Polemics

Justin Bass fact-checks Dan Barker’s debate performance

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Two Rams butting heads: may the best ram win!
Two Rams butting heads: may the best ram win!

I read this post from Justin Bass, PhD about his recent debate with Dan Barker on the historical Jesus. Bass takes a look at Barker’s arguments in his written work, as well as his performance in the debates.

First, Barker does not quote any mainstream historians, he only cites people like G.A. Wells (a professor of German language), Barbara G. Walker (an expert in knitting), and other people on the radical fringe:

In writing on Jesus and Christianity, Dan cites only these other sources: John Remsburg, J. M. Robertson, W. B. Smith, Barbara Walker, G. A. Wells, Randall Helms, John Allegro, Hugh Schonfield, Earl Doherty, Robert Price and Richard Carrier. A review of their credentials quickly reveal that the majority of them are inadequate sources for Jesus and early Christianity.

[…]That was very honest of Dan to admit that he erred in using Walker as a source, but why did Dan not cite anywhere in his books James Dunn, E. P. Sanders, John P. Meier, N. T. Wright, Paula Fredricksen, Dale Allison, Martin Hengel, Richard Bauckham, or really any of the other 6000+ scholars professionally teaching in relevant subjects of early Christianity?

One thing is for sure – with a list of clowns like that, Barker is not interested in truth, but just interested in believing whatever suits his emotional needs.

The rest of the Bass essay covers these topics:

  1. Did Nazareth Exist during the Lifetime of Jesus?
  2. Josephus and Tacitus on Jesus
  3. Did Paul Believe Jesus’ Resurrection was Physical or Spiritual?
  4. The 500 Eyewitnesses
  5. “Contradictions” in the Resurrection Accounts
  6. Dan’s One Alternative Explanation (for the minimal facts)
  7. Even if Jesus rose from the dead, Dan would still not accept Him as his Lord

You might remember that I already blogged about Dan Barker’s crazy view that Nazareth did not exist at the time of Jesus, and the archaeological discoveries that falsify his view.

Let’s just look at one of other ones in the list. I think this is the craziest one of all – Dan Barker’s explanation for the minimal facts:

Bass writes:

I presented 7 facts concerning the historical Jesus and the rise of the Christian movement in the first century in my opening statement that are agreed upon by all full-time teaching scholars in the Western world (6000+) whether in Classics, History, or in Early Christianity. And I argued that the best explanation of these 7 facts is that Jesus of Nazareth rose bodily from the dead and therefore is Lord of all.

Throughout the night, Dan only gave one possible alternative explanation that would, even if true, explain only one of my 7 facts. He admitted before he shared this explanation that the hallucination hypothesis (which is the leading alternative explanation among NT scholars today) is “weak.” Instead, Dan proposed a theory found first in the writings of Robert Price. You can watch the clip above, but Dan essentially argues that because Peter felt so bad about his denial of Jesus after his death, he had an experience that convinced him Jesus was still alive. But as I said in the debate this in no way answers why someone like Paul would become a follower of Jesus and I pressed Dan for evidence for this theory and he gave none.

Ultimately, this was just something Robert Price just made up out of thin air and Dan is carrying on Price’s imagination.

How the heck are you supposed to get Paul to exchange his comfortable life as a zealous, respected Pharisee for his life as a Christian missionary based on Peter feeling guilty? Paul was trying to kill Peter – he isn’t interested in Peter’s supposed feelings of guilt. No one – and I mean no one – doubts that Paul was a zealous Pharisee who thought that he saw a post-mortem appearance of Jesus. That is the only way to explain his complete change of mind. In fact, the Peter-grief theory does not explain the empty tomb. It does not explain the post-mortem appearances to Paul, James and others, and it does not explain the early belief in the resurrection that emerged in Jerusalem. It’s a ridiculous theory, and the only way to believe it is by insulating yourself from the evidence.

