Atheists will immediately recognize many of these rhetorical “themes”, as Avalos calls them. The six are as follows: the accusation of fundamentalism (secularists/atheists are “no different from religious fundamentalists insofar as they believe that they are correct, and all other positions are wrong”), omnifideism (” all worldviews and approaches are ultimately based on faith, and so deserve equal validity as scholarly methods”), the accusation of exclusivism (that excluding faith as a legitimate method of scholarship is “close-minded”), the angry atheist (ignore us, we’re just angry people), psychoanalysis (the real explanation for atheism can be found in the “biography” of each atheist), proprietary rights (the Bible is a religious book therefore “only people of faith can rightly understand [it], and atheists have no business studying it”). [Quotes are taken from "Six Anti-Secularist Themes: Deconstructing Religionist Rhetorical Weaponry" by Dr. Hector Avalos.]

Secular biblical scholars aren’t alone in being subjected to these rhetorical “weapons.” Most of them have been repeatedly employed against evolutionary scientists (starting with Darwin, of course), skeptics studying occult and “supernatural” claims, and of course atheists.

Read it for yourself. I strongly recommend it.

So Silent He is Not There

After reading Francis Schaefer’s He is There and He is Not Silent, I realized for the first time how silent God actually was. Sure, it was claimed that God had been loud thousands of years ago, that even today God spoke privately to the hearts and minds of individuals, but — and this is the kicker — publicly God is silent. Imagine, I realized, if Congress passed laws but never published them, instead only letting certain “blessed” individuals know, in private, what laws they had passed. In such a case, how could anyone be certain what the laws were, or whose claims to know the laws were legitimate? Yet that is the situation with God’s laws.

That is the great flaw of revealed religion. It is always a matter of a few individuals claiming to be “blessed” with knowledge of God’s laws and intentions. The rest of us always receive the revelations of revealed religions from other humans, not from God direct. In fact, anyone can claim that God spoke to them and therefore that they speak for God, but there is no way to confirm or deny those claims. Unless God speaks directly and universally to all of us, speaks publicly, we have no reliable way of knowing his intentions — other than by studying the nature of the world itself.

Revealed religion is credible only when the revealing comes direct from God in a publicly confirmable way, not when it comes from humans claiming divine sanction. Moreover, if our revelations came direct from God there would be little debate about their content — whereas in fact what we see in the world is hundreds of religions with thousands of discrepancies, an indication of human not divine origins.

If God is not speaking directly and publicly, then natural religion is all we can have. In fact, revealed religion is worse than useless: if there is a God then human revelation is in fact dangerous to those who believe in it. Since it doesn’t come from God it is likely to be false — and for all we know displeasing to God.

The Problem with Prayer

Another thing I didn’t notice until well after becoming an atheist is the horrendous problem with prayer. To put it bluntly, prayer cannot be reconciled with God’s existence. Prayer exists to inform God of a problem or need and, if the prayer is successful, to talk him into doing something he was otherwise not going to do. It is difficult to view prayer in a way that is not insulting to God, for prayer is necessarily meant to be intercessionary. If prayer is not intended either to inform God or change God’s mind, then it has no purpose which is not achievable simply by hoping. But if prayer is nothing but hoping, then we should call it hoping, not prayer. And its content would consist of telling about our hopes. It would contain no requests addressed to God.

Santa Claus for Grownups

Another thing I didn’t recognize until years after becoming an atheist is the similarity between God and Santa Claus. Like the Easter bunny, Santa Claus serves the purpose of fostering in children a desire for supernatural agency, a magical being who can drop from the sky to provide for your needs & wants. Like the desire to secretly discover you are a prince or princess, or the wish for a fairy godmother to someday make you important, Santa Claus prepares the way for God.

I used to wonder why adults fed such illusions to children only to pop them later as they became older. Wasn’t that a bad strategy? Didn’t it risk making children skeptical of adult claims about God. But in fact, it doesn’t make them skeptical, rather is softens them up for more complete and satisfying fantasies, such as spending eternity in paradise. In fact, popping the childish myths helps establish adults as reliable authorities on supernatural beings. Adults “prove” that they know which supernatural entities are real (God) and which are only childhood fantasies (Easter Bunny). God, Santa Claus for adults, is the one supernatural entity children see their parents take seriously. After all, we don’t go to church, synagogue or mosque week in and week out for the others.

