Truth
AskWhy! Atoms and Icons 4
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Tuesday, 12 November 2002
Sources
In chapter 4, Fuller is still keeping up his pretence that theology and science have something in common, and so can co-exist amicably and even work together. A lamb and a wolf have a great deal in common but co-existence and mutual co-operation seems quite unlikely, except in fairy tales. Fairy tales are what Christians believe. Christianity and Satanism have immense amounts in common. On the Fuller argument, they should be finding ways of co-operating.
Fuller now turns to the sources used by theology and science. His complete unreality emerges clearly here. The sources of each are comparable. Science makes observations on the physical world. Does theology make observations, then, on the spiritual world? No! They have to find something to observe in the real world too, but plainly it cannot be God or angels, so it is the Word of God! Not only that but theologians and clergymen have been doing the same for 2000 years and so there is a large body collected of their own observations on the bible and each other. They are like mad gardeners taking it in turns in digging the same small patch and wondering why nothing grows there.
Instead theologians like Fuller go and pinch someone else’s cabbages, but they still don’t understand them, and can do nothing with them. Traditional theologians eschew all this and stick to their bible, a weed that God planted one night when nobody was looking. Now it is their study and they dissect it assiduously because it is God’s revelation of His will to them.
It seems strange that God who is omniscient and omnipotent does not think it worthwhile assessing the revelations He has given in the past. He must be certain of them because Christians are sure He has not sought to reveal Himself since. The Moslems disagree about this. Mohammed came from God with a fresh revelation to keep people on their toes. They have decided however that God called it a day with Mohammed’s revelation. The Jews accept a lot of revelations but they all happened before the Christian one. Indeed, the last one was at the time of Ezra, a Persian official in the fifth century BC.
The trouble with revelation is that once it has happened no one who believes it will accept another. Some people however get fed up with the old revelation and become inclined to accept a new one, so when a prophet of it arrives, they hail him. Since those loyal to the old revelation refuse to accept the new prophet, a new religion has to be started. It shows that revelation is arbitrary, as everything to do with religion is. The greatest objection to Christianity, that Christians cannot answer and simply call a mystery of God, is that God who is omniscient, omnipotent and almighty could communicate with us clearly and continuously, if He really existed in some sense and wanted to do it. The fact that He does not refutes one or other of these assumptions about God. Sensibly, it refutes God all together.
All this mass of evidence that Christians say they have but cannot explain is personal. Yet, it does not suffice for Christians to say that God has revealed Himself to them personally. It can convince no other sensible person, and the fact that the sheep are convinced says something about them not the skeptics. To claim that God has revealed Himself also says more about the one who makes the claim than about God. What distinguishes such a claim from megalomania? The safer diagnosis of anyone making such a claim would be magalomania.
They key question in any such case is why God, since He has the power, Christians say, does not reveal Himself to everyone. The almighty being supposedly loves everyone and wants to save them, who knows what from, but He does, we are told. Why then doesn’t He do it properly? Why is God so shy? Why does He not demonstrate His omnipotence? An early criticism of Christianity was that it was not universal. In the Christian myth, all men are fallen, so the salvific nostrum should be a universal one. And the Christian God could tell everyone in His sleep—after all, He created the universe. He does not!
Those who are saved are self-selected. Mobs are self-selected too. Self-selected groups of people are inclined to hysteria. Self-selected groups are also inclined to be self-righteous. They do what they do with self-righteous justification. Christians are the most self-righteous of all. The select themselves because they are self-righteous. The truth of these statements is demonstrated by the history of Christianity. This is objective Christianity, not the subjective, personal delusions that each of them has. It is the result of these self-delusions. Personal revelation is the source of it.
The Bible
Desperate to find some source for theological meanderings, Fuller claims examination of the bible is it. It is a source of “comparable richness and variety” to the whole wide world, which is the source of the natural sciences. It is hard to think of any statement put forward ernestly that could be more deluded. It simply defies comprehension. Fuller even recognises that some of the books bound together in this compilation are not what they seem, like Daniel which is meant to be set and therefore written 400 years before scholars know it was. Such a descrepancy makes prophecy of events in the intervening years easy and accurate. Even so they are often wrong.
