Category Archives: Flawed concepts

Why it makes no sense to pray for anything

Flawed concepts,

Jesus says believers can ask him/God for anything they want, and he will do it. As long as you have even the tiniest amount of faith, nothing will be impossible for you. Not even moving mountains. Whatever you ask for in prayer will be yours, if you believe it will be.

Well, some parts of the Bible suggest that you might have to ask in the name of Jesus. And have somebody else agree with you on what you’re asking for. The Bible says the prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective. So just make sure you have a clear conscience, and then you can get anything you ask for. As long as it’s God’s will, anyway…

“Stand up! What are you doing down on your face?”

—God

But actually, the Bible says God gives generously to all without finding fault. So forget about all those apparent preconditions (belief, righteousness, agreement, asking in Jesus’s name, aligning with God’s will, etc.). None of those things are even required before God will give you what you ask for. If you don’t have what you want, it’s only because you haven’t asked God for it. Jesus agrees: he taught that everyone who asks receives. God even gives good gifts to evil people if they ask.

Of course, Jesus and the Bible are wrong, as usual. In reality, nobody ever gets what they want because they prayed for it. Even Jesus didn’t get what he prayed for!

Testing the claim

Scientific experiments

Since Jesus makes such a strong claim—that you can ask for anything in prayer and God will always give you what you ask for—all it takes to disprove that claim is to observe one single case of someone not getting what they prayed for. But we can do better than that. Even the weaker claim that prayer sometimes gets results can be disproved. When people have tried actually rigorously testing the hypothesis that prayer has a healing effect, most of the studies have found no healing effect.

Why only most? A few false positives are to be expected by chance, even if there is no real effect. But usually when a study seems to show that prayer works, it’s because that study is flawed. The more a study is well-designed, the less effect of prayer it finds.

In some of the studies, the subjects all knew people were praying for them. And that’s the only reason they felt better afterwards. As shown by other studies that found that people felt better when they thought people were praying for them, not when people actually were praying for them.

(Although not even that placebo effect consistently works. Some well-done studies have found that the patients who didn’t know they were being prayed for had worse outcomes than the ones who weren’t being prayed for at all. And that the people who knew they were being prayed for ended up even worse off than that.

Maybe that knowledge gave those patients performance anxiety. Or maybe the patients interpreted doctors resorting to prayer as an indication that their situation was hopeless. Or maybe there’s no real effect here either way, just minor random variation.)

Then there’s this study, where there weren’t enough subjects involved, and the statistical analysis was done by a biased person without sufficient blinding (a problem other prominent prayer studies have had as well), and they claimed success based on outcomes other than what they were originally supposed to be testing for, and they failed to control for which patients had health insurance, and they didn’t distinguish between prayer and other supernatural healing methods, and it’s not clear whether actual prayer was even involved at all.

And that’s not the worst one that has been done. Another study on prayer had an even smaller sample size and no control group, and was not double-blinded. And it was funded by the Templeton Foundation, which gives the researchers a corrupt incentive to report results in favor of religion regardless of what they actually find.

Even in the few prayer studies that are pretty well designed and still get so-called positive results, the effects are much more limited than you’d expect from an all-powerful God. If the difference in outcomes between groups in those studies was really caused by God and not chance, why would that difference merely be something like 14% of patients in the prayer group getting a bad outcome vs 22% in the control group? And why would most of the outcome variables measured show no effect of prayer? Including variables like “recovering quickly” and “not dying”, which were outcomes that people were specifically praying for.

There was one study on prayer (for increasing fertility) that did find quite a significant effect size… but that study turned out to be completely fraudulent.

“God works in ways mysteriously similar to random chance.”

Keep in mind that these specific studies I’m mentioning here are just the few where prayer appeared to get fairly good results. The vast majority of studies on prayer have found no significant effect at all.

Anyway, maybe studies on prayers for sick people shouldn’t be taken as evidence for or against the effectiveness of prayer, because prayer is awfully hard to control for. Most people who are sick are already going to be praying and/or having others pray for them. So it would be hard to be sure you actually had a non-prayer group of patients to compare with. It’s probably better to assess the effectiveness of prayer by looking at something that people aren’t going to be praying about already.

Informal experiments

Most people don’t even bother keeping track of which of their prayers were or were not successful. As a result, they only remember the times when they got what they asked for. But if you do try keeping track, you’ll find that most of your prayers actually go unanswered.

You can also try keeping track of the same things you would have asked God for, but without praying. Or you could try praying to a jug of milk or something instead. It won’t make any difference. You will get about the same success rate as when you prayed to God, because all the “answered prayers” you’ve experienced were just coincidences. (Of course, to make it a fair comparison, you have to make sure that the way you evaluate the results of praying to the milk jug is just as biased as the way you interpret the results of praying to God.)

Here’s an even easier way to test whether prayer has any effect: Try asking God to do something that unambiguously could not possibly happen without supernatural intervention. After all, if you believe you have access to an all-powerful God who is willing to answer your prayers, why limit your requests to things that can happen without God’s help? Jesus promised that believers can pray for things that seem impossible, and they will get what they ask for.