Mere Christianity

It was only after I stopped drinking the Christian cool-aid that I discovered how tremendous the gap between the case for God and the case for Christianity actually was. It was clear to me that the case for God’s existence was flawed, but at least it was rational and understandable. Theists were wrong, but they were reasonable.

But concede — just for the sake of their argument — that God exists, and that reasonableness comes to an end. Christians, I discovered, can provide no good reason to jump from God’s existence to Christianity. Almost inevitably, they start quoting from the New Testament, as if an appeal to ancient authority is all that is required to prove that Christianity — of all the religions in the world — is the correct one. Unfortunately for them, they have little else. Natural theology (reasoning from God’s nature, and the nature of the world) simply can’t get you from God’s existence to the truth of Christianity or any other revealed religion.

CS Lewis tried to fudge the gap by arguing that Christianity was so off the wall, such an unlikely story, that it had to be true. Christianity was a manly religion too, said Lewis, because it asks for a blind leap of faith. Competitors? they weren’t off the wall enough to be believable, or weren’t manly enough, or in the case of pantheism could be ridiculed as “pan-everythingism”. Lewis, the most famous of Christian apologists, was incapable of coming up with anything but emotional arguments for the truth of Christianity.

The Faithlessness of Faith

And really, that’s about the best any Christian has done in bridging the gap between the reasonableness of belief in God and the unreasonableness of Christianity. Nor have any other revealed religions done better. Reason can get you to God (though atheists will disagree), but beyond that faith is all there is. That would be “manly” faith, of course, faith confident and brash and unquestioning, something like the way the brash unquestioning Nazis were manly, I suppose.

The problem with faith, of course, is that it proves too much. Faith “proves” Hinduism and Islam and Mithracism as convincingly as it proves Christianity. As a method for determining truth, faith is useless.

Some theologians have tried to obtain at least the Christian attributes of God from natural theology, though even that is a bit tortured. The problem is, you can’t get the Bible from natural theology, or from studying the world, or from thinking about God’s nature. Nor the Koran, of course. And therefore you can’t get the doctrines of revealed religion except by blind faith. But why blindness should favor Christianity or Islam over Mithracism no one can explain. All faith is darkness, and therefore for the person who actually believes in God, useless. Even harmful.

If atheism is true, faith can be benign. But if there is actually a God then faith — because of its blindness — is an incredibly risky business to engage in. For faith pretends — without any reasonable evidence — to know all kinds of specific things about God. What if God doesn’t agree with your blind assertions? Worse, what if she/he/it feels insulted by them?

That’s the rub. If there’s one thing the revealed religions are good at, it’s insulting God. The faithful insist on painting the Supreme Being a buffoon as ignorant of science as they are, easily manipulated by prayer. In their warped vision God becomes an evil ruler plotting to burn billions of sentient beings in everlasting hell.

Having thoroughly insulted the being they bow before, believers had better hope atheists are right. Had better hope God is a mere phantom in the emptiness of silence space.

——

Note: this post has been slightly edited since first posted

“Millions of Christians read the Easter story through the lens of faith,”* the author tells us. This is supposed to be a good thing. Problem is, Blake continues, popular culture is interfering with that faith by presenting alternate mythologies about Jesus: The Da Vinci Code, The Jesus Papers, Misquoting Jesus: the Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, and to top it off now scholars have discovered the long-lost Gospel of Judas according to the May issue of National Geographic.

It’s enough to prompt Bob Hodgson with the American Bible Society (he’s actually dean of the Nida Institute for Biblical Scholarship with ABS) to complain, “we’re losing control of our sacred stories.”*

But Bob, it’s your own fault for insisting that your sacred stories are historically true — for that means that they are not “your” stories but everyone’s. Stick with Christianity’s sacred stories as just that: mythologies belonging to Christianity alone, and Christians have some emotional right to claim proprietorship. But once you insist on historical truth for your myths that right dissipates. History belongs to us all, even if only to be mythologized anew, as a book like The Da Vinci Code attempts to do.

So Hodgson and other Christians need to make a choice: is Jesus a sacred story belonging to the Christian religion, or is Jesus historical and therefore a story which belongs to everyone?

