Reality Check - What Must Be the Case if Christianity is True?

7/24/2011
Below I've put together all thirty theses (so far) that most Christians agree on and why they are
all improbable:

1) There must be a God who is a simple being yet made up of three inexplicable persons existing
forever outside of time without a beginning, who therefore never learned anything new, never
took a risk, never made a decision, never disagreed within the Godhead, and never had a prior
moment to freely choose his own nature.

2) There must be a personal non-embodied omnipresent God who created the physical universe
ex-nihilo in the first moment of time who will subsequently forever experience a sequence of
events in time.

3) There must exist a perfectly good, omnipotent God, who created a perfectly good universe out
of a desire/need to glorify himself by rewarding in heaven the few human beings who just got
lucky to believe by being born at the right time and place, and who will condemn to hell those
who do not believe.

4) That the highest created being, known as Satan or the Devil, led an angelic rebellion against
an omnipotent omniscient omnibenelovent omnipresent God, and expected to win--which makes
Satan out to be pure evil and dumber than a box of rocks.

5) That there was a first human pair (Adam & Eve) who so grievously sinned against God when
tested that all of the rest of us are being punished for it (including animals), even though no one
but the first human pair deserved to be punished. If it's argued that all of us deserve to be
punished because we all would have sinned, then the test was a sham. For only if some of us
would not have sinned can the test be considered a fair one. But if some of us would not have
sinned under the same initial conditions then there are people who are being punished for
something they never would have done.

6) That although there are many other similar mythological stories told in Ancient Near Eastern
Literature that pre-date what we read in the Bible, the stories in the Bible are about real events
and real people.
7) That although we see completely different perspectives and evolving theologies in the Bible,
including many things that are barbaric and superstitious to the core, it was authored by one
divine mind.

8) That when it comes to verifiable matters of historical fact (like the Exodus, the extent of the
reign of David, Luke's reported world-wide census, etc) the Biblical stories are disconfirmed by
evidence to the contrary as fairy tales, but when it comes to supernatural claims of miracles that
cannot be verified like a virgin birth and resurrection from the grave, the Bible reports true
historical facts.

9) That although a great number of miracles were claimed to have happened in the different
superstitious cultures of the ancient world, only the ones in the Bible actually happened as
claimed.

10) That an omniscient God could not foresee that his revealed will in the Bible would lead
believers to commit such atrocities against others that reasonable people would conclude there is
no divine mind behind the Bible. I call this The Problem of Miscommunication.

11) That God created human beings with rational minds that require evidence before they accept
something, and yet this same God does not provide enough evidence but asks them to have faith
instead.

12) That although people around the world are raised in different cultures to believe in their
particular god(s) there is only one God and he will judge all people based upon whether or not
they believe Jesus is Lord.

13) That Jesus fulfilled Old Testament prophecy even though there is not one passage in the Old
Testament that is specifically fulfilled in his life, death, and resurrection that can legitimately be
understood as a prophecy and singularly points to Jesus as the Messiah using today's historical-
grammatical hermeneutical method.

14) That although there were many false virgin birth claims about famous people (like Julius
Caesar, Alexander the Great, Plato) mythical heroes (like Mithra, Hercules) and savior gods (like
Krishna, Osiris, Dionysus) in the ancient world, Jesus was really born of a virgin.
15) That while there is no rational explanation for how a person can be 100% man and 100%
God, and although ancient pagan superstitious people believed this can take place (Acts 14:11-
12; 28:6), Jesus was incarnate God in the flesh.

16) That while the results of science are assured when it comes to chemistry, physics,
meteorology, mechanics, forensic science, medical science, rocket science, computer science,
and so forth, when it comes to evolutionary science that shows all present life forms have
common ancestors, or when science tells us that dead bodies do not arise from the grave because
total cell necrosis is irreversible, the results of science are wrong because the Bible says
otherwise.

17) That although there is no rational explanation for why Jesus had to die on the cross to atone
for our sins, his death atoned for our sins.

18) That although historical reconstructions of the past are are notoriously difficult because they
depend on the poor evidence of history, and even though historians must assess that evidence by
assuming a natural explanation for it, and even though historical evidence can never establish
how to view that evidence, the Christian faith can be established historically anyway. My
argument is that when it comes to miraculous claims, yesterday’s evidence no longer can hold
water for me, for in order to see it as evidence, I must already believe in the framework that
allows me to see it as evidence. In other words, in order to see yesterday’s evidence as evidence
for me, I must already believe the Christian framework that allows me to see yesterday’s
evidence as evidence for Christianity.

19) That although there is no cogent theodicy that can explain why there is such ubiquitous and
massive human and animal suffering if a perfectly good omnipotent God exists, God is perfectly
good and omnipotent anyway.