So ask God to do something like moving a mountain, or making a coin land the same way 50 times in a row. Or if you prefer, try asking him to do something more useful, like restoring an amputated limb, or eliminating all cases of a common disease. And to make sure that what’s happening is unambiguous, ask him to do it instantly and without any help from humans.1

When you ask for something unambiguous like that, you never get it. It doesn’t matter how good a reason you have for wanting the miracle to happen.2 It also doesn’t make any difference if you make sure to fulfill all the conditions that the Bible sometimes says (and sometimes doesn’t say) are required for your prayers to be answered.

If the only way it can happen is with God’s help, it will never happen. You only get “results” from prayer when you ask for something mundane. Something that can happen even though there’s no God listening to you.

“Give a man a fish, and you’ll feed him for a day. Give him a religion, and he’ll starve to death while praying for a fish.”

Consider the massive amount of evil that is constantly happening in the world. There must be so many people praying all the time for God to stop those things from happening, yet they continue to happen. God clearly isn’t answering prayers. And if he’s not willing for whatever reason to do anything about all the world’s big important problems, do you really think he’s going to take your trivial personal requests? The little things you ask for and get are just things that would have happened anyway.

When one or a few people pray during a disaster and end up being the only survivors, this is taken as evidence that prayer is effective. But were those people really the only ones who prayed? Most people are religious, so probably not.3 You just don’t hear about the rest praying, because dead people don’t get to talk about what happened when they prayed, so everyone ignores them. But most of the people affected by the disaster likely did pray. And most of those people who prayed didn’t survive. So no, that is not evidence that prayer is effective.4

Similarly, lots of extremely ill people pray for recovery, and lots of them don’t recover. But the few who do recover are the only ones you get to hear talking about what happened when they prayed. So if you don’t actively look into the numbers, you can easily get a very distorted impression of the effectiveness of prayer. In reality, prayer has no effect on death rates.

There were much higher rates of premature death before we had modern medicine, even though prayer was no less common than it is today. Similarly, there are much lower rates of premature death in countries where prayer is relatively uncommon but that do have access to modern medicine, compared to less developed but more religious countries. Health outcomes are correlated with human progress only, and prayer clearly has no effect.

You don’t even have to test it to know that prayer won’t get results

What happens if you pray for something that requires other people to do something? Either God doesn’t respect people’s free will and will force those people to do things just because you asked him to, or the outcome of your prayer depends on those people’s decisions rather than on God.

“The man who prays is the one who thinks that God has arranged matters all wrong, but who also thinks that he can instruct God how to put them right.”

—Christopher Hitchens

Or what happens if two people pray for incompatible outcomes? They’re not both going to get what they asked for. Jesus’s claim that all prayers will be answered isn’t even logically possible.

But why should you even need prayer? A good God would protect everyone from harm all the time, not just when they prayed. So why pray? Do you think God doesn’t already know what you need? If an all-knowing God hasn’t helped you already without you praying, it’s because either God is not good, or helping you isn’t actually the right thing to do. Either way, praying isn’t going to make any difference.

They say God has a plan. They say everything that ever happens happens for a good reason, since it’s all part of God’s perfect plan. This idea is incompatible with the idea of a prayer-answering God. Not everything people want is going to be part of God’s original plan. So any prayers that don’t happen to fit into the plan are going to have to go unfulfilled.

What else could God do? Do you really expect God to change his plan just because a human asks him to? Why would you even want him to? Do you think you know better than God? To ask God to do what you want is to say that you think his own plan isn’t good enough. Prayer is blasphemy.

God already knew what you would want, and he already took that into account in his original decision. Either he was already going to do what you think he should do, so asking him to do it is pointless, or he already decided it wasn’t the right thing to do, which means you are asking God to do something bad. Do you think God is going to agree to do something bad for you? Do you think just because you think the alternative course of events would be bad, God is going to prevent it, and thereby prevent all the greater good consequences that he knows it will have?

“Long time ago God made a divine plan. Gave it a lot of thought. Decided it was a good plan. Put it into practice. And for billions and billions of years the divine plan has been doing just fine. Now you come along and pray for something. Well, suppose the thing you want isn’t in God’s divine plan. What do you want him to do? Change his plan? Just for you? Doesn’t it seem a little arrogant?”

—George Carlin

Because according to a popular theistic argument, every seemingly undesirable event that ever happens was planned by God for a reason. It must have some awfully important planned consequences, if God was willing to intentionally plan for that unpleasant event to happen, just so those consequences could happen. So God is certainly not going to let you disrupt his perfect plan and prevent all the good that was going to happen because of that event, just because you said so. He’s going to ignore your prayer.

If God is all-knowing and all-good, then he doesn’t need you to tell him what to do, and he isn’t going to let you. Or alternatively, if God does let imperfect humans influence his actions, then God is imperfect.

