seem pointless and unnecessary, and in fact it’s true that Christians don’t actually have any justification for suffering (they just have hope in the possibility that some unknown justification might exist somewhere), and it’s also true that God Himself (as reported by men in the Bible) does not even pretend to offer any justification for suffering. But don’t think about it. Trust that your ignorance is hiding an answer somewhere you can’t find it, and then just feel.

At this point, Craig introduces an interesting apologetic. He wants to try and convince us that “knowing God is an incommensurable good to which suffering cannot even be compared.” As an example, he tells us about an elderly shut-in named Mabel, whom he heard about via a friend named Tom. Tom describes her thusly.

As I neared the end of [the] hallway, I saw an old woman strapped up in a wheelchair. Her face was an absolute horror. The empty stare and white pupils of her eyes told me that she was blind. The large hearing aid over one ear told me that she was almost deaf. One side of her face was being eaten by cancer. There was a discolored and running sore covering part of one cheek, and it had pushed her nose to one side, dropped one eye, and distorted her jaw so that what should have been the corner of her mouth was the bottom of her mouth. As a consequence, she drooled constantly… I also learned later that this woman was eighty-nine years old and that she had been bedridden, blind, nearly deaf, and alone, for twenty-five years.

Tom was surprised to find that despite her condition, she was still alert enough to carry on a conversation, and he went back to visit her often. When he asked her what she thought about all day, she replied, “I think about my Jesus.” This made Tom feel guilty because he had trouble thinking about Jesus for five minutes, let alone all day. So he asked her what she thought about Jesus.

I think how good He’s been to me. He’s been awfully good to me in my life, you know … I’m one of those kind who’s mostly satisfied… Lots of folks would think I’m kind of old-fashioned. But I don’t care. I’d rather have Jesus. He’s all the world to me.

I’m glad that Mabel found something within her grasp that gives her comfort. After all, what else does she have? But honestly, it’s hard to say, from this account, whether she’s just in denial or is experiencing one of the not-uncommon symptoms of mild dementia. I know Craig’s story is part of an emotional rationalization and we’re not supposed to think too hard about what’s being said here, but let’s do a bit anyway. Look at where she is and what she is saying. She’s saying that Jesus has been good to her. Go back and read Tom’s description of exactly how Jesus was treating her. Blindness, deafness, cancer, loneliness—if that’s what Jesus is like when he’s being good to you, I hate to imagine what he’d be like pissed!

Granted, that’s probably not what Mabel really meant. She probably meant just that she was using rigged scorekeeping—giving Jesus credit for whatever she liked, and excusing him from blame for whatever she didn’t like. She describes herself as “one of those kind who’s mostly satisfied,” so it seems likely that her positive outlook was just natural to her, and not due to any overt action on Jesus’ part at all. Mabel may be unique, but that’s because of who Mabel is, not because of who Jesus is.

That’s not really the point Craig is trying to prove here. He’s trying to prove that suffering can turn you into the kind of person who praises Jesus even while you’re suffering. But there’s no evidence that Mabel’s story proves anything more than that she’s just a really patient and tolerant person, like her kindred spirits in nursing homes in Egypt, who smile and tell you Allah has been good to them, and Hindus who have been blessed by their gods, and Asians whose ancestors have been kind, and so on. There is some comfort in the idea that nursing homes can be made less miserable by the delusions and dementia of the residents, but it’s a pretty poor blessing relative to what a real God ought to be able to do.

Think about it (there’s that pesky word “think” again). Suppose that this story were everything Craig wants it to be. Suppose that poor Mabel experiences a lifetime of Jesus being “good” to her by afflicting her with malnutrition, childhood disease and sexual abuse, followed by unwed pregnancy caused by rape, marriage to an abusive and alcoholic bully, lifelong poverty, and the premature deaths of her children. Suppose she ends up in a nursing home, blind and deaf and riddled with cancer, but having learned, through it all, to love Jesus and know him in a way few Christians can even imagine. If that’s “good,” and if it leads to a knowledge of God that is “an incommensurable good that cannot compare to our sufferings,” then why should heaven be any different for Christians than Mabel’s life has been? Assuming that God is a good God, and that Craig’s emotional appeal is a good justification for suffering, why should Heaven be any different?

