Gary Habermas' curious evasion

The following message by Gary Habermas re: the Flew Scandal:

In our case, when asked if he knew me, Tony said something like, "yes, I think we met at a debate." What appeared to question his memory of me was actually the very opposite: a very accurate comment from more than 20 years ago! The first time we met (in 1985) was at a debate, and it was not one of our dialogues, either, so Tony was entirely accurate.

The quote from the article is not quite accurate. It differs in an ever so slight but important way:

"Have you ever run across the philosopher Paul Davies?” In his book, Flew calls Paul Davies "arguably the most influential contemporary expositor of modern science."

"I’m afraid this is a spectacle of my not remembering!"

He said this with a laugh. When we began the interview, he warned me, with merry self-deprecation, that he suffers from "nominal aphasia," or the inability to reproduce names. But he forgot more than names. He didn’t remember talking with Paul Kurtz about his introduction to "God and Philosophy" just two years ago. There were words in his book, like "abiogenesis," that now he could not define. When I asked about Gary Habermas, who told me that he and Flew had been friends for 22 years and exchanged "dozens" of letters, Flew said, "He and I met at a debate, I think."

Notice the absence of the word "yes." In the context of the section, it's clear that Flew couldn't a definite answer to the question, contrary to what Habermas indicates.

Flew's response on that point could have been a relatively isolated glitch, involving failure to match a name to anything rather than completely forgetting about Habermas. Still, it's one of a number of pieces of evidence of the mental decline Flew has gone through.

William Lane Craig slinging sleaze at Hector Avalos

Some background: a few years ago, Evangelical apologist William Lane Caig debated biblical scholar Hector Avalos. Craig went first, and opened with a bizarre stunt: he pointed to a previous debate where Avalos complained about claims made by his opponent (Rubel Shelly) which as far as I could tell (just from listening to Craig, before hearing Avalos' response) were misleading at best. Somehow, this was supposed to show a lack of character on Avalos' part. Craig claimed his personal attack was made solely in order to raise the level of his debate with Avalos. Avalos shrugged off this maneuver at the time, but more recently responded to Craig on this point, along with others that came up in their debate. Craig responded, accusing Avalos of unprofessional ad hominem attacks which Craig said ought to damage Avalos' reputation. Craig also claimed that, with one exception, "his remarks hardly merit comment."

The first problem is that the rationale is bogus: some errors really are so egregious that they call into question a persons competence or integrity, and there's nothing wrong with saying so in public debate. What's truly disgusting about Craig's response however, is the hypocrisy, since Craig was the first one to resort to personal attacks in his dealings with Avalos.

Someday, I will probably cease to be surprised by Craig's utter disregard for anything resembling professional ethics (which is why I refuse to call him a philosopher or a scholar, in spite of his doctorates). For the moment, though, he continues to astound me.

D'Souza and Mariottini: still clueless

Cross posted at God is for Suckers!)

Oh boy, Claude Mariottini just managed to be impressed by a Dinesh D'Souza article. D'Souza is going after Dawkins for saying he doesn't mind Christian symbolism in the public square. D'Souza's citations of what Dawkins has previously said on the subject are one-sided: he acts as if admitting a few good things are to be found in Christianity is something new for Dawkins, but The God Delusion talks about the beauty of the King James Version and gives a mixed review of Jesus' teachings rather than an entirely negative one. In place of the Nazi analogy, I'd suggest one from Greek mythology: I can appreciate the cultural heritage while realizing that the Greek heroes and gods were often portrayed as behaving monstrously. As a matter of fact, I even admit that the fascists produced at least one fascinating aesthetic achievement: El Valle de los Caidos, which was built under the direction of Francisco Franco. Of course there's an issue of historic distance: I feel a distance from Franco and the ancient Greeks that I don't feel from Hitler or Christianity; living in secularized Britain, Dawkins must feel a bit more distance from orthodox Christianity than I do.

Both D'Souza and Mariottini float silly speculations about the reason for Dawkins' statements, which in general aren't worth addressing, but I do find it interesting that Mariottini is still promoting the same silly misunderstanding of Dawkins' views on disproving God which I pointed out here. For the last time: Dawkins denies he can conclusively disprove the existence of God because of a general philosophical view that it is impossible to conclusively disprove anything, not because the holy spirit is getting through to him. Okay, so I hope that's the last time I have to say that, but it probably won't be.