Since it makes no sense to expect God to answer prayers, it’s much more likely that there’s a more mundane explanation for any apparently answered prayers. Maybe the improvement you experienced only corresponded with your prayer because you didn’t feel the need pray until you had nowhere to go but up. Or maybe you pray all the time, so of course anything good that happens is going to happen after you pray. Or maybe you mistakenly gave the credit to prayer when what had really helped was one of the other ways you tried to get what you wanted…

Making excuses for God

Believers have plenty of explanations for why God doesn’t answer prayers. It’s easy to come up with excuses for God when you’ve had so much practice because God has been constantly disappointing you all your life.

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Why it makes no sense for God to forgive your sins because Jesus died

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What belief is the most essential to Christianity? Probably the atonement: The idea that by sending Jesus to die, God has made it possible for your sins to be forgiven. Unfortunately for Christianity, nothing about that idea makes any sense.

How exactly does the death of Jesus make salvation possible?

Did Jesus bring forgiveness for sins, or did he pay for our sins? Those are not the same thing at all. If fact, they’re mutually exclusive. So why do people usually seem to talk about Jesus as if he had done both of those things? Which one did he actually do? It can’t be both. If the sins were forgiven, then there was nothing to pay for. And if they were paid for, then there was nothing to forgive.

If you paid off a debt to someone, it’s true that he would then stop demanding that you repay him, but you wouldn’t say he had forgiven you in that case. It’s only forgiveness if he decides he doesn’t need to be repaid, not if he only stops demanding payment because he’s already been paid. What would you think of someone who claimed to have “forgiven” your debt and expected you to be grateful for it, while still demanding that you pay it? Or worse, while demanding that somebody who didn’t actually owe him anything pay it?

If God decided to forgive people, why couldn’t he just forgive people? Why would someone still have to pay the penalty for everyone’s sins? Jesus says forgiveness is a virtue, so what could stop a good God from forgiving? God claims to prefer mercy over sacrifice, so why didn’t he just have mercy on everyone instead of sacrificing his son? The book of Hebrews says there can be no forgiveness without shedding blood, but it offers no explanation for that barbaric and absurd claim. It’s like the author doesn’t know the meaning of the word “forgiveness”.

When you forgive people, do you insist that there has to be some kind of bloodshed involved, or else you won’t really have forgiven them? Do you think the only way you can possibly forgive someone is by either having them tortured and killed, or having your son tortured and killed? Is that what Jesus expects us to do when he encourages us to forgive each other? Is he telling us to torture and murder our sons? This Christian version of “forgiveness” is insane. Real forgiveness does not lead to violence in any way.

Why would God have to do anything before he could forgive people? Especially if he makes the rules, if he’s the ultimate authority on morality, as Christians like to say. If that’s true, he could have just declared that it was right for him to forgive sins without anyone having to be tortured and killed first, and it would be so. Or he could have just decided that none of the finite things people do make them deserve to be tortured forever in the first place.

If God can define morality however he wants, why would he choose to create an impossibly high standard of morality, knowing what would happen when humans inevitably failed to fulfill it? Not a very good plan, God. A reasonable God would never need to resort to either hell or the crucifixion to deal with humanity’s sins, because he would have given us reasonable moral standards that we could actually achieve, or he would have made sure we were actually capable of being as good as he wanted us to be.

An all-powerful God who can prescriptively define morality always has the option to NOT torture people forever. And a loving God who had a choice would never choose to torture people forever. That is not how you treat people you love.

According to one concept of atonement, what Jesus is taking away is “original sin”. That term refers to the idea that just by disobeying God once, Adam and Eve brought “sin” on all their descendants, making everyone guilty of “sin” regardless of what they actually do. (And so God decided to repay that one insignificant offense with the infinitely disproportionate punishment of eternal torture for everyone.)

If that’s the case, then even the reason for thinking atonement is needed in the first place doesn’t make any sense. People aren’t guilty because of what other people do. People can only be guilty because of their own actions. God even says so.

If God thought Adam and Eve’s descendants were all going to be “guilty” by default, why did he allow them to reproduce at all? Why not just start over with a new pair of humans? He said later that he was going to wipe out humanity with a flood and start over, but he didn’t actually do it. He kept a few of the sin-infected people alive, and then he let them fill the earth right back up with sinful people.

He should have actually started over, with brand new sinless people. And he should have done it back before anyone had children. He wouldn’t even have to kill anybody. He could have separated Adam and Eve for the rest of their lives, and removed that pointless troublesome tree that he never should have put in the Garden of Eden in the first place, and then he could have made some new people in the garden.

Some branches of Christianity believe that Jesus and his mother were both conceived free from “original sin”. If God can make exceptions like this, if he can produce sinless people from sinful parents, why not just do that with everybody, and save Jesus the trouble of dying?

Early Christians thought they could explain why Jesus had to die. The generally accepted story in the early centuries of Christianity was something quite different from now: Satan had somehow gotten possession of everyone’s souls, and the only way God could possibly get them back was to give him Jesus as a ransom, because Satan demanded it. (Which makes God look pretty weak. And which ignores the fact that that sort of thing is against God’s principles. And the fact that the Bible says Jesus was a sacrifice to God, not to Satan.)

