Cold Case Christianity For Kids, mother and daughter team review – Chapter Four, part 2

My ten-year-old daughter and I, both atheists, are teaming up to review J. Warner Wallace’s children’s apologetics book ‘Cold Case Christianity For Kids’. Links to all posts in the series are collected at the end of this introductory post.

In the first part of this chapter, we had some stuff about witnesses and how to assess their reliability, and Jeffries asked the cadets to apply these principles to the ‘witnesses mentioned in the Gospels’, conveniently ignoring the fact that the only information we have on ‘the witnesses mentioned in the Gospels’ are some reports, from unknown people, an unknown number of decades later, telling us that some people (the reports don’t always entirely agree on which people) witnessed the events reported, with no information on how these reports were verified or passed on to others. In a situation like that, not only have we got no chance of assessing the reliability of the witnesses, but it’s a moot point as we also have no idea how much their reports might have been changed/embroidered/misremembered in the process of being passed from one person to another prior to being written down.

Sadly, no trained skeptics are there to point any of this out, so Jeffries gets to go on making his approach sound like thorough and appropriate investigation.

Jason, as instructed, starts to work through the list of questions Jeffries has given them for assessing witness reliability, starting with ‘Were they actually there?’. Jeffries tells them they should ‘use our detective minds again’, which, as always, means ‘go along with Jeffries’ leading questions’. Back to the skateboard investigation as an example; in this case, an example of how to draw unwarranted conclusions about when something was written while making it sound as though the evidence backs you up. Here’s how it works:

If Daniel had written a report on the skateboard investigation yesterday, argues Jeffries, it wouldn’t have included the information he got from his sister or the shop owner today. (Today? When did they have time? I thought they went to the Bible class police cadet academy straight after school. Oh, well, maybe it’s a school holiday.) Therefore, Jeffries would have been able to tell it was written yesterday purely from the fact that those things were omitted.

If you’re looking at an official report meant to include all known details, this is probably fairly reasonable (of course, in that case the report would also be dated and it would be a moot point, but that’s by-the-by here). However, what Wallace/Jeffries is trying to do here is to extrapolate this to accounts that aren’t that official. Sorry, but you can’t work on the assumption that the only possible reason why anyone wouldn’t include X in an account is that it hadn’t yet happened at the time of writing.

Thus: Because Acts doesn’t include the destruction of Jerusalem (70 AD) or the deaths of Peter, Paul, and James (supposedly from 61 – 64AD, although Wallace doesn’t explain how Jeffries thinks he knows the dates of death of Peter and Paul, since all we have on those are late legends; I suppose we might know when James died, since that famously gets mentioned in Josephus), Jeffries argues that Acts was written before 61 and thus the gospel of Luke was written even earlier than that. QED.

I’m not an expert, but I do know that there is a general consensus in Biblical scholarship that the gospel of Luke is thought to have been written around 80 AD at the earliest. (There is a lot of uncertainty around the dating of all of the gospels, but this is thought to have been the earliest likely date for Luke.) This, it is worth noting, is despite a heavy preponderance of conservative Christian scholars in the field of Bible studies, who would love to be able to date the gospels as early as possible and would be delighted with evidence supporting an earlier rather than a later date. I don’t know the details of how Biblical scholars reached the conclusion that the gospel of Luke had been written in the 80s AD or later, but I’m willing to bet that the answer is not “Because we never thought of this point about Luke not including those events! This changes everything! Thank you, Wallace, for coming up with this!”

But… even if Wallace/Jeffries is right here, how much would that help? We’d still be looking at this gospel being written potentially as much as a quarter-century later, which is enough time for a lot of embroidering of a story to happen as it passes from one person to another. But Jeffries doesn’t see that as a problem, because…

“[…]This gospel was written early, while people who really knew Jesus were still alive. If the Gospels contained lies, the people who knew Jesus would have spotted them. It’s hard to fool people who were there and knew the truth.”

….because of the ‘Disciples As Perfect Proof-Checkers’ fallacy. (That isn’t an official name for it, by the way; I just came up with that one. Has a good ring to it, though.)

This fallacy is a common one; the idea that inaccuracies or legends couldn’t have been written into the gospels while the original witnesses were still alive because they’d have called the gospel-writers out on it. It sounds superficially persuasive, until you start looking at the assumptions required here:

  • That the church founders would even have heard or read the gospels. That becomes a heck of a large assumption when you figure in that we don’t know where the original gospels were written; that by that time, Paul and others had travelled around setting up some pretty far-flung communities of believers, in an age where travel was difficult and uncommon, especially amongst the poor; that we don’t know whether these gospels were being read aloud regularly to their communities, or whether the church founders could themselves read; and that it’s now recognised that the gospels were written in Greek while Jesus’s original followers would have spoken Aramaic as their native tongue.
  • That the gospel authors would, if called out on errors, be happy to correct their works.
  • That it would, at that point, be possible to retrieve and rewrite all copies that had so far been written. (Remember that none of this was being done via formal publishing. If a copy of your work had gone off to a far-distant community, then the only way to change that would be to send or take the corrected copy yourself and hope the community would be willing to make the switch.)

“Let’s face it,” I said to Katie, “Luke wasn’t going to rewrite his gospel just because someone pointed out there was a mistake in it.”

Katie immediately spotted the relevance to our current project. “Like, I’ve spotted a lot of flaws in the story already, and so have you, as we both know. But that doesn’t mean this guy is going to rewrite the whole thing, does it?”

Of course, it’s not an exact parallel; the disciples and other witnesses to the events around Jesus’s life should, in theory, been able to speak about their situation with more authority than I daresay Wallace would consider we held on his opinions. But still… how likely is it that Luke would have been willing to, say, arrange for the ending of all existing copies of his gospel to be rewritten just because some guy turned up at the church meeting claiming to be a disciple and saying “No, actually, that bit about Jesus sharing our food never happened”?

Cold Case Christianity For Kids, mother and daughter team review – Chapter Four, part 1

My ten-year-old daughter and I, both atheists, are teaming up to review J. Warner Wallace’s children’s apologetics book ‘Cold Case Christianity For Kids’. Links to all posts in the series are collected at the end of this introductory post.

Chapter 4: Test Your Witnesses: Don’t Get Fooled by Your Witnesses!

Chapter Four! Six months after I started this, we are actually onto Chapter Four! Storming along here! It felt pretty exciting to slide that Kindle page across, I can tell you. And, hey! We may have solved the skateboard mystery! I know you must be all on the edges of your seats.

Daniel has a sister called Lacey who is ten years older than him, which immediately makes me wonder what the backstory to that one was. Large family? Fertility difficulties? Accidental late pregnancy? Whatever the reason, it means that Lacey might have been at their school at the right time to have known the skateboard owner. Daniel realises this and asks her, and she was! And she thinks she can remember him! That’s impressive – I sure as hell wouldn’t remember seeing a particular skateboard with a particular person, ten years later. Or ten minutes later, for that matter, so probably it’s just that I’m not very observant about skateboards, but… seriously, would someone remember this? Oh, well, maybe Lacey loves skateboards and so it stuck with her.

Anyway, Lacey tells Daniel that she thinks the owner was a boy called Lincoln Singleton, who was three years older than her, moved away about five years ago, and always wore what I initially read as ‘blackboard shorts’ but was actually ‘black board shorts’. Which was not much less confusing to me as I’d never heard of board shorts, but my daughter figured out they must be something you wear to go skateboarding, which sounds logical. Daniel and Insert Character go back to the skateboard shop (‘back’ because they went there in the last chapter; it was so boring I don’t think I bothered writing about it) and the owner thinks he remembers seeing a boy who fits Lacey’s description.

But! We have a discrepancy! Lacey remembers this boy as being very tall, but the shop owner doesn’t! Fear not, readers; when they report back to Jeffries, he assures them that eyewitnesses never agree entirely. He also points out a logical answer for the discrepancy here; a boy who looks very tall to a short child three years younger than him is not necessarily going to look tall to an adult. More generally, of course, the point is that we don’t expect eyewitnesses to agree on every point.

You know where this is leading, don’t you? If your answer was “To an assurance that it’s quite all right that the gospel writers disagree with one another” then well done; you are quite correct. We get another of those grey insert boxes, reiterating the point about witnesses disagreeing and then giving us this gem:

So, when you see that two gospels describe something in a slightly different way, don’t panic.

Because, of course, panicking is exactly what a child is going to do when seeing a contradiction in the gospels. Thank goodness we have Wallace to reassure us, is all I can say.

Meanwhile, before we get to discussing the gospels, Jeffries lists four questions we need to ask to find out whether a witness can be trusted.