Polemics

Atheist Jerry Coyne explains why morality is impossible for atheists

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Sherlock Holmes and John Watson about to do philosophy
Sherlock Holmes and John Watson about to do philosophy

Let’s review what you need in your worldview in order to have a rationally grounded system of morality.

You need 5 things:

1) Objective moral values

There needs to be a way to distinguish what is good from what is bad. For example, the moral standard might specify that being kind to children is good, but torturing them for fun is bad. If the standard is purely subjective, then people could believe anything and each person would be justified in doing right in their own eyes. Even a “social contract” is just based on people’s opinions. So we need a standard that applies regardless of what people’s individual and collective opinions are.

2) Objective moral duties

Moral duties (moral obligations) refer to the actions that are obligatory based on the moral values defined in 1). Suppose we spot you 1) as an atheist. Why are you obligated to do the good thing, rather than the bad thing? To whom is this obligation owed? Why is rational for you to limit your actions based upon this obligation when it is against your self-interest? Why let other people’s expectations decide what is good for you, especially if you can avoid the consequences of their disapproval?

3) Moral accountability

Suppose we spot you 1) and 2) as an atheist. What difference does it make to you if you just go ahead and disregard your moral obligations to whomever? Is there any reward or punishment for your choice to do right or do wrong? What’s in it for you?

4) Free will

In order for agents to make free moral choices, they must be able to act or abstain from acting by exercising their free will. If there is no free will, then moral choices are impossible. If there are no moral choices, then no one can be held responsible for anything they do. If there is no moral responsibility, then there can be no praise and blame. But then it becomes impossible to praise any action as good or evil.

5) Ultimate significance

Finally, beyond the concept of reward and punishment in 3), we can also ask the question “what does it matter?”. Suppose you do live a good life and you get a reward: 1000 chocolate sundaes. And when you’ve finished eating them, you die for real and that’s the end. In other words, the reward is satisfying, but not really meaningful, ultimately. It’s hard to see how moral actions can be meaningful, ultimately, unless their consequences last on into the future.

Theism rationally grounds all 5 of these. Atheism cannot ground any of them.

Let’s take a look at #4: free will and see how atheism deals with that.

Atheism and free will?

Here’s prominent atheist Jerry Coyne’s editorial in USA Today to explain why atheists can’t ground free will.

Excerpt:

And that’s what neurobiology is telling us: Our brains are simply meat computers that, like real computers, are programmed by our genes and experiences to convert an array of inputs into a predetermined output. Recent experiments involving brain scans show that when a subject “decides” to push a button on the left or right side of a computer, the choice can be predicted by brain activity at least seven seconds before the subject is consciously aware of having made it. (These studies use crude imaging techniques based on blood flow, and I suspect that future understanding of the brain will allow us to predict many of our decisions far earlier than seven seconds in advance.) “Decisions” made like that aren’t conscious ones. And if our choices are unconscious, with some determined well before the moment we think we’ve made them, then we don’t have free will in any meaningful sense.

If you don’t have free will, then you can’t make moral choices, and you can’t be held morally responsible. No free will means no morality.

Here are some more atheists to explain how atheists view morality.

William Provine says atheists have no free will, no moral accountability and no moral significance:

Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear — and these are basically Darwin’s views. There are no gods, no purposes, and no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death. When I die, I am absolutely certain that I am going to be dead. That’s the end of me. There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will for humans, either.

Richard Dawkins says atheists have no objective moral standards:

In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, or any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference… DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music. (Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (1995))

When village atheists talk about how they can be moral without God, it’s important to ask them to justify the minimum requirements for rational morality. Atheists may act inconsistently with their worldview, believing in free will, expecting praise and blame for complying with the arbitrary standards of their peer group, etc. But there is nothing more to morality on atheism that imitating the herd – at least when the herd is around to watch them. And when the herd loses its Judeo-Christian foundation – watch out. That’s when the real atheism comes out, and you can see it on display in the Planned Parenthood videos. When God disappears from a society, anything is permissible.