Then they decided that Satan didn’t even know who Jesus was, but for some reason he still agreed to trade many souls for what he thought was just one ordinary soul. So God tricked him into giving up all the souls, by giving him one that he didn’t realize he wouldn’t be able to keep. God somehow fulfilled the requirement of justice by just pretending to pay off his debt to Satan. That was the generally accepted view for several more centuries,5 till they decided that didn’t make God look very good either.

So after Christianity had existed for over a thousand years, theologians finally started coming up with accounts that didn’t involve God making a deal with the devil, and they ended up inventing the modern atonement doctrine, where our sin is a debt that we’re unable to repay.

But this version doesn’t explain why God couldn’t just forgive everyone if he wanted to forgive them. St. Anselm thought that God just forgiving everyone without being “repaid” would go against God’s justice, but making someone who doesn’t owe God anything pay the debt for everyone else isn’t just either.

Penal substitution theory

Christians commonly say Jesus was punished in place of everybody else, so the requirement for justice was fulfilled, and now nobody else has to be punished. Except that’s not justice. Punishing an innocent person for what a different person did is absurdly unjust. It doesn’t matter if Jesus was willing. That doesn’t make it just for God to punish the innocent, or to let the guilty go unpunished.6 Nothing could be less just. A just God would never accept this arrangement of giving everyone what they don’t deserve.

Sure, someone could volunteer to, in effect, pay a fine for someone else. There’s nothing stopping you from giving a criminal a gift of money which the criminal could then use to pay the fine himself. But that doesn’t work with other kinds of punishments.

Guilt is not transferable. You can’t become guilty of something without actually doing it. You can’t stop being actually guilty just because somebody else decides to take the blame for what you did. Guilt is the state of having done wrong, so by definition, someone who hasn’t done wrong can’t be guilty, and someone who has done wrong can’t be not guilty.

And even in the case of fines, let alone execution, none of the purposes of punishment are fulfilled if the wrong person is being punished. If the authorities didn’t care whether the people they punished were guilty or not, the threat of punishment would no longer have any positive effect on people’s behavior. Punishing innocent people instead of guilty people just incentivizes people to behave worse. If God did that, people would understandably conclude that God hates good people.

No court would accept someone who had nothing to do with a crime offering to be executed in place of the criminal. And any judge who intentionally had an innocent person physically punished for someone else’s crime would lose his job.

Punishing the innocent, even by accident, is widely considered to be the most unjust thing you can do, something to be avoided at all costs. And the God of the Bible seems to agree with that way of thinking. But we’re supposed to believe that God punished an innocent person on purpose, and that this was somehow a good thing??

If it really was right to punish innocent people instead of guilty people, the Bible suggests that this would be intuitively obvious to everyone, which is far from the reality. Outside of this one particular case, just about everyone in the world would agree that that is not justice.

Some people have made analogies attempting to show that we do normally accept guilt being transferred from one person to another. But those alleged examples are all flawed, in one way or another. For instance:

God even says that at least some sins can only be atoned for by the blood of the one who committed the sin, so that rules out the possibility of anyone else’s blood atoning for them. So do the passages in the Bible that say that no payment can ever be enough to ransom or redeem someone’s soul so they can have eternal life. God says the one who sins is the one who must die. If God executes anyone other than the guilty person, God is doing wrong by his own standards.

Some people think sins against an infinite God are infinite sins, and therefore can only be repaid by the death of a God-man, not by the death of an ordinary human.7 But if ordinary humans can do an infinite amount of evil just by doing ordinary evil things, why shouldn’t they be able to make up for it by doing an infinite amount of good, just by doing ordinary good things?

Anyway, that’s not how it works. Even if we were to ignore all the actual victims and say God is the victim of all sin for some reason, the severity of an evil act isn’t directly proportional to how powerful the victim is. Kicking a big strong man isn’t morally worse than kicking a little kid.

Also, if Jesus is God, and God is the victim of sin, that means the victim is the one being punished in place of the perpetrator. Why would you punish the victim? This just keeps getting more and more absurdly unjust the more you think about it.

Some Christians say Jesus took on everyone else’s sin, so that God considered him guilty and everyone else innocent. That would mean either that Jesus (who they believe is God) was actually incredibly sinful, or that God was wrong or was basing his judgment on a falsehood, none of which seems compatible with what Christians believe God is like. Do they really think God can be morally imperfect?

Was Jesus even punished in our place at all? Not really. If he was, he would be in hell. Yet the Bible says he’s in heaven. Jesus would have to spend eternity in hell if he was really taking the punishment for humanity, but the Bible says all he had to do was die. And even that wasn’t an eternal punishment, since he’s an immortal God that can’t truly die. Because Jesus wasn’t damned, the best his “death” could be expected to accomplish would be to save us from having to die… and he didn’t even accomplish that.

Other theories of atonement

The death of Jesus is often described as a sacrifice. Which kind of sacrifice would that be? God has specific rules for these things, you know. If Jesus was female, or if he was a goat or a bull, then maybe he could be a sin offering. Or if he was just one year old, then maybe he could be a Passover lamb. But Jesus wasn’t any of those things, so why would God accept him as an offering? And how could it possibly be acceptable for God to sacrifice his son at all, if he thinks that’s such an evil thing to do that it justifies genocide against those who do it?