“The first question,” Katie declared, “is if they are evil. Because if they are evil, I don’t think they can be trusted!” Not a bad question, actually, but the actual four questions were:

  1. Were they actually there?
  2. Can we verify what they say in some way?
  3. Have they changed their story over time?
  4. Do they have some reason to lie?

I’m looking forward to seeing what Jeffries has to say about the gospels as far as those last two items are concerned. I’m also curious as to whether this is based on any sort of official list of police or legal guidelines, or whether Wallace made it up. It does seem to be missing a couple of important points; how accurate were the witness’s observations in the first place (i.e., was this event something they spotted in passing and had a vague impression of, or did they check lots of details, or what) and how well does the witness remember them (including the question of how long a time period elapsed between the event and the witness’s report)?

There is a brief discussion of the two witnesses of the elusive Lincoln Singleton, in which Jeffries and the cadets agree that it is fair to conclude that these reports of memories of something unimportant to the witnesses that they saw approximately ten years ago can indeed be counted as trustworthy. It’s at times like this that I feel really reassured as to the quality of the investigative efforts going on in the US police forces.

Back to ‘the case for Jesus’; Jeffries apparently asked Jason to do some research last week, and Jason read the gospels. (All of them? That’s pretty impressive, especially for a child to manage in one week’s worth of spare time.)

“I read the four Gospels and I see there are places where the stories don’t seem to be entirely the same. But now that I understand what eyewitnesses are like, I guess that’s not all that surprising.”

I wonder what he thought about the places where they’re entirely different? Or the places where one of them mentions something so amazing (a man being raised from the dead after four days, a nationwide darkness with the dead rising out of their graves and walking) that you’d expect all four gospels to put that one in, and yet none of the rest do?

Jeffries, of course, agrees with Jason, and then says:

“Now let’s ask our four questions to see if the witnesses mentioned in the Gospels pass the test.[…]”

…except that we have absolutely no direct reports from any of the ‘witnesses mentioned in the Gospels’. (In fact, when it comes to the resurrection accounts the Gospels can’t even agree on who exactly the witnesses were.)

So this situation is simply not equivalent to assessing the validity of a witness statement. All we know here is that four (unknown) people have reported that various people witnessed Jesus do various things, including getting killed and turning up again a day and a half later, and that one of them (Luke) assured his readers that he has ‘carefully investigated everything from the beginning‘ (Luke 1:3) but without giving us any further details of what reports he received from whom, what measures he took to check their accuracy, and what ‘carefully investigated’ actually means to him here in terms of how much care, and more importantly how much impartiality and analytical thought, he brought to the investigation. With this sort of knowledge base, asking these kinds of questions about the witnesses’ trustworthiness is meaningless.

This seems like a good place to split this chapter. Back soon with more!

 

Cold Case Christianity For Kids, mother and daughter team review – Chapter Three, part 3

My daughter and I, both atheists, are teaming up to review J. Warner Wallace’s children’s apologetics book ‘Cold Case Christianity For Kids’. All posts in the series are collected at the end of this post.

Quick recap: This is the chapter in which Wallace presents his evidence for the existence of his God. In the first part of my review of this chapter, I discussed at some length the problems with the lack of direct evidence for God and how this lack is actually strong evidence against the Biblical god. In the second part, I wrote some not-very-consequential stuff about Jeffries’ drawings, and Katie invented potato-worship. In this part, I hope to actually answer the points put forward. We can dream…

The rest of the chapter consists of Jeffries going over the evidence for God’s existence, which he divides into four categories:

  1. The need for a First Cause
  2. Fine-tuning
  3. DNA
  4. The moral argument.

Here are my thoughts on each of those (I don’t have much from Katie; she was still focused on potatoes).

 

1. First Cause argument

“First, we’re in a universe that began to exist, just like we talked about before. What made it begin? Whatever it is, it would have to be something outside of space, time, and matter. We know that God fits that description.”

This… is about as logical as saying “We need an explanation for crop circles. Whatever created them would have to be something with great technological abilities. We know that aliens fit that description, so this counts as evidence for the existence of aliens.”

You can’t demonstrate the existence of a hypothetical being by simply declaring that it could have been responsible for such-and-such. If you want to go down that road, you have to demonstrate that this being was either the only thing that could have caused such-and-such, or, at the very least, that it was significantly more probable than any other possible options. I’m going to add here that Wallace is a police officer; I assume he knows full well that you can’t prove someone committed a crime purely by saying that they could have done it, and still less can you solve an unsolved case simply by hypothesising the existence of someone who could potentially have done it.

Wallace may of course have meant to argue that there are no other possible causes for the universe. If that’s what he was getting at, however, it’s on him to show that this is the case.

 

2. Fine-tuning

“Next, scientists tell us that the universe is incredibly fine-tuned for the existence of life.[…]”

Whoa there, cowboy. For years I was reading apologetic books assuring me that one reason I should believe in God was the utter unlikelihood of life having developed on this planet without someone to create it, and now suddenly an apologist is trying to tell me that the universe is incredibly fine-tuned for life? Get your stories straight here, guys.

The fine-tuning argument, for anyone who hasn’t previously run across it, is based on the finding that various physical constants of the universe (gravitational force, electromagnetic force, strong atomic force, weak atomic force) all need to fall within a very narrow range in order for a) the universe to continue to exist at all, and b) stars and the different kinds of atoms to come into being. All these constants do in fact fall within the necessary ranges (as you can probably deduce from the fact of our existence), and apologists will often use the odds against this to argue that it’s incredibly unlikely that our universe could have come into being without being deliberately designed and created.

Various problems with this argument have been raised. The main one, from what I’ve read, is that a couple of other well-established theories in physics seem to point to the likelihood that our universe is actually part of a multiverse containing unlimited numbers of ‘pocket universes’ with infinitely varied physical laws. However big the odds against any one universe having a workable combination of physical constants, in a multiverse with infinite pockets there are going to be universes that hit the sweet spot.

(Some versions of the fine-tuning argument also include claims about the incredible improbability of finding the correct planetary conditions to support life. The flaw in this one is hopefully even more obvious; this universe contains colossally vast numbers of stars and planets, so it really isn’t that unlikely that at least one of that mind-boggling number of planets happens to have a combination of qualities suitable to allow the development of life.)

Scientists have no idea why this is the case,

That, as per the links I included above, is just flat-out false. Scientists do indeed have ideas as to why this is the case. They have an entire detailed theory – the multiverse, as briefly described above and described in more detail in the above link – as to why this is the case. You may of course disagree with the ideas/theories they have and want to argue against them in some way, but denying that those ideas and theories even exist is not accurate.

unless of course, the universe was designed for a purpose: to be the home for human beings like you and me.

The second part of that quote does not follow logically from the first half.

Let’s, for a moment, suppose that the fine-tuning argument was absolutely correct. Let’s suppose that the reason why our universe has physical constants that fall so precisely within the ranges they do was because it was deliberately designed this way by a god who wanted a universe that would last for billions of years and contain multiple different forms of atoms which would be able, eventually, to develop into solar systems. It… would also still be a universe in which it took hundreds of millennia to form the first atoms, nine billion years to form our planet, and over four billion years more to get to the point where humans developed.

A god who would deliberately design a universe in such a way is not a god who appears to be showing any particular interest in humans whatsoever. While it’s very natural that we want to think of ourselves as being the primary focus and concern of a divine being – his reason for having created the entire universe, no less! – this belief is not something that can be backed up by what we observe in the universe around us. Even if the fine-tuning argument is correct and this universe was designed for a purpose, it does not look as though this purpose has anything whatsoever to do with ‘human beings like you and me’.

 

3. DNA

Scientists also see signs of design in biology.

Er, no. Scientists see signs of evolution in biology. A small minority of scientists – usually those with pre-existing religious ideas regarding the existence of design – do believe there are signs of design there, but it’s very misleading to talk as though scientists as an overall group were looking at what they could see in biology and saying “Wow; signs of design there”.

Your body is incredibly designed

A flaw in one of the genes that code for Vitamin C, putting us at risk of scurvy when we don’t get enough Vitamin C in our diet and hence causing the suffering of countless people who could have easily synthesised the vitamin they needed if only that gene was working correctly.

A blind spot in our vision due to retinas that face the other way from what even basic common sense would suggest.

Incompatibilities in head and pelvis shapes that not only make childbirth horrendously painful for women, but have led to millions of babies and mothers over the centuries dying in childbirth or suffering severe lifelong injury.

The human body is indeed incredible. I’m a doctor; I’ve learned a great deal about just how incredible it is. But it also has important flaws that provide very good evidence that we were not designed by a loving God aiming to get everything just right for us.

and you even have information in your body called ‘DNA.’

THAT FULL STOP SHOULD BE OUTSIDE THOSE QUOTES. Ahem. Just saying.

