Appendix
Notes
Introduction
1See, for example, the United Press International article by Uwe Siemon-Netto titled “God Not So Dead: Atheism in Decline Worldwide,” World Tribune, March 3, 2005, at www.worldtribune.com/ worldtribune/ 05/ breaking2453432.91875.html. See also the admission that “worldwide atheism overall may be in decline” in Phil Zuckerman, “Atheism: Contemporary Numbers and Patterns,” in The Cambridge Companion to Atheism, ed. Michael Martin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 59.
2Gary Wolf, “The Church of the Non-Believers,” WIRED, November 2006 at www.wired .com/ wired/ archive/ 14.11/ atheism_pr.html.
3Aptly put by Albert Mohler in his article “The New Atheism,” homepage (November 21, 2006) www.albertmohler.com/ commentary_read.php?cdate=2006-11-21.
4Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), p. 36.
5Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation (New York: Knopf, 2006), p. 67. He adds, “I would be the first to admit that the prospects for eradicating religion in our time do not seem good. Still, the same could have been said about efforts to abolish slavery at the end of the eighteenth century. Anyone who spoke with confidence about eradicating slavery in the United States in the year 1775 surely appeared to be wasting his time, and wasting it dangerously. The analogy is not perfect, but it is suggestive. If we ever do transcend our religious bewilderment, we will look back upon this period in human history with horror and amazement. How could it have been possible for people to believe such things in the twenty-first century? How could it be that they allowed their societies to become so dangerously fragmented by empty notions about God and Paradise? The truth is, some of your [that is, Christians’] most cherished beliefs are as embarrassing as those that sent the last slave ship sailing to America as late as 1859 (the same year that Darwin published The Origin of Species).”
6Wolf, “Church of the Non-Believers.”
7As quoted by Andrew Higgins, “The New Crusaders,” Wall Street Journal, April 12, 2007, p. A1.
8 Dinesh D’Souza, debate with Christopher Hitchens, accessed April 28, 2009, at http://216.75.61.152/ xstream/ neproductions/ tkc/ debate.wmv.
9 Dawkins, God Delusion, p. 37.
10See Daniel C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York: Viking Press, 2006), pp. 200-248, esp. pp. 230-31.
11Alister McGrath and Joanna Collicutt McGrath, The Dawkins Delusion (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2007), p. 12.
1: Richard Dawkins on Arguments for God
1William Lane Craig, “God Is Not Dead Yet” Christianity Today, July 2008, pp. 22-27.
2These were among the scores of comments posted to the article www.christianitytoday.com/ ct/ 2008/ july/ 13.22.html.
3Since my space is limited, I can consider only the objections that Dawkins himself raises. You can probably think of other objections that he doesn’t raise. Good for you—that shows you’re thinking for yourself! If you’re interested in exploring these arguments further, then I’d invite you to take a look at my book Reasonable Faith, 3rd ed. (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 2008). If you’re ready to go even deeper, look at some of the books listed in the bibliography at the end of this chapter.
4For discussion of such arguments see my Reasonable Faith, pp. 116-24.
5Interview of Paul Davies by Philip Adams, “The Big Questions: In the Beginning,” ABC Science Online, January 17, 2002 www.abc.net.au/ science/ bigquestions/ s460625.htm.
6Alex Vilenkin, Many Worlds in One: The Search for Other Universes (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), p. 176.
7Such an exercise of causal power plausibly brings God into time at the very moment of creation.
8Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), p. 77.
9Cited in Lewis Wolpert, Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), p. 215. Unfortunately, Wolpert’s reference is mistaken. The quotation seems to be a pastiche from Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (New York: Basic Books, 1996), p. 133, and Richard Dawkins, “The Ultraviolet Garden,” Lecture 4 of 7, Royal Institution Christmas Lectures (1992), http://physicshead.blogspot.com/ 2007/ 01/ richard-dawkins-lecture-4-ultraviolet.html. Thanks to my assistant Joe Gorra for tracking down this reference. See also chap. 7 n. 25 of this volume.
10Dawkins, God Delusion, p. 215.
11Ibid., p. 221.
12Ibid., p. 251.
13Ibid., pp. 23, 264, 313-17, 326, 328, 330.
14Ibid., pp. 78-79.
15For more on the moral argment see chap. 7 of this volume.
16Dawkins, God Delusion, p. 144.
17Ibid., p. 145.
18Ibid., p. 147.
19Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose, The Nature of Space and Time, The Isaac Newton Institute Series of Lectures (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 20.
20See the NASA website of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/ m_mm/ mr_limits.html.
21I. D. Novikov and Ya. B. Zeldovich, “Physical Processes near Cosmological Singularities,” Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics 11 (1973): 401-2.
22Joseph Silk, The Big Bang, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1989), pp. 311-12.
23Stephen W. Hawking, “Information Loss in Black Holes” at http://arXiv:hep-th/ 0507171. Accessed April 28, 2009.
24See Roger Penrose, The Road to Reality (New York: Knopf, 2005), pp. 762-65.
25Dawkins, God Delusion, p. 158.
26Because Dawkins erroneously thinks that the world ensemble is simple, it never occurs to him to ask, who designed the world ensemble?
27Dawkins, God Delusion, p. 149.
28Ibid., p. 83.
29Ibid., p. 84.
2: The Image of God and the Failure of Scientific Atheism
1John Calvin Institutes of the Christian Religion 1.1.1.
2John Searle, Freedom & Neurobiology (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), pp. 4-5.
3Antony Flew and Roy Abraham Varghese, There Is a God (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), p. 167. In context, only rationality is mentioned, but in other parts of the book, reference is also made to consciousness, free will and the self.
