Why Faith Fails The Christian Delusion by John W. Loftus
Foreword
Chapter 8 of Lee Strobel's The Case for Faith is titled "I Still Have
Doubts, So I Can't Be a Christian." Within this chapter, Strobel comforts
believers who "fall prey to doubts." He assures us that doubt can actually
strengthen faith.
I'm not sure why, but as an epigraph, he includes a quote from me:
In their most inner thought,, even the most devout Christians know that
there is something illegitimate about belief. Underneath their profession of
faith is a sleeping giant of doubt.... In my experience, the best way to
conquer doubt is to yield to it.
-Dan Barker, pastor-turned-atheist
Strobel doesn't comment on this, positively or negatively. I'm guessing he
figures that what I said is so patently absurd that it needs no refutation. He
probably knows I was mimicking Oscar Wilde's famous quip that "the only way
to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it," so if doubt equals temptation, then it
must be horrible.
Strobel's fluffy inspirational advice to doubters is not only erroneous (the
previous chapter repeats the falsehood that Hitler was a "deliberate antitheist"),
but it also stereotypes nonbelievers. He confesses that his own doubts as an
atheist were motivated by the fear that "my hard-drinking, immoral, and self-
obsessed lifestyle would have to change if I ever became a follower of Jesus, and
I wasn't sure I wanted to let go of that." The roots of doubt, he insists, have
nothing to do with the shaky truth claims of Christianity-because if we had the
facts, "what we would have is knowledge, not faith." (And that is bad?) One of
his interviewees assures us that "all unbelief ultimately has some other
underlying reason." Many famous atheists, he claims, had a strained relationship
with their father, "thus creating difficulty in them believing in a heavenly Father." Each argument of the skeptic is "just a smokescreen ... merely a fog ... to
obscure his real hesitations about God." If we critics point out the psychological
components of faith, he says, "Yes, people have a psychological need to believe-
just as some people have psychological needs not to believe.... What's the reason
you don't want to believe? Is it because you don't want the responsibility faith
brings with it? Is it because of despair over your own incorrigibility? Or is it
because you don't want to give up parties?"
How did he know!
So if Strobel is right that faith trumps knowledge, why put that faith in
Christianity? Why not another religion? Strobel's expert, a minister who
counsels church leaders, reports that "when it comes right down to it, the only
object of faith that is solidly supported by the evidence of history and archeology
and literature and experience is Jesus."
Well, which way is it? If faith is paramount, why do we need any evidence at
all? Doesn't it follow that the less you know, the stronger your faith?
The most important question we can ask about any religion is this one: "Is it
true?" Is the evidence forJesus "solidly supported," as Strobel claims? When I
started asking myself that question after almost two decades of preaching the
Gospel, my beliefs began to unravel. The more I learned, the less respect I had
for faith. Today, given the choice (regardless of my "psychological reasons"), I
would rather know-or not know-than believe. The case for faith is a case for
ignorance.
It's been said that converts make the best Catholics. OrJews. Or fill-inthe-
blanks. You have to be quite motivated to focus intently enough on the details of
a new worldview to learn exactly what you are embracing. On average, converts
probably have more zeal than those who got their religion simply by being born
into it. Like learning a second language, it is exciting to feel you are becoming
fluent, and you want to use what you have acquired to justify the effort. The very
fact of changing (if not the actual facts of the religion) can give the mind an
exciting feeling of new ness, wonder and color of purpose that was probably
lacking, or fading, in what came before. Otherwise, why change?
Perhaps it is also the other way around. If we can infer anything from the life
stories of the contributors of this volume, maybe deconverts make the best
critics. Or atheists or agnostics. Or fill-in-the-blanks. All but one of these
skeptical authors have emerged from a religious background. Some of them, like
me, were fanatical preachers-even ordained clergyof the Christianity we now
discard.
But it's a question of averages. No one in the country is more dedicated to
atheism or capable of critiquing religion than my wife, Annie Laurie Gaylor, a
third-generation nonbeliever. David Eller's penetrating and devastating chapters-
written by a "natural born atheist"-show that what unites the authors of this
volume is not revenge for having been victimized by the deceptions of religion,
but a burning desire for actual facts. If we doubters do have a psychological
motivation, perhaps it is the mental hunger, the intense craving to truly fill in the
blanks of knowledge. As you read the following chapters, you will sense-almost
palpably-the searing human drive to understand.
I was only seventeen years old in the summer of 1966 when I was "called by
God" to Nogales, Mexico, to convert Catholics into Christians. I preached for a
week in downtown churches and took a team of young evangelists into the
streets to round up children who needed to be saved from their sins by the love
of Christ. We hiked up a muddy hillside to visit some of the humble homes, and
I still vividly remember my first taste of a chile relleno, served under a smoke-
blackened ramada with chickens running under our feet. (When I jokingly said,
"This is delicious! What's for dinner?" they pointed under the table.)
