Week 3, How can we be sure of our faith?
A fair bit to write about this and I'm adding a little bonus at the end...


Part 1: The video
Gumbel again gets going with a nice little anecdote about how he met the woman who would be his wife at university and how exciting relationships are.
I'm sure you can all see what's coming.
"Relationships are great, and Christianity is a relationship with God" I'm paraphrasing here but that was the gist of the anecdote.


Gumbel tells us that he knows we can receive eternal life and that Christians can be confident on it because of the Bible, and that faith is based on facts not feelings, what these facts are however goes unmentioned (see my previous posts for exactly what I think of Jesus's existence). We're told that God reveals himself to those who have faith, my first thought about this is Ray Comfort's argument that "If you sincerely hit your knees and ask God to reveal himself he will do". When you do this and he doesn't however the usual response is "You weren't sincere enough". So it can be boiled down to if you already believe in him then you will see God everywhere. Although this argument can be equally applied to any religion.


The Bible verse Revelation 3:20 is read and a reference to the painter Holman Hunt and how he left off the handle on the outside of the door when he painted The Light of the World. Hunt's reasoning was that the handle was on the inside and you have to let Jesus into your life, he won't force himself in.

Looking back to a previous presentation Gumbel asks "How do we know that Jesus was resurrected?" in a spectacular fit of circular reasoning he says "We know he raised from the dead because God raised him from the dead". Sitting there totally stunned by the logical fallacy, reading through my notes there is a blank patch where I just stopped to consider if I actually just heard that.


Back to the relationship we are told that Gumbel knows he was married because he has his marriage certificate, if someone came to you with only a marriage certificate and claimed to be married you might believe him, if the name of the wife was Angelina Jolie and they were married on the Moon you would want a little more evidence though. The marriage certificate alone is insufficient evidence to claim that he is currently married, he has more evidence than that though, he can introduce us to his wife and to the witnesses at the marriage, now honestly answer me if you can do the same with Jesus?


Moving on to what faith is, Gumbel defines faith a trust, in a way it is. You have faith that when you are driving along someone isn't going to come off the other side of the road and smash into you head first. Well is it really the same? or do we have evidence that people won't do this since it has not happened in our experience and we can put ourself in their position and recognise that if they do smash into us it would be bad for both parties so they won't, can faith that something won't happen based on experience, and the faith that something exists based on a religious experience? I have never doubted the strength of religious experiences, but whether these experiences are supernatural or purely psychological (such as the placebo effect) is the right question to ask.


Gumbel asserts that people's characters are changed when they become Christians and they become better people, my only thought being that the same can be said for all religions. Gumbel asserts that Christianity is a step of faith based on evidence, and that Jesus is here tonight.
And with that the video ends.
The leader of the group shares with us the stories of Nicky Cruz, David Wilkerson and the Mau-Maus, a nice little story I suggest everyone look up, my only question is could the same be achieved with purely secular means?


Part 2: The discussion:
Mary leads the discussion group again first considering what faith is, my definition is believing something without evidence, however I thought stating this would not be best.
The definition that most people agree to is any religious belief is classed as faith. I ask how they can differentiate their faith from that of the other religions. They answer that when they pray God answers them. An example is given that they thank God for everything when something goes right in their life (my thoughts on this are if you thank God for success you should blame him for failure, but this is kept to myself) Jane (another pseudonym, I'm running out of female biblical names now) says that she prayed before her driving test and thanked him when she passed, of course the systematic failure of prayer is well documented. I add that "If you pray for help before an exam, that's technically cheating" another member justifies it as "using the resources available" the inner monologue starts up with "if you can just pray why revise?" but this is kept internal.
Mary then asks if people are changed for the better when they join Christianity, among the many thoughts I have on the matter; which denomination, how do we judge better etc. The best response seemed to be "can any religion change your character?" The question goes unanswered.
The assertion that other religions aren't relationships is brought up, and that with the facts we have their faith is not based on feelings. I ask if your faith is based on the relationship, are relationships not based on feelings? The question is dodged, again...
Unfortunately this was a shorter session so we were signalled that we were out of time and after thanking Mary and everyone else I head off.

BONUS! Is there anybody there?
It seems the local CU are in overdrive this week, due to being on a busy course I cannot attend the majority of these events however this one seemed interesting.