And if you choose the latter, remember: history is no respecter of mythology.

—-
* John Blake, “Defending the Faith”, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, April 15, 2006, Faith & Values section, page 1

Suppose, however, that God did give this law to the Jews, and did tell them that whenever a man preached a heresy, or proposed to worship any other God that they should kill him; and suppose that afterward this same God took upon himself flesh, and came to this very chosen people and taught a different religion, and that thereupon the Jews crucified him; I ask you, did he not reap exactly what he had sown? What right would this god have to complain of a crucifixion suffered in accordance with his own command?”– Robert G. Ingersoll, “Some Mistakes of Moses”

I longed to have something to retaliate with. So I made plans to create my own pamphlets to give in kind. I made lots of notes, and had titles planned out like: Is God Real? , Christian Vanity , Bad News for Modern Man , Is God Any Good? , The Faithlessness of Faith , and Make-Believe God.

But my favorite had the title, The Devil’s Christianity. I imagined it with a red and black devil lurking on the cover, much like many of their booklets. Only this one would put Christianity on the run—and do so using nothing but God and Genesis.

And I more or less completed it, though I never managed to turn it into a pamphlet. This was partly because I found myself exposed to pamphlet-bearing Christian far less frequently after moving to Atlanta.

But here is the text. And yes, it does put Christians on the run!

The Devil’s Christianity

A large sum of money was delivered in our city the other day—something like half a million dollars. The authorities took every precaution to protect it while delivery was made. Yet somewhere in route to the bank, the shipment was stolen.

How?

It turned out that the thief had disguised himself as one of the guards—in fact the very man placed in the rear of the armored truck to protect the treasure had stolen it.

The devil is craftier than any crook. We need only recall the story of Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis. The devil did not beguile the first couple with promises of riches or fame. What he offered was simply the opportunity to have the kind of wisdom God has, knowing both good and evil. You see, Adam and Eve were not content to be as God made them: they wanted to be more like God, to have the knowledge of gods. With this vanity the devil beguiled them.

Now, you are probably thinking to yourself, “Had I been in Eden and the devil appeared before me, I would not have been fooled. I’d have observed the red horns protruding out of the head, the sharp ears, the pitchfork, the sneer on the face, and I would have been on guard immediately.”

But you forget, the devil is crafty. Had he chosen to appear before the original humans with horns, pitchfork, sneer and all, he would have fooled no one. Instead he came as one of God’s humble creatures, a snake. Remember that this was before serpent and devil were identified in anyone’s mind; that association came later. To Adam and Eve, the serpent was just another one of God’s myriad creations.

There is also an early Church tradition that the devil appeared before our first parents in the image of an angel. If so, he could have had no better disguise.

The thief dresses in policeman’s clothing; the devil in an angel’s garb. After all, the devil is the world’s first thief—and its last. What he steals from us is our honesty, our integrity of thought. He likes to push us into false presumptions about ourselves and the world, and about what God means us to be. Any trick that will succeed is fair game to the devil. He will as soon appear in the guise of an angel preaching God’s word as in the guise of a big paycheck, and he comes often as both.

We saw earlier that the devil tricked Adam and Eve by preying on their desire to be like gods. When they ate from the forbidden tree of knowledge, our first parents lusted after the wisdom of the ages. Later, had not the Lord guarded it with a flaming sword, they would have lusted after the tree of eternal life as well. These two lusts constitute our human weakness, and it is essential that we not forget it.

Why? Because they are the same temptations which, as Christians, we grasp after today. We must not mistake ourselves. The devil is nothing less than the common voice inside us which insists that we are like gods, that we shall ascend to heaven, that we shall never die.

The devil whispers his beguiling music into our ears, that there is a way for us to escape this earth God placed us on, a way to move to heaven and live like eternal beings, like gods. It is precisely as Christians and through Christianity that the devil beguiles us. We are going to rise to heaven and dwell there eternally at God’s right hand, he whispers. We are going to be—take that back, already are—of the same eternal stuff that God is.

And don’t we want it—to be like God and live forever? Isn’t that so much more pleasant than the truth of our mortality?