(Edited to add: In fact, it seems Wallace is in the clear on this one; I hadn’t realised that the US and UK not only have different spelling, but different punctuation rules as well. Thanks, brucegee, for the heads-up.)

Anyway, Jeffries goes on to explain to them that DNA is ‘an instruction manual for your body’, and tells us:

It contains more information than all the books in your school library, and information is a sure sign of intelligence.

No, it isn’t. To take an example that Wallace will be familiar with from his own working life; sometimes police officers will get called out to a death that turns out, on inspection, to have been due to natural causes. In those situations, the police officers will collect information from things like what position the body is in when it’s found and whether there are any signs of injuries. The information they get from these signs wasn’t put there by an intelligent being; if it’s a death from natural causes, then things like the position of the body also happen due to natural causes. It’s still information.

(To pre-empt a possible objection; Yes, in this example it takes intelligence to decipher the information. There are other situations where that isn’t true; for example, one-celled creatures can respond to different food sources in their environment, so they’re clearly detecting some type of information from the food sources and processing it in some kind of automatic chemical reaction that can take place without intelligence being required. More importantly, however, this wasn’t Wallace’s analogy here. He isn’t trying to argue that your cells are intelligent because they can read and act on the information in your DNA; he’s trying to argue that only an intelligent source can put any information there in the first place.)

We get another of Wallace’s grey insert boxes, this one giving us an unusually narrow definition of the term ‘information’: ‘A series of symbols, objects, or letters that describe a specific idea or request’. None of the dictionary definitions I looked up included a requirement for information to be expressed as ‘a series of symbols, objects, or letters’ in order to meet the definition, so Wallace seems to have manufactured a definition that fits with the belief he wants to get across.

Back to the skateboard, this time so that Jeffries can show the cadets the words ‘Made in USA’ printed on the base of the board as an example of information that couldn’t have got there by chance. Of course that information couldn’t; it’s expressed in a specific human language using a code (the written word) worked out by humans. Wallace seems to think that the coded groups of nucleotides in DNA that specify particular amino acids in proteins are analogous to this, as though the cellular machinery that manufactures proteins had to learn and check code books in order to do so.

Needless to say, that’s not actually how it happens; in fact, transcription of the DNA code is mediated by complex molecules of what’s known as ‘transfer RNA’, each of which links to a specific group of three nucleotides at one end and a specific amino acid at the other, meaning that, as the tRNA molecules link on to the chain of nucleotides, the amino acids carried by each of them will line up in a specific order. (It’s more complicated than that, involving messenger RNA and ribosomes just for starters, but that’ll do for purposes of this post.)

Of course, apologists will often then argue that this system is so complicated it can’t possibly have come about just by evolution, even given millions of years to develop (alternatively, a subset of apologists known as young-earth creationists will try to argue that our planet has only been here for a few thousand years and thus this system can’t have had millions of years to develop, despite truly colossal amounts of evidence to the contrary). However, this argument runs into the usual two problems:

  1. If you want to use this as an argument for the existence of a divine creator, you first have to prove that there is simply no way at all that this could have happened through natural causes. In other words, not just handwaving and talking about how it’s all just too complicated, but coming up with every possible pathway that could have led to the development of this system through natural causes, demonstrating why every single one of them couldn’t work, and demonstrating that there is no possibility that there might be another pathway that we just haven’t thought of yet. So, good luck with that one, guys.
  2. Even if you were to manage to do that, coming up with proofs so watertight they could survive being poked and prodded by the minds of the collective world of biology and biochemistry, you would still run up against the problem I mentioned above; that all you would have done would be to prove the existence of some type of divine creator, not the particular type of divine creator with a deep interest in and love for humans.

 

4. The moral argument

At this point, it’s mentioned that ‘some [of the cadets] look like they are ready to head out for the day’. Yes, I’ll bet they are by now. Jeffries gestures to them to keep paying attention and brings up the example of stealing being wrong:

“[…]Where does that kind of moral truth come from? Is it just a matter of opinion? Does it come from the state where we live?”

He gets them to conclude that stealing wouldn’t be OK even if there weren’t a law against it, and then gives them what is known in the logic trade as a false dichotomy:

“All right then,” continues Jeffries, “the truth about stealing seems to come from something other than my personal opinion or the state where I work. It’s bigger than all of us. God is also bigger than all of us, so God is the better explanation for the source of truth about stealing.”

…and, if you take the trouble to think about it instead of opting straight for ‘God did it’, our ability to empathise with others is a still better explanation, which Jeffries is completely ignoring.

Katie had wound down somewhat by now on the subject of potatoes, so I asked her what she thought about this argument. She was exceedingly unimpressed with it.

“Well, it’s kind of obvious,” she told me. “What if you’d just bought something for £50? If someone else steals it, that’s like £50 that’s been given to someone without their permission.”

I asked her why she thought this would be a problem. “Because it’s just like you’ve worked hard for that and they’ve done nothing to get it. It’s not nice at all.” I pushed her a little further, curious as to whether she’d be able to put any form of the ‘we wouldn’t like it if someone did it to us’ argument into words. “Basically I’m not happy about it because that makes no sense. It’s not my personal opinion that it’s wrong to steal. You literally just agreed with it! Either I’m missing something or these people are idiots!”

Jeffries, meanwhile, has finished his argument and his diagram and sums up, assuring the cadets that as long as you put only the most minimal effort possible into searching for other options clearly ‘God is the best explanation for all this evidence’.

“And science is the best explanation for all this other evidence,” Katie told me. “And the best explanation for all this evidence which makes sense for it is THE POTATO. BOW DOWN BEFORE THE POTATO! HE IS THE LORD AND SAVIOUR OF THIS WOOOORRRRRLLLLLLD!”

The chapter ends, we’re told, with the cadets looking around at one another and considering what Jeffries has just said. (“Did they think it was silly?” Katie asked me. I like to think that they were wondering when the hell they’d get to the bit of the course where they got to learn about fingerprinting.)

And that, dear readers, is not only the end of this chapter and of this probably excessively long blog post, but also of the bit Katie and I read together last October when we started this! Whoopee! We have finally caught up! It is no doubt a sad comment on my life to admit that I’m excited about moving on to the next chapter after all this time. I’ve been a lot more in my stride with blogging these past few months, so I’m hoping that getting through subsequent chapters won’t take nearly as long (for what that’s worth). We’ve already read the first part of the next chapter last night and I’ll start writing it up as soon as I can.

Cold Case Christianity For Kids, mother and daughter team review – Chapter Three, part 2

My daughter and I, both atheists, are teaming up to review J. Warner Wallace’s apologetics book ‘Cold Case Christianity For Kids’. All posts in the series are collected here.

 

Jeffries is about to explain the indirect evidence for the existence of God. Which he illustrates with diagrams. This cues a joke about ‘Better to be an artist than a con artist!’ which Wallace seems to have written so that he can put in one of his little grey inset boxes with the question ‘Some people think the disciples of Jesus were con artists, but is this a reasonable conclusion?’ No, Wallace, I do not think they had any good motivation to try a con that would have put their lives on the line and I do agree they believed what they were saying about the risen Jesus, but that does not mean they were right.

“You know,” Katie said thoughtfully of Jeffries “I think he might be a con artist, because he’s trying to trick them into being Christians.”

I…. couldn’t actually counter that. As previously mentioned, one probably unintentional effect of Wallace’s writing format for this book is that Jeffries is in effect presented as running a fairly blatant Christian evangelising class disguised as a police cadet class. I don’t think Wallace deliberately meant it that way – I think he’d probably be quite shocked if he heard it described that way – but that still is what the description in his book comes down to, and it’s really not OK.

Anyway, Jeffries assures the cadets ‘”This won’t be difficult to sketch out”‘ and proceeds to draw a line of falling dominoes (to indicate First Cause), which sounded quite difficult to sketch out as far as I was concerned. Katie, the family artist, assured me that for someone who was good at art it wouldn’t be that difficult, but pointed out that drawing it on a whiteboard, as Jeffries was, would be pretty difficult; whiteboards are hard to draw on. Jeffries goes on to illustrate his other points with pictures of a designer’s compass, a DNA molecule, a – you have got to be kidding me – a microscope, and two Ten Commandments-style stone tablets, so, excuse me, but I do not really buy this “This won’t be difficult to sketch out” line. #overthinkingit #seriouslysidetracked

Ahem. The indirect evidence? Ah, yes. Back to Jeffries’ speech:

“First, we’re in a universe that began to exist, just like we talked about before. What made it begin?

“A potato,” Katie suggested.

Whatever it is, it would have to be something outside of space, time, and matter. We know that God fits that description.”