As I sat down in the coffee shop I begin to read a booklet called "Has science disproved God", being initially open minded I am thoroughly disappointed by the blatant straw men and false dichotomies (one example being that Naturalism is the belief that only matter and chance exist).
It starts with the fine tuning 'argument', if we changed law X by amount Y everything would change and life would be impossible...
Well this argument assumes that the laws could be different, and can be summed up by the statement "If things were different, things would be different". Well great deduction there Sherlock! (I am well known for my immense sarcasm at times), the booklet then says that scientists thought of the multiverse in an attempt to explain this without using God since science is biased against God, all of you should know this is rubbish.
What the Argument from Fine Tuning/Design/Anthropic Principle/Teleological Argument fails to note is that about 95% of the universe is dark matter/dark energy the problem with the fine tuning should be obvious know, that 5% includes all the stars, gas clouds, galaxies etc. The Carl Sagan quote that "The cosmos is all there is, all there was and all there ever will be" is mentioned and used as evidence that science is biased against supernatural claims.
Science is biased against supernatural claims since there is no evidence that anything supernatural exists. Since the universe is commonly defined as the totality of everything that exists, including all matter and energy, the planets, stars, galaxies, and the contents of intergalactic space. So by definition anything outside the universe is outside everything that exists, therefore does not exist. The problem with the fine tuning argument is that the universe is not fine tuned at all, there are places of the universe that will kill us INSTANTLY, there are predators, pathogens and particles that can easily kill us, we are on a collision course with the Andromeda galaxy that will obviously be catastrophic, the sun will die out and expand engulfing the Earth, sticking to Earth the majority of it is uninhabitable, we have to modify the environment so we can survive there. There is so much more I could type but I will leave you to find the many other objections yourselves.

The video begins, with low expectations after the booklet my hopes are not high.
The usual things are mentioned, how free will cannot be explained if we are "Just genetic survival machines" and therefore must have come from a God, blatant argument from ignorance.
It is said again that we cannot be just meat machines since we have thoughts, and no computers today have thoughts therefore we must be more than just matter and energy. If we are determined by solely our genes we cannot have free will etc.
We are not determined only by our genes, we are the sum of our experiences, we know how memory works, we know that our thoughts are affected by our memories and our thoughts inform our actions. This fact is somehow omitted. The false dichotomy of either A: We are determined solely by our genes, or B: There is more to the brain than just matter and energy, is set up now.
The question is then asked, one I saw coming a LONG time ago, of where do we get out morals? And that right and wrong/good and evil have to come from a God so atheists cannot say anything is right or wrong.
Can't we? My morals come from a variety of things, mainly an understanding of the consequences of my actions but also from the empathy I feel to all other human beings. The example of Oskar Schindler is used, how he risked his life to save Jews at the hands of the Nazi's and how this could not be explained by evolution or genetics alone. I make the case that this could be down to empathy again. You can see when other people, and indeed other organisms, are suffering, you know how it feels to suffer maybe not as much as they do but you can imagine. You know that if you were in that position you would want help. I compare this to me getting up and punching someone, other people would get up to stop me because they know/can imagine how bad it feels to be punched. The speaker asks whether the Nazi's felt empathy for the Jews, I referenced the Milgram Experiment about how people will submit to authority (just following orders), which I recommend everyone reads about.

It is stated that emergence is a problem for evolution, particularly the emergence of conscience/the mind. It depends on how we define those terms, the mind is just a term for what the brain does, and conscience is our own perception of what our brain does. We know that if we knock out certain parts of the brain certain functions of the mind/conscience will be affected. for instance in a stroke, the part of the brain that is affected shuts down in a way, Jill Bolte Taylor explains it much better than me here.


In the booklet there is the statement that "Science explains what/how but religion explains why". To me this one of the most ridiculous statements ever, it is just a word game. Both are attempting to answer questions about what is. There is either something there or there isn't, if there is something there then there is something you can examine. I'm not saying that things we can't examine do not exist but burden of proof lays with the claimant, if I claim X exists then I have to be able to provide evidence, it is similar to the Dragon in my garage. After a discussion with the speaker, which is just us going around in circles about morality, I thank him for the talk and head home.

Thank you for reading guys, let me know what you think in the comments.
I would like to leave you with this.

Week 2: Why did Jesus die?