Truth is hard to face. Yet face it we must. For having fallen for the belief that our final nature is eternal soul rather than mortal body, we have tumbled head over heals into that age-old error of Adam and Eve’s. Like them we have fallen for the devil’s whispering lies: the enticing presumption that we “can be as gods.”

We would do well at this point to observe that the doctrine of the immortality of the soul is not found in the Old Testament. Yet it was a doctrine wide-spread throughout the ancient world. We find it among the Greeks and the Romans, but we do not find it among the chosen people, the ancient Jews. If the Old Testament is indeed the word of God, then the notion that we are immortal must come from the devil. And the New Testament, which is wrapped around that blasphemy of immortality like a snake, is the devil’s wicked deceit.

Because, in fact, in wanting to “be as gods” what we are really wishing for is to not be what God intended for us. God, after all, formed us of clay, and dictated that we should die.

But we rebel. We want something better than this confinement to earthly life, this entrapment in bodies. Well, if there’s a lie to be sold, it will never want for someone to sell it. Along comes the devil, whispering that we can have something better, if only we listen to him.

“Devour this apple from the tree of eternal life, and be as gods. Have faith in me, for I am the path to eternal salvation.”

Thus the devil dressed as an angel beguiles us.

We stand in the shoes of Eve and Adam. The sweet-talking angel has just handed us his polished apple, and calls it the key to heaven.

So he claims. But what are we to believe?

Truly we desire to be supernatural. We are so sick of earth, which we’ve polluted, and of our limited bodies, all this hurt and disease and injustice (most of which we have inflicted on each other). Naturally we envy God’s existence, and not just His lifestyle, His home. Who doesn’t yearn for a heaven?

Isn’t it the easiest thing in the world to ignore the obvious facts of our existence, and hope for better? Let the devil sell us our dreams.

The devil says it is only what God wants for us, and who are we to deny what it pleases us to hear?

Yet the fact is, and Genesis confirms it, God formed us from clay. He created us as animals, not as angels. Intelligent animals, without question, but animals nonetheless. We are inescapably tied to our bodies, of this we cannot doubt; more than this we cannot know.

If God has plans for us beyond this life, we simply cannot know. What Christianity arrogantly calls the Word of God may as easily be the word of the devil, and in a world where we truly cannot know, even to speculate is to push our opinions on God.

We simply cannot know.

What we can know, however, is very clear, We are bodies, and it seems obvious that since we are, it is bodies that we were intended to be. We have feelings, we have thoughts, we have pain, we have joy, we live, we die, all by the dictates of this physical planet. These limits, this mortality, is God-given.

It follows that the debate between atheism and theism is to a significant extent a debate about which viewpoint—God or evolution—provides a better explanation for the design we see around us.

One prominent observation about organisms is that they often come in sexes. Pretty much all complex animals have male and female sexual organs and engage in a variety of sexual behaviors. I will now proceed to look at which explanation—God or evolution—better addresses this aspect of animal design.

Does God Like Sex?

One thing about design is that it is a two-edged sword. Although design may be asserted as evidence of a Designer, it also follows that the design chosen reveals a lot about the Designer who chose it. So it is with sex and God.

Why did God create sex?

And in particular, since it is what most interests our species, why did God create human sex?

For the vast majority of animals, including mammals, sexual intercourse is closely tied to reproduction. Most mammals have sex only when the female is in estrus, that is, when the female is capable of getting pregnant. Not so with humans. Whereas the females of most species send out chemical signals that they are ready for sex only during estrus, women send out signals throughout their cycle: they are biologically ready for sex anytime, and so are men.

Why would God do this? Or more pertinently, what kind of a God would do this?

Quite obviously, a God who likes sex, and likes it a lot.

A sex God.

Because it is not just that humans are ready for sex anytime. Much more stands out about human sexuality: consider our preening and dating behaviors, our generous erogenous zones; our large, exquisite organs of sexual arousal & pleasure, the great variety of our sexual positions and practices, and (to top everything off) orgasm. All exist to tug humans into sexual wonderland even at those times when it is impossible for pregnancy to occur.

Why was God so into sex? And why—Catholic Church be damned—did God decouple human sex from reproduction?

Why is procreation part-time, and sex full-time?

The Evolution of Sex

But before we pursue this line of thought, let’s take a look at the evolutionary explanation for sex. This way we’ll have something to compare when evaluating the theistic outlook.