20) That while scientific tests on petitionary prayers have produced at best negligible results and
at worst completely falsified them, God answers these kinds of prayers anyway.

21) That even though Christianity shows evidence that it is nothing but a cultural by-product of
human invention there is a divine mind behind it anyway.

22) That Jesus is the Son of God even though the textual evidence in the New Testament
conclusively shows that the founder of the Jesus cult was a failed apocalyptic prophet who
prophesied that the eschaton would take place in his generation, which would involve a total
cosmic catastrophe after which God inaugurates a literal kingdom on earth with the "Son of
Man" reigning from Jerusalem over the nations.

23) That although there can be no moral justification for the sufferings of animals in this created
world, a perfectly good God created this world anyway. We don't even see God's care for the
lower animals in his supposed revealed word, which is described in Psalm 119 as his "perfect
will." Think otherwise? Then read what I wrote here:
https://sites.google.com/site/thechristiandelusion/Home/the-bible-and-animals
24) That although the only method we have for determining the truth in factual matters is
methodological naturalism, which assumes a natural explanation for any phenomena, and
although this method is the hallmark of the sciences, the phenomena of the Bible can be
exempted from this method as applied through Biblical Criticism, and believed anyway.

25) That although God's supposed revelation in the canonical Bible is indistinguishable from the
musings of an ancient, barbaric, superstitious people, the Bible is the word of God. As
SilverBullet recently said: “...the lord doesn't work in mysterious ways, but in ways that are
indistinguishable from his non-existence. It seems to me that there is nothing in the Christian
scriptures, no sentence, paragraph, or idea, that couldn't be anything more than the product of the
humans alive at the time that the apparently divinely inspired scriptures and ideas were
"revealed". Sure, its possible for a god to reveal himself in an inspired book, and throughout
history, in ways that are indistinguishable from the work of human minds and human minds
alone. But how probable does that seem to you?”

26) That although it's claimed God got the attention of Abraham, Moses, the Pharaoh, Gideon,
Mary, Joseph, and Saul (who became Paul) and that he knows how to get the attention of anyone
and everyone, there is no objective evidence he's trying to get the attention of the billions of
people who don't believe. In fact, Christians are much more concerned than God is that non-
believers are converted. Just compare the lengths to which Christians will go in order to convert
non-believers, with a God who has the means to convert everyone and yet does nothing to help
them do this. If you say God is helping to convert non-believers then tell us how to objectively
know God is actually doing this.

27) Christianity is a faith that must dismiss the tragedy of death. It does not matter who dies, or
how many, or what the circumstances are when people die. It could be the death of a mother
whose baby depends upon her for milk. It could be a pandemic like cholera that decimated parts
of the world in 1918, or the more than 23,000 children who die every single day from starvation.
These deaths could be by suffocation, drowning, a drive-by shooting, or being burned to death. It
doesn't matter. God is good. Death doesn't matter. People die all of the time. In order to justify
God's goodness Christianity minimizes the value of human life. It is a pro-death faith, plain and
simple.

28) That God's punishments are good, right, and just, even though it means sinners are thrust into
a surprisingly dangerous world, and in death will be blindsided by an eternal punishment in hell,
which is "Christianity's most damnable doctrine." In this world how do you think human beings
first learned that venomous creatures like certain kinds of spiders, snakes, ants or scorpions could
kill us? People/children had to die, lots of them. How do you think human beings first learned
that polluted water or lead poisoning could kill us? Again, people/children had to die, lots of
them. It was inevitable since God never told us what to avoid in order to stay alive. We had to
learn these kinds of things firsthand. The same thing can be said for hell. People do not know
their choices will send them to an eternal punishment in hell. For if we knew this, and if it was
possible not to sin at all, we wouldn't sin. Do you doubt this? Then consider that if you knew
with certainty that by crossing a line drawn in the sand you would get beaten to a pulp by a biker
gang, you would not do it!

29) When believers like Christians or Muslims contend their faiths are based on reason, one may
simply object that this can’t be so because their god in fact doesn’t allow it. Using reason to
arrive at any other belief than the correct one will earn you an eternity in hell. Thus, reason is an
evil to be avoided....Blind, unquestioning, and unexamined belief is what the theist’s retributive
god truly desires, not a belief grounded in reason. And yet they maintain Christianity is
reasonable.

30) The Christian thinks there is an objective absolute morality that stems from their perfectly
good God, which is both eternal and unchangeable. But the morality we find in the Bible is
something quite different than what they claim. Morality has evolved. What we find in the Bible
is not something we would expect from a perfectly good God, but Christians believe there is a
perfectly good God anyway. So Christians must choose, either 1) hold to a philosopher's god
divorced from the historical realities of the Bible, or 2) continue to worship a moral monster.