Without Luke or Mark present in the discussion it was a challenge to hold myself back, but here’s how it went…

(Warning, this will be a little less laid back than my previous entry)

Part 1: The video

Once again we were presented a talk by Nicky Gumbel, assuming the last one was supposed to have proven that Jesus existed (spoiler: it didn’t), this talk was to give the reason he died and show how loving God was in ‘sacrificing’ himself/his son for us (wasn’t much of a sacrifice since he, Jesus, got to go to heaven and be worshipped forever).

He starts with the usual stuff, we are all sinners, Romans 3:23 (for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,) and John 3:16 etc. All the things you’ve probably heard before. He then listed a few things considered sinful; murder, theft, lying etc. he then says that thinking of someone in anger is equal to murdering them and that committing the smallest sin is equal to committing them all (he used the analogy that making scrambled eggs with 15 good eggs and 1 bad egg would ruin the whole thing) which I personally found horrendous (more on this in the discussions). It honestly felt like listening to Ray Comfort’s “are you a good person”. He stated that the 10 commandments were a good moral guide (doesn’t say which set and even in the set he probably means the first 4 are God being jealous and egocentric) my only thought was should you be observing the feast of the unleavened bread?

A quick anecdote about a Judge paying the fine he just ordered his old friend to pay and how this is compared to Jesus. Another about how when we see something happen we cry out for justice to be done but if we do that ourselves we will always justify it.

Nicky then states that the fact evil occurs is one of the main problems of Christianity yet does not even try to respond to the problem of evil, for those who don’t know the problem of evil goes like this:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent

Is God able to prevent evil, but not willing? Then he is malevolent

Is God able and willing to prevent evil? Then why does evil occur?

Is God neither willing nor able? Then why call him God?
This applies to the Christian and other monotheistic views of God (Omnipotent, Omniscient, Omnibenevolent, and Omnipresent).

Nicky states that even if you think you are good compared to someone else God is perfect, if we use the analogy of height, with the least moral person at the bottom and most at the top, Nicky said that the most moral person would be at the ceiling and God would be in the sky, so when God is looking down all humans look equal (again more on this in discussions). Nicky finished by saying Jesus is perfect, I don’t personally think chasing people with whips is perfect but each to their own (ironic saying each to their own when sat here arguing with them isn’t it? The Alpha Course is aimed at Christians and non-believers though).

He finishes with an anecdote about a man who was addicted to alcohol; he gave his life to Jesus and beat his addiction (failing to note we have these stories for pretty much all religions and even aliens).

There is mention of a cheque with no name on it, from Jesus and the price on it was something like “forgiveness for all your sins” and all you have to do is accept it and write your name to get into heaven.

No mention of Hell, at all. Which is a shame because I couldn’t use the Mafia Boss analogy (one of my favourites) so I will put it here:

A mafia boss walks into a store, he says to the owner “nice store you have here, it would be a shame if it burned down. I tell you what, give me £500 and I won’t burn it down”.

God is basically saying “nice life you have here, shame if you have to burn in hell forever. I tell you what, worship my son and I won’t send you to hell”.

(I know all you Christians are thinking “God doesn’t send you to hell you send yourselves there” just like you burn down your own store by not paying)

But that’s not entirely fair is it?

What’s actually happening is a man who says he works for the mafia is asking for money, you can’t even be sure if the mafia boss is real or that he would burn your store down if he was, same with God. It can be said it is better to worship/pay just in case; this is Pascal’s wager and can be applied to any religion. If it’s better to do things based on what could happen you would have to be a member of every religion ‘just in case’.

Part 2: Discussion

Mary again leads our group off into a room to have a discussion. Mark has gone off to Beta and Luke is no-where to be seen so I was understandably cautious.

I managed to get the first question in and asked

“Do you think it is moral for lying to be considered equal to murder, since committing the least sin is considered equal to committing all of them?”

Someone else added to this saying “Should a liar be considered equal to Hitler? And if Hitler repented…”

I had to clarify that Hitler was indeed Christian (none of them used the ‘No True Scotsman’ fortunately) this clearly shocked them.

The anecdote about the Judge is mentioned,

I ask if it is moral for me to be punished for someone else’s crimes. For example if someone causes £20,000 of damage and they can’t pay it, is it ok for me to pay it for them. Surprisingly a lot of people say “yes but only if you wanted to pay it”.