4The strong version of scientism maintains that science provides us with the sole basis of knowledge; the weaker version claims that science furnishes us with the most certain basis of knowledge, even if other disciplines provide more weakly justified beliefs or knowledge.
5Wilfrid Sellars, Science, Perception, and Reality (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), p. 173.
6John Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 83-93.
7Even when naturalists venture away from strong physicalism, they still argue that additions to a strong physicalist ontology must be depicted as rooted in, emergent from, dependent on the physical states and events of the Grand Story.
8John Searle, Freedom & Neurobiology (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
9 John Searle, Minds, Brains, and Science (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 98.
10John Bishop, Natural Agency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 1.
11In fact, all of them are subject to synchronic and diachronic determinism in this sense: Regarding synchronic determinism, at some time t, the physical conditions are sufficient to determine or fix the chances of the next event involving the object and its environment. Regarding diachronic determinism, at any time t, the object’s states and movements are determined or have their chances fixed by the microphysical states of the object and its environment. This latter determination is bottom-up.
12Victor Reppert, C. S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2003), p. 70.
13Thomas Nagel, The Last Word (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 75.
14A. C. Ewing, Value and Reality (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1973), p. 84.
15Jaegwon Kim, Philosophy of Mind (Boulder, Co.: Westview, 1996), pp. 131-32. “Most physicalists . . . accept the causal closure of the physical not only as a fundamental metaphysical doctrine but as an indispensable methodological presupposition of the physical sciences” (pp. 147-48).
16Daniel C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York: Viking Press, 2006), p. 107.
17Carl Sagan, Cosmos (New York: Random House, 1980), p. 105.
18Michael Ruse, “Evolutionary Theory and Christian Ethics,” in The Darwinian Paradigm (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 262-69.
19J. L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982), p. 115. Cf. J. P. Moreland and Kai Nielsen, Does God Exist? (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus, 1993), chaps. 8-10.
20Helga Kuhse and Peter Singer, Should the Baby Live? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 118-39.
21Joel Feinberg, Social Philosophy (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973), pp. 84-97.
22David Hull, The Metaphysics of Evolution (Albany: State University of New York, 1989), pp. 74-75.
23James Rachels, Created from Animals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 171-72. Cf. pp. 93, 97, 171.
3: Evidence of a Morally Perfect God
1For instance, in Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York: Penguin, 2006), pp. 240-46, Daniel Dennett takes up the question Does God exist? without considering at all whether God’s being perfectly loving would formatively influence the kind of evidence supplied by God to humans. Many other representatives of this misleading approach could be listed.
2Philosophical and theological questions about God often suffer from a seriously vague conception of God, resulting typically from undue abstractness in the assumed idea of God. Perhaps some humans use theological abstractness to divert attention from a divine moral challenge to humans.
3Henry Sidgwick, Outlines of the History of Ethics, 5th ed. (London: Macmillan, 1902), p. 114.
4For the details of and the solution to this widespread problem, see Paul K. Moser, The Elusive God: Reorienting Religious Epistemology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
5On the role of divine judgment and its cognitive effects in such challenges, see Edward Meadors, Idolatry and the Hardening of the Heart (London: T & T Clark, 2006).
4: God and Physics
1Mathematical beauty involves qualities such as economy and elegance. Like all forms of beauty, it is easier to recognize than to describe, but mathematicians can agree about its presence, so that it is an intersubjectively recognized property.
5: God and Evolution
1John Farley, The Spontaneous Generation Controversy from Descartes to Oparin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), p. 73.
2Helen Pearson, “What Is a Gene?” Nature 441 (2006): 398-401.
3Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 6th ed. (New York: New York University Press, 1988), p. 154.
6: Evolutionary Explanations of Religion
1Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods, trans. Horace C. P. McGregor (New York: Viking Penguin, 1986), pp. 87, 90.
2For more on this, see Michael Murray’s “Scientific Explanations of Religion and the Justification of Religious Belief” and, with Andrew Goldberg, “Evolutionary Accounts of Religion: Explaining and Explaining Away,” in The Believing Primate: Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Reflections on the Origin of Religion, ed. Jeffrey Schloss and Michael Murray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
3For more on this, see Michael J. Murray, “The Evolution of Religion: Nonadaptationist Accounts,” in Science and Religion, ed. Melville Stewart (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).
4Justin L. Barrett, Why Would Anyone Believe in God? (Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira Press, 2004).
5Deborah Kelemen, “Why Are Rocks Pointy? Children’s Preferences for Teleological Explanations of the Natural World,” Developmental Psychology 35 (1999): 1440-53.
6J. K. Chu, B. Liston, M. Sieger and D. Williams, “Is God in Our Genes?” Time, October 25, 2004.
7Richard Dawkins, “Viruses of the Mind,” posted on Center for the Study of Complex Systems (September 2001) www.cscs.umich.edu/ ~crshalizi/ Dawkins/ viruses-of-the-mind.html.
8Matthew Alper, The God Part of the Brain: A Scientific Interpretation of Human Spirituality and God (New York: Rogue Press, 2000), p. 79.
9Jesse Bering, quoted in Julia Reischel, “The God Fossil,” Broward-Palm Beach New Times, March 9, 2006.
10Of course there is still a difference here. In the case of the deer track, we infer the presence of the deer from the causal evidence, and in the divine case the beliefs are directly caused in us by the remote causal activity of God. But in both cases, the beliefs—in the deer and in God—are caused by the target of the belief acting in ways that cause the belief.
11Barrett, Why Would Anyone Believe in God?
12John Calvin Institutes of the Christian Religion 1.3.1.
7: God, Evil and Morality
1Epicurus, according to Lactantius (ca. A.D. 240-320) in De Ira Dei (On the Wrath of God), trans. Philip Schaff www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu/ 03d/ 0240-0320,_Lactantius,_De_Ira_Dei_%5BSchaff%5D,_EN.pdf.
2Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation (New York: Knopf, 2006), p. 55.
3Agnostic Paul Draper, considered to be one of the leading philosophers of religion currently writing on arguments from evil, makes the following comment: “I do not see how it is possible to construct a convincing logical argument from evil against theism.” See Paul Draper, “The Argument from Evil,” in Philosophy of Religion: Classic and Contemporary Issues, ed. Paul Copan and Chad Meister (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), p. 146.
4For more on this argument, see Alvin Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977), pt. 1.
5For an excellent delineation of various problems of evil, see Michael L. Peterson, God and Evil: An Introduction to the Issues (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1998).
6For some of these responses, see my Evil: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Continuum, forthcoming).
7William James, The Will to Believe, sect. 9 http://falcon.jmu.edu/ ~omearawm/ ph101will tobelieve.html.
8 Christopher Hitchens, “An Atheist Responds,” Washington Post, July 14, 2007, A17.
9 For more on this, see Paul Copan, “The Moral Argument,” in Philosophy of Religion: Classic and Contemporary Issues, ed. Paul Copan and Chad Meister (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), pp. 127-41.
10See, for example, Hitchens’s debates with Al Sharpton at http://fora.tv/ 2007/ 05/ 07/ Al_Sharpton_and_Christopher_Hitchens and with Alister McGrath at http://richarddawkins.net/ article,1752,Debate-between-Christopher-Hitchens-and-Alister-McGrath,Christopher-Hitchens-Alister-McGrath; see also Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Twelve, 2007).
11Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation, p. 11.
12Sam Harris, however, argues that moral relativism is “nonsensical” in his book The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), pp. 178-82.
13“God Debate: Sam Harris Versus Rick Warren,” Newsweek, April 9, 2007 www.msnbc.msn.com/ id/ 17889148/ site/ newsweek/ print/ 1/ displaymode/ 1098/ (emphasis added).
14Harris, End of Faith, pp. 170-71.
15Ibid., p. 171, n. 2.
16Daniel C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion and a Natural Phenomenon (New York: Viking Press, 2006), p. 376.
17Consequentialism is a kind of moral view that evaluates actions with respect to their consequences. Utilitarianism is a consequentialist theory. Deontological ethics considers certain features in a moral action to have intrinsic value, regardless of its consequences.
18Richard Dawkins, preface to The Selfish Gene (1976; reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. v.
19Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), pp. 214-15.
20Ibid., p. 216.
21In his debate with Al Sharpton, Christopher Hitchens seemed to base his moral position on this: “Why do I care? . . . Why do I mind about other primates [i.e., other human beings]? . . . Because I hope they mind about me in return.” Is this a basis for right and wrong? Is this the kind of moral position we want to affirm? What about those people who can never return the scratch? Is goodness based merely on tit-for-tat—I’ll help you if (and only if) you’ll help me? Reciprocal altruism may well be an important and perhaps even essential characteristic of morality, but a moral stance certainly includes much more than this. And Dawkins’s additions are simply not enough to give us a moral foundation needed to provide us with a justification for objective good and evil.
22Dawkins summarizes these himself in God Delusion, pp. 219-20.
23Dawkins states clearly that “morals do not have to be absolute” in God Delusion, p. 232.
24Michael Ruse and Edward O. Wilson, “The Evolution of Ethics,” in Philosophy of Biology, ed. Michael Ruse (New York: Macmillan, 1989), p. 316. In Shakespeare’s tragedy, when Macbeth is about to kill King Duncan, he has a hallucination of a dagger floating in the air.
25Actually, I think Dawkins does realize it, for in an earlier work he says this: “The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.” Richard Dawkins, “God’s Utility Function,” Scientific American, November 1995, p. 85 (emphasis added).
26Dawkins, God Delusion, pp. 220-21.
27C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1953), chaps. 1-5.
28Katherine Hepburn in Ladies’ Home Journal (October 1991) as quoted in David Mills, Atheist Universe (Berkeley, Calif.: Ulysses Press, 2006), p. 33.
29Thanks to James Stump, David Cramer and William Lane Craig for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay.
8: Is Religion Evil?
1Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), pp. 249-50.
2Terry Eagleton, “Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching: A Review of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion,” London Review of Books, October 19, 2006. For Eagleton’s subsequent magisterial demolition of the views of Dawkins and Hitchens, see Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
3This theme is particularly evident in the string of soundbites, implausibly passed off as an argument, in Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Twelve, 2007). In this chapter I shall focus particularly on Dawkins’s God Delusion, as it is widely seen as the most influential and intellectually sophisticated of the recent writings from the New Atheist school.
4Damien McElroy, “Amish Killer’s Widow Thanks Families of Victims for Forgiveness,” Daily Telegraph (London), October 16, 2006 www.telegraph.co.uk/ news/ worldnews/ 1531570/ Amish-killers-widow-thanks-families-of-victims-for-forgiveness.html.
5Letter to N. L. Ozmidov in Selected Letters of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, trans. Andrew R. MacAndrew, ed. Joseph Frank and David I. Goldstein (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987), p. 446.
6Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Devils, trans. Michael R. Katz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 691.
7Dawkins, God Delusion, p. 249.
8Dawkins, God Delusion, p. 259.
9 Chris Mooney, “Not Too Bright,” Skeptical Inquirer, March-April 2004.
10Michael Shermer, How We Believe: Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God (New York: Freeman, 2000), p. 71.
9: Are Old Testament Laws Evil?
1This essay summarizes some of the themes found in Paul Copan, “Is Yahweh a Moral Monster? The New Atheists and Old Testament Ethics,” Philosophia Christi 10, no. 1 (2008): 7-37.
2Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), p. 248.