“No, no, no, it’s a potato. But it’s a very lonely potato, so it made a whole universe so it can have friends.”

Jeffries draws a set of falling dominoes on the board….

HAIL THE POTATO! IT’S THE REASON YOU’RE HERE TODAY! BOW DOWN! BOW DOWN! BE FRIENDS WITH POTATO! I’TS WHY YOU WERE CREATED!!!!!!!

HE IS THE LORD AND SAVIOR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

BOW DOWN!!!

…all of which was actually typed by Katie, who grabbed the computer from me to type about her new religion of potato-worship. I clearly wasn’t going to get much insightful conversation about the book that evening.

Having thus covered nothing whatsoever of use in this post, I shall end it here and move on to – I hope – actually answering some of the points properly in my next post.

Cold Case Christianity For Kids, mother and daughter team review – Chapter Three, part 1

My daughter and I, both atheists, are teaming up to review children’s apologetics book Cold Case Christianity For Kids, by J. Warner Wallace. The introduction to the series is here; posts in the series are being linked up there as I go along.

 

We’re on to Chapter 3! The full title of this one is ‘Think Circumstantially: Examine an Important Kind of Evidence!’ (exclamation mark Wallace’s). It begins with the reader’s insert-character clearly influenced by the classes;

During the week, you find yourself thinking “big” thoughts – thoughts about God and whether He is real.

Though not ‘about Gods and whether They are real’, I notice. Logically, the possibility that multiple divine beings exist should be one we consider just as seriously as the possibility that one specific divine being exists (however seriously that is). But apologetics books will frame these questions as being solely about whether their God exists; other possibilities are left unexamined. (For simplicity’s sake, I’ll continue to use the term ‘God’ throughout the rest of this post.)

You wonder if Jeffries might be able to help answer your questions,

Now, wherever did you get that idea?

but when you meet the following Tuesday, he’s more interested in the skateboard.

You’re missing your chance, Jeffries!

Anyway, the bit about the skateboard doesn’t actually move the skateboard investigation any further forward. (Of course it doesn’t; we’re only on Chapter 3 of an eight-chapter book and this skateboard investigation is obviously going to have to last us the full book. I’m guessing we’ll have a Big Reveal in the final chapter?) This particular skateboard investigation section is used to illustrate the difference between witness evidence, which is known as ‘direct evidence’, and indirect or circumstantial evidence (such as the evidence the cadets used last week to figure out the skateboard was old). Jeffries gives the example of a colleague who came in with drops of water on her hair and clothes, thus providing him with indirect evidence that it’s raining. (“She’s just had a shower. It’s sunny outside,” Katie quipped.) All this is, as usual, setting things up for the religious topic of discussion this week, which is – as you may have gathered from the chapter beginning – the does-God-exist question.

You speak up: “Can we talk a little more about the Jesus case? I was thinking about God and miracles this week. […]”

It’s a little ironic that Wallace starts this character’s query off with a request to talk about ‘the Jesus case’, because, in fact, this chapter isn’t going to mention Jesus at all; it’s going to be a general chapter about whether to believe in ‘God’. The particular God under discussion is of course the one broadly described in Judeo-Christian-Islamic monotheism rather than any other possible concepts of deities, but there’s no specific mention of Jesus, as as such. I don’t think Wallace could see past his own religion here to notice that theism and Christianity aren’t actually synonymous.

Jeffries is, of course, delighted to be asked this, and assures them:

“This is a perfect example for this week’s lesson. Indirect evidence can be powerful, and we do have indirect evidence for God. A lot of it, actually.”

I didn’t notice this on my read-through with Katie, but this raises a very interesting point. Is there a reason that Wallace/Jeffries feels he can’t offer direct evidence for God?

What would such evidence look like? We’ve just been told that direct evidence is the testimony of a witness, so, in this context, direct evidence would be the testimony of someone who has actually witnessed God in some way. There are, of course, plenty of people who believe that God has spoken to them, so it’s interesting that Wallace/Jeffries doesn’t offer this here as an example of direct evidence. I don’t know, of course, why Wallace made this choice; but I wonder if possibly he recognises that these claims are actually very poor quality evidence when properly examined. These supposed communications from God

  • typically feel very similar to our own internal experiences and thoughts (compare this to our experience of seeing, hearing, or otherwise sensing things around us; we experience those sensations as coming to us from external sources)
  • are often flat-out contradictory in terms of what different people interpret as being God’s message to them.

The claims of communications received from God actually look like what we’d expect if people were very good at imagining that a divine being was communicating with them. And that’s fairly poor evidence.

There’s a point here so obvious it frequently tends to get overlooked; namely, that it is of course perfectly possible to communicate with human beings in such a way that we can clearly sense these communications as coming from external to ourselves. This describes all the communications that we, as humans, have with one another. When someone speaks to you, or you read a note that they’ve left you, or a book that they’ve written, or a comment they left on the Internet… then you’re not normally in any doubt about the fact that you’re receiving a communication from someone who actually exists. Most of the people reading this have never met me, but I’m guessing you’re not in any doubt that the words you’re reading were written by a real person.

So… suppose that a divine being actually did communicate with us in such a way that we experienced the communications as clearly coming from some external source. (This could be the traditional Voice booming out or letters of fire in the sky, but it could just as plausibly be via an extra sense other than the five we know about. All I’m hypothesising here is that we would clearly experience this communication as coming from a source external to our own minds, just as we do when someone speaks to us or we read something they’ve written.) If that were so… well, Wallace wouldn’t have needed to write this chapter in the first place, because everybody would believe in this god already.

While believers sometimes complain that atheists would just refuse to believe no matter what evidence was offered, in actual fact people generally do believe the evidence of their own senses. It’s also worth noting that there are many people who desperately wish they could get this sort of communication from God – they feel abandoned by God, or alone, or on the brink of losing their belief, or don’t believe and would very much like to – who would find it wonderfully comforting and satisfying to have such definite communications. Which means the next question needs to be why, given the benefits of communicating universally with humans in such a clear-cut way, a god would choose not to do so?

Well, there are a couple of fairly obvious possible reasons:

  • A god might have some kind of limitation in ability rendering him/her unable to communicate with us that clearly.
  • A god might have no interest in communicating with us. It’s a big old universe, and quite possibly even a multiverse; while we quite naturally tend to think of ourselves as the most important beings in it, it’s not hard to hypothesise that a divine being might have no interest in us whatsoever and have created the universe for completely different reasons.

So our lack of direct and clearcut communication from a god certainly doesn’t automatically equate to the non-existence of any god.

However, the problem here is that Wallace isn’t trying to argue for the existence of any god. He’s trying to argue for the existence of his God; the particular divine being described in the Bible. This God’s salient features, as described, most certainly do include a) vast abilities that do indeed include the ability to communicate with any willing individual (and arguably with unwilling ones, but I’ll keep it as willing individuals for simplicity) and b) a strong desire for every single person on earth to get to know Him.

It therefore makes no sense whatsoever that, if the God described in the Bible really exists, he would not communicate with humans in such a clearcut way. He has the ability; he has the motive. He has devoted followers who are, in at least some cases, begging him to do so; some of those followers will lose a previously strongly-held faith when they get no answer. The fact that we don’t get any such clearcut communications is, therefore, compelling evidence that the specific God described in the Bible does not exist.

Jeffries believes he has indirect evidence for the existence of (a) God. It will hopefully not be too much of a spoiler at this point if I tell you that I was not very impressed by the evidence, but that’s a subject for another post. The thing is… even if Jeffries had compelling indirect evidence for the existence of a divine being, the very fact that he can’t offer direct evidence is actually strong evidence against the existence of the particular god he wants to demonstrate.

Cold Case Christianity For Kids, mother and daughter team review – Chapter Two, Part Four

My nine-year-old daughter* and I, both atheists, are teaming up to review children’s apologetics book Cold Case Christianity For Kids, by J. Warner Wallace. The introduction to the series is here; posts in the series are being linked up there as I go along.

 

*She is in fact now 10. She was 9 when we sat down to review this chapter. One of these days I’ll catch up with myself, although I hope I manage it before she turns 11.

 

(This is a longer post; we were getting close to the end of the chapter and finishing it all in one lot seemed simpler at this point than breaking the narrative yet again.)

At somewhere around this point in the narrative, according to my notes, Katie and I seem to have diverged into a brief aside about what Jesus’s death is meant to be about in Christian narrative; the belief that we’re all sinners who can’t get into Heaven and thus Jesus had to die in payment for our sins. I can’t remember how we got onto this, but remember being interested to see what she’d make of it, as it’s a theology I’ve always found quite horrifying. Katie, as it happened, focused on another detail entirely; she didn’t see why death was necessary according to this theory.