I then ask is it ok for me to serve someone else’s Jail time if I wanted to? The answer is no.

I ask Mary if we get into heaven through faith or works, she dodges the question by asking what the group think, with varied answers although it was stated either way “Hitler was definitely in Hell”. I had an answer prepared for both:

If works then belief in God/Jesus is irrelevant and all that matters is being a good person.
If faith then you can do literally anything and as long as you ‘truly repent’ you can get into heaven.

We then talk about how and why people sin, I ask “if we do not sin did Jesus die for nothing?” I get answered with everybody sins (in honesty this was the answer I was looking for and used to my advantage later). I jokingly ask whether we should go out and sin to make Jesus's death more worthwhile.

Questioning if anyone has read 1984, thankfully a few had, I consider the belief that thinking of someone in anger is equal to murdering them and, in a very Hitchens kind of way, state that “This is the very definition of thought crime”. I receive no response to this.

The group considers the prospect of thought crime for quite a while, I state how thoughts do not harm someone but actions based on those thoughts do. Someone pipes up with “If you are angry at someone you will take that anger inward, you will become angry at yourself, you will get depressed and harm yourself”. One of the longest slippery slopes I have ever heard my only answer was to consider finding a way to manage anger and whether anger can be justified.

We are signalled that time is running out so I finish with “Since you believe we all sin, and that God created us, is it unfair to say that we are created sick and commanded to be well?”

The question remained unanswered.

Mary brings out some of the cheques Gumbel mentioned and offers everyone a cheque they all take one but I respectfully declined, thinking back it would have made a decent souvenir.

As I finish I can predict some criticisms:

You didn’t mention Hell, Morality, and the Euthyphro Dilemma etc.

How putting the tree in Eden was like putting a loaded gun in a baby’s crib.

How immoral original sin is.

Admittedly I could have mentioned a lot of things but I had to save something for next week…

Although I am a humanist, having been invited to join in on an Alpha Course at my local church I felt it would be rude to simply say no without at least showing my face. So here goes:
(note that all names used, except those of historians, are pseudonyms)


Week 1 (technically week 2 but I missed the 1st): “Who is Jesus?”
At first impressions they all seemed like a lovely bunch of people and they are; literally no bad things to say about them.
Thankfully Mark, my Christian friend who I had agreed with that it was a bad idea to out me as a non-believer to early, was the only person there who knew I was not a believer, for now anyway. Mark’s friends Luke, Eve and I were having a bit of a joke around, such a nice atmosphere I almost forgot where I was until we were called to watch the video.


Part 1, Intro Video


I was expecting something good, hoping to learn something new at least. Yet, since I had actually done my research on the historicity of Jesus, I was woefully disappointed. It was a talk given by Nicky Gumbel, a skilled speaker and founder of the alpha course, his skill at speaking did not translate to history however. It wasn’t long before the well-known forgery in Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews was being used as evidence of the divinity of Jesus. A brief mentioning of Tacitus and Suetonius, failing to mention that they were writing in the 2nd Century CE (I refer to CE now since the booklet I was handed said that AD and BC were evidence of Jesus’s divinity) and Suetonius only mentioned Chrestus, which was a common Greek name meaning good, not Jesus by name and Tacitus only repeats the then belief of Christians claiming no knowledge of Jesus’s existence.
We are then led through a painful amount of bible verses and even the empty tomb argument for Jesus’s existence. He then brings up the Lewis trilemma (Liar, Lunatic or Lord) and uses it as justification of Jesus’s existence and divinity, the trilemma itself assumes that Jesus existed and performed miracles; so in essence is a useless argument (more on this later). 
Nicky tells an anecdote of how he used to be an Atheist and when reading the New Testament he was instantly converted (obviously he didn’t read the horrendous things in the Old Testament). He rants about how all the nice things Jesus said (missing out the selling everything and relying on God to provide everything, slavery and chasing people around with whips) prove he was God. We then hear about Jesus’s resurrection, which apparently 500 people saw yet none of them wrote about it, and how Christianity is a relationship with Christ. The personal experiences people have with Christ (none cited however) being used as proof of his existence. The video draws to a close and Nicky asserts that all historians accept Jesus’s existence (which is probably news to most historians I have met) and divinity, with that the video ends.