If Jesus is God, this sacrifice would be God sacrificing God to God. I can comprehend someone sacrificing himself. But how can you make a sacrifice to yourself? You would end up still having whatever you were supposed to give up, and then you wouldn’t have actually sacrificed anything. Or how about sacrificing someone to himself? Can you make any sense of that? “I’m going to sacrifice you to you. By killing you. Hope you appreciate the sacrifice I’m making for you!”

If we ignore all the parts of the Bible that portray God as sacrificing someone else, and just say that God paid the price for sin himself, does any of this make more sense that way? Well, if you forgive a debt that was owed to you, you are giving up that value. So by forgiving humans, you could say God is paying the price… to the people who were supposed to pay him? That’s backwards; that doesn’t actually fulfill anyone’s obligations.

Or is he supposed to be paying it to himself? That definitely doesn’t work. If someone owes you a debt, there’s no way you can repay that debt yourself. You can’t pay off a debt to yourself. Nothing you do can change the fact that someone else owes you, unless you decide to just forgive the debt, in which case it will not be repaid (which means Jesus doesn’t have to do anything).

For that matter, if someone owes you a debt, and then someone like Jesus who doesn’t owe you decides to pay off that debt to you, that doesn’t change the fact that the first person is in debt. He just owes it to Jesus now, unless Jesus decides to forgive him. But if you’re God, and Jesus is God, then you might as well have just forgiven the person yourself in the first place. There was no reason to get Jesus involved. Not that Jesus even could have paid a debt to God in the first place, since if Jesus is God, God already has anything that Jesus has.

But God isn’t who people are really indebted to, anyway. Do you know how Jews think about sin and forgiveness? It makes so much more sense than what Christians believe. People are sinful because they actually commit sins, not just because they were born. And sins that harm other people are sins against those people, not sins against God. As the Bible says, your actions don’t affect God; they only affect other people.

So Jews say God is conditionally willing to forgive sins that were actually committed against him. But God can’t forgive you for sins that you committed against other people. Only the actual victims can do that. What kind of jerk would declare that you were forgiven for harming other people, without even bothering to ask those people what they thought about it?

Some people have said that what Jesus did was not about being punished, but more about showing that you’re sorry and repentant, and getting back on good terms with the person you’ve wronged. In cases where doing that would require actions that you’re unable to do yourself, it might be acceptable to get someone to do those things for you. So in the case of Jesus, we have God trying to convince sinners to agree to have God (Jesus) do what it takes to restore their relationship with God.

There are a bunch of problems with that. If the one who was wronged is the one acting to restore the relationship, it sounds like that person is already willing to forgive, so there’s nothing to do on his side. The repentant attitude of the sinner is all it should take. There’s certainly no reason a process like this should ever have to involve anyone being tortured and killed. And again, we’re completely ignoring the actual victims of the sins, and instead making it about God for some reason.

Maybe rather than punishing Jesus in our place, God punished us by harming Jesus? Like a whipping boy. It could reasonably be considered a punishment to know that someone you care about is suffering or dying. But harming an innocent person because of what someone else did would still be outrageously unjust.

If the innocent person willingly agreed to be harmed, then maybe this could be an acceptable thing to do. In that case, it doesn’t matter that he doesn’t deserve punishment, since he’s not actually being punished. He’s just being treated the way he willingly chose to be treated. But it doesn’t exactly sound like Jesus was willing to be tortured and killed. It was what God wanted, not what Jesus wanted.

There are more problems with vicarious punishment: It vicariously harms people who don’t deserve to be punished, since the wrongdoer will probably not be the only person who cares about the proxy person. It’s unnecessary, since doing wrong will already have natural consequences that the wrongdoer can feel bad about. Hearing what happened to somebody else is not that much of a punishment for people who never actually met the guy or saw what happened to him. If the person really doesn’t mind being treated that way, that’s even more reason not to feel bad for him. And feeling bad for someone else is way too small a punishment to substitute for eternal torture.

Some people have tried to make sense of what Jesus accomplished in terms of a barbaric archaic concept of “honor” that doesn’t make any sense morally to begin with.

Christians have to keep trying and trying to explain how killing an innocent person is good and removes the need to punish guilty people, because in two thousand years none of those attempts have ever succeeded, because their core tenet just doesn’t make any sense.

  • Acceptance theory: God, being omnipotent, could have achieved atonement by any means he chose. So he arbitrarily chose to do it by having his own son tortured and killed, for reasons nobody knows. Even though that wasn’t the only way or even the best way he could have done it. That’s not even an explanation.
  • Embracement theory: Humans committed the worst possible sin, and God… decided to just let them? And that somehow makes it okay, and means sin doesn’t matter anymore? What does that even have to do with Jesus?
  • Shared atonement theory: Jesus is God, and the universe can’t exist without God. So when Jesus died, God died, and the universe died, and everyone died. And then they all came back with Jesus,8 so now everyone has already been punished, I guess? Except everyone didn’t die. Other people were clearly still alive in the Bible when Jesus was dead. And if nobody even noticed anything happening to them, that wasn’t a punishment. Also, this wouldn’t affect people who weren’t living at the time.
  • Moral influence theory: All Jesus actually did was set an example for us, and now it’s up to us to do what it takes to redeem ourselves. But if we can just save ourselves like that, then we don’t actually need Jesus. God got him killed for no good reason. Even if we did need him to set an example with his life before we could live good lives, which we don’t, we still wouldn’t need him to die. What does that have to do with setting a good example?