3Ibid., pp. 242, 243, 247, 241.
4Daniel C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York: Viking, 2006), pp. 206, 265, 267.
5Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Twelve, 2007), pp. 101-2.
6Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation (New York: Knopf, 2006), p. 8.
7Sam Harris, The End of Faith (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), p. 18.
8Harris, Letter, pp. 18-19.
9 Ibid., p. 23.
10Ibid., p. 24.
11See Paul Copan, That’s Just Your Interpretation (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2001); How Do You Know You’re Not Wrong? (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2006); When God Goes to Starbucks: A Guide to Practical Apologetics (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008); and “Is Yahweh a Moral Monster? The New Atheists and Old Testament Ethics.”
12John Barton, Ethics and the Old Testament (Harrisburg, Penn.: Trinity Press International, 1998), p. 7. See Brevard S. Childs, Biblical Theology in Crisis (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1970), p. 125, where he notes that there is no “clear-cut answer” on how to do biblical ethics.
13Bruce C. Birch, Let Justice Roll Down: The Old Testament, Ethics, and Christian Life (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1991), p. 36.
14See John Goldingay, Theological Diversity and the Authority of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987), chap. 3.
15Brevard S. Childs, Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments: Theological Reflection on the Christian Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), p. 680.
16John Barton, Understanding Old Testament Ethics: Approaches and Explorations (Louis-ville: Westminster John Knox, 2003), p. 73.
17Bruce C. Birch, “Old Testament Ethics,” in The Blackwell Companion to the Hebrew Bible, ed. Leo G. Purdue (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), p. 297.
18Alden Thompson, Who’s Afraid of the Old Testament God? (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1988), p. 33.
19Goldingay, Theological Diversity, p. 86.
20Hector Avalos makes this faulty claim, along with a number of outrageous distortions, in “Paul Copan’s Moral Relativism: A Response from a Biblical Scholar of New Atheism,” Debunking Christianity (August 1, 2008) http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/ 2008/ 07/ paul-copans-moral-relativism-response.html. I cannot here address them except in passing. For example, he essentially accuses me of holding that the killing of the Canaanites was good (“Killing women and children is sometimes good”) and presumably should be applauded. No, this was, as John Stott said, “a ghastly business; one shrinks from it in horror” (John Stott and David Edwards, Evangelical Essentials [Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1988], p. 263). Punishment or the taking of life, even if just, is far from good and pleasant. (Consider, at a much lesser level, removing life support from a dying loved one; here we have a measure of last resort that is still far from “good.”) Also, in the context of slavery (e.g., 1 Pet 2:18-20), Avalos claims that biblical writers believed it was “good to be treated in a dehumanizing way” and that, according to New Testament writers, it “is deemed good to suffer pain and injustice.” This is a distortion. No, it is better to suffer for doing what is right than for wrongdoing; in the former case, such suffering is still unjust and thus not good. Nor is it virtuous to seek after suffering as good.
21Birch, Let Justice Roll Down, p. 43.
22See Joe M. Sprinkle, Biblical Law and Its Relevance (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2004), chap. 3.
23Christopher J. H. Wright, Walking in the Ways of the Lord (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1995), p. 124.
24Muhammad A. Dandamayev, “Slavery (Old Testament),” in Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 6, ed. David Noel Freedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992).
26All references to ancient Near Eastern legal texts are taken from William W. Hallo, ed., The Context of Scripture: Volume II: Monumental Inscriptions from the Biblical World (Leiden: Brill, 2003); Martha T. Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd ed. (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997). A fine summary about crimes and punishments related to women is Elisabeth Meier Tetlow, Women, Crime, and Punishment in Ancient Law and Society: Volume 1: The Ancient Near East (New York: Continuum 2004).
27Contra Avalos, “Paul Copan’s Moral Relativism.”
28Some of my discussion here is taken from William J. Webb, “A Redemptive-Movement Hermeneutic,” in Discovering Biblical Equality, ed. Ronald W. Pierce and Rebecca Merrill Groothuis (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2005).
29Gordon McConville, Grace in the End: A Study in Deuteronomic Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1993), p. 148.
30Avalos (“Paul Copan’s Moral Relativism”) mentions Exodus 21:21-22 as an indication of slaves being mere chattel. Actually, if a slave is killed by a master, the master is to be punished (following on the heels of this passage is mentioned “life for life”). This is quite remarkable and unique in the ancient Near East (on this unique feature, see Christopher J. H. Wright, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God [Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2004], p. 292). The debt slave is referred to as a master’s “money,” suggesting that the master harms himself if he harms his servant.
31Hittite law did not, however, permit sexual relations with a cow or sheep or pig or dog (paras. 187, 188, 199). These references are taken from Hallo, The Context of Scripture; Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor.
32Paul Johnson, Art: A New History (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), p. 33.
33Robin Parry, Old Testament Story and Christian Ethics (Carlisle, U.K.: Paternoster, 2005), p. 68.
34Although Deuteronomy 25:11-12 appears to suggest that a woman’s hand must be cut off if she seizes the genitals of the man who is in a fight with her husband (and if so, this would be the only biblical instance of punishment by mutilation), Jerome T. Walsh offers a more plausible interpretation—namely, depilation (“you shall shave [the hair of] her groin”) rather than mutilation. The word translated “hand” here is kaph—the “palm” of a hand or some rounded concavity such as a dish, bowl, or spoon or even the arch of a foot—rather than the commonly used yad (“hand”). To “cut off” a “palm”—as opposed to a hand—would be quite odd. Furthermore, the verb qasas in the intensified piel form (ten occurrences) is rightly translated “cut off” or “[physically] sever.” However, here qasas appears in the milder qal form. Three other Old Testament occurrences of qasas in the qal form mean “cut/shave [hair].” This would be the open concave region of the groin, and thus a shaving of pubic hair—a punishment of public humiliation not unusual in the ancient Near East. Thus, the talionic punishment is public sexual humiliation (of the woman) for public sexual humiliation (of the man). See Jerome T. Walsh, “You Shall Cut Off Her . . . Palm? A Re-examination of Deuteronomy 25:11-12,” Journal of Semitic Studies 49 (2004): 47-48; also, Richard M. Davidson, Flame of Yahweh: Sexuality in the Old Testament (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2007), pp. 476-80.