What is the modern value of books of sacrificial rituals and tariffs meant to serve a greedy priesthood, now thankfully defunct, but whose talents for self-aggrandisement have been passed on to Christian bishops, preachers and theologians? What is the value of ancient apocalypses, written by people who were so oppressed and badly treated that they looked forward to the world ending. Some modern Christians read them and believe them as God’s Word even though they are the least oppressed people alive. They want to oppress the rest of us. What is the modern value of a long, faulty and tendentious history of the Jewish monarchy meant to show up the people as disobedient to God so as to force them to be obedient to the king?
A character called king David is still believed by millions if not billions to have been the founder of the biblical kingdoms, but there are few historians today who think so. The evidence is that Omri was, a man hardly mentioned in the bible. What value are lists of ancient laws now utterly outdated but still believed to be the laws of God by many Christians even though they contrive simultaneously to believe that their younger God has abrogated them? What is the point of believing that God has given us in perpetuity primitive and wrong myths of origin? Finally who but vacantly uncritical people can accept the contradictory accounts of the foundational miracles of Christianity in the second part of God’s holy Word? This rag-bag of unreliable fairy tales is for Fuller “an incredibly rich and diverse source of centuries old wisdom”. Frankly nobody sane could write such tripe. There could be no better example of what Dostoevsky must have meant.
So, what is Fuller’s excuse for seeming to be insane. These books are not to be read literally. They are poetic. Books of temple sacrifices and books of ancient laws are poetic now. No one denies that such a rag-bag contains poetry, quite a lot of it, but what should be particularly holy about poetry. Poetry is likely to be less true because it is poetic than prose. Fuller says it is poetic that God made the world in six days, and was never intended to reflect geology. This conclusion is forced onto these ingrates by the discoveries of scientists. Before Hutton, Lyell and Agassiz everyone believed the biblical myth. Now no one does except some extreme Christian fundamentalists. Now it is rejected by everyone sensible, but when will Christians reject the rest of the rubbish in the so-called holy Word? Indeed, what is the abnormal psychology they have that makes them need to believe a lot of impossible things?
Was it poetic then that Adam lived in a garden and ate an apple? If it was as poetic as the six days of creation, it was not true at all. What then is the need for an atoning sacrifice of an incarnated God? Was the 5000 meter deep flood poetic? Were Abraham, Isaac and Jacob all poetic? Was Moses and the exodus? Was Joshua and the conquest? Were David and Solomon and their mighty unlikely empire poetic? Was it poetic that a people, famous for having a law, had to have laws read out to them by a Persian official called Ezra? Is it poetic or merely contradictory that the man sent as God incarnate should have abrogated the Jewish law but simultaneously urged that every minute point of it should be obeyed?
It might be that all of these stories should be interpreted allegorically, but Christian theologians until Fuller, if that is his view, have rejected such an idea. They have anchored themselves firmly in the historicity of the Word. Historical it is not, but what good are allegories? Their interpretation is entirely arbitrary, doubtless fine for theologians—it gives them a purpose—but unlikely to convince anyone with a head on their necks. How does anyone falsify an allegorical interpretation?
An Evolving God?
Fuller himself highlights the different portrayals of God in the Jewish scriptures. He is not monotheistic. He is not omniscient. He is often a national not a universal God. He is a murderous and genocidal God. He accepts human sacrifice. He is present with His people continuously in the mythical parts, then goes away. He cannot be looked upon but nevertheless He is looked upon “face to face”. He is anthropomorphic and walks in gardens. He rides on clouds as His chariot. He lives in a box. He lives in a house. He is angry and jealous, then kind and finally loving—indeed, He is love. Do Christians actually know what they believe?