Craig’s problem is that this is not a rational answer to the problem of suffering (let alone the problem of evil). He isn’t really even trying to give us a sound justification for suffering. He’s encouraging us to stop thinking and just feel. Even though Mabel’s case may not be distinguishable from a mild-to-moderate case of senile dementia, he wants us to feel like we can all be Mabels, even in the worst of circumstances—despite the very large number of Christians in nursing homes who are not Mabels, even though they have the same Jesus she does.

Craig closes with one last emotional appeal.

[E]ven though the problem of suffering is the greatest objection to the existence of God, at the end of the day God is the only solution to the problem of suffering. If God does not exist, then we are locked without hope in a world filled with pointless and unredeemed suffering.

Aka “the appeal to wishful thinking.” This is perhaps the ultimate emotional rationalization of suffering: the idea that if you let the existence of sin and suffering convince you that the Gospel is not true, then you’ll find yourself stuck in a world where there’s no good reason for suffering. If you wish it weren’t true, then it must not be true. But if you think about it, it’s actually better to understand that there’s no good reason for suffering. That means it’s ok to work on ending it. And that’s a good thing.

So we’re done with Craig’s attempt to rationalize away the problem of evil via his rationalizations for the lesser problem of suffering. It’s a hopeless cause for Craig, because his position is inherently self-contradictory: if sin and suffering are the only way to achieve incommensurable good, then Christians must do everything they can to promote sin and suffering, while on the other hand if there IS a way to ultimate goodness without the need for sin and suffering, then God has no excuse for not pursuing the less-evil road to goodness.  Either way, you can’t reconcile Christian teachings about God with the evidence we find in the real world. The most you can do is blind yourself with emotional rationalizations, and pretend the problem does not exist.

Last week, Dr. Craig was just starting to give us four Christian doctrines which (he claims) increase the probability that suffering can coexist with the Christian God. It’s part of his attempt to appear as though he is addressing one of the most significant positive atheistic arguments—the problem of evil—without actually confronting any serious challenge to his conclusions. So far he has replaced the problem of evil with the less-potent problem of suffering, has lowered the standard that Christians have to meet (by declaring that all Christians need to do is suggest the possibility that God might coexist with suffering), and has raised the standard that atheists have to meet (by declaring that atheists have the burden of proving that there is no possibility of God coexisting with suffering). In this week’s installment, he’s going to give us a good demonstration of using rationalization to further evade the issues.

Here are the four traditional Christian doctrines which increase the probability of God co-existing with human suffering, according to Craig. They all have at least one thing in common. Can you spot it?

1. The chief purpose of life is not happiness, but the knowledge of God.
2. Mankind is in a state of rebellion against God and His purpose.
3. God’s purpose is not restricted to this life but spills over beyond the grave into eternal life.
4. The knowledge of God is an incommensurable good.

We looked briefly at point #1 last week, and commenter Flyborg pointed out that this excuse doesn’t really solve the problem.

Imagine you walk into a pie shop, and immediately start choking on tear gas which is coming through the vents. Through shock and pain, you yell “Why the heck did you fill this place with tear gas?! What kind of pie shop does this? What’s going on?”, to which the owner replies “The chief purpose of this pie shop is not happiness, but to sell pies!” How does that answer why the shop owner thought that tear gas was superior to NOT-tear-gas?

Exactly. And if you look at Craig’s four arguments, you’ll notice that they all have this flaw. They all purport to increase the probability that a loving God could co-exist with the amount of human suffering we see in the world, and yet none of them really have anything to do with the probability of God and suffering co-existing. (Note: #2 might seem to be an exception, but we’ll get to that shortly.)

What’s really happening here is a textbook case of someone in denial appealing to simple rationalizations in order to evade the facts that are inconsistent with their beliefs. Suffering is a problem for Christians. They’ve wished for a God who was so nice, He would solve all their problems, “wipe away all their tears,” and end suffering forever. But suffering hasn’t gone away, even though God has had plenty of chances to do something about it. In fact, suffering hasn’t even diminished (other than what men have been able to do on their own through science). Does that mean their wished-for God isn’t real?

Historically, Christians and other believers have used rationalization, aka “backwards thinking,” to deal with the problem. How do you account for the existence of suffering? Well, maybe God has a good reason for it. Ok, what good reason? Well, think of something God might be trying to do. If you can think of something, then that’s a reason. But it might not be a good reason. So how can you be sure God’s reasons are good? Well, what’s He trying to do? If it’s a good thing, then that makes the reason a good reason (aka “the end justifies the means”). Right? So maybe suffering exists because God wants us to get to know Him, because knowledge of God is the greatest possible joy and satisfaction for mankind, even if it doesn’t happen until after we die. Since maximum happiness and satisfaction are good, that means God has a good reason for allowing suffering.