I bet I could come up with a much more coherent account of what the death of Jesus accomplished. How about this? God tried to save mankind from hell by killing the guy who was going to judge them and send them there. (And then God defeated his own plan by resurrecting him, so now most people won’t be saved after all. Whatever. Still makes more sense than any of the standard explanations. No matter what good the death of Jesus was supposed to do, it’s negated if he gets to just come right back to life like that.)

Or how about this? God is the author of human nature. God is the one who programmed our nature into our brains. Therefore, God is the one who is actually responsible for everyone’s sins. God knew exactly what humans would do if he made them the way he did. If he didn’t like it, he could have designed them differently. Since God somehow ended up designing humans so badly, and since he was so bothered by humans behaving exactly the way he designed them to, God had to punish himself. He never actually needed to punish us, because our nature is his fault, not ours.

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Why believe in miracles

Flawed concepts

A miracle is a supposed event that is contrary to the laws of nature. The idea is that an event like that can only be explained as the work of a supernatural being like God. Who else would be capable of breaking the laws of the universe? Here are a few of the problems with the concept of miracles.

When you hear a report of a miracle, consider how often people say things that aren’t actually true. What seems more likely, that a real miracle happened (something that goes against the way we’ve always known the world to work), or that the person claiming a miracle happened9 lied or was mistaken (something that happens all the time)?10

Particularly in the case of miracles reported in ancient times, it would be easy for people as ignorant as they were back then to be fooled. People who think faith is a virtue would probably be pretty easily fooled as well.

What’s God got to do with it?

What if it turns out that an apparently miraculous event can actually be explained in terms of ordinary natural phenomena? It may still be amazing, and it may be useful… But there’s no reason to think it’s a true miracle in that case, and it’s not very strong evidence of anything supernatural.

Even if we assume the stories in the Bible aren’t entirely made up, a lot of the miracles reported there have possible natural explanations. And that’s just based on what we know about the natural world. There’s no way to know for sure that an apparent miracle doesn’t have a non-supernatural cause that we don’t know about yet.

Even if you’re convinced that a violation of the laws of nature has occurred, that’s no reason to think it has anything to do with anything supernatural. Maybe nature just doesn’t happen to be perfectly consistent or lawful. And in a lot of cases, even if you accept that it’s proof of something supernatural, there’s no reason to assume that an apparent miracle is evidence of the existence of any particular god, or that someone performing miracles was sent by God.

Why couldn’t there be some other god behind it, or something supernatural other than a god, or some other explanation you haven’t thought of? There’s no reason to think that the cause of a miracle has to be all-powerful, or have any of the other attributes God is said to have. If all you know is that you can’t think of any usual explanation for what happened, all you can reasonably conclude is that you don’t know how it happened.

If you were to take one religion’s miracles as proof that that religion was true, how would you explain all the other religions’ miracles? People of many different religions believe they have experienced miracles that can only be explained by their religion being true. They can’t all be right. People of many different religions also believe that miracle claims associated with other religions are all false. They can all be right about that.

The Bible even says that evil people and evil spirits can perform miraculous signs of their own. So why assume that miracles have anything to do with God? It would make just as much sense to conclude that your religion’s miracles are the devil’s way of tricking you into believing in a false religion.

Miracles are things that don’t happen

Is it even possible in principle for the laws of nature to be broken? What exactly are the laws of nature? The word “law” here means a universal principle stating that things always happen in a certain way, which we take to be a fact as a result of extensive observation or experimentation. The laws of nature are our descriptions of how reality works. And anything that contradicts an accurate description of reality can’t be real.

There is always a possibility that our current ideas about the laws of nature aren’t perfectly accurate, and will need to be revised. What if we knew for a fact that an event had occurred that violated what we believed to be the laws of nature? That would just mean that we were mistaken about those laws, and we would need to update our concept of the laws of nature to accommodate that new knowledge of reality. And that would mean that the surprising event should no longer be considered a violation of the laws of nature, or a miracle.

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Mundane miracles

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A miracle is a supposed event that is contrary to the laws of nature.11 The idea is that an event like that can only be explained as the work of a supernatural being like God. But what if it turns out that an apparently miraculous event can actually be explained in terms of ordinary natural phenomena? It may still be amazing, and it may be useful… But there’s no reason to think it’s a true miracle in that case, and it’s not very strong evidence of anything supernatural.