“But wouldn’t it be really, really painful?” she asked me, referring to Jesus’s death. “And wouldn’t the pain be the payment? I mean, supposing you got shot in the face for everyone’s sins – even if you survived it, wouldn’t it be really painful being shot in the face? Wouldn’t that be the payment?”

Good point. I can’t remember how I answered it. Anyway, we got back to the story.

To recap, Jeffries had been steering the cadets through the line of apologetic argument that consists of listing possible explanations for why the disciples went round preaching the resurrection to everyone, finding objections to every explanation other than ‘Jesus really did rise from the dead’, and then declaring that, since that’s the only explanation that we haven’t refuted, it must be the correct one. Katie had neatly spotted the key flaw in this; that miraculous resurrection is unlikely enough that, even if reasons make all the other explanations highly unlikely, we are still not going to be left with a situation where miraculous resurrection becomes the most likely. The cadets/Jeffries had the following list:

  1. Jesus didn’t really die – He fainted, woke up, and walked away.
  2. The disciples were so upset about Jesus dying that they imagined they saw Him alive.
  3. The disciples stole the body of Jesus and lied about the resurrection.
  4. The story of the resurrection was added on many years later as the story of Jesus became a legendary fairy tale.
  5. Jesus rose from the dead.

…and had got as far as refuting point 1, though not to Katie’s satisfaction. On with the story; since only three cadets ever seem to get to say anything in this class, it’s Hannah’s turn to refuting the next point.

Hannah wants to mark off one more: “I don’t think they imagined it either. We read that five hundred people all saw Jesus at the same time and in the same way. They could not all imagine the exact same thing.”

So, hang on; did she and Daniel also read 1 Corinthians? That’s an odd thing for children tasked with researching the resurrection to decide to read; the gospels, yes, but there would be no reason for them to realise that this particular letter had any information in it. Of course, what’s more plausible here is that she and Daniel just read an apologist’s work on the subject. If so, that would also explain both why Daniel’s knowledge of the resurrection evidence seemed to be helpfully structured in the form of a minimal facts list rather than referring to specific gospel references, and also why Hannah erroneously thinks that the report of the appearance to the five hundred has them all seeing Jesus ‘at the same time and in the same way’, which in fact isn’t stated in the appearance report at all.

Jeffries, having apparently not heard of the Fátima miracle, agrees that there is “no such thing as a ‘group dream’ or ‘group hallucination'”. No, but there’s such a thing as religious fervour stirring large groups up into a state of mass hysteria.

Jason speaks up now: “But couldn’t the disciples have lied about it? Or maybe somebody else lied about it years later and added the story of the resurrection to the legend of Jesus?”

“Aha!” declares Jeffries. “That’s where the fourth piece of evidence comes in. The disciples were willing to die for what they claimed about the resurrection. Awfully hard to understand unless they were telling the truth. Who would die for something they know is a lie?”

I initially thought Jason’s question was a response to Hannah’s point about the report of five hundred people seeing Jesus; that he was trying to point out that we don’t know whether five hundred people actually did see Jesus, or whether rumour and exaggeration added this particular claim on to an already-existing resurrection belief some years later. As such, it’s a perfectly valid point, and one that someone should have made, but on rereading it I realised this bit was actually meant to refer to points 3 and 4 on the original list; it seems no-one is going to take any issue with taking the one-off report of five hundred people seeing the risen Jesus at face value. Jeffries also tells us that points 3 and 4 have other problems which they’ll have to talk about later as they’re almost out of time, so I guess we’ll hear more about them in subsequent chapters.

Katie, meanwhile, was busy thinking of other possible explanations the cadets might have missed; Theft And Fraud By Persons Unknown was apparently next on her list, closely followed by Alternative Supernatural. “What if the guy who stole him decided to pretend to be him? To put his clothes on and make wounds in his hands to look like him? For the praise? Because he saw all the praise Jesus was getting and wanted some? Let’s say your best friend dies and you see someone who looks like him. You see some slight differences, but do you think you care? You’d be like ‘You’re alive, you’re alive, you’re alive!’ And if this reincarnation stuff is true, how do you know ghosts aren’t? He floats up to heaven, he gets absorbed into God – he’s a ghost! Oh, my god, I’m coming up with twenty different explanations!”

I asked her if she wanted to hear my thoughts on what they were saying, and she agreed she did. I explained about the Bible not, in fact, saying that all the five hundred people who were supposed to have seen Jesus saw him ‘in the same way’ – we don’t have any details at all on what they thought they saw. I also explained that I’d read one historian saying that grave robberies were common in those days.

“Well, that makes sense,” Katie said. This is, I pointed out to her, a disturbing thing to hear from your child in response to information about people stealing bodies from graves; to my relief, it turned out that this was because she’d learned about grave robbing when studying Ancient Egypt last year. She agreed that this could account for a missing body. (It wouldn’t on its own account for the claims of resurrection appearances – I still think the most likely explanation is that these started as grief hallucinations and went on to some kind of religious fervour-induced mass hysteria experience – but that’s a bit complicated for a child and, as it was late and Katie wasn’t seeming desperately interested in getting more details, I don’t think I went into that at that point.)

Back to the book; Jason admits that the empty tomb is harder to explain away than he thought, but when Jeffries asks him “Explanation #5, that Jesus rose from the dead, seems to be the simplest explanation, doesn’t it?” Jason replies “Maybe, but I’m still not sure.” Good answer, Jason; this side of the story sounds convincing when it’s all you’ve heard, but it’s a great idea to find out more about the other side of a story before you make your mind up. (Yes, I know my headcanon is that Jason is secretly an evangelical Christian plant placed in the group to steer the conversation to religious issues. If he is a skeptic, though, good on him for not falling for the first superficially convincing argument he hears.) Chapter ends.

Katie, two chapters in, declared herself unimpressed with the arguments so far. “I’ve been able to disarm every single thing they throw at me,” she said, “so, unless they’re stepping up their game… I’m thinking that they’re probably not going to be able to convince me.”

Cold Case Christianity For Kids, mother and daughter team review – Chapter Two, Part Three

My nine-year-old daughter* and I, both atheists, are teaming up to review children’s apologetics book Cold Case Christianity For Kids, by J. Warner Wallace. The introduction to the series is here; posts in the series are being linked up there as I go along.

 

*She is in fact now 10. She was 9 when we sat down to review this chapter. One of these days I’ll catch up with myself, although I hope I manage it before she turns 11.

 

When we left our intrepid cadets, they had just been writing a list of possible explanations for the resurrection story. For those who don’t recognise it, Wallace is here using a line of argument used fairly commonly among apologists, which goes like this:

  1. Make out a list of several purported explanations for the resurrection story, including the possibility, merely mentioned as one theory among several at this stage, that the whole thing is true and Jesus really rose from the dead.
  2. Go through each point on the list apart from the ‘Jesus actually rose from the dead’ suggestions and point out all the reasons not to believe it happened.
  3. Conclude that since the only remaining not-disproved explanation is that Jesus did really rise from the dead, this must be the reason, and therefore the resurrection has been proved. QED.

By the way, for anyone interested in an discussion and takedown of the points normally covered in this line of argument I would recommend Richard Carrier’s extremely detailed and comprehensive essay Why I Don’t Buy The Resurrection Story, which goes through the arguments in vastly more detail than I’m going to be able to manage here. Anyway, my last post covered the part that dealt with stage 1 – writing the list of explanations – and the chapter was now moving on to stage 2 of the argument.

I asked Katie what she thought. (As I said before, I wish I’d done that before reading her the list of suggested explanations the book gives; it would have been interesting to hear what a child of this age who wasn’t a fictional mouthpiece for Christian apologetics might come up with of her own accord. As it was, I asked what she thought of the list.)

“I think the possibilities are,” Katie told me, “1. that they imagined him alive – but, since he apparently touched them, that doesn’t make sense unless they were all crazy people on drugs or something. So, I think the most likely thing is that he just fainted. I mean, why do you die on the cross anyway? Do you just die from having nails through your hands?”

I briefly explained the causes. “So… blood loss and lack of oxygen. Wouldn’t that cause someone to faint?” Katie mused. “And when you faint, you look a bit dead and a bit asleep.”

Which, I suppose, does at least answer my longstanding inner question of ‘Swoon Theory? Who the hell believes in Swoon Theory anyway these days?’, which is what I always think when I read these arguments. My nine-year-old daughter under the influence of a Christian apologetics book that was meant to have the reverse effect on her, that’s who. (Seriously, though… could I just point out that every time I remember ever reading this argument, the List Of Possible Explanations has included, and nearly always started with, Swoon Theory – and yet, in years and years of checking every counter-apologetics work I could find in any of the major or minor libraries I frequented during this time, which included a lot of libraries, I can’t remember ever seeing a single counter-apologist actually put this forward as an explanation. So, strawman much?)