Prior to the evolution of sex, scientists tell us, reproduction occurred asexually, through mitosis (cloning) of the parent genome. Cloning allows rapid reproduction. But when organisms and their environments become particularly complex, cloning’s disadvantages come to the front. For one thing, mitosis tends to insure a relatively stable genome and therefore does not allow quick adaptation to changes in the environment.

Furthermore, copying errors can accumulate over time when the genome is cloned. A few of those errors or mutations will turn out to be beneficial, but most will not. And that is where another disadvantage arises: copying errors (good or bad) accumulate, but cloning provides no effective way to decouple beneficial errors from harmful ones.

Sexual reproduction does.

The evolution of sexual reproduction allowed complex organisms to adapt rapidly to a changing environment, a trait especially important in fending off bacterial and viral invaders. Sex accomplishes this, in part, because it creates greater genetic diversity within a species by seeding novel combinations of genes in each individual. (Such individual variability within species was one of Darwin’s key observations in developing the theory of natural selection.) Sexual reproduction, therefore, enhances the ability of more complex species to adapt and thrive over time. Indeed, moving from mitosis to sexuality was probably essential to their evolution.

Now let’s take a quick look at the evolutionary explanation for why sex is “always on” in human beings.

Human Sexuality

Bear in mind that, like evolution itself, evolutionary explanations are always evolving. That said, the current scientific picture of human sexuality focuses on the huge investment of time and energy which the human species must put into a relatively small number of offspring. A human baby requires a decade or more before reaching an age where it can survive on its own.

In other species which have small numbers of offspring which take years to reach maturity, pair-bonding has been observed to be a common solution. So it is not surprising at all that we find pair-bonding in humans. Indeed, it is evident to scientists that human sexuality is largely about forming relatively enduring pair-bonds so that children can be raised safely to adulthood.

It is also clear that in humans the pleasure and drawing power of sexual intercourse is used to make those pair-bonds enduring. Or to put it another way, orgasm is the glue that binds a couple together and creates a family.

But this is probably not the whole story, as we learn from observing our nearest genetic relatives, the bonobos. Bonobos, like humans, seem to revel in sex. And like humans, they engage in both straight and gay sex.

Bonobo sex, like human sex, is about forming pair-bonds, but bonobos also use sex to reduce conflict and tension. For example, when unacquainted bonobo groups bump into each other at a feeding ground, matters can become extremely tense. This tension is broken when a female or two from each group gregariously advance and begin having sex with each other. Afterwards they engage in sex with males from the other group, and—to be brief about it—a sexual orgy ensues.

As might be expected, this breaks the tension. The two groups of bonobos become friendly and the result is that they are able to coexist without warring over who owns the feeding ground. Bonobos, it seems, take to heart the injunction “make love not war”.

Although not to the same extent as bonobos, it appears likely that humans also use sex to develop group cohesion. Certainly, sex as a diplomatic tool is something which has been observed throughout human history. This brief survey shows us that from a scientific perspective, sexuality is something coherent and understandable.

God & Orgasm

So much for the evolutionary explanation. How well does God serve as an explanation for sex?

Many theists will say that the explanation is right there in the Bible, in Genesis. Men and women desire to have sex all the time, and find it so enjoyable, because sexual pleasure is one of the punishments God handed down for eating the apple. God condemned Eve to feel an “urge” for Adam.

Before the fall, presumably, the first humans were capable of having sex in order to procreate—after all, they had sexual organs. But it would have been intercourse without arousal or passion, and it would have occurred only when pregnancy was possible.

So we are told by Saint Augustine, who argued in The City of God that before the fall Adam could have mentally willed himself to have an erection without experiencing any feelings of desire or arousal. Furthermore, Augustine claimed that Adam would have ejaculated and impregnated Eve without the slightest drop of passion or pleasure in the process—no different than squirting ketchup on a hotdog. (That last is my analogy, not Augustine’s, who was not familiar with hotdogs or ketchup, I believe.)

To summarize: before the fall we were pure. Neither Adam nor Eve was capable of experiencing an orgasm. The vast network of blood vessels and nerve endings surrounding the genitals, although anatomically present, served no purpose. Penis and clitoris, although anatomically present, could provide no pleasure.