There is no way to know, but it is not impossible that one of those children
who came to hear us was named Hector. I learned years later that Hector Avalos
(a contributor to this book) was born in that very neighborhood. Hector, like me,
became a child preacher, a true believer who happened to fall too much in love
with the Bible. The language captivated him-not the Reina Valera or King James
versions, but the original languages. Hector went on to get a PhD in Hebrew
Bible and Near Eastern Studies at Harvard and is today one of the most highly
respected biblical scholars in the country, the "atheist Bible professor" whose
classes, I hear, are always frill. He is one of those eager and helpful experts
whose brain I often get to pick when preparing for debates.
Richard Carrier is another one of those deconverts who make the best critics.
Or rather, a de-deconvert. Raised nominally Christian, Richard became a devout
Taoist, immersing himself so thoroughly in the religion t
hat he arrived at the
place where he could see its limitations. Broadening his studies, he read the entire Bible, word for word. "When I finished the last page," he reports, "though
alone in my room, I declared aloud, `Yep, I'm an atheist."' Today Richard is
another one of those resources whose knowledge and advice on history and
philosophy are invaluable, especially when it comes to the early Roman Empire.
Robert Price was a bornagain, evangelical preacher with Campus Crusade and
InterVarsity, starting as a teenager. He immersed himself in apologetics, but after
years of convincing nonbelievers to "come to the Lord," he, too, discovered that
he had learned too much, and today is one of those go-to guys, a towering expert
on the (non)historicity of Jesus.
Ed Babinski is a Catholic-turned-fundamentalist-turned-agnostic, and Valerie
Tarico also comes from a fundamentalist background, which might explain her
fascination with psychology. Jason Long says he was "born agnostic" (weren't
we all?) and returned to agnosticism after years of Christian Sunday school and
Bible study failed to make sense. Paul Tobin was born and raised a Roman
Catholic, dabbled a little in Pentecostalism (Assemblies of God) as a teenager,
went back to the church and slowly "evolved" into an atheist.
And then there's John W. Loftus, editor of this volume, a former student of
William Lane Craig, the renowned apologist, and a true-believing minister and
Christian apologist who eventually "saw the light." Nobody understands better
than John what it is like to believe from the inside, and no one else is in a better
position to have formalized the "outsider test" for religious faith, a test that is
fast becoming an indispensable part of the critical arsenal. More evidence that
insiders make the best outsiders.
No one can pretend that the contributors to this volume have not given Jesus
and the Bible a fair shake or that they don't know intimately what they are
talking about.
Something is happening in the United States. All of the polls show that this
country is becoming gradually less religious. According to the definitive
American Religious Identification Survey (2009), currently the fastest growing
"religion" in America is nonreligion. Between 15 percent and 20 percent of adult
Americans report they are free from religion. Although only about 10 percent
can be classified as thoroughly secular atheists, agnostics, and nonbelievers
(about the same as this book's contributors were raised!), that is still much larger
than Jews, for example, a respected minority that has shrunk to 1.2 percent.
Among young people from college age to age thirty, it is 25 to 30 percent who
are free from faith, the least religious generation in recent memory. I think that is
exciting!
Whatever it was that happened in Europe-after centuries of deep religious
history and zealous divisiveness, where today most people are totally secular and
the beautiful churches stand empty-seems to be starting to happen on our own
continent. What occurred in Europe was not a result of atheist missionaries
diligently converting a malleable populace. It happened naturally. An evidence
of a similar cultural shift on our own continent is the phenomenal organic rise of
freethought clubs on college campuses. The Secular Student Alliance and the
Center for Inquiry have their hands full signing up new
freethought/atheist/humanist/skeptic groups, often composed of students who
thought they were all alone in their efforts, only to learn that they are part of a
larger movement with no followers (we are all leaders), a growing population of
critical, caring young people who don't care a hoot about any "next world." They
are in love with this world, and want to remove all obstacles to science, reason,
morality, and progress.
It is obvious-and many students confirm it-that the Internet has been a real
"blessing" for free inquiry. It is now impossible for religious leaders and
apologists to hide the embarrassing facts of biblical scholarship. The availability
of clear and documented critical information on the Secular Web (infidels.org),
for example, or the Freedom From Religion Foundation (ffrf.org), or the
individual Web pages of the contributors to this volume (look them up!), and
many other dozens of wonderful resources, virtually guarantees that those of us
who want to know-not believe-will not be starved into sectarian submission.
Another evidence of a profound change is the success of blockbuster atheist
and antireligious books by Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens,
Daniel Dennett, Victor Stenger, and others. This proves that there is a vast,
growing "market" out there for skeptical ideas. (If not, who is buying all these
books?) I have little doubt that this current volume will not simply be riding that
wave but will be helping to propel it.