William Lane Craig weighs in on the Flew scandal

I've found out from Richard Carrier that William Lane Craig has weighed in on the Flew scandal. The audio is actually an interesting listen--Craig is as slick as ever, and unlike most of the apologists who've weighed in here he appears to have stopped 30 seconds to think before opening his mouth. When all's said and done though, he still manages to sidestep the main issues, and deserves every bit of scorn Carrier pours on him ('cept maybe the childish part--most children aren't that sleazy). Read Carrier's whole article.

The Flew affair: wrapping up the spin

(Cross posted at God is for Suckers!)

A couple of weeks ago, I declared I was taking a break from my blogging on the Antony Flew scandal. I've decided to come back to wrap up on the spin apologists have been putting out. For those new to the story, read the New York Times piece by Mark Oppenheimer on Flew first. It's what touched off the controversy, and the defining feature of the whole thing is that the Evangelical apologists rushing to exploit Flew seem incapable of addressing it as it stands, but rather compulsively misrepresent it.

Christianity Today is just baffling:

In "The Turning of an Atheist, "Mark Oppenheimer raises questions galore without actually proving any of his points.

Oppenheimer supports everything he says with statements the people involved. What more proof does CT have in mind? It's never explained.

He questions the degree of Flew’s involvement in writing the book...

Everybody agrees that Roy Varghese did most of the work writing the book, and this should not be much of a surprise to anyone who understands that "with" is frequently used as a euphamism for "ghostwriten by."

...the credibility of scientists whose perspective Flew adopted...

I've read the article through many, many, times, but if Oppenheimer himself ever questions the credibility of the scientists involved, I keep missing it. Oppenheimer does quote Richard Carrier and Paul Kurtz doing so, but so what? I don't know how he could have covered this story without mentioning the fact that the claims made in Flew's book are controversial.

...and even Flew’s mental competence at the advanced age of 84. (Oppenheimer suggests that Flew may be "a senescent scholar possibly being exploited by his associates" and raises the possibility that his "memory [is] failing" and that "his powers [are] in decline.")

This point is supported with a fair amount of details from Oppenheimer's own conversations with Flew. Flew couldn't remember relevant people, concepts events, and explicitly admitted he had erroneously endorsed a view because he had simply forgotten one of the main objections to it he had spent his life promoting. Again, what kind of proof does the CT author have in mind?

Bruce Chapman has put up a couple of posts at a Discovery Institute website so lacking in substance that it's hard to find anything to criticize in them. In the first post, Chapman accuses the Times of having sent Oppenheimer to discredit Flew. The possibility that Oppenheimer simply set out to cover it and followed the facts where they lead is ignored without an attempt at justification. Then he calls the idea "that Flew is getting old and forgetful" a "conceit," simply ignoring the grounds given for this conclusion. The second posts suggests a lawsuit against the times, without explaining what possible grounds there might be for such an action.

William Dembski, that paragon of honesty, has called the Times piece "vile" and "despicable," without actually finding anything to criticize about it.

Journalist and philosophical wanabe Dinsesh D'Souza is another entry in the flat-out-lie school of spinning this one:

The only evidence that Flew has lost his mind is that he's 84 years old.

No, the evidence is specific failures of memory documented by Oppenhiemer.

A man of 84 naturally loses some of his memory, especially for names, but this does not mean he has lost his marbles.

This next sentence should make us pause and wonder if even D'Souza knows what he's trying to say. He acknowedges in a way that Flew's memory failures are documented, but readers of D'Souza who haven't read the Times article won't be clear on this. He also seems to suggest that if you're at an age where a problem is common, your having the problem doesn't count as having the problem. If that's D'Souza's argument, all I can say is that it's one of those things for which the phrase "WTF, mate?" was created.

Most of the positive Amazon.com reviews aren't worth reading, much less responding to, but I'll look at one because it's from the literary agent for the book. The main criticism is rather confused:

The NT Times Magazine article referenced in other reviews could be categorized as an ad hominem argument (defined as "appealing to feelings or prejudices rather than intellect, or attacking character and not content"). In an attempt to find a "story behind the story" the article sidesteps the actual story itself, which is that Antony Flew, a brilliant atheistic philosopher, has changed his mind about the existence of God.