Anyway, back to the story, which is now in the second stage of the argument; offering refutations for all the non-‘rose-from-dead’ explanations. Daniel votes against Swoon Theory. For purposes of narrative convenience, he apparently knows the facts that Wallace needs someone to put forward in order to refute this one; he tells the others that crucifixion was a ‘long, terrible way to die’ and that Roman soldiers were experts in checking that their victims were really dead, so he sees no chance that Jesus could have survived this process and done so undetected. (The narrative does not go into how a nineish-year-old happened to know so much about crucifixion).

Katie was unswayed by this argument. “Uh-uh,” she told me firmly. “You know about this stuff. Do you think there’s any chance he could live?”

Despite not actually being a proponent of Swoon Theory myself (personally, I go for Hallucination with a heavy coating of Legend, but that’s a post for another day), I had to answer ‘Yes’ to this one. Fluke survivals of significant trauma happen (especially when you consider that Jesus’s crucifixion seems to have been considerably shorter than the usual). And, while I’ve no doubt the Roman soldiers were good by the standards of their time at checking for signs of life, that’s still relative; ‘the standards of their time’ would have been less rigorous than the standards now. Undetected survival of a crucifixion would have been massively rare, but… any chance? I had to say yes.

“So there you go,” Katie agreed. “There’s a chance he could live. A doctor says that, and you’re very wise.” (Can I just add: Hooray! After all these years, finally one of my children thinks I’m actually wise!)

“And besides,” Katie mused, her thoughts off and running, “these people think he’s magical, so couldn’t we stretch the truth a tiny bit? And the Roman soldiers – maybe there are a group of them who feel bad for this guy, and they’re the ones who check whether he’s really dead. And they say “OK, let’s set him free” because they don’t want him to die. And maybe they’re the ones who open up his tomb.”

I was proud of her for thinking of possible explanations, but an apologist could probably pick half-a-dozen holes in that one, and I didn’t want to leave her with conclusions formed on shaky arguments. “Hang on. That explanation sounds like it’s getting complicated…”

“Still,” Katie declared, homing in on the main weakness of this particular line of apologetic argument more accurately at nine than I’d previously managed at twice that age, “we’re not looking for the simplest explanation. We’re looking for the most likely to be correct. So that one,” she waved vaguely at my computer to indicate the ‘Jesus rose from the dead’ explanation, “is the most simple… do you think it’s the most likely? Have you ever seen someone die and then been like oh, hey, how’re you doing?” She spread her hands in invitation of a non-existent refutation. “I don’t think so. And since you’re a doctor and you know about this stuff, then… cross that one off the list, ‘cos it’s impossible!”

And that, of course, is the biggest flaw of this particular line of apologetic argument. No matter how much apologists might argue that miracles/the supernatural are theoretically possible, the fact remains that, in practice, they have a probability effectively indistinguishable from zero. Over and over and over again, claims of miracles have been investigated and found not to stand up to investigation, Even where problems with the other explanations that we can think of make them unlikely, that isn’t going to make ‘It was a miracle’ the likeliest option.

In the previous chapter, Wallace/Jeffries tried to pre-emptively circumvent this problem by arguing that a God who could create the universe could also do miracles, and therefore we shouldn’t rule that possibility out. The problem with that, though, is that there is a vast chasm between “It is theoretically not impossible that this could have been done by a divine being” and “The likelihood of this having being done by a divine being is high enough that we should consider that as the default explanation if others are ruled out”. We can’t theoretically rule out miracles, in the same way as we can’t theoretically rule out alien visitations or fairy magic; but, in practice, they don’t stand up as a default explanation for the unexplained. If that wasn’t the case, after all, Wallace’s own job as a cold-case detective wouldn’t exist; in any case where other obvious explanations for a murder were ruled out, this same logic would lead us to the conclusion that the victim had actually been miraculously smote dead by God.

As one of my commenters aptly put it a few posts back: ‘Kaas’ Law: “When you have eliminated the impossible, what remains may be more improbable than that you made an error in one of your impossibility proofs.”’

Cold Case Christianity For Kids Review, with actual kid. Introduction.

For a long time now, I’ve been meaning to do a chapter-by-chapter book review and discussion, following in the footsteps of such illustrious bloggers as Libby Ann, Ana Mardoll, Jenny Trout, and many others. I had a couple of possible books in mind, and indeed still have them in mind, but then… I saw that J. Warner Wallace’s Cold Case Christianity For Kids was available pretty cheaply on Kindle, and had a sudden brainwave. Since I happen to have a non-Christian child with an interest in the whole idea of doing reviews of stuff, why not go through it and write a review together with her?

I wasn’t sure how Katie would feel about the idea, but in fact she jumped at it and decided we should do this as her bedtime story each night. (Which may commit me to a rather faster schedule of typing up posts than I actually have a hope of managing. Oh, well. Bridge, cross, when, etc.) “It’ll probably make me change my mind about some things,” she told me, “but probably not about the main thing.”

I decided that I’d make my notes on a file on my laptop word processor as we went through. This has the advantage of speed (my typing’s a lot faster than my writing) but the drawback that Katie leans in and types whatever random things take her fancy, so my notes on her thoughts are somewhat interspersed with random interjections such as ‘Mooo! Sorry, unexpected cow interruption’ or ‘Wednesdays are explosive’. (My daughter has a somewhat surrealist turn of mind.)

“This review,” I told her, “is going to end up sounding like that time we were at your Auntie Ruth’s wedding and the rabbi was starting to say “So, here is the explanation of why it’s a Jewish custom for the groom to smash a glass with his heel…” and you randomly shouted out “Rory the racing car!”

She giggled at that one. “What was wrong with me?”

“Well, you were two and a half at the time. So fair enough. But maybe we could aim for something a bit more serious here…”

So, I’m planning to filter out those interjections before writing up the blog posts, but, you never know, if the primary subject matter gets boring…

Anyway, since not much happens in the book’s introduction, I’ll start out by using this post to fill in some background.

 

Dramatis Personae (OK, that is actually meant to refer to a book’s characters so I’m totally misusing it here. Dramatis Personae for this blog series, I mean.)

J. Warner Wallace

J. Warner Wallace, the author of this book, is a detective who became famous for applying investigative principles to Christianity, deciding it was all true and he should convert, and writing several books about it why he thinks this. These are called the ‘Cold Case Christianity’ series, since he aimed to crack the what-happened-to-Jesus mystery in the same way he cracks cold cases at work. He also has a blog, in case you want to read more.

Katie

My daughter is nearly ten, an intense, imaginative live wire of a child who loves art, computer games, maths, and science, and has recently adopted a bunch of teasels and stuck eyes on them to turn them into pets.

I’ve never tried to dictate the religious beliefs of either of my children, believing that it’s something they need to decide for themselves; I tell them my beliefs when the subject comes up, but also tell them that other people have different beliefs. Katie in fact told me shortly before she turned six that she didn’t believe in God. In more recent years, she moved on to a rather interesting and complex belief system that involved God being an evil god from an alternate universe who had taken this universe over; all this praying people did, she believed, was only encouraging him and really ought to be stopped. It was an intriguing and quite well worked-out belief system, but, when I asked for an update prior to starting this review, I found out she’d moved back to atheism again.

“Just stuff,” she told me, when I inquired as to what had changed her mind. “Sometimes I might want an Oreo for pudding and then change my mind and want something else. Sometimes I just change my mind about stuff.”

I asked her again the following day, and got a more substantive response: “Science explains things better,” she told me (though without being able to specify any examples). “And God doesn’t seem very nice. For one thing, he’s anti-gay. If Christians are wrong about him being so amazing, there’s more chance they’re wrong about the rest of that malarkey. I don’t know what malarkey means, actually – what does it mean? Meh. Whatever.”

Me

Longstanding atheist/general skeptic. I do actually have one thing in common with J. Warner Wallace in that I also spent a lot of time investigating Christianity’s claims; from the fact that I’m here on this site, you can probably deduce that I came to a different conclusion from him. And, yes, I totally want to write a series of posts on that investigation at some point. Someday I will have time. Someday…

At some point I’m sure I’ll get round to figuring out how to put up my sidebar bio, but since I haven’t done that yet I’ll add here that I’m also a British GP, mother of two, and bookworm.

 

OK, that’s us. On to the book’s introduction, which is in two parts: ‘A Quick Hello’, and ‘Wanted: A Few Good Detectives’. All that’s happening at this point is the setting up of the story, so nothing too unmissably thrilling. If Katie did make comments on these bits, I didn’t write them down and can’t remember them, so for this bit it’s just the summary and my thoughts.