And that’s where the rationalization stops. If you want to find out the truth instead of just defending a predetermined conclusion, however, there are a few more questions you need to ask, like “could the same goals be achieved without sin and suffering?” and “do sin and suffering, in fact, actually accomplish those goals?” But Craig never mentions those problems. And he exaggerates his counter-arguments: his four doctrines can really be boiled down to only one: that God might be using suffering in order to bring us into a knowledge of and obedience to Himself, which is (allegedly) the greatest possible good for mankind. And even that rationalization dodges a few important facts.

As the sole self-existent Being, God can only be bound by necessities that are either inherent in His own nature, or else created by Him. In the former case, the need for human suffering is built into God Himself, so good luck in heaven guys! But in the latter case, God has the option of achieving his goals without sin and suffering, in which case “ultimate human happiness” ceases to be a good reason for God to resort to human sin and suffering (assuming it’s better to achieve good without sin than to do so through sin). And anyway, why would sin be better at creating Ultimate Good than righteousness alone would be? The Christian rationalization really falls apart if you just poke it a little.

So let’s look at each of these four doctrines individually. First, the idea that the chief purpose of life is not happiness, but the knowledge of God. Craig spends four pages defending this point (the other 3 points get 2 pages, combined). The content of those four pages can be boiled down to one statement: committed Christians are a greater percentage of the world’s population today than they were in 100AD, therefore God must know what He’s doing. It’s a classic post hoc fallacy: since Christianity is expanding in the presence of human suffering, human suffering must be contributing to the expansion of the Christianity. Apparently, if you want to help God save all the souls, the best way to do that is to make sure there’s lots of suffering: famines, civil wars, disease, and so on. (It also doesn’t hurt to have a reeeeeeally  flexible definition of what a “committed Christian” is.)

Point #2, the “man is in rebellion against God” argument, strangely only gets a single paragraph of defense from Craig. That’s odd, because blaming the victim is the oldest trick in the book. Theism/animism itself may have arisen as a superstitious “explanation” for why some people suffer when others don’t: the victims must have offended some kind of invisible spirit or god or something, and that’s why they’re suffering.

But blaming the sinner only begs the question. Man is not in control of whether sin, suffering, and evil exist in God’s creation—God is. The problem is not that suffering is more likely if men rebel against God, the problem is that an all-cool God would not be likely to create the conditions and situations that would end up with His beloved creatures rebelling. Craig is simply passing the buck.

Point #3, that God’s purpose extends beyond mortal life, is simply irrelevant, a transparent gloss over the fact that so many lives end without God ever having blessed them with enough blessings to justify what He has put them through. What’s more, if you consider Jesus’ remarks in Matthew 7 about how few people are really saved, and realize that most of God’s “beloved” children are promised lives that go from a brief period of suffering to an eternity of suffering, it really doesn’t help to say God’s purposes extend beyond mortal life. Wouldn’t it be better to bring us to a knowledge of Himself without any sin and evil and suffering at all?

Which brings us to Craig’s last point, which is that knowledge of God is an “incommensurable” good (i.e. so good that it’s worth it whatever it costs). This is the underlying assumption for Craig’s first point. After all, if knowing God were a bad thing, then God’s pursuit of this goal could hardly be called a good reason for resorting to sin and suffering. But even if we assume that knowing God were a good thing, there’s nothing about this assumption that makes God any more likely to co-exist with suffering, and here’s why.

God does not show up in real life. Nobody has any photographs of His face, or any audio recordings of His voice. You can’t overhear God speaking to someone else, or catch Him on a security camera as He walks down the street. God, in short, does absolutely nothing to show up for that intimate, personal, one-on-one relationship that He allegedly wanted so bad He was willing to literally die for it. But Christians don’t like to admit that He is absent. They claim to have a direct experience of God, spiritually; that God comes into their hearts in some mystical way and works in them and through them to inspire their hearts with love and their minds with a deeper understanding of Himself.

What that means is that even if the knowledge of God were the ultimate good, God would not be restricted to imparting that knowledge through suffering alone. He would have other channels available to Him—better channels, in fact, since people are prone to misinterpret the significance of worldly and materialistic happenstances. Consequently, if Christians are not lying to us about God coming into their hearts and communing with them, the goodness of the knowledge of God only decreases the probability that He would resort to sin and suffering to cruelly and imperfectly communicate it.

