Why I Am Not a Christian

by Richard Carrier

  That’s the proper way to get at the truth. Now back to the point...

  All the Wrong Evidence

  Consider the generic claims that God exists, God is good, and God created this universe. What evidence do we have for any of these particular propositions? The only evidence ever offered for the “existence” of God essentially boils down to two things: “The universe exists, therefore God exists” and “I feel God exists, therefore he does.” Otherwise, we can’t prove anyone has ever really seen God—seen him act, speak, or do anything (even by some supernatural proxy). Even if we could prove a single genuine miracle had ever really happened, we still would not have evidence that God caused that miracle, rather than a misunderstood human power over the supernatural, or the work of spirits, or sorcery, and so on. To confirm God as their cause would require yet more evidence, of which (again) we have none.

  As for those who claim to have “seen” or “spoken” to God, it turns out on close examination (when we even have the required access to find out) that they are lying, insane, or only imagining what they saw or heard. Even believers concede that this is most often the case—because they must, in order to explain all the non-Christian visions and divine communications pervading human history and contemporary world cultures. These always turn out to be subjective experiences “in their minds,” and they are rarely consistent with each other. Rather, we find a plethora of contradictory experiences which seem more attenuated to cultural and personal expectations than to anything universally true. Dreams and visions and voices, across all times and sects and world religions and cultures, just don’t contain any consistent content—as I explained in my previous chapter on God’s silence. If God didn’t cause those “other” cases (and you must conclude he didn’t, lest you convict God of being a liar), then you can’t claim God caused “your” cases. The same causes are likely at work in both.

  So, too, for the “feeling” that God exists. This is no different than the “feeling” I once had that the Tao governs the universe (which I describe in an early section of Sense and Goodness without God), or the “feeling” others have had that aliens visit them, the spirits of the dead talk to them, or several gods and nature spirits live all around them. Just like dreams and revelations, people have “felt” the existence of so many contradictory things that we know “feeling” something is the poorest possible evidence we can have. Most people “feel” something completely different than we do, and since there is no way to tell whether your feeling is correct and theirs is wrong, it is just as likely that theirs is correct and yours is wrong. And since there are a million completely different “feelings” and only one can be true, it follows that the odds are worse than a million to one against your feeling being the true one. So “feeling” that God exists fails to meet even a minimal standard of evidence, much less an extraordinary standard. And as I said, the very same goes even for more “profound” religious experiences involving the actual appearances or voices of supposedly supernatural beings.† So we have no evidence here. As I explained earlier, were the Christian God genuinely communicating with us, his communications would be consistent across all times and regions.

  Other than all that, which as demonstrated is simply the wrong evidence to have, people offer the existence of the universe as “proof” that God exists. Some propose that there would be no universe if there wasn’t a god, but this is not a logical conclusion. A theory like “nature just exists” is by itself no less likely than “a god just exists.” Others propose that since the universe had a beginning, a god must have started it, but this fails both empirically and logically. Empirically, a beginning of time and space became suspect once examination of the quantum theory of gravity led to the realization that a beginning of space-time at a dimensionless point (called a singularity) is actually physically impossible. So now most cosmologists believe there was probably something around before the Big Bang—and probably quite a lot of things (I’ll return to this point in the next chapter). As a result, we no longer know if the universe had a beginning.† And logically, even if the universe had a beginning, this does not entail or even imply that an intelligent being preceded it. If God can exist before the existence of time or space, so could the nature of the universe (as many cosmologists argue, all we would need is a fairly simple quantum state to get everything else going). In short, the appearance of time and space may have simply been an inevitable outcome of the nature of things, just as Christians must believe that God’s nature and existence is inevitable. And since it can be either, the mere fact of there being a universe is evidence for neither.

  The most popular—and really, the only evidence people have for God’s existence and role as Creator—is the apparent “fine tuning” of the universe to produce life. That’s at least something remarkable, requiring an explanation better than mere chance. As it turns out, there are godless explanations that make more sense of the actual universe we find ourselves in than Christianity does—but we shall examine this point in the next chapter (pp. 66-80). For now, it is enough to point out that “intelligent design” is not the only logically possible explanation for the organization of the universe, either, and so we would need specific empirical evidence for it. Just as scientists needed copious amounts of evidence before justifying a belief that the present cosmos was the inevitable physical outcome of the Big Bang, so do Christians need copious amounts of evidence before justifying a belief that the organization that arose from the Big Bang came from an intelligent engineer. Again, the mere possibility is not enough—we need actual evidence that an intelligent engineer was the cause, and not something else. And Christians don’t have that. Or anything like it.

  Finally, to prove “God is good” we have essentially nothing at all. Since God is a totally silent do-nothing (as I surveyed in the previous two chapters), we don’t have anything to judge his character by, except an utter lack of any clear or consistent action on his part—which we saw earlier is sufficient to demonstrate that if there is a God, he is almost certainly not good (and therefore Christianity is false). Christians do try to offer evidence of God’s goodness anyway, but what they come up with is always just circular logic or far too weak to meet any reasonable burden.

