Why I Am Not a Christian Read online

  Why I Am

  Not a Christian

  Four Conclusive Reasons

  to Reject the Faith

  by

  Richard Carrier, Ph.D.

  To truth, reason,

  and common sense.

  Why I Am Not a Christian:

  Four Conclusive Reasons to Reject the Faith

  Copyright © 2011 by Richard Carrier, Ph.D.

  All Rights Reserved

  Published by Philosophy Press

  (Richmond, California)

  www.richardcarrier.info

  ISBN (of softcover edition):

  978-1456588854

  Contents

  Why This Book

  God is Silent

  God is Inert

  Wrong Evidence

  Wrong Universe

  Conclusion

  Why This Book

  I’m cognitively defective. Or that’s what Christians tell me. It’s not true, of course. But the curious thing is how desperately they need to believe there is something wrong with me. For otherwise, they cannot explain how someone so well informed about their religion could reject their faith—indeed, someone who doesn’t just give it a pass, but rejects it as firmly as any other bizarre cult or superstition. Which is what it is. This book is about why.

  Once upon a time, a generous fellow by the name of John Ransom hired me to write out my reasons for rejecting the Christian religion. The result was an online essay, of which this is an updated edition in print. Why a print edition? Because yet another generous fellow wanted there to be one. So he arranged for this book to be published. “It’s just too important, too well put, not to have it in a handy carry-about form,” he said. In this way we can take it with us, store it on our shelves (or in our kindles), read it while all cozy on our couches or lawns, write notes in the margins, hand copies out to other people willing to read it. Besides, he said, Christian fundamentalists need something to burn at the next Nuremburg rally.

  Why me? Well, I’ve become something of a world renowned atheist, noted for my work in both history and philosophy, particularly in my criticism of the dubious and often delusional claims of various Christians. Just google my name and you’ll see what I mean. Given my close study of the issues and my renown for cutting straight to the heart of them, I should summarize my case, John said, simply and clearly so everyone can understand where I'm coming from. He was especially frustrated by Christians who routinely come up with implausible excuses to defend their faith, which they don’t really examine—as if defending their faith with any excuse mattered more than having a genuinely good reason to believe in the first place.

  Discussing our experiences, we realized we’d both encountered many Christians like this, who color their entire perception of reality with the assumption that they have to be right, and therefore the evidence must somehow fit. So they think they can make anything up on the spur of the moment and be “sure” it’s true. This is the exact opposite of what we do. We start with the evidence, and then figure out what the best explanation of it all really is, regardless of where this quest for truth takes us. John and I also shared the same experiences in another respect: when their dogmatism meets our empiricism, slander is not far behind. I have increasingly encountered Christians who accuse me to my face of being a liar, of being wicked, of not wanting to talk to God, of willfully ignoring evidence, of being “cognitively defective”—because that is the only way they can explain my existence. I cannot be an honest, well-informed pursuer of the truth who came to a fair and reasonable decision after a thorough examination of the evidence, because no such person can exist in the Christian worldview, who does not come to Christ. Therefore, I must be a wicked liar, I must be so deluded by sin that I am all but clinically insane, an irrational madman suffering some evil demonic psychosis.

  There is nothing I can do for such people. Nothing I ever show or say to them will ever convince them otherwise—it can’t, because they start with the assumption that their belief in Christ has to be true, therefore right from the start everything I say or do is always going to be a lie or the product of some delusion. They don’t need any evidence of this, because to their thinking it must be the case. Such people are trapped in their own hall of mirrors, and for them there is no escape. They can never know whether they are wrong, even when they are. No evidence, no logic, no reason will ever get through to them.

  When we combine this troubling fact with the observation that their religion, like every other, appears tailor-made to justify their own culture-bound desires and personal vanities—as if every God is made in man’s image, not the other way around—then we already have grounds for suspicion. The fact that the Christian idea of God has constantly changed to suit our cultural and historical circumstances, and is often constructed to be impervious to logic or doubt, is reason enough to step back and ask ourselves whether we’re on the wrong track with the Christian worldview. And the fact that Christianity is identical in all these respects to other religions—like Hinduism or Islam, which every Christian must agree are false faiths yet are nevertheless just as firmly believed, on essentially the same force of evidence, and defended with essentially the same excuses—should finally shake anyone out of their complacency and compel them to ask whether they, too, are as blind as all those other people with false religions. But anyone who is not thus shaken will be incapable of ever knowing who is wrong...is it those people, or themselves?

  This essay will never convince Christians who have locked themselves inside a box of blind faith like this. But for other Christians out there who actually have an open mind, a good summary of my reasons for rejecting Christianity will help show why I am not a deluded liar, but in fact an honest and reasonable man coming to an honest and reasonable decision. What follows is not meant to be a thorough exploration of every nuance and problem, nor an exhaustive account of all the arguments and evidence. Rather, it’s a mere summary of the four most important reasons I am not a Christian. This is only the beginning of the story, not the whole of it. That’s what my benefactor asked for: a simple but well-written explanation of why I am not a Christian.