Craig has tried to lower the standard Christians have to meet, and to raise the standard skeptics have to meet, and he has still failed. His “four doctrines that increase the odds of God co-existing with suffering” all fail to do so. They’re obvious rationalizations that try to distract us with irrelevancies while failing to address the real problems. But it gets worse. Craig follows up this denialist tour de force by going back to his earlier example of tragic and pointless suffering: the little boy who died in an earthquake-collapsed building before rescuers could reach him.

Why did God permit [him] to suffer so? We’re in no position to know. Perhaps through the tragic death of this boy, God knew Mexican authorities would be shocked into requiring new construction standards for earthquake-proof buildings, thereby saving many future lives. Maybe He let it happen because the authorities should be so shocked. Maybe He permitted it so that some other person, facing death or illness in a hospital and seeing the reports on television would be inspired by the boy’s courage to face his own challenge with faith and bravery.

That is a pretty sad shambles of a rationalization. Craig can’t seem to decide if suffering is a good thing or a bad thing. The boy’s suffering is supposed to be good because it might reduce suffering later on? Doesn’t God need human suffering to bring about His Ultimate Good for mankind? That would make it wrong to reduce suffering. So which is it? Is it better to reduce suffering, or not to reduce it? Doesn’t reducing the suffering mean making it harder for God to achieve His goals? (And if it doesn’t, shouldn’t God be doing more to reduce suffering?)

Oh, and that remark about the boy’s inspiring “courage?” Yeah, complete and utter bullshit. Let’s go back a few pages so that Dr. Craig can tell us how inspired he was by the boy’s courage after the quake.

During the next several days, the whole world watched in agony as the teams tried to remove the rubble to get to the boy. They could communicate with him, but could not reach him. His grandfather, who had been trapped with him, was already dead. “I’m scared!” he cried. After about eleven days, there was silence. Alone in the darkness, trapped without food and water, afraid, the little boy died before the rescue teams could free him.

Yeah, inspiring story, Bill. It should be a Christmas special, like the Little Drummer Boy. Give Christian kids something to look forward to.

But that’s what Christians do with facts that contradict their faith: they just re-write the story to make it more compatible with their beliefs. Craig accomplished a complete reversal of this horrific tragedy, transforming a pitiable, scared, and helpless victim into an inspiringly courageous hero whose noble sacrifice would ease the sufferings and doubts of the terminally ill, in only 17 pages. Imagine what hard-core believers could do with the Crucifixion during the many years between Jesus’ burial and the earliest gospels.

We’ll wrap up next week with what Craig calls “the emotional problem of suffering.” Stay tuned.

If you want to know whether or not Christians are telling the truth about God, it’s theoretically very simple: all you need to do is look at the real world and see whether or not it’s consistent with what Christians are saying. Do we find conditions that match the consequences we should reasonably expect, given an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good and all-loving God—or don’t we?

One of the primary goals of apologetics is to prevent us from finding out the answer to that question, and in today’s installment of On Guard, William Lane Craig gives us a good example of the technique. As we saw last week, he has already pulled a sneaky bait and switch, substituting the lesser problem of suffering for the far more difficult problem of evil. This week, he’s going to use a variety of techniques, including the Argument from Ignorance, to try and jam our BS detectors, and leave us incapable of distinguishing false claims about God from true ones.

Last week, Craig refuted the straw man argument that suffering must necessarily exclude the possibility of God’s existence. This week, he’s going after a somewhat better argument, which he calls the “evidential version” of the argument against God. This argument states that “It is improbable that God could have good reasons for permitting suffering.” Once again, he’s subtly twisting the argument, framing it in terms designed to maximize his chances for success. A better argument would be, “It’s improbable that God would employ evil means to achieve good ends, rather than achieving them by good means.” But that would be a much harder BS detector for Craig to successfully jam, so he sets up the easier straw man instead.

His first response is an appeal to ignorance.

First, we’re not in a position to say that it’s improbable that God lacks [sic] good reasons for permitting the suffering in the world.

…The success of the atheist’s argument will depend on whether we’re warranted in inferring that because the suffering looks unjustified it really is unjustified. My first point is that we’re just not in a position to make that kind of judgment with any confidence.