35Avalos (“Paul Copan’s Moral Relativism”) mentions an alleged biblical parallel with the river ordeal—the “water” (Num 5:16-22). But the difference here in this symbolic act is that the water itself is harmless (the ink is not toxic)—as opposed to the ancient Near Eastern punishment that ends up being the result of someone’s not being able to swim! Furthermore, any physical judgment in Numbers 5 is quite evidently supernatural and miraculous. Avalos adds that this practice in modern days would be indefensible. I would agree, but that’s a point I repeatedly make in my “Is Yahweh a Moral Monster?”: such practices aren’t the ideal morality—even if there is improvement.
36Tetlow, Women, Crime, and Punishment in Ancient Law and Society, pp. 12-13, 96-97, 136.
37David Lorton, “The Treatment of Criminals in Ancient Egypt,” in The Treatment of Criminals in the Ancient Near East, ed. Jack M. Sasson (Leiden: Brill, 1977), pp. 1-64; see, e.g., p. 25.
38“Crime and Punishment,” The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt, ed. Donald B. Redford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 1:318.
39Johannes Renger, “Wrongdoing and Its Sanctions: On ‘Criminal’ and ‘Civil’ Law in the Old Babylonian Period,” in The Treatment of Criminals in the Ancient Near East, ed. Jack M. Sasson (Leiden: Brill, 1977), p. 72; see also Wright, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God, p. 310.
40Contra Avalos, “Paul Copan’s Moral Relativism.”
41Brevard S. Childs, The Book of Exodus: A Critical, Theological Commentary (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1974), p. 93.
42John H. Sailhamer, The Pentateuch as Narrative: A Biblical-Theological Commentary, Library of Biblical Interpretation (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995), pp. 46-59; see also his Introduction to Old Testament Theology: A Canonical Approach (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995), pp. 272-89.
43Comments here are taken from chap. 3 in Goldingay, Theological Diversity.
44Paul Copan, “Yahweh Wars and the Canaanites,” Philosophia Christi 11, no. 1 (2009): 73-90. I am indebted to the work of Richard S. Hess, especially his “War in the Hebrew Bible: An Overview,” in War in the Bible and Terrorism in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Richard S. Hess and Elmer A. Martens (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2008); Richard S. Hess, Joshua: An Introduction and Commentary, Tyndale Old Testament Commentary (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 1996).
45On the exaggeration of numbers in the ancient Near East and Old Testament, see Daniel M. Fouts, “A Defense of the Hyperbolic Interpretation of Numbers in the Old Testament,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 40, no. 3 (1997): 377-87. In military contexts in the Bible, ‘eleph (the Hebrew word for “thousand”) can also mean “unit” or “squad.”
46Richard S. Hess, “The Jericho and Ai of the Book of Joshua,” in Critical Issues in Early Israelite History, ed. Richard S. Hess, Gerald A. Klingbeil and Paul J. Ray Jr. (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2008), pp. 38-39.
47Wright, Old Testament Ethics, pp. 474-75; Iain Provan, V. Philips Long and Tremper Longman III, A Biblical History of Israel (Lousiville: Westminster John Knox, 2003), p. 149.
48Gordon Wenham, Exploring the Old Testament: A Guide to the Pentateuch (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2003), p. 137.
49Avalos (“Paul Copan’s Moral Relativism”) writes: “If jihadist Muslims kill millions of Americans in order to wipe out our supposedly corrupt religion, then I suppose that would be morally acceptable by Dr. Copan’s logic. It all depends on whether you accept the faith claim that Allah is the true God.” My argument is that if God commanded it, then he had sufficient reason for doing so. This isn’t to justify actions done by anyone in the name of God. See my discussion regarding “General Lin” in When God Goes to Starbucks, chap. 12; cf. chaps. 13-14.
50Gordon J. Wenham, Story as Torah: Reading Old Testament Narratives Ethically (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2000), p. 80.
51McConville, Grace in the End, pp. 148-49.
52Christopher Wright, “Response to Gordon McConville,” in Canon and Biblical Interpretation, ed. Craig Bartholomew et al. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2006), p. 283. See Wright’s fuller explanation in this chapter.
53Wenham, Story as Torah, p. 81. Interestingly, the last commandment of the Decalogue (“You shall not covet”) directs our ethical perspective in the direction of the heart’s dispositions and intentions—beyond property and theft laws.
54Wright, Old Testament Ethics, p. 300.
55N. T. Wright, Climax of the Covenant (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), p. 181.
56Parry, Old Testament Story and Christian Ethics, p. 78.
57Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (New York: Basic Books, 1995), pp. 132-33.
58Richard Dawkins, A Devil’s Chaplain (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), p. 34.
59Paul Copan, “God, Naturalism, and the Foundations of Morality” in The Future of Atheism: Alister McGrath and Daniel Dennett in Dialogue, ed. Robert Stewart (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008).
60Alvin J. Schmidt, How Christianity Changed the World (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2004); Jonathan Hill, What Has Christianity Ever Done For Us? How It Shaped the Modern World (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2005); Dinesh D’Souza, What’s So Great About Christianity? (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 2007); Rodney Stark, The Victory of Reason (New York: Random House, 2006).
