Why I Don’t Trust Christian Apologists
By Nicholas Covington
I wanted to write this article to raise awareness about something very serious: It has been my experience that the defenders of Christianity are often dishonest, inconsistent, and show a marked lack of critical thinking skills. This does not mean that every last Christian apologist is dishonest. But is should raise your awareness: Just because someone is defending Christianity does not mean that they will be honest with you, even though honesty is supposedly a Christian virtue. Nor does it mean that they will be intellectually gifted or knowledgeable about the subjects they write on. Far from it, as we will see.
Falsehoods
In his review of “The God Who Wasn’t There”, Mike Licona states:
“It is not that parallels could not expose Christianity as a myth. On the contrary, if a number of religions contemporary with Christianity (and especially if they preceded it) had clear reports of their leaders experiencing a phenomenal birth, being miracle workers and exorcists, providing similar teachings, dying by crucifixion, and rising from the dead, we may have to give serious consideration to these parallels. However, such parallels are imaginary. They exist only in the minds of Jesus mythers.”
First off, let me state that I do not believe “The God Who Wasn’t There” to be a scholarly work. In fact, I think that the movie makes several claims which are probably false (For example, the claim that other religions had a communion meal of bread an wine that represented the god’s flesh and blood).
However, the fact that Brian Flemming wasn’t very professional in researching his movie does not excuse Mike Licona’s sloppiness in researching pagan parallels. In my private research I’ve found numerous parallels between Jesus and contemporary or previous “sons of God” (article forthcoming, will be linked when it is done).
Misrepresentation
Here is what Bob Turkel (aka “J.P. Holding”) wrote about one of Michael Martin’s contributions to “The Empty Tomb: Jesus Beyond the Grave”:
“Rather peculiar is Martin's point that ‘God could have become incarnated and have died for sinners on an indefinite number of other occassions’ and thus there is ‘no a priori reason to suppose that he would have become incarnated and have died as Jesus in first-century Palestine. Indeed, given the innumerable alternatives at God's disposal it would seem a priori unlikely that the incarnation and the resurrection would have taken place where and when they allegedly did.’ [49]
“Martin never explains why any of this is so. What particularly is ‘wrong’ with the first century, or with Palestine, that makes these ‘unlikely’ as a time or a locale? Has Martin performed some sort of ‘Turtledove Analysis’ showing that God would more likely have chosen 16th century Bolivia for the incarnation and resurrection? Or 13th century BC Tierra del Fuego? Or 19th century India?”
To anyone who has read “The Empty Tomb” attentively, it is obvious that Turkel completely missed the point of Martin’s essay: We do not know that God was more likely to choose 16th century Bolivia as the time and place for the incarnation of his Son. That’s precisely the point: There are innumerable times and places in which God could have sent his Son, and in many cases we have no more reason to think that one is more likely than another. This is why claiming one specific time and place (1st century Palestine) for the incarnation of God is initially unlikely.
As those familiar with Bayes’ theorem will know, the initial improbability of some event does not mean that it did not occur. It only means that the lower the initial probability of some event is, the greater the evidence we will need to say that it occurred (or probably occurred). (Note: The initial probability of some event happening means the probability of that event occurring if we knew nothing about the evidence for or against it happening. For example, if you were asked whether a married couple [whom you did not know] had ever had a fight, the initial probability that they had at least one fight during their marriage would be very high since nearly all couples have fights. Your judgment on this matter is completely independent of any specific evidence for or against this couple fighting. Of course, if you investigated the couple you might be able to find strong evidence that they had never fought during their marriage, and you could be justified in believing they were peaceful in spite of the initial improbability that they had been.)
Inconsistency
Mike Licona said that those who view Josephus’ references to James the Just as a later addition to the text are “fringe”, as if this were a proper refutation. First of all, this is false: The Catholic Biblical Quarterly published an article advocating this position “Eusebius and the Testimonium Flavanium”. So the forgery position for this reference to Jesus is a minority view, but not so much that it deserves the title “fringe”, which one might associate with a conspiracy theorist (it was, after all, published in a main stream peer-reviewed journal).
Secondly, it is inconsistent for Mike to constantly toss out the “majority opinion” and expect everyone to accept, as he did above, and then to hold to a different standard when it comes to evolutionary theory. Mike probably knows that evolutionary theory is by far the majority position, yet he somehow doesn’t think that this makes it reasonable for outsiders to accept. I guess an appeal to the majority is only acceptable when it’s favorable to his viewpoint.
Here is what Bob Turkel wrote in response to the Christ mythicists, concerning whether professional historians were biased in their assessment of the evidence for a historical Jesus:
“Of course, it is possible that all of the professional historians (even those with no religious interest!) are biased or wrong, while proponents of the ‘Jesus-myth’ are the objective ones. And yes, a consensus does not equate with evidence. But a consensus on any historical question is usually based on evidence which is analyzed by those who are recognized as authoritative in their field, and therefore may be taken at their word.”
I agree with Turkel on this point, to a certain extent. It would be irresponsible and irrational to reject the conclusion of an entire scholarly field out of hand. However, as an outsider to any field, one should be very humble and very careful to read and understand the arguments of experts, and to ask them plenty of questions to further your own understanding, before you outright reject their conclusions.
Yet Turkel has been very inconsistent: In an essay called “Why I Don’t Buy (or Sell) the Evolution Story” (which has now been taken off of his site, but is reproduced in part here) he said that he did not accept the consensus position of Biological Science that Evolution occurred, even though he admits to knowing very little about the subject. He went even further and implied that the public advocates of Evolution (such as Richard Dawkins) “could not reason their way out of a paper bag”. Can he not see how incredibly arrogant and foolish such a statement is? How would he respond if I said that I did not accept the historicity of Jesus because I thought the advocates of it had something wrong with their brains? Such an argument is twice fallacious because it is attacking the person (and not the idea), as well as inconsistent with Turkel’s own standards which he previously laid out.