In other words, we look at the kind of God that Christians describe, and then we look at the real world and see that it looks nothing at all like the consequences that would result from such a God behaving according to the abilities, character, and motives that Christians ascribe to Him, and then Craig immediately starts trying to jam our BS detectors with Fear, Uncertainty and Doubts based on what he calls “human limitations.” Notice, these limitations don’t seem to have any adverse effect on Christians’ ability to make bold and confident positive assertions about God, they only prevent skeptics from using real-world evidence to distinguish false claims from true ones. Go figure.

Now, to prove his point, Craig appeals to a couple of popular images. The first is the “butterfly effect” from chaos theory, aka “sensitive dependence on initial conditions.” The popular image is a butterfly flapping its wings in Africa, setting off a chain of events that lead eventually to a hurricane in the Atlantic. Men could never predict the drastic consequences of such a subtle chain of events, and therefore (Craig alleges) we can never know that God does not have good reasons for (to pick a random example) allowing thousands of orphaned Romanian babies to die of AIDs, etc.

The second image he uses is from the movie Sliding Doors, which uses a split-screen technique to tell the story of the way a woman’s life would be different depending on whether or not she missed a train. It’s the butterfly effect again, with radically different outcomes proceeding from such an apparently trivial incident, but with an added twist that [trying to avoid spoilers here] the “successful” branch ends badly, while the “disaster” branch eventually achieves a more satisfying outcome.

In both images, Craig is trying to establish the point that we cannot predict what ultimate outcome will result from any of our experiences, and therefore we cannot know whether God might not have some ultimate good outcome in mind for, say, wiping out hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children in a single horrific tsunami. Ok, he didn’t use that specific example, and it is kind of hard to see how that story would end “and they lived happily ever after,” especially given Jesus’ teachings on the majority of people spending eternity in hell. But that’s the gist of Craig’s argument.

Oops, I mentioned hell. Hell is kind of a problem with Craig’s argument here, because he’s trying to say that the end justifies the means and that our present day suffering is outweighed by the greater good that will eventually result. Except that for the unsaved, according to Jesus, the ultimate state is suffering, not blessing. Thus, in the case of hell, God needs a “good reason” that does not depend on the possibility of a later, greater good. But I digress.

There’s two ways we can critique Craig’s argument without going beyond human limitations. The first is to consider the morality of using evil to do good. Craig’s assumption is that God might have a good reason for making bad things a part of His divine plan for bringing about goodness, which assumes in turn that evil might have more power to accomplish good than good itself has. If good, on its own, had the same power as evil to accomplish good results, then even if God had a “good” reason for resorting to evil, He would have an even better reason not to make evil part of His Grand Design. Thus, Craig’s assumptions involve some really strange ideas about evil being better than good.

The second critique would be to look at what Craig himself is saying. He’s saying that God can use the butterfly effect to achieve controlled results. That’s a terrible argument to use as a justification for suffering, because it greatly improves the chances that a less-evil alternative will be available to God. Even if we didn’t already assume (as Christians teach) that God is sovereign and guides the destinies of men, there are billions of butterflies, and an uncountable number of similar subtle influences that God could exploit to continually create a set of conditions in which good things resulted without all the evil. (And without violating free will any more than butterflies already do.)

But let’s agree, for the sake of argument, that there might be some set of circumstances, and some necessary outcome, where even an all-wise (etc) God would be forced to resort to evil in order to achieve a good result. Seems like that would be pretty rare, at best, but let’s agree that it’s at least conceivable. Does that get Craig off the hook? Not at all, because if it would be rare for an omniscient deity to get stuck like that once, it would be doubly rare for Him to make the same mistake twice. But Craig doesn’t have to account for God allowing only one or two rare instances of evil, he has to account for God resorting to evil every frickin’ time it happens.

Remember, the atheistic argument, as chosen by Craig himself, is that it is improbable that God would have good reasons for allowing suffering. He has to make it sound less likely that there could be a better way to achieve the same results. But his argument against the superior alternatives is to describe how God would have even more options than a naive understanding of omniscience and omnipotence would give Him credit for. That’s not helping Craig’s case in the slightest!

Craig’s second point in response to the evidential argument, is to essentially ignore it. Seriously! He argues that if we take the existence of suffering in context with the cosmological argument, the fine tuning argument, and the moral law argument, we can ignore the evidence-based “probability” of God’s non-existence, because the other arguments are Just That Good. He even has a picture of a set of scales, with his arguments on one side, and the evidence from suffering on the other, and the arguments outweigh the evidence. Case closed.