  For example, some argue “God gave us life” as evidence he is good, but that presupposes God is our creator, and so is generally a circular argument. But it also fails to follow from the known facts, since a mindless natural process can also give us life, and even an evil or ambivalent God could have sufficient reason to give us life. Moreover, the harsh kind of life we were given agrees more with those possibilities than with the designs of a good God, much less the Christian God, especially since there is as much bad in life as good, and no particular sense of merit in how it gets distributed. In fact, the evidence is even worse for Christianity on this score, since if the universe was intelligently designed, it appears to have been designed for a purpose other than us—but, again, I’ll get back to that in the following chapter.

  Other Christians try to argue that God is probably good because “God gave his one and only son to save us,” but that is again circular—for it already presumes that Jesus was his son, that God let him die, and that God did this to accomplish something good for us. Until each one of those propositions is confirmed by independent evidence, there is no way to use this “theory” as if it were “evidence” that God existed or was good. Indeed, that “God gave his one and only son to save us” still fails to follow from the known facts because the same deed could have been performed just as readily for different motives, motives that were not so good.

  For example, early Christians tried to explain away the existence of pre-Christian resurrection cults by accusing the Devil of fabricating them to fool mankind and lead us astray. That is a coherent theory that could just as easily explain the entire Christian religion. In other words, Christianity may simply be just one more clever scheme to give a devious God a good laugh. And considering all the evil, misery, and torment
that has been caused by the Christian religion—and the fact that God, if he exists, quite obviously gave, or allowed to be given, contradictory and mutually hostile messages to Muslims, Christians, Jews, and Hindus with the inevitable and predictable consequence of furthering human conflict and misery—the theory that “God gave his one and only son to screw us” has even more to commend it than the Christian alternative.†

  So the supposed evidence that Christians try to offer for God’s existence, creative activity, or goodness simply doesn’t cut it. It turns out not to be evidence, but theories about otherwise ambiguous evidence, theories that themselves remain unproven, and often barely plausible when compared with more obvious alternatives that more readily explain the full range of evidence we have. Therefore, the Christian theory has insufficient support to justify believing it. And this remains so even if Christianity is true. For even if it is true, we still don’t have enough evidence to know it is true. By analogy, even if it were true that Julius Caesar survived an arrow wound to his left thigh in the summer of 49 B.C., the fact that we have no evidence of any such wound entails that we have no reason to believe it occurred. We can only believe what we have evidence enough to prove. And there are plenty of true things that don’t make that cut.

  So much for the general propositions. None that Christianity depends upon have any adequate support. We may as well believe angels magically frame people for murder by planting fingerprints. But that still leaves us with the more specific propositions that Jesus performed miracles and rose from the dead. Many Christians really do offer the miracles and resurrection of Jesus as evidence that God exists and that the Christian theory is true. We will set aside the problem that even doing such things would not prove Jesus was God, since other supernatural powers or agencies could have arranged the same result, even if all those things happened. More problematic for Christianity is that we have insufficient evidence any of these things really happened. To understand why, let’s consider an imaginary alternative...

  Hero Savior of Vietnam

  Suppose I told you there was a soldier in the Vietnam War named “Hero Savior” who miraculously calmed storms, healed wounds, conjured food and water out of thin air, and then was blown up by artillery, but appeared again whole and alive three days later, giving instructions to his buddies before flying up into outer space right before their very eyes. Would you believe me? Certainly not. You would ask me to prove it.

  So I would give you all the evidence I have. But all I have are some vague war letters by a guy who never really met Hero Savior in person, and a handful of stories written over thirty years later by some guys named Bill, Bob, Carl, and Joe. I don’t know for sure who these guys are. I don’t even know their last names. There are only unconfirmed rumors that they were or knew some of the war buddies of Hero Savior. They might have written earlier than we think, or later, but no one really knows. No one can find any earlier documentation to confirm their stories, either, or their service during the war, or even find these guys to interview them. So we don’t know if they really are who others claim, and we’re not even sure these are the guys who actually wrote the stories. You see, the undated pamphlets circulating under their names don’t say “by Bill” or “by Bob,” but “as told by Bill” and “as told by Bob.” Besides all that, we also can’t find any record of a Hero Savior serving in the war. He might have been a native guide whose name never made it into official records, but still, none of the historians of the war ever mention him, or his amazing deeds, or even the reports of them that surely would have spread far and wide.