News

Democrats defeat Republican bill to defund Planned Parenthood

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Iowa senator Joni Ernst
Iowa Senator Joni Ernst’s bill to defund Planned Parenthood

Life News has the story.

Excerpt:

Senate Democrats today defeated an effort to revoke taxpayer funding for the Planned Parenthood abortion business by filibustering the bill and preventing a vote on it. Republicans were unable to secure the 60 voted needed to invoke cloture and stop debate on the bill, allowing an up or down vote.

The legislation follows four shocking videos that have caught Planned Parenthood doctors discussing and arranging the sale of body parts of aborted babies.

The Senate voted 53-46 on the cloture motion — failing to get the 60 votes needed to stop the Democratic filibuster against the de-funding measure. had the cloture vote been approved and the bill passed, and should the House pass its own bill to de-fund Planned Parenthood, President Barack Obama said he would veto the measure. The vote was an improvement over a 2011 vote that saw the vote on the filibuster fail and technically the Senate is 5 votes away from overcoming a Democratic filibuster.

I am actually curious to hear how the videos where put to the Democrats, and how they responded, because who could really vote in favor of these practices?

The Republicans did a good job of showing the Democrats the evidence:

During the debate in the Senate, Republican lawmakers sought to highlight those shocking videos showing Planned Parenthood arranging for the sale of aborted babies.

Republican Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa said, “The American taxpayer should not be asked to fund an organization like Planned Parenthood that has shown a sheer disdain for human dignity and complete disregard for women and their babies.”

“The barbaric practice of conducting abortions in a way that promotes harvesting fetal organs, or profiting from such practices, has no place in modern society,” said Sen. Dan Coats of Indiana. “Planned Parenthood’s disgusting practices should not receive a dime of taxpayer money.”

Here’s Joni Ernst making the case:

Basically, she summarized what was in the videos, and yet the Democrats still voted in favor of allowing the organ harvesting to occur. Atheists like to talk a lot about empathy, and here you can see the empathy of the secularists on display. If the roles were reversed, and they were the unborn child, you can bet that they would vote for their own lives. But, tough break for those kids. They are not powerful senators, so kill them all and sell their body parts. That’s what a Democrat is. Surprise! All this talk about being against slavery is just smokescreen – Democrats are in favor of slavery. It never ended, for them.

Well, it’s a loss. The right way to do this, of course, would have been to attach the defunding of Planned Parenthood to an essential bill, and shut down the government over it. But the Senate Republicans are not as conservative as the House leaders or the Governors.

Here’s what comes next:

With the Senate voting against de-funding, attention now turns to attempts to de-fund Planned Parenthood via the budget process. Already, 18 House Republicans have said they will not allow passage of any essential bills to fund the federal government if such bills do not include language de-funding Planned Parenthood.

Attention will also now turn to Congressional and state efforts to investigate Planned Parenthood’s sale of body parts from aborted babies and state-level efforts to de-fund Planned Parenthood further.

And in fact, my #1 choice for President, Governor Bobby Jindal, went ahead and did something about this in his home state of Louisiana:

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal canceled Planned Parenthood’s Medicaid contract with his state Monday, moving to strip the organization of funding in the wake of disturbing undercover videos that appeared to show employees haggling over selling fetal tissue obtained from abortions.

Mr. Jindal said the videos showed Planned Parenthood workers admitting they engaged in late-term abortions and did them to try to leave fetus body parts as intact as possible so they could be sold later.

He said his state health department believes Planned Parenthood’s local affiliates could be breaking laws that prohibit groups that take funding from encouraging women to have abortions.

“Planned Parenthood does not represent the values of the people of Louisiana and shows a fundamental disrespect for human life,” the governor said in a statement announcing the move. “It has become clear that this is not an organization that is worthy of receiving public assistance from the state.”

My #2 choice for President, Governor Scott Walker, had already de-funded Planned Parenthood in his state. Striking, since Wisconsin is a blue state. But then again, Scott Walker is not someone who runs from a fight.

I really hope we nominate someone conservative this time.