Normally, I wouldn’t spend much time on this, because it’s such an obvious case of rejecting the evidence in favor of a set of preconceived rationalizations. There is one line in here, though, that you have to see. Craig loves to turn the tables and use the atheist’s own arguments against him, and I think this time it really backfires on him.

Although at a superficial level suffering calls into question God’s existence, at a deeper level suffering actually proves God’s existence. For apart from God, suffering is not really bad. If the atheist believes that suffering is bad or ought not to be, then he’s making moral judgments that are possible only if God exists. [Emph. added---DD]

I had to push back from my desk and stare at that one for a while. So in other words, God’s existence makes the world a worse place than it would be without Him. Without God’s existence, nothing would be bad. “Whoa, Jim, that pit bull just chewed your foot off!” “Yeah, I know, I’m in extreme pain, but that’s ok because God doesn’t exist.” “Sally, is it true that your dad went insane and killed all your kids?” “Yeah, I’m suffering terribly, but it’s ok, because there’s no God.” WTF?

I can see where this is something Craig has no choice but to affirm. It’s the logical extension of his arguments about morality. But seriously, it shows both the flaw in his definition of “good” vs “bad,” and the downright silliness of the whole argument. Yes, it’s literally true that by Craig’s own arguments, the world is a worse place if God exists than it would be without God. God’s existence is what makes suffering bad. If it weren’t for God, suffering would be perfectly ok, at least according to a Christian worldview. And folks, that is one seriously screwed up worldview. I’m just saying.

We’re not going to have time to look at all of Craig’s third point regarding the evidential argument against God, but we can peek at the first couple paragraphs. The third point is that “Christianity entails doctrines that increase the probability of the coexistence of God and suffering.” Or to put it another way, Christians have figured out a few classic rationalizations for why their allegedly good God does not do more to oppose the evil in the world, especially as represented by pointless suffering. And here’s his first rationalization.

1. The chief purpose of life is not happiness, but the knowledge of God.

If you want to really get to know someone, you need to know something about the things they’re passionate about. If you want to really get to know a pro football player, you need to know something about football. If you really want to understand a scientist, you should learn something about science. And to achieve a true knowledge of God, you need to suffer.

Says a lot about God, doesn’t it?

I could develop this idea in more detail, but we’ve covered this ground before. It’s the same old problem of claiming that God can’t do good without directly or indirectly resorting to evil. In this case, it’s particularly bad, because we’re assuming that God can’t even communicate knowledge of Himself without harming His allegedly beloved children and condemning most of them to eternal torment on the grounds that they’ve failed to know Him. Funny, isn’t it, how Almighty God can suddenly turn into such a clueless weakling whenever apologetics needs an out?

Craig has a lot of Christian doctrines intended to excuse God’s failure to oppose evil in the world, and we’ll try and cover them all next week. Stay tuned.

The more I read William Lane Craig, the more respect I have for the sheer deviousness of his approach. We’ve already looked at how he pulls a philosophical bait-and-switch scam in order to substitute the problem of suffering for the far less tractable problem of evil. And now that we’re considering just the limited question of how suffering seems to contradict the Christian idea of a loving God, he pulls another trick on the unsuspecting believers in his audience.

The approach he’s going to take is to claim that suffering is merely an emotional reaction of people who reject God. Many Christians, however, feel the same way. Even though they don’t reject God, they feel that human suffering poses a problem for their Christian faith. So Craig does something psychologically very clever: he begins this part of his book with two long, highly-detailed stories of children suffering horrible, lingering deaths due to natural disasters. He takes great pains to induce a powerful emotional reaction in his readers, and then he begins his argument that the problem of suffering is an emotional problem rather than an intellectual one, while their thoughts are still being overpowered by their emotions.

I’ve got to admit, scruples aside, that is one ingenious approach.

Craig begins his attack on the argument from suffering by insisting that the burden of proof is on the atheist. He wants that clear from the outset: it’s not enough for the atheist to point out how suffering conflicts with Christian teachings on the love of God, he has to prove that God and suffering are mutually exclusive possibilities. This is important, because Christians don’t have a good explanation for suffering, and thus no apologetic good can come of allowing the skeptic to ask for one.

Too often believers allow unbelievers to shift the burden of proof to the believer’s shoulders. “Give me some good explanation for why God permits suffering,” the unbeliever will demand, and then he sits back and plays the skeptic about all the believer’s attempted explanations. The atheist winds up having to prove nothing. This may be clever debating strategy on the atheist’s part, but it’s philosophically illegitimate and intellectually dishonest.