Dan Barker
Copresident of the Freedom from Religion Foundation and author of
Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America's Leading Atheists the editor of this book I envisioned it as an extension of my -
previous one, Why I Became an Atheist. A Former Preacher Rejects Christianity
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2008), which I think of as important
background reading for the chapters in this one, although you don't need to read
it in order to understand and benefit from this present book. All the themes in
this book expand on issues raised there. I personally think this book delivers a
powerful blow to Christianity, especially when combined with its predecessor.
Someone has to tell the emperor he has no clothes on. These two books help to
do just that.
In part 1 David Eller, Valerie Tarico, Jason Long, and I elaborate and defend
my Outsider Test for Faith, which calls upon believers to examine their
culturally given faith from the perspective of an outsider, with the same level of
skepticism they use to examine the other religious faiths they reject. Eller does
so from an anthropologist's perspective, while Tarico and Long do so from the
perspective of psychology. Eller argues that there is no such thing as Christianity.
There are only local Christianities, since Christianity is a cultural phenomenon
that is both affected by its culture and in turn affects the culture in which it
thrives. Among other things Tarico argues that the sense of certainty that faith
gives believers is a psychological malaise. Long shows us from several different
studies that we human beings are often irrational and gullible people. Then I
revisit the argument by defending it from additional criticisms. I happen to think
such a test is devastating to believers who think Christianity, or any other
socalled revealed religion, is true.
In part 2 are chapters related to the Bible as God's word. Edward Babinski
goes into detail about the flat-earth, three-tiered cosmology we find in it. Paul
Tobin then surveys what biblical scholarship tells us about the rest of the Bible.
It is inconsistent with itself, not supported by archaeology, contains fairy tales,
failed prophecies, and many forgeries. Then I argue that since the Bible was used
by the church to justify some horrific deeds, God did a poor job of
communicating his will in it. This is what I call the Problem of Miscommunication. The Bible cannot be God's word in any meaningful sense at
all.
In part 3 are two chapters related to the problem of evil. Hector Avalos takes
aim at Paul Copan's attempt to justify Yahweh's actions in the Old Testament,
which utterly fail. Then I argue there is no good reason for the amount of animal
suffering in the world if there is a perfectly good God. These two chapters show
convincing reasons why the Judeo/Christian view of God is indefensible.
Part 4 contains chapters that question what Christians believe about Jesus.
Robert Price deals with Paul Eddy and Gregory Boyd's book The 7esus Legend
and finds their whole methodology wrong. Richard Carrier applies my Outsider
Test for Faith to the New Testament stories about a resurrected Jesus. Then I
argue that at best Jesus is to be understood as a failed apocalyptic prophet, since
the prophesied new age (or eschaton) never occurred in his generation as
predicted. Together, in one way or another, we show that what Christians believe
about Jesus is not the case, to say the least.
Finally, in part 5 are chapters arguing that modern society does not depend on
Christianity for morality or science. David Eller shows us how human morality
arose. We don't need a god to explain morality, so consequently there is no moral
lawgiver, and no argument from morality to the existence of God. If God wrote a
moral code within us, he did so in invisible ink. Hector Avalos decisively
answers the claim that atheism was the cause of the atrocities of Hitler. In fact,
centuries of Christian antiSemitism were more to blame for the Holocaust. Then
Richard Carrier closes the book by effectively arguing that Christianity is not to
be credited with the rise of science. He compiles a massive amount of material
showing that Greek science was blossoming way before Christianity arose on the
scene.
I want to sincerely thank each and every contributor to this volume in hopes
that our combined efforts will make a difference. I think every chapter is
significant and insightful, all written for the college-level reader, for the most
part. Richard Carrier did a yeomen's job with peer-reviewed comments on each
one of the chapters, which has made this a better book. A FAQ site to discuss
this book can be found at http://sites.google.com/ site/thechristiandelusion,
where we will attempt to answer critical reviews of it when they appear, so look
for it. Alas, we can already predict the effect this book will have. What typically
happens in every generation as Christians are forced to confront skeptical
arguments against their beliefs is that instead of giving up their faith, they
reinvent it. Every skeptical attack is countered by Christians in every generation
in order to save their faith from refutation, and so far Christians have been
successful. After all, Christianity is still around. But they do so at a high cost.
In my own lifetime I have seen Christianity reinvent itself like a chameleon
changes colors. Because of the onslaught of skeptical arguments, more and more
Christians are claiming that their faith is a "properly basic belief," and as such, it
doesn't need any evidence to support it (a la Alvin Plantinga in Warranted
Christian Belief). Others like William Lane Craig are arguing that the witness of
the Holy Spirit "trumps all other evidence" since it's "an intrinsic defeater of any
defeaters brought against it." (Question 68: "The Witness of the Holy Spirit" at
http://www.reasonable faith.org). In effect, Christians have insulated their faith
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