  If you need more, if you want to see how I got here from close and extensive study of the relevant facts, both historical and philosophical, then I have a large body of work out there for you to explore. Start with my books Sense and Goodness without God (2005) and Not the Impossible Faith (2009), and my chapters in John Loftus’ book The End of Christianity (2011). My work on the historical evidence of Jesus’ resurrection appears in Loftus’ earlier book The Christian Delusion (2010) and Lowder & Price’s book The Empty Tomb: Jesus Beyond the Grave (2005). More can be found through my website: richardcarrier.info.

  For the present book I shall assume that C.S. Lewis was correct when he said “mere Christianity” consisted in the belief that “there is one God” who “is quite definitely good or righteous,” “who takes sides, who loves love and hates hatred, who wants us to behave in one way and not in another,” and who “invented and made the universe.” But this God also “thinks that a great many things have gone wrong” with the world and thus “insists, and insists very loudly, on our putting them right again,” and to this end he arranged the death and resurrection of “His only Son,” Jesus Christ, who is (or embodies or represents) the Creator, and can alone “save” us from “eternal death” if we now ask this Jesus to forgive our sins. That’s as quoted and paraphrased from his aptly titled (and very popular) tract Mere Christianity.

  If this is what Christianity is (and most Christians appear to believe so), then there are four reasons why I do not believe a word of it. And all four would have to be answered with a clear preponderance of evidence before I would ever change
my mind. I’m serious about this, too. If all four points are ever refuted with solid, objective evidence, then any other quibbles I have beyond these four would not stop me from declaring faith in Christ. For surely any other problem I or anyone might find with the Christian worldview could easily be solved from within the faith itself—if it weren’t for the following four facts. So to those we now turn.

  God is Silent

  If God wants something from me, he would tell me. He wouldn’t leave someone else to do this, as if an infinite being were short on time. And he would certainly not leave fallible, sinful humans to deliver an endless plethora of confused and contradictory messages. God would deliver the message himself, directly, to each and every one of us, and with such clarity as the most brilliant being in the universe could accomplish. We would all hear him out and shout “Eureka!” So obvious and well-demonstrated would his message be. It would be spoken to each of us in exactly those terms we each would understand. And we would all agree on what that message was. Even if we rejected it, we would all at least admit to each other, “Yes, that’s what this God fellow told me.” I came to this conclusion on my own, from obvious common sense, but it has been thoroughly demonstrated by renowned philosophers as well: see J.L. Schellenberg’s Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason (1993) as well as Ted Drange’s Nonbelief and Evil (1998) and Nicholas Everitt’s The Non-Existence of God (2003).

  Excuses don’t fly. The Christian proposes that a supremely powerful being exists who wants us to set things right, and therefore doesn’t want us to get things even more wrong. This is certainly an intelligible hypothesis, which predicts there should be no more confusion about which religion or doctrine is true than there is about the fundamentals of medicine, engineering, physics, chemistry, or even meteorology. It should be indisputably clear what God wants us to do, and what he doesn’t want us to do. Any disputes that might still arise about that would be as easily and decisively resolved as any dispute between two doctors, chemists, or engineers as to the right course to follow in curing a patient, identifying a chemical, or designing a bridge. Yet this is not what we observe. Instead, we observe exactly the opposite: unresolvable disagreement and confusion. That is clearly a failed prediction. A failed prediction means a false theory. Therefore, Christianity is false.

  Typically, Christians try to make excuses for God that “protect our free will.” Either the human will is more powerful than the will of God, and therefore can actually block his words from being heard despite all his best and mighty efforts, or God cares more about our free choice not to hear him than about saving our souls, and so God himself “chooses” to be silent. Of course, there is no independent evidence of either this remarkable human power to thwart God or this peculiar desire in God, and so this is a completely ad hoc theory: something just “made up” out of thin air in order to rescue the actual theory that continually fails to fit the evidence. But for reasons I’ll explore in a later chapter, such “added elements” are never worthy of belief unless independently confirmed: you have to know they are true. You can’t just “claim” they are true. Truth is not invented. It can only be discovered. Otherwise, Christianity is just a hypothesis that has yet to find sufficient confirmation in actual evidence. And no such hypothesis should be believed in, until that required evidence appears.

  Be that as it may. Though “maybe, therefore probably” is not a logical way to arrive at any belief, let’s assume the Christian can somehow “prove” (with objective evidence everyone can agree is relevant and true) that we have this power or God has this desire. Even on that presumption, there are unsolvable problems with this “additional” hypothesis. Right from the start, it fails to explain why believers disagree. The fact that believers can’t agree on the content of God’s message or desires also refutes the theory that he wants us to be clear on these things. This failed prediction cannot be explained away by any appeal to free will—for these people have chosen to hear God, and not only to hear him, but to accept Jesus Christ as the shepherd of their very soul. So no one can claim these people chose not to hear God. Therefore, either God is telling them different things, or there is no Christian God. Those are the only options left. Yet if there is a God who is deliberately sowing confusion, this contradicts what Christianity predicts to be God’s desire, which entails Christianity is the wrong religion. And if God isn’t telling his willing believers different things, then he isn’t telling them anything, which also contradicts what Christianity predicts to be God’s desire, which also entails Christianity is the wrong religion. So either way, Christianity is false.