This is William Lane Craig we’re dealing with here, so I trust you all brought your industrial-grade irony meters. But regardless, is he right about the burden of proof? Is it really up to the atheist to pro-actively disprove the existence of God? Remember, when we say “God,” we’re talking about something that does not show up in real life, and about which our only sources of information are the things men say about Him.

In the case of suffering (and to an even greater degree in the case of evil), the things Christians say about their God are rather blatantly inconsistent with conditions we find in the real world. That makes it highly unlikely that what Christians say is really true. We’re not talking about philosophers initiating a discussion about the possibility of God, we’re talking about whether believers have yet met their burden of proof with regards to the claims they make about Him. Based on this and other significant inconsistencies in their story, they have not.

Craig’s solution to this dilemma is to insist that believers do not need to find an answer for this inconsistency, and that it is up to the skeptics to prove, beyond all possible doubt, that there is no way Christians could ever rationalize away the inconsistencies.

Don’t allow the atheist to shirk his intellectual responsibilities. He’s the one who claims that the coexistence of God and suffering is impossible or improbable. So it’s up to him to give us his argument and to support his premises. It’s the Christian’s turn to play the skeptic and question whether the atheist has shown that God cannot have or does not have a good reason for permitting the suffering in the world.

Here’s where the bait and switch comes in. If the Christian were to ask for a good reason why God cannot and/or does not have a good reason for incorporating evil into His grand design for history, that’s a fairly easy task, given a reasonably consistent definition of good and evil and related moral concepts like responsibility and negligence. But Craig nipped that one in the bud before the chapter even started, by selecting the problem of suffering instead of the problem of evil.

Notice, too, how carefully Craig is stacking the deck against the atheist. Not only does the atheist have to meet an impossibly high burden of proof, but the proposition he must prove is that suffering is incompatible with the existence of God. Not that it’s incompatible with God’s alleged love, or compassion, or wisdom, or power, but with God’s very existence. Given the way the definition of God can shift to meet the needs of the moment, that’s a pretty tall order.

Not to put too much of a burden on the unbeliever though, Craig helpfully offers to build our argument for us. He offers two supposedly atheistic arguments against God’s existence: that suffering makes God’s existence impossible, and that it merely makes His existence improbable. We probably won’t have time to cover them both this week, but let’s get started on the first one.

According to the logical version of the problem it’s logically impossible for God and suffering to both exist…

The atheist is claiming that the following two statements are logically inconsistent:

1. An all-loving, all-powerful God exists.
2. Suffering exists.

Now the obvious question is, why think that these two statements are logically inconsistent? There’s no explicit contradiction between them…

Again, a carefully-stacked deck. Craig is leaving out one very important element. The problem is not that God and suffering both exist, the problem is that suffering exists and God does nothing about it. Or more comprehensively, suffering and evil exist without any overt opposition from an allegedly all-good, all-powerful, and all-loving God.

In the famous parable of the Good Samaritan, whose actions are the most like God’s? It’s not the Samaritan, whose compassionate aid was praised by Jesus. It’s the priest and the Levite, who passed by on the other side of the road, leaving the wounded traveler lying in the ditch. God’s response to suffering is the opposite of what Christianity teaches as a “good” reaction. The classic Christian rationalization for this is that God knows more than we do, so “presumably” He is acting for the greater good. But that response falls short for two reasons: first, if we can never know that it’s not better to suffer, then why should we blindly assume that compassion is always the “good” thing to do? But secondly and more significantly, is it even remotely plausible to suppose that, by purest coincidence alone, the “good” thing for God to do would always turn out to be to fail to show up and help?

But this is getting away from what Craig wants to talk about (not surprisingly). Let’s get back to what he calls the atheist’s “logical” argument.

There seem to be two hidden assumptions made by the atheist. They are:

3. If God is all-powerful, He can create any world that He wants.
4. If God is all-loving, He prefers a world without suffering…

In order for this argument to show a logical inconsistency between statements 1 and 2, both of the hidden assumptions made by the atheist must be necessarily true. But are they?

Consider 3, that If God is all-powerful, He can create any world that He wants. Is that necessarily true? Well, not if it’s possible that people have free will! It’s logically impossible to make someone do something freely.