Historically, Yehouah was initially a Canaanite sky and storm god, one of the sons of the high god, El. Then a big change was made when the Persians took over Canaan and sent in several batches of colonists to set up a fiscal state to collect tithes and promote worship of a universal god. They set up the temple state of Yehud and lo! Old Yehouah became a god similar in characteristics to the Persian god, Ahuramazda. When the Maccabees set up an independent Jewish state, for the first time in history, the made Yehouah into the national God of the Jews. Finally, the Christians purloined the Jewish scriptures and the Jewish God and made Him into a god of love.
A scientist, looking at this, simply sees the god evolving according to the circumstances, particularly who owns Him. After the closure of the New Testament canon, God evolved even further, taking on aspects of Platonism, first from Gnosticism, then from the neo-Platonists. Finally, He became a trinity. This evolution of the god of the Jews and the Christians is entirely contrary to any idea of God being absolute, and is entirely in line with god being a human construct. Christians cannot see it or will not accept it. The very exercise of theology denies that God is any sort of absolute. Theologians change His nature to fit the circumstances. The point of Fuller’s book is to suggest ways in which theologians can imagine that God is somehow reconciled with the scientific age. God is whatever the theologians declare He is. Meanwhile for simple Christians, God is still what they were taught in Sunday school. Theologians cannot stray too far from that without their flock straying off to more traditional churches.
The stubbornness of Christians in the face of evidence is legendary, and is the central reason why Christianity is incompatible with science. Fuller discusses monasticism, for example, which he says may be traced back to the early Christians who were known as the “Desert Fathers”, but, peculiarly, included women. Fuller lists their characteristics as:
- living according to a rule,
- sexual chastity,
- renuciation of possessions,
- regular and frequent worship of God,
- manual labour,
- obedience to a superior.
S Antony (c 286 AD) is always given as the first of them even though it is freely admitted that monks lived in the desert before him! Who then were these pre-Christian desert monks? The list of characteristics that Fuller gives identifies them plainly as Essenes or their Egyption equivalents, the Therapeutae, of whom some were women. With the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, any doubt about the identity of these desert monks should have been dispelled, but no Christian will accept historic conclusions contrary to their beliefs unless they are explicitly engraved by God in stone tablets.
These Essenes lived in the same areas, under identical conditions but about 200 years before Antony had his calling to emulate them. The evidence that some Essenes evolved into Christians is so strong now, even though it is circumstantial, that it is perverse to deny it. Christians do so because of their dogmatic insistence that Christianity began with one man only sent as a revelation by God. Frequently we have to ask the Christians why God choses to reveal himself in a way that allows it to be confused with what already exists. No scientist could accept such idiocy. The simple non-supernatural explanation is that Christians are a type of Essene.
Some Essenes and their lay followers accepted a particular leader called, by the Christians, Jesus Christ, as being a revelation from God. Others did not accept it, and stuck to their traditions. The outcome was a new religion which at first had the same basic world view as the original Essenes, modified only by the special nature of their dead leader. These schismatics eventually varied from the original by being subject to the gentile influences of the wider empire.
The local sects of Essene and Christian monks must have lived scarcely distinguishable existences for years. The original Essenism lost its morale and sense of purpose with the failure of the Bar Kosiba revolt and dispersed, leaving only the Christians, though even they, by now, were regarded by the gentile Christians as odd, if not heretical. The Ebionites and Nazarenes who were remnants of the original followers of Jesus were considered heretical, while the more monkish desert fathers, being like the Qumran sectaries, were regarded as odd but acceptable. Christians do not want to learn more about these times and try to test the hypotheses that seem so likely. They are blissful to be ignorant, but any scientist would be looking for definitive evidence—if the Christian obfuscators have left any.
Fuller considers “seeking after God” in different fashions—one of which is living like these Desert Fathers—is a useful pursuit which gives insights that theologians can use. Today, the psychological effects of starvation and self-denial are also known, but not by Christians who insist that the hallucinations that are induced are visions of God. The very thing that induced Popper to derive his criterion of falsification was that beliefs like this, astrology and psychiatry could find a way of explaining anything and everything that needed an explanation. Popper taught us that falsifiability was the criterion to distinguish foolishness from good sense. Can any theologian offer any testable hypothesis that will convince us that they are not deluded? No one would want to argue that living an ascetic lifestyle has no merits, but no one should pretend or delude themselves that doing it is somehow “seeking after God”.