  So this excuse doesn’t work. It fails to predict what we actually observe. You might still insist “I hear God!” But do you? How is your “inner voice of God” any more God’s actual voice than a Muslim’s or a Hindu’s or a Catholic’s or a Mormon’s or a Luheran’s or a Calvinist’s? Or anyone else’s? God is either sowing confusion (or allowing it to be sowed), and therefore in no way the Christian God, or none of you are hearing God, but just your own inner voice, which you have mistaken for God’s (and if they all make this mistake, so can you). Which the Christian God would never in good conscience allow. So again, there can be no Christian God.

  You can’t escape this by claiming we have to persuade ourselves that God exists before we can hear him, for that’s the very method of self-delusion that produces this result: universal disagreement and confusion over what God is actually saying. God would never require you to deploy a method “to know him” that demonstrably leads everyone else into error, because he would know that you would know (or would someday discover) that this proves such a method is wholly unreliable. A loving God would demand instead a method actually capable of distinguishing the true God from false. Which means if this self-persuasion is the only method you know, then there is no God who cares whether you get it right, but only a method of deluding yourself into believing there is—the very same method by which everyone else (Muslim, Hindu, Moonie, Mormon, Calvinist) is as deluded as you.

  That follows just from observing the confusion and disagreement of willing believers. But even considering atheists like me, this ad hoc excuse for God’s silence still fails to save Christianity from the evidence. When I doubted the Big Bang theory, I voiced the reasons for my doubts but continued to pursue the evidence, frequently speaking with several physicists who were “believers.” Eventually, they presented all the logic and evidence in terms I understood, and I realized I was wrong: the Big Bang theory is well-supported by the evidence and is at present the best explanation of all the facts by far. Did these physicists violate my free will? Certainly not. I chose to pursue the truth and hear them out. So, too, I and countless others have chosen to give God a fair hearing—if only he would speak. I would listen to him even now, at this very moment. Yet he remains silent. Therefore, it cannot be claimed that I am “choosing” not to hear him. And therefore, the fact that he still does not speak refutes the hypothesis. Nothing about free will can save the theory here. Christianity is simply refuted by the plain facts.

  Even when we might actually credit free will with resisting God’s voice—like the occasional irrational atheist, or the stubbornly mistaken theist—Christianity is still not compatible with the premise that God would not or could not overcome this resistance. Essential to the Christian hypothesis, as C.S. Lewis says, is the proposition that God is “quite definitely good” and “loves love and hates hatred.” Unless these statements are completely meaningless, they entail that God would behave like anyone else who is “quite definitely good” and “loves love and hates hatred.” And such people don’t give up on someone until their resistance becomes intolerable—until then, they will readily violate someone’s free will to save them, because they know darned well it’s the right thing to do. God would do the same. He would not let the choice of a fallible, imperfect being thwart his own good will.

  I know this for a fact. Back in my days as a flight-deck firefighter, when our ship’s helicopter was on r
escue missions, we had to stand around in our gear in case of a crash. There was usually very little to do, so we told stories. One I heard was about a rescue swimmer. She had to pull a family out of the water from a capsized boat, but by the time the chopper got there, it appeared everyone had drowned except the mother, who was for that reason shedding her life vest and trying to drown herself. The swimmer dove in to rescue her, but the woman kicked and screamed and yelled to let her die. She even gave the swimmer a whopping black eye. But the swimmer said to hell with that, I’m bringing you in! And she did, enduring her curses and blows all the way.

  Later, it turned out that one of the victim’s children, her daughter, had survived. She had drifted pretty far from the wreck, but the rescue team pulled her out, and the woman who had beaten the crap out of her rescuer apologized and thanked the swimmer for saving her against her will. Everyone in my group agreed the rescue swimmer had done the right thing, and we all would have done the same—because that is what a loving, caring being does. It follows that if God is a loving being, he will do no less for us. In the real world, kind people don’t act like some stubborn, pouting God who abandons the drowning simply because they don’t want to be helped. They act like this rescue swimmer. They act like us.

  So we can be certain God would make sure he told everyone, directly, what his message was. Everyone would then know what God had told them. They can still reject it all they want, and God can leave them alone. Their free will remains. But there would never be, in any possible Christian universe, any confusion or doubt as to what God’s message was. And if we had questions, God himself would answer them—just like the Big Bang physicists who were so patient with me. Indeed, the very fact that God gave the same message and answers to everyone would be nearly insurmountable proof that Christianity was true. Provided we had no reason to suspect God of lying to all of us, Christianity would be as certain as the law of gravity or the color of the sky. That is what the Christian hypothesis entails we should observe—for it is what a good and loving God would do, who wanted us all to set right what has gone wrong. And since this is not what we observe, but in fact the exact opposite, the evidence quite soundly refutes Christianity.