Again, Craig is building a straw-man by making the atheist’s assumption too specific. If you take #3 as being “An all-powerful God could create any world He wanted, within reason,” then clearly there’s no logical reason why He could not make a world in which people simply were not vulnerable to physical or emotional pain. The free will argument is a bit out of place here, since that’s a Christian rationalization for the problem of evil, which Craig is pointedly side-stepping. But suffering is even easier to avoid than evil. With or without free will, an omnipotent God would have the power to create people who were simply impervious to injury and suffering, physical or otherwise. Thus, the possibility of a world without suffering is necessarily valid, given the premise of an omnipotent Creator.

But what about assumption 4, that If God is all-loving, He prefers a world without suffering? Is that necessarily true? It doesn’t seem like it. For God could have some overriding reasons for allowing the suffering in the world. We all know cases in which we permit suffering in order to bring about a greater good (like taking our child to the dentist).

This is the core of Craig’s denial of the problem of suffering, and why he chose to address suffering alone instead of the larger and more significant problem of evil. We all know that sometimes a little suffering now prevents much greater suffering later on, and thus we go to the dentist, and/or take foul-tasting medicines, and/or do tedious, tiring chores, and so on. But hang on—that argument assumes that the lesser suffering is justified by the need to avoid the greater. In other words, it assumes some amount of suffering necessarily exists. But wouldn’t it be preferable not to have any suffering at all, lesser or greater?

Let’s take a moment to rephrase assumption 4 slightly. “If God is all-loving, He prefers a heaven without suffering.” Is that really true? Or should Christians expect to suffer in heaven for all eternity? If a loving God would prefer a heaven in which there is no suffering at all, then why not suppose that the same would be true in the rest of His creation as well? Sure, suffering is supposed to build character, but what does “character” mean? “Character” is your ability to stand up to adversity, i.e. to endure suffering and hardship. But if a loving God wanted to promote strength and courage and loyalty and so on, there are alternatives that don’t require suffering. Maybe He should just sign us all up for soccer instead? Could be a pretty cool game if none of the players ever suffered fatigue or injury…

Craig’s rejection of assumption 4 is merely denial based on his own assumption that suffering is necessary. But is that assumption justified? Let’s see him live up to his own standards of proof for that one. I’d like to hear his logical proof that it’s necessarily true that suffering must be preferable, given an all-loving God. And then it would be interesting to hear him explain why suffering should not be preferable in heaven as well.

It’s rather sad, in a way, to see Craig grasping at straws in his attempts to justify God’s manifest negligence with regards to suffering.

The atheist might insist that an all-powerful being…could bring about the greater good directly, without allowing any suffering. But clearly, given freedom of the will, that may not be possible. Some goods, for example, moral virtues, can be achieved only through the free cooperation of people. It may well be the case that a world with suffering is, on balance, better overall than a world with no suffering. In any case, it is at least possible, and that is sufficient to defeat the atheist’s claim that 4 is necessarily true.

Yeah, phew, eh? Notice the difference in standards of evidence here: the atheist has to prove his point beyond all possible doubt, but the Christian can establish his claims merely by suggesting the possibility that it might be better to have suffering. In other words, there might be some constraint that would prevent God from achieving the greater good without suffering, and therefore the atheist’s argument is refuted. Or so Craig would have us believe.

The question is, where would such a constraint come from? Craig was arguing before that God is the only self-existent, non-contingent being. If there is some constraint that requires suffering in order to achieve good, then it must either be inherent in God’s nature (in which case we should expect as much suffering in heaven as we find on earth), or else it exists by divine decree, in which case we have a new problem, because then the requirement itself is optional, and we have to assume that God just prefers to make suffering mandatory. Some “all-loving” God, eh?

Craig’s final conclusion seems to be this:

God could not have created another world with as much good as, but less suffering than, this world, and God has good reasons for permitting the suffering that exists.

As we’ve already see, though, this is rather a clumsy goof. By substituting the problem of suffering for the greater problem of evil, he’s sabotaged his own apologetic. This argument is based on a response to the problem of evil, as made allegedly necessary by free will. The problem of suffering, however, is trivially resolved by making people immune to pain and injury. To make this argument work, you have to make an additional assumption: either that suffering is a good and preferable thing in and of itself (masochism), or else that good, by itself, is somehow intrinsically flawed and incapable of producing greater good on its own. That would mean that God, being perfectly good, was also perfectly intrinsically flawed and incapable of producing greater good without directly or indirectly inflicting suffering on others. Either way, if suffering is indeed required to produce the minimum acceptable amount of good, then it is wrong to seek to relieve suffering.

Yeah, apologetics can be pretty heartless at times.