61Paul Davies, Are We Alone? (New York: Basic, 1995), p. 96.
10: How Could God Create Hell?
1A much more famous sermon by Edwards is “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” which describes hell in rather vivid terms. It’s a safe guess that mention of this sermon would also have set Hume off.
2Ernest Campbell Mossner, The Life of David Hume, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), p. 570.
3Thomas V. Morris, Making Sense of It All: Pascal and the Meaning of Life (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), pp. 21-22.
4Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), pp. 320-21.
5For a more thorough discussion of this point, see my book Hell: The Logic of Damnation (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), chap. 1.
6Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1954), p. 112.
7Ibid., p. 41.
8 John Wesley, The Works of John Wesley, 3rd ed. (1872; reprint Grand Rapids: Baker, 1979), 6:434 (my italics).
9 C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001), p. 175.
10Ibid., p. 176.
11Wesley, Works, 6:430.
12C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (New York: Macmillan, 1962), p. 127.
13For those who would like to follow up these issues in more detail, see my critique of Talbott in my book Hell: The Logic of Damnation, pp. 113-38. More recently, see Talbott’s essay and my response in Universalism: The Current Debate, ed. Robin A. Parry and Christopher H. Partridge (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), and my essay “A Hell of a Choice: Reply to Talbott,” Religious Studies 40 (2004): 203-16. The same volume has a reply by Talbott and my rejoinder.
14C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001), p. 71.
15Ibid., pp. 30-31.
16Thanks to David Baggett, Claire Brown, Philip Tallon and Elizabeth Turner for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay.
11: Recognizing Divine Revelation
1Kim Phuc, “The Long Road to Forgiveness,” All Things Considered, June 30, 2008 www.npr.org/ templates/ story/ story.php?storyId=91964687.
2Charles Taliaferro, Contemporary Philosophy of Religion (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 427-42; and Charles Taliaferro, Evidence and Faith: Philosophy and Religion Since the Seventeenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
3Evelyn E. Underhill, Mysticism: The Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness (Oxford: Oneworld, 2001), p. 66.
4Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), p. 31.
5Daniel C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York: Viking, 2006), p. 240.
6Jan Narveson, “God by Design?” in God and Design: The Teleological Argument and Modern Science, ed. N. A. Manson (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 93-94.
7David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (London: Harvard University Press, 1888), p. 251.
8J. R. Lucas, Freedom and Grace (London: SPCK, 1976), p. 26.
9Dawkins, God Delusion, pp. 31, 106.
10See also my Contemporary Philosophy of Religion (Malden: Blackwell, 1998); and Evidence and Faith: Philosophy and Religion Since the Seventeenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
11Dennett, Breaking the Spell, p. 130.
12I return to this point below when considering the importance of taking into account the value of evidence.
14David Hume, Of National Characters (London: Longmans, 1886), p. 225.
15I thank Elizabeth Clark, Aaron Stauffer and Elsa Marty for helpful comments on this essay.
12: The Messiah You Never Expected
1You can chase down these accusations against Jesus if you read Luke 14:1-6, Mark 7:1-20, Mark 3:20-27, Matthew 11:16-19, Mark 14:53-65, Matthew 27:62-64, Mark 15:1-20 and John 8:39-47.
2G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York: Doubleday, 1990), p. 95.
3The only exception for reciting Shema was in the event of a father’s death. We learn this from a later rabbinic text called the Mishnah (Berakot 3.1). I’m not sure this halakah was in effect in the first century, but it can serve to illustrate just how sacred a duty was to bury one’s father.
4Jacob Neusner, A Rabbi Talks with Jesus (New York: Doubleday/Image, 1994), p. 70.
5Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (New York: Dover, 1996), p. 79.
6Flannery O’Connor, Collected Works (New York: Library of America, 1988), p. 1035.
7A book should be mentioned here: Gerald Hawthorne, The Presence and the Power (Waco, Tex.: Word, 1991).
8Translation: Jacob Neusner, The Mishnah (New Haven: Yale, 1988).
9˜William Shakespeare Julius Caesar 2.1.182-83.
10G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1993), pp. 192-93.
11This chapter is rooted in three of my publications: The Story of the Christ (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2006), pp. 45-62; “Calling Jesus Mamzer,” Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 1 (2003): 73-103; Who Do My Opponents Say That I Am? An Investigation of the Accusations Against the Historical Jesus, ed. S. McKnight and J. B. Modica, Library of New Testament Studies 327 (London: T & T Clark, 2008).
13: Tracing Jesus’ Resurrection to Its Earliest Eyewitness Accounts
1Most notably on the Gospels, see Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006). Cf. James D. G. Dunn, Jesus Remembered, vol. 1 of Christianity in the Making (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003).
2For examples, Gary R. Habermas, The Risen Jesus and Future Hope (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003); The Historical Jesus: Ancient Evidence for the Life of Christ (Joplin, Mo.: College Press, 1996).
3Second-century historian Lucian of Samosata addressed the removal of subjective factors from the historian’s work (6:7-15, 72-73, 39-43), as well as the proper function of eyewitness testimony, unlike the ancient writer who claimed to have been a witness, although Lucian decided that the facts opposed his claim (6:43-47)! See Lucian’s How to Write History, vol. 6 of Lucian in Eight Volumes, trans. K. Kilburn, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959).
4Raymond E. Brown, The Death of the Messiah, 2 vols. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1994), esp. p. 1376; cf. pp. 1350-78. The former date is more commonly chosen by scholars, though nothing depends on our being specific.
5John Dominic Crossan, Who Killed Jesus? Exposing the Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Gospel Story of the Death of Jesus (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1995), p. 5.
6For examples, Bart D. Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University, 2000), pp. 43-44; Helmut Koester, Introduction to the New Testament, vol. 2, History and Literature of Early Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982), pp. 103-4.