  Besides the dubious evidence of these late, uncorroborated, unsourced, and suspicious stories, the best thing I can give you is that war correspondence I mentioned, some letters by an army sergeant actually from the war, who claims he was a skeptic who changed his mind. But he never met or saw Hero in life, and never mentions any of the miracles that Bob, Bill, Carl, and Joe talk about. In fact, the only thing this sergeant ever mentions is “seeing” Hero after his death, though not “in flesh and blood,” but in a “revelation.” That’s it.

  This sergeant also claims the spirit of Hero Savior now enables him and some others to “speak in tongues” and “prophecy” and heal some illnesses, but none of this has been confirmed or observed by anyone else on record, and none of it sounds any different than what thousands of other cults and gurus have claimed. So, too, for some unconfirmed reports that some of these believers, even this army sergeant, endured persecution or even died for believing they “saw Hero in a revelation”—a fact no more incredible than the Buddhists who set themselves on fire to protest the Vietnam War, certain they would be reincarnated, or the hundreds of people who voluntarily killed themselves at Jonestown, certain their leader (Jim Jones) was an agent of God.

  Okay. I’ve given you all that evidence. Would you believe me then? Certainly not. No one trusts documents that come decades after the fact by unknown authors, and hardly anyone believes the hundreds of gurus today who claim to see and speak to the spirits of the dead, heal illnesses, and predict the future. Every reasonable person expects and requires extensive corroboration by contemporary documents and confirmed eyewitness accounts. Everyone would expect here at least as much evidence as I’d need to prove I owned a nuclear missile, yet the standard required is actually that of proving I own an interstellar spacecraft—for these are clearly very extraordinary claims, and as we saw above, such claims require extraordinary evidence, as much as would be needed, for example, to convince the United Nations that I had an interstellar spacecraft on my lawn. Yet what we have for this Hero Savior doesn’t even count as ordinary evidence, much less the extraordinary evidence we really need.

  To complete the analogy, many other things would rightly bother us. Little is remarkable about the stories told of Hero Savior, for similar stories apparently have been told of numerous Vietnamese sorcerers and heroes throughout history—and no one believes them, so why should we make an exception for Hero? The documents we have from Bob, Bill, Carl, and Joe have also been tampered with—we’ve found some cases of forgery and editing in each of their stories by parties unknown, and we aren’t sure we’ve caught it all. Apparently, their stories were used by several different cults to support their causes, and these cults all squabble over the exact details of the right cause, and so tell different stories or interpret the stories differently to serve their own particular agenda. And the earliest version, the one told by Bob, which both Bill and Joe clearly copied, and just added to and edited (and even Carl seems to have done the same, just far more loosely), appears to have been almost entirely constructed out of passages from ancient Vietnamese poems, arranged and altered to tell a story full of symbolic and moral meaning. These and many other problems plague the evidence, leaving it even more suspect than normal.

  This Hero Savior analogy entirely parallels the situation for Jesus. Jesus even has the same name: “Christ Jesus” in Hebrew literally means “the messiah and savior.” In other words, “Hero Savior.” The shady state of the evidence is likewise the same, as documented by Bart Ehrmann in Jesus Interrupted (2009) a book I strongly recommend.† And the way the Gospels just emulate and adapt prior stories is discussed by many scholars, including myself in Not the Impossible Faith (2009), and I will soon publish a book more directly On the Historicity of Jesus Christ.†

  Every reason we would have not to believe these Hero Savior stories applies to the stories of Jesus, with all the same force. All we have attesting his miracles are letters by a guy (Paul) who never saw Jesus except in private “revelations,” and Gospels by unknown authors of unknown date using unknown sources and methods to document wildly unbelievable claims we wouldn’t trust from any other religion. So if you agree there would be no good reason to believe these Hero Savior stories, you must also agree there is insufficient reason to believe the Jesus Christ stories. Hence I am not a Christian because the evidence is not good enough. For it is no better than the evidence proposed for Hero Savior,
and that falls far short of the burden that would have to be met to confirm the very extraordinary claims surrounding him. I make this case in much fuller detail in chapter eleven of John Loftus’ book The Christian Delusion (2010).

  And That’s the Problem...

  Things could have been different. For example, if miracle working was still so routine in the Church that scientists could prove that devout Christians alone could genuinely perform miracles—restoring lost limbs, raising the dead, predicting tsunamis and earthquakes (and actually saving thousands with their timely warnings)—then we would have a well-confirmed generalization that would lend a great deal of support to the Gospel stories, reducing the burden on the Christian to prove those stories true. Likewise, if we had credible documents from educated Roman and Jewish eyewitnesses to the miracles and resurrection of Jesus, and if we had simultaneous records even from China recording appearances of this Jesus to spread the Gospel there just days after his death in Palestine, then the Christian would surely have some solid ground to stand on. And the two together—current proof of regular miracles in the Church, and abundant first-hand documentation from reliable observers among the Jews, Romans, and Chinese—would be full and sufficient evidence to believe the claim that Jesus really did perform miracles and rise from the dead, or at least something comparably remarkable.