Part 2, Discussion
After singing Amazing Grace, the first few lines I still find abhorrent, we are split into groups. I am grouped with Mark, Luke and a few others around my age. The group is being led by a young student, Mary, who initially invited me to this after seeing an argument between me and my course mate (ironically during this argument I had already responded to the claims about Tacitus, Josephus and Suetonius). Mary started off by asking what I thought was a great question in “If you could ask God anything, and be guaranteed an honest answer, what would you ask?” The first thing that popped into my head was “Why did you go to great lengths to conceal yourself?” but I thought it best to wait for other questions first. The suggestions from the group (Why did he make everything, why does he provide some with evidence but not others) were great but my personal favourite was “Why did God create things the way they are if he knew what was going to happen?” For a second I actually though there was another non-believer in the room so I thought now would be a good time to ask mine, it received mixed reactions but the atmosphere was still nice, it would not remain this way.


Mary’s first question was “Based on the video do you think there is enough evidence to believe Jesus existed?”
“Yes”
“Yes”
“Yes”
“Yes”
“Yes”
“No”
At this point with everyone looking at me, Mary asked me why, thankfully I had done my research and responded with what I thought to be a bulletproof argument: “The Josephus testimonial is a known forgery…Tacitus and Suetonius were not contemporaneous…The Lewis trilemma presumes his existence and can be equally applied to any religious figure.” Not wanting to mention the problems with the bible too soon as not to offend, although this came back to bite me in the ass. Mark explained that we have non-contemporary accounts of WW2 and we believe them and assuming 100% accuracy of the bible we should believe the stories about Jesus. I replied with the contemporary accounts, archaeological finds and enlistment details of soldiers etc. we have of world war 2 we can confirm it actually happened. Inevitably Julius Caesar was mentioned, I used the example that we had other contemporary accounts of him, things he said, did, coins with his face on, and sculptures of him.
Luke said there would be no coins with Jesus’s face on since he was a minor figure, my internal monologue screaming at me “He was seen by 500 people, raised himself and others from the dead, you mean to tell me nobody wrote about the zombie invasion of Jerusalem?” Needless to say I kept this thought to myself.


We discussed whether Jesus’s teachings were good and whether that was justification enough to believe he was God, it was mentioned that Jesus spoke of himself whereas other religious figures spoke of their Gods only and that Jesus was only human. I made a comparison between Jesus, Muhammad and Buddha and said that while I accepted that there was probably a real human who Jesus was based upon, there is insufficient evidence to warrant a belief that he was God. (At this point every time a question was asked people would wait for what I had to say, yet Mark’s presence kind of held me back, he had once referred to me as “Making Dawkins look moderate”)


One of the other members said that “Believing Jesus existed is the biggest leap, you have already made it, it only takes a little faith to believe he is God” I just thought of Apollonius of Tyana but before I could bring him up Luke made a remark that we take it on faith that coins contain gold, I replied that we can melt them down and test for gold, that the level of evidence should be different based on the claim and that their faith was equal to a Muslim’s faith in Allah. With Carl Sagan stuck firmly in my head I recited “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. I then asked if people believe me when I say there is a £1 coin in my pocket they answered yes; going all Sagan again I asked if they believed there was a “Dragon in my Garage”. This got a few laughs at least. It was stated that if people believe there is something and it is proven later they were right, Mark made a reference to the Library of Alexandria and how many books have been destroyed that could have contained evidence for Jesus’s divinity.


The final sentence I managed to get in was “Do you think we should believe something without evidence, based entirely on the chance some could be found?” There was silence for a moment, this seemed to have got a few people thinking, until one member said “I believe it because it makes me feel good, and if that doesn’t harm others it shouldn’t matter”. The words Condoms, Crusade, Homophobia, and Slavery etc. were racing through my head at this point, but this was all erased by what another member said:
“I know because I have felt God, I have heard him talking to me and guiding me”
The internal monologue fired up again with “Muslims say the same thing with Allah, Hindus with…”
At this point we were signalled that time was running out and I felt it would have been rude of me to say that so I didn’t.
As we left I shook hands with Mary and thanked her for the invite, she asked if I would be there next week, avoiding the question I said it depends on how busy I am, I’m not busy at all on those nights and I did really enjoy it. Even if I didn’t happen to agree with them they were all really nice people to be around, so I may just be there next week.