Fuller turns to reason as a tool of theology, regrettably one not used enough or the theologians would find something more useful to do. His first reasonable statement is to say that the physical world tells us something about God, quoting Psalms again:
The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.Psalms 19:1
What this tells us is that the psalmist considered his god to be a sky god. The glory of God is the sun. This is not a bit of abstract poetry praising the transcendental God via the natural world, it is praising God directly. It is doubtless the Persian God, Ahuramazda, who wore the heavens as a cloak. Fuller seemed happy to describe an evolving God, but no thologian ever tries to find the roots of the Christian God in Zoroastrianism, yet that is where they are. Christianity is barely even a heresy of Zoroastrianism, the two religions are so close in their essential concepts. The main difference is that Zoroastrianism is more coherent.
Fuller admits that the bible “is far from unambiguous, and can bear many interpretations”. What then are the criteria of interpretation? How does the Christian know what is the right one? Christians add humour to imbicility by saying the holy ghost tells them, but it is curious that the holy ghost always tells them whatever is scientifically least likely. Christians like to think the bible is historic, but even though much of it cannot be, the Christian will not use the external evidence that shows it to be mythical. In almost every particular that can be raised, Christianity simply cannot overlap with science. Either Christianity is false or science is.
Evil
Fuller has heard that the problem of evil in the world means the Christian concept of God is wrong. If God permits evil in the world, it must be because He does not know about it, so He is not omniscient. Or, He knows, but can do nothing about it, so He is not omnipotent. Or He has created it Himself, as the bible says, so He is not perfectly good. He treats this in an annex to the chapter in which he says it is most often put to him as an obstacle to belief.
One answer is that there is some sort of balance over time of good and evil, the good ultimately prevailing. This is the Zoroastrian answer. Good and evil spirits are struggling over time. Good ultimately prevails, so God, the good God, is not the god of evil. The evil spirit of Zoroastrianism appears in Christianity as Satan, or the Devil. In Christianity, though, God is responsible for evil, because He is omnipotent, and the evil spirit is nothing worse than a fallen angel, that God could squash like a fly. Christianity therefore makes God not perfectly good, and makes the religion incoherent because God cannot apparently simply squash the evil spirit, Satan, and put an end to evil, even though He is all powerful.
The problem for theologians is why He does not do it, whence the points made here. That it takes Him a while, really means that God is not omnipotent, because His power is limited to a slow application over time. More important is that the ultimate victory of God is no comfort to those who have already suffered and died. Why should God be pussy-footing around? Mind you, the Zoroastrian answer is that there will be an eschaton when everyone who is righteous will be resurrected into a perfect world forever. This is the proper Christian belief.
The moral imperative in Zoroastrianism was to choose the side of right or wrong in the cosmic fight against evil. History was the history of the cosmic struggle, which could notionally still be lost if enough people were not good. This is altogether more coherent than Christianity, but would put the theologians out of a job—it is too simple and intuitional. People can understand it, even if it is untrue. That is why most Christians do not believe the theologians and the clergymen but stick to Satan as God’s real and powerful opponent.
Free-Will
The next possibility Fuller considers is the one attributed to S Augustine. Again it has its origin in Zoroastrianism. Augustine was once a Manichee, a Zoroastrian hybrid religion, that came directly from Persia. In Zoroastrianism, humans have to choose between truth and the Lie—good and evil to us—thus taking sides in the cosmic battle. (There must be something significant in Christians always preferring to pick the Lie.) Augustine, in the same way, placed the onus for good and evil on to humanity where it scientifically belongs. People choose it themselves. Humanity has free-will. Those who choose evil, in Augustine’s view brought evil into the world.
There is little doubt in the Gathas of Zoroaster, that this was what the Iranian prophet was getting at. He let people believe that there were good and evil spirits objectively in the world, but they did not choose people, people chose them. His message was to his disciples: “You choose. The consequences are your own!” The problem remains of suffering caused by natural causes like flood or famine. Zoroastrianism could blame them on the wicked spirit whose aim was to cause suffering, so it was everyone’s duty to weaken him as much as possible by refusing to win him small battles.