A Quick Hello

J. Warner Wallace introduces himself as a police detective specialising in ‘cold cases’, which he defines for the reader. We also learn the following pieces of information about his background:

  • As a boy, wanting to become a policeman like his dad, he learned a lot from attending the Police Explorer Academy (which he doesn’t describe, but it seems fair to assume it’s some sort of programme for children interested in learning more about police work).
  • As a newly-qualified police officer, he was mentored by a senior officer called Alan Jeffries, whom he came to admire and respect greatly.
  • Later on, he used his detective skills to investigate the story of Jesus, and concluded that ‘the evidence was overwhelming’ and that the Biblical accounts were true.

His aim here, apparently, is to combine all three of the above for this book; the readers will ‘enter the Detective Cadet Academy’, be trained by Alan Jeffries, and, as well as learning how to be good detectives, will learn ‘how to investigate the case for Jesus’. Also, the reader’s family can get involved and do this with them (so Katie and I are obviously on the right track here). Also, there’s a webpage.

Wanted – A Few Good Detectives

This is the introductory part of the story proper, which is told in second person present tense, like those ‘choose your own adventure’ books (though without all the ‘if you choose to fight the dragon, go to page 75’ bits).

We’re told that the local police department is starting a new detective training academy for student cadets (i.e. schoolchildren) which ‘you’ and ‘your friends, Daniel and Hannah’ jump at the chance of attending. At the first session, you get introduced to Alan Jeffries, who is going to be running the sessions, which apparently consist of these three and ‘some students from other schools in the area’. Jeffries gets impatient when you want to look at the exciting stuff actually going on in the police station, because apparently you’re all meant to spend the time sitting in the briefing room hearing about police work rather than getting to see any, or something. Which… I have to say doesn’t sound like a wildly successful and well-planned police academy cadet course to me, but what do I know.

So, Jeffries shows you through to the briefing room and asks what part of investigation interests the cadets most, and Daniel eagerly replies that he’s interested in gadgets/high-tech stuff he’s seen in movies, and asks if Jeffries can show them some of that stuff. Jeffries smirks at Daniel… wait, what the hell? Smirks? That is just such an unpleasant way to treat someone. Is this a ‘I do not think that word means what you think it means’ moment on Wallace’s part, or did he seriously mean to portray Jeffries as acting like a git?

Anyway, Jeffries tells Daniel that actually they solve most cases by ‘learning how to think’, because ‘[t]he brain is more reliable’ than gadgets/computers. Wait, what? Brains are actually not that reliable. Of course, they do have the huge advantage of being able to put facts together into patterns in a way that computers and gadgets can’t, but surely the data that the police get from the high-tech stuff is of crucial importance in giving their brains as many facts as possible to work on? I get that this is all a set-up for the whole ‘you’re going to use your brain to investigate Christianity’, but is it actually accurate as a description of what works for solving crimes?

Anyway, it seems the answer to Daniel’s excited request to be allowed to see high-tech police stuff is, in effect, a ‘no’. Poor Daniel. I’m not too impressed with this police cadet course so far, but nonetheless we are assured that ‘[y]ou can hardly wait for the next session!’ Maybe because almost nothing seems to have happened in this one and you feel it can only get better?

The one other thing to mention about this section is that we get an insert titled ‘CSI Assignment’, apparently the first of several such repeated through the book, in which the reader has to fill in blanks in Bible verses. Unfortunately Wallace doesn’t, as far as I can see, tell us anywhere which translation he’s using, which can be kind of a problem when you’re filling in blanks. Anyway, this assignment says:

God also wants you to use your brain to investigate the truth. Read Matthew 22:37-38. God tells us to love Him with all our heart, our soul, and our _______.

Read 1 Thessalonians 5:19-21. God tells us to examine everything _________.

So, as long as you assure children that they’re supposed to investigate the truth, it’s fine to declare the things you’re supposed to be proving as though they’re proved facts. Something tells me that Wallace didn’t spot the irony in that one.

Anyway, determined to do the thing properly, I found the BibleGateway site and looked up those verses for Katie to do the fill-in-the-blank thing (for those verses, the default translations are close enough to the one Wallace was using that it was easily doable). And that’s it for the introduction. I’ll link further chapter reviews back here as I do them.

 

Chapter reviews – links

Chapter One: Don’t Be a “Know-It-All”: Start Every Investigation Like a Detective!

In which we start investigating the Case of the Mysterious Skateboard, the Case of Jesus, and the Case of The Illicit Evangelising.

Chapter Two: Learn How To Infer: Learn How Detectives Find The Truth! Part 1

In which there is a bit more skateboard-related stuff.

Chapter Two: Part 2

In which there is a bit of resurrection-related stuff, loosely based on Habermas’ Minimal Facts argument.

Chapter Two: Part 3

In which there is more resurrection-related discussion, I spot a suspected evangelical plant among the cadets, and my daughter spots a major apologetics flaw.

Chapter Two: Part 4

In which my daughter and I continue to be unimpressed with Wallace’s attempts to prove the resurrection story to children.

Chapter Three: Think Circumstantially: Examine an Important Kind of Evidence! Part 1

In which the insert character considers believing in God, and I raise the tricky question of what kind of God.

Chapter Three: Part 2

In which Jeffries does quite a bit of drawing and my daughter invents potato-worship.

Chapter Three: Part 3

First Cause and fine-tuning and morals, oh my!

Chapter Four: Test Your Witnesses: Don’t Get Fooled by Your Witnesses!

In which we find possible witnesses of the skateboard’s owner, and Jeffries inappropriately extrapolates dubious witness trustworthiness guidelines.

Chapter Four: Part 2

In which Jeffries ignores significant problems with Gospel reliability.

Chapter Four: Part 3

In which I spot some significant disingenuousness on Wallace’s part.

Chapter Four: Part 4

In which Wallace’s standards for verifying evidence are low, and the cadets have disturbingly creepy smiles.

Chapter Five: Respect the Chain of Custody: Make Sure No One Has Tampered with the Evidence!

In which Jeffries does a poor job of explaining chain of custody.

Chapter Four: Reprise

In which I revisit the end of Chapter Four to explain just how deep the problems with Jeffries’ assurances about gospel reliability go.

Chapter Five: Part 2

In which we get a seriously flawed argument about chain of custody for gospel stories.

Chapter Five: Part 3

In which oversimplification on Wallace’s part leads to more flawed arguments.

Chapter Six: Hang On Every Word: Spot the Truth When You Hear It!

In which Jeffries gets a witness and ignores her to do more evangelising.

Chapter Six: Part 2

Some background information; what do we really know about the authorship of the gospel according to ‘Mark’?

Chapter Six: Part 3

Several reasons why analysing the gospels as though they were forensic statements might not be as accurate a method as Wallace would like to think.

Chapter Six: Part 4

Wallace’s forensic statement analysis of Mark’s gospel; interesting, but unconvincing.

Chapter Seven: Separate Artifacts from Evidence: Clean Up Your Crime Scene!

Jeffries spends another week ignoring the witness statement on every word of which we were meant to be hanging, and I make some predictions. In between, there is some textual reliability stuff.

Chapter 8: Resist Conspiracy Theories: Discover Why Lies Are Hard to Keep!

Conspiracy theory strawman. I knew it.

Chapter 8: Part 2

Why teach your cadets to detect, when you can just hand ’em the answers?

Chapter 8: Part 3

Why bother with plot continuity, when you can focus on apologetics instead?

Postscript

You came for the apologetics, now stay for the theology! No? Well, maybe the zombies, then…

Final sections and final thoughts

And, well, that’s about it, really. Thank you for reading.

 

 

What I’ve been reading – The Maze Runner trilogy

(Content note – This post contains spoilers for the books. Also mention of post-apocalyptic scenarios, though I don’t go into that bit very much. Also, at the end, a bit about fantasy high-tech medical stuff described in more graphic terms than you might want to hear.)

Caveat: I read the first book and the first part of the second book, but then skim-flipped from there through to the end of the third, as by then they’d moved into the ‘post-apocalyptic wasteland populated by crazed, doomed survivors’ part of the setting, which is something that just doesn’t float my boat. It is therefore possible that I might have missed an explanation that made at least somewhat more sense out of the plot. If so, do let me know, and my apologies.

Anyway, this is going to be a summary of my thoughts on the trilogy as a whole. If you want a really good chapter-by-chapter deconstruction of the first book, do check out Whitley Birks’ excellent review (plus her other reviews while you’re there; it’s a superb blog with all kinds of interesting points about what well-known authors got horribly wrong through lazy research/not doing the writing).

Here’s the overriding impression with which this trilogy left me: the author had a lot of good ideas but then had no idea how to write a coherent plot that would properly account for them all.