7Koester, History and Literature, pp. 103-4.
8˜John Drane, Introducing the New Testament (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986), pp. 236-38.
9˜See 1 Corinthians 11:2, 23; 2 Thessalonians 3:6; 1 Timothy 1:15; 3:1; 4:9; 2 Timothy 2:2, 11; Titus 1:9.
10For the classic treatment of this subject, see Oscar Cullmann, The Earliest Christian Confessions, trans. J. K. S. Reid (London: Lutterworth, 1949); cf. Joachim Jeremias, The Eucharistic Words of Jesus (London: SCM Press, 1966).
11C. H. Dodd, The Apostolic Preaching and Its Developments (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1980), p. 16.
12For examples, see Habermas, Historical Jesus, esp. pp. 152-57; Gary R. Habermas, “The Resurrection Appearances of Jesus,” in In Defense of Miracles: A Comprehensive Case for God’s Action in History, ed. Douglas Geivett and Gary R. Habermas (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1997), esp. pp. 263-70.
13Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, pp. 265-66.
14See William Farmer, “Peter and Paul, and the Tradition Concerning ‘The Lord’s Supper’ in 1 Corinthians 11:23-25,” Criswell Theological Review 2 (1987): 122-30.
15Dodd, Apostolic Preaching, p. 16.
16For these lists, see Habermas, Risen Jesus and Future Hope, esp. nn. 75-102.
17Koester, History and Literature, p. 103.
18See Paul’s efforts to take up offerings on behalf of poor believers (1 Cor 16:1-4; 2 Cor 8:1-15).
19Dodd, Apostolic Preaching, p. 16.
20For a number of these passages, see Acts 1:21-22; 2:22-36; 3:13-16; 4:8-10; 5:29-32; 10:39-43; 13:28-31; 17:1-3, 30-31.
21Dodd, Apostolic Preaching, pp. 17-31, esp. pp. 19, 24, 26, 31.
22For this agreement between Paul and the other apostles on the nature of the gospel message, see Martin Hengel, The Atonement (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1981), pp. 38, 69; John Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus (New York: Doubleday, 1987), p. 118; Hans Dieter Betz, Galatians: A Commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Churches in Galatia (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979), p. 76; Ben Meyer, “Resurrection as Humanly Intelligible Destiny,” Ex Auditu 9 (1993): 15; Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, p. 266.
23Howard Clark Kee, What Can We Know About Jesus? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 1-2.
24Such as those listed in note 20 above.
25Gerd Lüdemann, The Resurrection of Jesus, trans. John Bowden (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994), p. 38.
26Michael Goulder, “The Baseless Fabric of a Vision,” in Resurrection Reconsidered, ed. Gavin D’Costa (Oxford: Oneworld, 1996), p. 48.
27Larry W. Hurtado, How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God? Historical Questions About Earliest Devotion to Jesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), esp. p. 4; N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), p. 319; cf. Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, pp. 264-68, 307-8.
28Dunn, Jesus Remembered, p. 825 (emphasis in the original).
29Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Hachette, 2007), pp. 22-23.
30Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), pp. 119-20.
31For a classical treatment on the dating of the pagan stories, see Günther Wagner, Das religionsgeschichtliche Problem von Römer 6, 1-11 (Zürich: Zwingli Verlag, 1962), especially Wagner’s excellent summary in part 3, sects. A-B. Even Helmut Koester includes similar comments, particularly in Introduction to the New Testament, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982), pp. 190, 193.
32For several major reasons, see Habermas, Risen Jesus and Future Hope, pp. 23-24.
33For a detailed discussion and critique, see Gary R. Habermas, The Resurrection of Jesus: A Rational Inquiry (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, 1976), pp. 146-71.
34Wolfhart Pannenberg, Jesus: God and Man, trans. Lewis Wilkins and Duane Priebe (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1977), p. 91 (emphasis in the original).
35For details, see Gary R. Habermas, “Experiences of the Risen Jesus: The Foundational Historical Issue in the Early Proclamation of the Resurrection,” Dialog: A Journal of Theology 45 (2006): 288-97.
36Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, p. 308 (emphasis in the original).
14: Why Faith in Jesus Matters
1I’ll quote from the Bible to illustrate my points. I think the evidence is overwhelming that the Bible is historically reliable, giving us accurate information on the events as they actually happened. Beyond that, I believe the Bible has credentials that show it to be a supernaturally inspired book. For a summary of my thoughts on this see Choosing Your Faith . . . in a World of Spiritual Options (Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndale House, 2008). And for a fuller introduction to this information, read Lee Strobel’s classic The Case for Christ (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998).
2Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), p. 107.
3Dinesh D’Souza, What’s So Great About Christianity (Washington D.C.: Regnery, 2007), p. 214.
Postscript
1“Christianity Challenges the University: An International Conference of Theists and Atheists,” Dallas, Texas, February 7–10, 1985, organized by Roy Abraham Varghese.
2See Gary R. Habermas and Antony G. N. Flew, Did Jesus Rise from the Dead? The Resurrection Debate, ed. Terry L. Miethe (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987; Eugene, Ore.: Wipf and Stock, 2003).
3Some examples by Antony Flew include “Miracles and Methodology,” in Hume’s Philosophy of Belief: A Study of His First Inquiry (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961); “The Credentials of Revelation: Miracle and History,” in God and Philosophy (New York: Dell, 1966); “Miracles,” in Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards (New York: Macmillan, 1967); “The Impossibility of the Miraculous,” in Hume’s Philosophy of Religion (Winston-Salem, N.C.: Wake Forest University Press, 1985); introduction to Of Miracles by David Hume (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1985); “Neo-Humean Arguments About the Miraculous,” in In Defence of Miracles: A Comprehensive Case for God’s Action in History, ed. R. Douglas Geivett and Gary R. Habermas (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1997).