The orgasm, like desire itself, was God’s punishment for disobedience.

And until the very moment of that punishment, the clitoris lacked a purpose. It was a bit of Godly design with no reason for existing, no rationale.

What divine foresight, to realize He would need the clitoris in order to punish Eve!

Given such punishment, it’s little wonder humans are sinners. Indeed, if this is God’s approach to punishing people it establishes him as the most lenient and liberal of judges.

“I’m going to punish you by making your life pleasurable,” God apparently told Eve and Adam. “I’ll condemn you to ecstasy and orgasm. Yes, I will throw in the death penalty, but not until after you’ve had a long and fruitful life. And just in case you misbehave in the future, I’ll provide further punishment after you are dead, so be warned!”

It is remarkable that religious conservatives who complain about liberal judges and delayed punishment never complain about God’s almost unfathomably greater liberality.

In short, this particular Biblical explanation for human sexual pleasure doesn’t make much sense. Pleasure as a punishment for disobeying God is something that only someone with an odd outlook—someone like Saint Augustine—could find convincing.

The Biblical Origin of the Penis

Setting aside the theory of orgasm as punishment, let us ask if sex is the sort of thing we might expect the eternal God of the universe to invent.

The pre-requisite for sex, it goes without saying, is that there must be sexes. Yet God’s existence, obviously, is a sexless one. God has no penis or vagina, we can be pretty sure; no need for a companion, and certainly no need for any biological system of reproduction. For God, it makes no sense to talk about sex or gender. God is not He or She, but It.

Traditionally, theists refer to God as He. This has served, undoubtedly, as a support for patriarchy. But it serves also to disguise the gulf between God and sex. In order to strip off that disguise, I will from this point refer to God by the more accurate pronoun: It.

Supposedly, God is complete in Itself, and misses out on nothing of importance by being sexless. And yet when peopling earth with Its creatures, God put sex into the design. Why?

The Bible gives no clue. True, Genesis does tell us that after creating Adam, God realized that the first human needed a companion or mate. But neither Adam nor God appear to have recognized, at first, that the companion needed to have a vagina to match Adam’s penis. Thus God paraded all the animals of the creation before Adam, who named them, but found none suitable for a mate. Only then did God get the idea to create Eve, and bring a vagina and clitoris and orgasm—in short, human sex—into the picture.

Still, we must ask, why did Adam have a penis in the first place? Was Adam created in God’s image—is that why? But if God does have a penis, what for? Lacking a divine partner, does God masturbate?

We have to give up on the Bible for a coherent explanation of sex.

Yearning for Love

Yet we are forced to go further and admit that, Bible aside, God simply had no good reason to create beings split into sexes. The best that theists can do is to speculate that God wanted to provide Its creatures with love, and love takes more than one. But still, why the duality of sex? Why not 3 sexes, or 4, or a trillion? And why was sex necessary for love, anyway?

The implication is that God was not satisfied with Its own divine lot. That is really the only explanation that can be given. God was eternally lonely, bored, sick with yearning for something pleasurable and bodily, something carnal.

And there you have it: sexual organs and desire and arousal and orgasms, everything God yearned for.

But then, why didn’t God create sexuality for God? Why didn’t God transform from an It into Him and Her? Why didn’t God split into God & Goddess, and go to town? The Greeks said so, but modern theists deny it.

Instead, God bestowed sex on humans, and prefers to watch. A Divine Voyeur.

Conclusion

If you are scientifically minded, this quick look at sexuality has probably made you smile. You know that in the context of evolution sex makes perfect sense. You are aware that for any given species, its sex practices tend to fit well with its survival needs and reproductive strategy. You know that sexual reproduction replaced cloning in more complex animals as a means of staving off the cumulative damage to the genome which results from copying errors. You know that sexuality enhances a species’ evolutionary fitness by providing a means of decoupling good genetic mutations from bad. You know that in humans sex is always on even when pregnancy is not possible, and that sexual pleasure serves to draw humans into pair-bonds for the benefit of raising offspring who require a considerable number of years to become self-sufficient.

In short, you know that evolution makes sense of sex.

You also know that God doesn’t.

And that is where we end up. Theism cannot explain in any adequate way why sex is part of the human design. On the other hand, evolution provides a very cogent explanation.