How many of the miracles reported in the Bible (supposing the stories aren’t entirely made up) have possible natural explanations?12

Knowledge

There are a lot of prophecies in the Bible. A lot of them have turned out to be false. A lot of them fail to specify a deadline for fulfillment, making it impossible to tell whether they’re false. Some of them seem suspiciously like they were written after the fact. Some of them predict events that are nothing out of the ordinary. Some of them are so vague that it’s no surprise that something happened that could be considered to fit the description. Some of them have only been fulfilled because people who knew about the predictions fulfilled them on purpose. And a lot of the passages that are considered prophecies weren’t even meant to be predictions at all. That doesn’t leave very many actual impressive predictions, if any.

Jesus and other prophets in the Bible are said to have been able to read minds and demonstrate inexplicable knowledge of other people’s pasts. It’s surprisingly easy to give the impression that you have abilities like that. When people want to believe that you’re psychic, they will perceive your readings as amazingly accurate no matter what you say. They’ll do most of the work for you, interpreting whatever you say as something meaningful and accurate. And they’ll ignore everything you get wrong.

Creation, destruction, and transformation

There’s one miracle that the Bible actually admits was faked: Joseph and his steward secretly put Joseph’s brothers’ money back in their sacks, after the brothers had spent it. Then Joseph and his steward lied to the brothers, and let them think God had created some new money and put it in their sacks. How many other fake miracles are there that the Bible isn’t telling us are fake?

What’s up with that burning bush Moses found that wouldn’t burn up, before he started hearing God talking to him? Maybe it was some kind of Acacia. They can be easily flammable and slow to burn up, and they can even trigger religious experiences.

Moses and Aaron tried to prove that God had sent them by turning a staff into a snake. But the Egyptian magicians were able to do the same thing. So either they were prophets of God too, or that trick doesn’t prove anything. I’ve heard it’s possible to do the stick-to-snake trick by holding an Egyptian Cobra and applying pressure near its head. That makes it go stiff and motionless so it looks like an inanimate stick, until you put it down.

The Bible says during the first of the ten plagues of Egypt, the water turned into undrinkable blood and killed everything in it. That sounds a lot like a phenomenon known as a red tide, where a certain kind of algae causes water to turn red and toxic. That could explain some of the other plagues, as well. Frogs flee from the unhealthy water and die, bugs get out of control because of the lack of frogs, bugs spread disease among the people and livestock, etc. And the remaining plagues could be explained by food poisoning and a volcano.

The collapse of Jericho could have been the result of a convenient earthquake that the Israelites later took credit for causing. Catastrophic earthquakes were apparently quite common there.

Why did the Philistines keep finding the idol of Dagon fallen over in the morning, bowing down toward the ark of the covenant, and eventually broken to pieces? Might one of the Israelites have snuck in and vandalized the idol during the night? It wouldn’t be the first time.

God told Isaiah he was planning on greening a desert, so that everyone would know God did it. But that would not be a justified conclusion, since that’s something people can do.

How could a crowd of over 5000 people eat and be satisfied if Jesus’s disciples only had five loaves of bread and two fish to offer them? Well, it never says nobody brought their own food. And why wouldn’t they?

Some branches of Christianity consider the Eucharist ritual to be a miracle. They believe the bread and wine actually turn into the body and blood of Jesus… which just happen to be completely indistinguishable from ordinary bread and wine for some reason. Least impressive miracle ever! No explanation needed.

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Everything wrong with heaven and hell

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Perverse incentives

  • The expectation of being rewarded or punished in the afterlife is supposed to be a reason to be good in this life. But rewards and punishments are not good reasons to be good. Focusing on personal repayment distracts from the real reasons to be good, which leads to selfishness and moral apathy. Especially in this case, where no one can even confirm that the rewards and punishments are actually being carried out.
  • If you do reward or punish people, they should be able to learn from the experience and know how to behave going forward. That doesn’t work if the reward or punishment never ends.
  • Expecting to be infinitely rewarded or punished depending on what you believe is arguably the worst possible obstacle to true belief.
  • Expecting to be infinitely rewarded or punished depending on what you do, combined with the belief you’ll be sent to hell for doubting its existence or doubting the authority of whoever’s telling you what you have to do to avoid being sent there, can make people do anything their religious authorities say, no matter how evil it might actually be.
  • A lot of religious people say it’s very important to God that we have free will. And they say it’s particularly important for us to be able to freely choose whether to accept him. So what’s up with all the threats and coercion? It’s hardly a free choice if you’re threatening to torture people forever if they don’t make the choice you want them to make.
  • The knowledge that life is short is an incentive to stop wasting time, focus on the things that matter most, and enjoy your life as much as you can while it lasts. If you think you’re going to live forever, you have no reason to do any of that. Scarcity makes things more valuable, including life. The belief in an everlasting afterlife devalues this life.
  • If you were really going to go to heaven when you died, the logical thing to do would be to kill yourself as soon as possible, after encouraging everyone you care about to do the same. Or maybe you wouldn’t do that, since having all those deaths on your hands might prevent you from going to the right place. But still, it wouldn’t make any sense to fear death, to try to avoid it, and to be sad when people die. A rational believer in heaven would live recklessly. Who cares if you die if you’re just going to keep living? Death would be a good thing if it meant you were going to a better world. And you would be anxious for it to happen as soon as possible, before you had a chance to do anything that might prevent you from getting there. (Of course, death is not actually a good thing, and not caring about death is a terrible idea, since heaven isn’t real. But many people think it is real, which is quite a dangerous belief.)
  • Having children is a terrible idea if it means there will be more people who have a good chance of ending up in hell. The existence of hell would mean that by reproducing, you risk causing infinitely more suffering than you would cause by doing any other bad thing you can imagine. Even if most people weren’t going to hell, as the Bible says they are, allowing any risk of even one person going to hell when you could have avoided it is unacceptable, and makes you an infinitely worse person than every childless criminal in history combined. The risk of causing your children to suffer forever is especially bad if people who die very young go to hell by default.
  • On the other hand, if you believe that people who die very young go to heaven by default, the logical thing to do would be to reproduce as often as possible and then kill all your children as soon as possible, to maximize the number of people who go to heaven.13 There certainly wouldn’t be any reason to oppose abortion if you believed that. In any case, if people who believed in heaven and hell acted logically on their misguided beliefs, believers would be extinct by now.
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Literal vs liberal interpretation