I mean, you can picture James Dashner thinking “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool to write about a large group of children trapped in a meadow in the middle of a maze, with no idea what was going on! Or for them to have some sort of trial that involved making their way a hundred miles across a post-apocalyptic wasteland within a time limit! Or to have a dilemma about whether it’s OK to do terrible things to children if it’s the only chance of saving the world! Or a government agency with the acronym WICKED and the slogan ‘WICKED is good’ and amnesiac people remembering this slogan but having no idea what it means! Doesn’t that sound great?”

And, yes… it was. For a while. Right up until the point where we got what was supposed to be the Big Reveal explanation for each of those. At which point I would be looking at it and thinking “What?! That doesn’t make any sense! What about…??”

Main plot points that evoked the “What?! That doesn’t make any sense!” explanation from me:

The reason WICKED are experimenting on the children is to find a cure for a deadly plague (known as the Flare) which is ravaging the rest of the human race; most of the children are naturally immune (some of them are apparently there as control subjects) so WICKED desperately need to study the children and find out what accounts for their immunity, in hopes of finding a cure for everyone else. So far, so good. The trouble is, they’re doing it by studying the way their brains function (by putting them through various stressful situations and monitoring their responses). Which makes no sense whatsoever. If you want to know what makes someone immune to an illness, surely you start by studying their immune system? Tissue biopsies of the brain would probably also be useful, but the only time we see WICKED trying to do that, it’s when they want to dissect Thomas’s entire brain (and only Thomas’s – they don’t seem to feel any requirement to compare biopsies from a variety of the children).

They’re also, apparently, taking a bizarrely long time to do this. The children get taken away from their parents at an early age and kept by WICKED for years until they’re old enough to take part in the Maze trials, which then go on for two more years. Since the time from infection by the Flare virus to destruction of your functioning brain doesn’t, from what I could see, seem to be that long – how exactly is it that the virus hasn’t wiped out everyone non-immune during those years and left the whole question of a cure moot?

WICKED are also quite extraordinarily profligate with money. The Maze walls, we are told, are hundreds of feet high and move into different positions every night. (Wait, what?! How do you even make a wall that high stable enough to be moved?? Now I’m all ‘Ye canna change the laws of physics, laws of physics, Cap’n!’ and that wasn’t even the plot hole I was about to discuss.) We also learn that the Maze is eight times the size of the central area (the Glade) which is in itself the size of eight football fields, so that is one bloody big maze. All made out of moveable walls hundreds of feet high. And the children live there for two years, with the walls being moved every night and supplies being sent in weekly. In fact, we learn in the second book that there are two such groups of children, not just one. So… how much did all this cost?? The cost of first building and then maintaining two such mazes would be… so colossally expensive that we need a new term for ‘colossally expensive’. I mean, which planet do you sell to whom in order to finance something like that? And this is all meant to be taking place in a post-apocalyptic world when even basic services are likely to be going belly-up. (We are told at one point in the third book that WICKED have managed to corner available funding and resources due to being the only ones holding out the promise of a cure, but… funding and resources available for cornering at that point are still not going to be that great.)

So, are we seriously meant to believe that at absolutely no point in the design of the Mazes did anyone in charge point out “Hey, I realise walls hundreds of feet high sound exciting, but surely we can get the same effect at a fraction of the price by making the walls something like eight or ten feet high”? Or that at no point during the two years that all this was going on and that both groups of children were making zero progress on cracking the code or figuring out how to escape did anyone say”‘Guys, this experiment isn’t getting us anywhere and you can’t justify claiming these levels of funds any longer. Find something to hurry it up”? I’m sorry, I just do not buy the idea that any government agency anywhere in the history of government agencies who were, are, or will be can get away with being that blithely unconcerned about funding availability for that long.

Nearly done (not because that’s an exhaustive list, just because it’s a list of the things that bugged me the most) but I do have to mention the Retractor that we learned about in ‘The Death Cure’. This is, supposedly, a hi-tech device that removes implants from the children’s brains by sending wires in via their ear canals. Because apparently Dashner either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that ears aren’t just holes stretching straight through to the brain. You send a wire in through someone’s ear, the first thing it’s going to meet is the eardrum, which seals the outer canal off completely from the middle ear. Go through that, and you’re getting into some complex and delicate anatomy – the tiny bones of the middle ear, and the inner-ear organs that process sounds and monitor your balance. I’m a GP, not an ENT surgeon, but trying to pull an implant out via that lot strikes me as a really bad idea.

Also, since they are apparently going for this appallingly bad via-the-ear plan, why do the Retractors go on the children’s faces to perform this procedure? Wouldn’t it make far more sense for them to go on one side of the head? I mean, if it’s on the face, the wire it sends out has to curve sideways and downwards to find the ear and then upwards and forwards again to negotiate the ear canal… I think Dashner was, once again, going for the ‘this is such a cool scary image’ approach over actual practicalities.

OK, I’m done. What did everyone else think of the books? Did I miss anything important? Do let me know.

The Lighthouse Keeper’s Lunch

The Lighthouse Keeper’s Lunch, by Ronda Armitage, is a favourite of my eight-year-old daughter’s. This is partly because it’s a fun story, and partly because we enjoy going through pointing out all the problems with it.

My daughter is a huge fan of the CinemaSins YouTube channel. (Yes, this is probably a terrible idea and bad mothering on my part, but she’s only interested in the reviews of children’s films, so hopefully she isn’t going to end up watching extracts from some weird slasher film while my back’s turned.) Last night, while she was reading this book for the umpteenth time, she declared ‘We really need to make a list of all the things wrong with this book like the Sin Counter does!’

And so here I am. (And, Ronda Armitage, if you’re reading this – my daughter absolutely loves your book. Plot bizarreness and all.)

Basic plot (with spoilers)

Simple enough. Mr Grinling works in a lighthouse. Every day, his wife makes a detailed and delicious packed lunch for him, and sends it to him down a cable transport system (they live in a cottage on the nearby cliff). Some seagulls get wise to this and start eating the lunch on the way down, leaving poor Mr Grimling lunchless. Mr and Mrs Grinling try a couple of different things to discourage the seagulls, eventually winning the battle when Mrs Grinling comes up with the idea of putting mustard sandwiches in his lunch. The seagulls don’t like the mustard sandwiches, and after a couple of days of this head off to seek their lunch elsewhere. Success! Well, except for the unfortunate fisherman who’s having his lunch eaten by seagulls at the end. But success for Mr Grinling, who gets his lunch.

Problems with the plot

(As opposed to problems with the gender role portrayal, which are pretty obvious.)

  1. Why on earth does Mrs Grinling send the lunch down a cable every day? Surely it would be far simpler to make it the day before so that Mr Grinling can take it over in his boat each day when he commutes? What would happen if the cable jammed and left his lunch dangling fifty feet in the air over the sea? What if the basket tipped off in a storm? (It definitely doesn’t look too secure in the pictures.)
  2. How do the seagulls have time to finish the lunch in the time it takes to slide down a cable? Sure, they could probably peck at it somewhat, but apparently they’re supposed to have completely finished it in the time it takes to get down the line (and this is not a small lunch).
  3. Mrs Grinling’s first attempt at foiling the seagulls is to tie the napkin to the basket – cue picture of Mrs Grinling standing triumphantly next to a ribbon-bound basket. In which she appears to have added one ribbon totally for decoration, as it runs horizontally round the basket, under the other ribbons, contributing nothing whatsoever to the ribbon-induced security of the basket. What was the point of that?
  4. But what’s far worse is her next plan – with Mr Grinling’s full co-operation, she decides to send their cat down the cable as well in order to scare away the seagulls. Yup. We have a picture of a terrified cat being placed in a basket despite his struggles, and then one of him cowering in the basket in terrified misery as he travels down this insecure cable arrangement, at risk of toppling fifty feet into the sea below and getting dashed against the cliffs. The Grinlings are totally OK with doing this. Someone report this couple to the RSPCA.
  5. Mrs Grinling finally comes up with the mustard sandwich plan, and we have a full-page picture of the seagulls spitting the sandwiches out with cries of revulsion. And – kudos to my daughter for picking up this particular point – the falling sandwiches show human-shaped bite marks, rather than beak-shaped bite marks. How exactly did this happen? Did the seagulls’ beaks somehow magically metamorphosize into human mouths for just long enough to take those fateful bites, then change back again?

 

So… what’s the moral? Maybe it’s that you should prepare for work the night before, a la Flylady; maybe it’s that being cruel to animals brings you no benefit, but, hell, you’ll also apparently suffer no consequences from it so why not give it a try. (Nope. Let’s not go with that one.) On the whole, I think it’s that it’s probably not a good idea to overanalyse children’s books.