4Some examples by Gary Habermas include The Risen Jesus and Future Hope (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003); The Historical Jesus: Ancient Evidence for the Life of Christ (Joplin, Mo.: College Press, 1996); The Resurrection of Jesus: An Apologetic (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1980; Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1984); “Knowing That Jesus’ Resurrection Occurred: A Response to Stephen Davis,” Faith and Philosophy 2 (1985): 295-302; “Resurrection Claims in Non-Christian Religions,” Religious Studies 25 (1989): 167-77; “The Late Twentieth-Century Resurgence of Naturalistic Responses to Jesus’ Resurrection,” Trinity Journal 22 (2001): 179-96. For a more popular treatment, see Habermas and Michael R. Licona, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2004).
5Gary R. Habermas and Antony G. N. Flew, Resurrected? An Atheist and Theist Debate, ed. John Ankerberg (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005).
6The dialogue took place as a part of the Veritas Forum and is accessible at www.veritasforum.com/ talks/ httm.
7Telephone conversation, September 9, 2004.
8Both participants also agreed to the title of the interview.
9John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971).
10Gerald L. Schroeder, The Science of God: The Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom (New York: Broadway Books, 1998).
11Letter from Antony Flew, November 9, 2000.
12Antony Flew, “God and the Big Bang” (lecture, 2000), pp. 5-6; this is a lecture commemorating the 140th anniversary of the British Association meeting regarding Charles Darwin’s The Origin of the Species.
13C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1980), esp. bk. 1.
14Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson, 1948).
15G. W. Leibniz, Theodicy, ed. A. Farrer, trans. E. M. Huggard (1710; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965).
16Donald W. Livingston, Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium: Hume’s Pathology of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 150.
17Antony Flew, Social Life and Moral Judgment (New Brunswick, N.H.: Transaction, 2003).
18Antony Flew, “Selves,” Mind (1949): 355–58.
19Antony Flew, The Logic of Mortality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987).
20Richard Swinburne, The Evolution of the Soul (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986).
21Antony Flew, Merely Mortal? Can You Survive Your Own Death? (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus, 2000).
22Joseph Butler, Butler’s Works, ed. W. E. Gladstone (Oxford: Clarendon, 1896), 1:387.
23For many cases see Gary R. Habermas and J. P. Moreland, Beyond Death: Exploring the Evidence for Immortality (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 1998; Eugene, Ore.: Wipf & Stock, 2003), chaps. 7–9.
24Letter from Antony Flew, September 6, 2000.
25Antony Flew, A New Approach to Psychical Research (London: C. A. Watts, 1953).
26Letter from Antony Flew, September 6, 2000.
27Flew, “God and the Big Bang,” p. 2. Habermas’s influence on Flew’s statement here is noted in Flew’s letter of November 9, 2000.
28Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologiae I.q.23.a.3.
29Thomas Aquinas Summa contra gentiles. 3.67.
30Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologiae III.supp.94.a.1–3.
31Qur’an 2, trans. Arthur J. Arberry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
33Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 416.
34This is the version of the Qur’an as “interpreted” by Arthur Arberry, in the Oxford University Press edition.
35D. J. West, Eleven Lourdes Miracles (London: George Duckworth, 1957).
36Bernard Smith, The Fraudulent Gospel: Politics and the World Council of Churches (London: Foreign Affairs, 1977).
37See, for example, Bertrand Russell, Bertrand Russell Speaks His Mind, ed. Woodrow Wyatt (New York: Bard Books, 1960), pp. 19-20.
38Permission was granted by the editor of Philosophia Christi to reprint this interview between Gary Habermas and Antony Flew from the Winter 2004 issue. More about the interview can be found at www.epsociety.org. The complete story of Antony Flew’s movement from atheism to theism is told in his book There Is a God (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2007), winner of the 2008 Christianity Today Book of the Year award for apologetics.
Appendix
39A third book along these lines, The End of Faith, has recently been written by Sam Harris, and more recently still a sequel, Letter to a Christian Nation, so perhaps we should speak of the touchdown triplets—or, given that Harris is very much the junior partner in this enterprise (he’s a grad student) maybe the “Three Bears of Atheism”?
40Dawkins does bring up (p. 54), apparently approvingly, the argument that God can’t be both omniscient and omnipotent: if he is omniscient, then he can’t change his mind, in which case there is something he can’t do, so that he isn’t omnipotent.
41See my Does God Have a Nature? Aquinas Lecture 44 (Marquette: Marquette University Press, 1980).
42The distinguished Oxford philosopher (Dawkins calls him a theologian) Richard Swinburne has proposed some sophisticated arguments for the claim that God is simple. Dawkins mentions Swinburne’s argument but doesn’t deign to come to grips with it; instead he resorts to ridicule (pp. 110-11).
43What about the Trinity? Just how we are to think of the Trinity is of course not wholly clear; it is clear, however, that it is false that in addition to each of the three persons of the Trinity, there is also another being of which each of those persons is a part.
44Stephen Hawking, “The Anisotropy of the Universe at Large Times,” in Confrontation of Cosmological Theories with Observational Data, ed. M. S. Longair (New York: Springer, 2002), p. 285.
45John Polkinghorne, Science and Creation: The Search for Understanding (New York: Random House, 1989), p. 22.
46One of the best versions of the fine-tuning argument is proposed by Robin Collins in “A Scientific Argument for the Existence of God: The Fine-Tuning Design Argument,” in Reason for the Hope Within, ed. Michael J. Murray (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), pp. 47-75.
47See my review of Daniel Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea in Books & Culture, May/June 1996.