Discussion Grounds

Tom,

You wrote that

[My first reason for] believing in the Christian revelation is not one I would present as any kind of proof, but rather as a step towards a first-phase outcome I hope to reach, which is to show that Christianity makes sense.

I would love to have somebody explain to me how Christianity makes sense. Even before we discuss whether Christianity also happens to be true, I would first like to hear a presentation of Christianity that even makes sense.

I reject theism pretty firmly for many strong reasons, but my objections to Christianity are so numerous that it is truly less plausible to me than belief in werewolves. I don’t mean that as an insult. If anything, it is an insult to werewolf-belief. Christianity is that problematic.

I could write thousands of pages on the extreme absurdities of even “mere” Christian doctrine – and many other people have done precisely that, so I don’t have to. In fact, we can turn to Christian theologians themselves to elucidate the absurdities of traditional Christian doctrine: thinkers like Schleiermacher, Harnack, Bultmann, Tillich, Robinson, and others.

Christian theology is such an ocean of contradictions and ad-hoc implausibilities that I barely know where to begin.

I don’t mean to be abrasive. But I hope you and other Christians can come to understand what Christian theology sounds like to an indifferent audience. It sounds like the rantings of a strung-out madman.

As far as I can tell, you believe that God created the universe 13.7 billion years ago, then kicked off a series of self-replicating cells called “life,” then tinkered endlessly with this this process as 99.9% of all species that have ever existed were completely wiped out. Life progressed for billions of years with no purpose – nothing but terror, desperation, and misery. Eventually, God tweaked the primate design into something as impressive and yet badly designed as the modern human. He then injected a supernatural ‘soul’ into these humans. And this is the origin of ‘man.’

As far as I can tell, you believe that God created man in full awareness that his imperfect nature would lead him to sin, and then condemned him to death (and later, eternal torment) for sinning, but then decided to provide a way for man to ‘redeem’ himself for his inevitable failure that God designed into him. And the best way God could think to do this was to send himself in human form to perform some magical healings, exorcisms, and party tricks for a few years among illiterate Jews in a 1st century desert. God then sacrificed himself to himself to appease himself for the sins he designed man to commit. God also decided that the way mankind could redeem himself would be to perform the cognitive work of believing that this all happened.

I could go on and on and on. Christian theology only gets weirder. Don’t get me started on the Trinity!

My point is that Christianity is absurd in the extreme. It is so implausible and so ad-hoc that it cannot offer itself as the “best explanation” for anything. Even if scientific explanations were unavailable to us, I would still say, “Uh, no thanks, I think I’ll keep looking for another explanation.” In fact, I could invent a hundred supernatural explanations for our universe that make much better sense than Christian theology.

And I’m still not clear on what your argument is. You wrote that “Christianity makes good sense of the human condition.” Are you saying that Christianity provides the best explanation – or even a coherent explanation – of the fact that we can know good and evil and perform both in great degrees? By what measure is Christianity a good explanation for the human condition? Do you think it has great explanatory scope, explanatory power, coherence with background knowledge, ontological simplicity, testability, and so on? Or do you mean something else?

Tom, you have said many flowery things and quoted the lovely Pensées at length, but your argument was presented so vaguely that it raises suspicions of obscurantism. If you present your argument so unclearly it cannot be refuted or supported, and if you can present it more clearly I suspect it will be easily refuted.

I would very much like to understand your argument so we can see if it has any merit. As I requested last time, “please give [your argument] in clear, logical form so that I know for sure what I’m responding to.”

Cheers,

Luke