Do Christians, incidentally ever consider where all those military metaphors come from in a religion of love? Put on the armour of light, fight the good fight, and the salvation army do not suit a religion of love, but they do suit a religion based on a cosmic battle of good and evil. They come from Zoroastrianism, via Mithraism.
Is the Augustine answer valid, though, in Christianity? Free-will seems to settle it, but if humans choose the evil route, then God has still created evil, and cannot therfore be perfectly good—or is not absolutely good. Christians do not want to believe that God is evil even in the smallest degree. He must be absolutely good. He could not therefore have allowed free-will in which evil was an option.
He could have allowed us free-will in which choosing evil was not an option. You might argue that evil has to be an option otherwise will is not free, and that might be so, but who would have been any the wiser. Evil would not have come into the world, and so would not have even seemed as if it were an option. We just would not have known, the world would have been free of evil, people would have been choosing among the non-evil options left, and life will have been free of suffering under a perfectly good God. S Augustine therefore did not come up with the explanation, unless lying is something that God is unable to do. That means that truth is a greater force in the universe than God, because even God—to be good—must be truthful. It does not bode well for all the Christian liars.
A Limited God?
Fuller’s final excuse is to admit that God is indeed not omnipotent. He cannot prevent suffering because He cannot prevent what is logically impossible. That is a limit to His power. A survey of US Christians showed that a third of them thought God could do anything, even logically impossible things. God was indeed omnipotent. Fuller, however, wants to relieve God, or really the theologians, of this problem. God is not all powerful, and part of the reason is that He has given people free-will, meaning that they can do as they like and God had relinquished any power over their choices.
That might be so, but according to Part I of the holy Word, when His Chosen People made the wrong choices, He freely punished them in awful and terrifying ways. God treats humans who exercise their free-will like a man who beats his dog for barking. Worse than that, He has personally laid aside a world of boiling sulphur to punish those who exercise their free-will to chose whatever He does not like by giving them eternal life to be roasted forever. What sort of free-will has he really granted people? What sort of God wants to do anything so perverse?
Not the Christian God, Fuller will say, because God is love, and love is weakness. A God who choses to be crucified is proof of it. God chose to suffer on the cross, so He too has suffered like humanity. He suffers every time someone rejects Him in favour of Buddhism or ecstatic dancing. He is therefore not omnipotent and suffering is not a thing He can prevent. It follows there is no practical purpose in praying for suffering in the world to stop because God cannot do it. The good must be satisfied with a reward in heaven, and must just grin and bear it here on earth. “Pie in the sky!” is the resurrected motto, just as it once was. Only for the good, though. God will still get His revenge on those who took Him at His word and made independent choices. Perhaps the theologians can explain why we could not have foregone the free-will in exchange for all of us finsihing up in the balmy place. Free-will, my eye!
Returning to the theme of “reason”, Fuller considers and rejects the pantheistic idea that God is Nature. It seems theologians have not favoured it because God could not have created Himself, and because it makes a lie out of transcendence. Well, transcendence is a lie anyway, if words are to have meanings at all. The universe is everything there is, but transcendence places something outside it. It is one of those logical restrictions that even God cannot ignore. As for Gods creating themselves, they used to do it all the time but apparently the theologians no longer like it. It is merely a question of fads and fancies. It is no longer fashionable, so it cannot be considered. Go on! Be a devil! Consider it!
Why then cannot God have been self-created? He is still a male so creation it must be—the heavenly potter—but had He been a She then it could have been self-birth. Since Fuller is trying to find parallels with science, it nicely parallels the Big Bang. As for trnascendence, once God is self-created, what need is there for transcendence? The answer is that it is an old dogma the Christians are not willing to ditch. Fuller thinks he is being radical but he is not being radical enough, if he wants to achieve his goal.