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I was raised to believe that everything the Bible says is literally true, and as a nonbeliever I still tend to interpret the Bible pretty literally. Here’s why:

Literalism is the natural form of religion that results from reading the scriptures.14 When people read the Bible with no preconceived ideas about what it should say, they will tend to assume it means exactly what it says. Why would it even occur to anyone that the Bible might not simply mean what it says (unless somebody else told them to think that)? I think the main reason is that some people can’t accept what they’re reading because they already have other, more strongly-held beliefs that are incompatible with the Bible.

Non-literalist religion is a self-deceptive phenomenon that results when people consider themselves religious, but also have beliefs and values that conflict with the scriptures. If they don’t want to outright reject the Bible or admit that their values don’t come from their religion, they have to make up metaphorical interpretations of the Bible that agree with what they already believe, and ignore what the Bible actually says.15

In a lot of cases, what the Bible says was meant completely literally, and was originally interpreted literally, and no one saw a problem with that. But as humanity’s knowledge of the world and standards of morality have improved over time, it has become increasingly clear to most people that what the Bible says literally is absurdly wrong. So those who can’t admit that the Bible is wrong have had to increasingly reinterpret it figuratively. Some take it so far that they’re basically atheists in denial.

Even literalists are now so used to thinking of certain concepts and expressions used in the Bible as figurative that it might not even occur to them that those things might have once been meant literally. But compared to what the writers intended, literalists aren’t literal enough! Like most people in ancient times, the writers of the Bible actually believed that people literally thought with their hearts. And their kidneys.16

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Faith is not reasonable

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Faith is commonly regarded as a virtue. But is it really a good thing? What exactly is faith, anyway? Let’s look as some definitions.

Faith: Complete trust or confidence in something. Believing something without question. Firm belief in something for which there is no proof. Faith can also mean an obligation of loyalty, and if we’re still talking about beliefs, that would mean being devoted to sticking to a particular belief (which goes along with believing something firmly and without question).

“Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking.” —Bill Maher

So then, faith means you decide to believe a particular idea even though there’s no evidence for it, and then you completely refuse to ever question it or consider changing your mind about it, disregarding all evidence to the contrary. Faith means being gullible regarding some ideas, and closed-minded to others. Faith means abandoning reason, willfully ignoring the evidence, breaking the connection between your beliefs and reality.

“There is no virtue in accepting something on faith, since it may very well be false, and it is clearly not virtuous to believe the false.” —Charlotte Schnook

Clearly this is an unbelievably bad way to form your beliefs. Considering what faith actually is, I don’t see how anyone could possibly think it was a good thing. There’s absolutely nothing good or reasonable about it. Having faith is just like having a delusion, except you’re doing it on purpose. If you want to have true beliefs and avoid having false beliefs, having faith is probably the most counterproductive thing you could possibly do.

Unlike reason and evidence, faith provides no way to determine which things you should believe. Any belief can be “justified” by faith just as well as any other. If you have faith in one religion, why not have faith in another religion? Why not believe that you are a six-legged zebra from the planet Japan? Why not accept on faith that you should give me all your money right now?

You can probably think of some reasons not to accept those things, but why do you suddenly think you need to have reasons for what you believe? If I tell you that Ahura Mazda is the real God, or that you are a six-legged zebra from the planet Japan, or that you need to give me all your money, why do you question it? You don’t need a reason to believe; you just need to have faith, right?

“If something can be used as a justification for everything, then it shouldn’t be used as a justification for anything.” —Matt Dillahunty

When the inherent irrationality of faith is pointed out, religious people will sometimes protest that their faith is based on evidence. Well, if you’re trying to base your beliefs on reason and evidence, that’s great. You’re more reasonable than some religious people. But letting evidence shape your beliefs is not what faith is, and it’s not what the Bible tells you to do. The unreasonable way of thinking I described above is exactly the kind of thinking that the Bible encourages, and describes as faith.

The Bible on faith

The Bible says faith means confidently believing in something you hope is true, but that you don’t actually see any evidence for. To live by faith is to live blindly.

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