The biblical myths could be completely excised, or, at least put into an appendix called, “Unhelpful Myths—Optional”, rather like the Apocrypha. Then a coherent religion could be put together, using scientific discoveries. Inevitably, it would cause schism and the religion would finish up a new one rejected by those attached to their old incoherent one.
Fuller justifies transcendence as the basis of the “otherness” of God, but what is this? Either it just means the same as transcendence, and the argument is circular, or it refers to the sense described as “otherness” reported by mystics. If deity was the natural universe, and a mystical experience was a sense of it in its grandeur, why would that not be a sense of otherness? The otherness is relative to the person experiencing it. Adelphiasophism accounts for it adequately, and that is pantheistic. Panentheism is a cop-out. It boils down to what Christians believe. It is nothing new.
Order
The stories in Genesis are not true but simply declare in a fairy tale way that God is the creator. Yet, the apparent design in Nature is not evidence of a designer—the Argument from Design—but is caused by evolution. The modern theologian, wanting a theology compatible with science, has to concur that the method used by God in His creative works is evolution. Order is rather different. Fuller comes out with the vacuous Christian large-number apology to introduce the Anthropic Principle. Then he continues it in an annex to the chapter.
Fuller has earlier removed omnipotence from God. Even God could not do some things because the nature of the universe precludes them, even for God. If God has made the universe, then He has made one that is not fully within His control, an odd thing for an almighty to do. If God was not almighty, He was Himself subject to constraints in putting the universe together. God Himself is subject to some even more fundamental rules, and these are “Order”. Christians are not usually willing to accept any such thing, but, if they are ready to accept Fuller’s idea that God is not omnipotent, then this could be the reason.
Earlier philosophers or theologians were willing to consider this, and some, such as the Stoics, considered that “Order” was really God, but not a conscious God such as the Christians like. It was more like what we would now call the basic structure of space-time. There is no conscious God, but, if one has to be conceived to suit the Christians, then He too has to be subject to the the fundamental logic of the universe—its “Order”. The Greek word taken to mean the universe actually embodies this idea of order in it. The origins of the idea seems again to have been Zoroastrianism, or less probnably, the Indo-European religion that it came from.
Since consciousness is an advanced and complicated state that is therefore extremely unlikely to come by chance, it must have evolved, but the Christian notion is that this highly unlikely being existed in the beginning. An unconscious order seems more feasible, and fits science better.
The Anthropic Priniciple states that this is the only possible world for intelligence to evolve in. Physics has identified a number of fundamental constants that fix the nature of the universe precisely. Physicists can work out the consequences of physical processes essential to the evolution of life, and even slight clanges make it impossible—the universe does not live long enough, or elements cannot be made in the stars, and so on. Christians like to conclude that the universe was made the way it is by God designing it so that humanity could evolve in it.
The central point, though, is that, if the universe were not suitable, no one could be remarking on it. In other words, there is nothing remarkable in that fish live in water. No water, no fish. There is nothing remarkable that we have evolved in the universe we are in. It is the equivalent of the water for the fish! Without it being here as it is, we should not be observing it. Life can only live where it can, and if other universes—that are or might have been—are unsuitable, life cannot arise in them.
To return to the favourite large number argument of the Christians, Fuller cites an astonishingly large number as the odds against the universe being as it is. It comes from the theoretical physicist, Roger Penrose, but Fuller does not want to trouble his flock with any details. It is merely a “basis for thinking the universe might not have come about purely by chance”, a modest statement, it seems, but intended to conjure the idea in the heads of the gullible that only God could be behind it, even though the chances of God arising by chance beforehand are notionally even less.
Supposing universes were being thrown up spontaneously, however—like the decay of radioactive atoms—what is to stop ours from eventually emerging however large the odds against it might be? Does Fuller know of a limit that his God has imposed on the number of possible universes? There could already have been countless numbers before ours. There might have been so many that there might have been countless numbers that have been suitable for life, however unlikely it might seem from Christian magic numbers. Christians like to boast of their infinite God, but they never stop to consider what infinity might imply in nature. It dispenses with the need for God.