First, the definition of ad hominem is weird, as standard definitions include only the second part. Second, the fallacy is only there if the inference that the arguments are unsound is drawn from the character flaws. If the information is simply presented as worth knowing (which it surely is), no fallacy committed. Finally, if the story is the conversion, not the arguments, how on earth can the agent complain about focusing on the man?

This is followed by a childlike statement from Flew, of whose authenticity I sadly have little doubt:

"My name is on the book and it represents exactly my opinions. I would not have a book issued in my name that I do not 100 percent agree with. I needed someone to do the actual writing because I'm 84 and that was Roy Varghese's role. The idea that someone manipulated me because I'm old is exactly wrong. I may be old but it is hard to manipulate me. This is my book and it represents my thinking."

Lastly, there is a quote from the publisher containing an outright lie: "the NYT Magazine writer generalized from Flew's aphasia to senility." For the half-dozenth time, Oppenheimer explicitly describes observing evidence of memory problems going far beyond Flew's self-described "nominal aphasia."

I have to say I'm surprised by the number of prominent Christians rushing to dirty their hands with such nonsense. In a way, I'm disappointed; it wasn't supposed to be this easy to show the world what scumbags they are. Then again, I've already commented on how boring such frauds can be.

In lighter news, John Haldane wrote the Times to say his involvement with Flew was limited, and that Haldane "sensed that his vigor was reduced." (Also published was a letter from Varghese, which I dealt with when it was published by Vic Reppert. The Times edited Varghese for length, but the stuff they cut wouldn't change the blatant falseness of Varghese's claim that "The only reason that people ask questions about his mental faculties is that he dared to change his mind.") Valarie Tarico has an excellent post on the subject, which sets aside addressing the spin to actually understanding it. Finally, via ExChristian.net, there's a somewhat outdated but still nice video of Richard Dawkins speaking on Flew.

Varghese's misrepresentation of Dennett

Today, I sat down to-re-read Varghese's preface for the sake of assessing the line, being promoted by Vic Reppert, that apologists weren't really making such a big deal about Flew's change of mind. The short of it is that while Varghese doesn't quite come out and say "this conversion is evidence that God exists," he does want you to think it's really, really, important, exaggerats his significance as a philosopher in silly ways, and is so desperate to show how much more important Flew is than recent well-publicized atheist writers (Dawkins et. al.) that he actually manages to lodge contradictory criticisms of them in the space of three sentences, first claiming they're logical positivists and then claiming they should be condemned for ignoring an important insight of the logical positivists. There are also some run of the mill misrepresentations of Dawkins, so boring they're barely worth mentioning ("Dawkins admits to believing things he can't prove, therefore he's admitted to believing things on blind faith!"--a confusion Dawkins took pains to clear up in The God Delusion.)

There's enough going on with this controversy to make me hesitate to write all that up in detail, but I did stumble across one point worth looking at closely. Here's Varghese, Talking about Dawkins et. al.:

In the first place, they refuse to engage the real issues involved in the question of God's existence. None of them even address the central grounds for positing a divine reality (Dennett spends seven pages on the arguments for God's existence, Harris none). They fail to address the issue of the origins of rationality embedded in the fabric of the universe, of life understood as autonomous agency, and of consciousness, conceptual thought, and the self. Dawkins talks of the origins of life and consciousness, conceptual thought, and the self. Dawkins talks of the origins of life and consciousness as "one-off" events triggered by an "initial stroke of luck." Wolpert writes: "I have purposely [!] avoided any discussion of consciousness, which still remains mostly poorly understood." About the origin of consciousness, Dennett, a die-hard physicalist, once wrote, "and then a miracle happens."

There are a number of misrepresentations here, but the bolded [by me] sentence is what really caught my attention. Varghese clearly wants his readers to think Dennett's solution to the problem of consciousness is a hand-waving declaration that it's miraculous. Immediately, it smelled funny: my first guess was that it was a rhetorical gesture by Dennett describing an apparent problem in his view, which would have been followed by an attempted demonstration that the problem was not what it appeared. So, I looked up the citation and went to the library to get the journal article. When I read the relevant section, my immediate response was to slump back on my stacks-browsing stool and think, "Oh my god, it's worse than I thought." Then I sat up and thought, "why on earth would I expect better from Varghese?" Here's what I had found:

This raises Foster's main point: isn't this way of characterizing the difference the difference between unacceptable dualism and tolerable expansionist materialism vacuous or question-begging? Why, Foster asks, should the dualist be required to explain things more deeply than the materialist? I'd pose a more lenient demand: that the dualist offer any articulated, non-vacuous explanation of anything in the realm of psychology or mind-brain puzzles. Since I am simply proposing a constraint on what sort of theory to take seriously, it really doesn't matter to me (except as a matter of communicative convenience) whether the term 'dualism' is defined in such a way as to permit varieties of dualism to meet the constraint. Indeed, Nicholas Humphrey declares that his position is, in a certain sense, a kind of dualism, and yet since it undertakes to meet the demands of objective science, I consider it radical, but eminently worthy of attention, now - not a theory to postpone till doomsday. And if Penrose were to declare that his position, too, was really a sort of dualism, and if this understanding of the term caught on, I'd want to shift nomenclature and find some new blanket perjorative for theories that tolerate 'and then a miracle happens.'

In other words, Dennett isn't describing his own view of consciousness, he's describing what he believes to be a common flaw in the views of some (but not all) of his opponents.

Notice the trick in Varghese's presentation: he gives every reason for his readers to think the quote refers to Dennett's views, but only says that Dennett wrote the words in a discussion of consciousness. I think this provides a useful piece of context for evaluating Varghese's statements elsewhere. In much of what he writes, he comes off as a crackpot whose follies are best explained by abysmal reading comprehension and reality-blindness caused by a fanatical need to "get those darned atheists." His attack on Dennett, however, suggests that he is capable of sitting down and calmly contemplating subtle ways to give a false impression of the facts. Chilling.

Richard Carrier on the Flew scandal

Over at his blog, Richard Carrier has put up his comments on the Flew scandal. The information is not absolutely essential, but it is nice to see and there's at least one point which I had been annoyed to see left out of the Oppenheimer piece.

I do take issue, though, with Carrier's suggestion that Flew didn't even read the drafts of the book. Carrier offers some arguments for this position, and they seem reasonable at first, but the case is severely undermined by the facts about how badly shot Flew's memory is. All the evidence can be accounted for on the hypothesis that Flew read the drafts, but was unable to remember the information that would have stopped him from signing off on them. Such a hypothesis would seem extravegant under normal circumstances, but Oppenheimer's account of his encounter with Flew indicates Flew's memory really is that bad. Therefore, the suggestion that Flew didn't read the chapters is unwarrented.

Reppert on the Antony Flew scandal, again

Vic Reppert is continuing to attack Mark Oppenheimer's expose of the Flew scandal. A commenter posting under the name "bad" dispatches the post perfectly:

"Why is this so intolerable to the hard-core atheist crowd. Why the character assassination?"

Well, sometimes people act with a real lack of character, and it's worth pointing this out and condemning it. In this case, the salivating over Flew's rather meager and almost seemingly disinterested embrace of deism amongst evangelicals really IS remarkably ghoulish, and if you think it helps your cause to say that this judgment is just a defense mechanism on the part of non-believers, I guess you have to go with whatever tactics satisfy your needs.

But speaking as a non-believer who has plenty of full on Christian believing friends I think are perfectly intelligent, the argument that I'm threatened by Flew's deism seems pretty silly to me.

"The mere fact of Flew's conversion to deism undermines the hard-line atheist conviction that there are no real, intelligent ex-atheists."

This, as I noted, makes no sense.

There are plenty of intelligent people who believe in god: but seeing as being intelligent does not prevent one from being wrong, that is neither here nor there as an argument for belief in a god.

Flew seems to have been convinced by arguments that, frankly, seem pretty darn flimsy to me. But it's no real skin off my back: lots of theists buy those arguments (though many other theists agree that they are bunk and use different arguments instead, or are just fideists).

What is of note, however, is the spectacle here. None of Varghese's "side" really seems to contradict the article: it just sort of sidesteps the more embarrassing implications and somehow manages to continue to avoid the fact that the book is being promoted as Flew's, when in fact Flew has many times said that he really isn't in a state to write or really even consider the arguments or scholars rigorously.

Flew, again by his own admission, doesn't seem able or willing to spend lots of time considering the counter-arguments to his new position, or the scientific scholarship involved, and so forth. Which is, in fact, not a really a big deal: no one is obligated to while away their remaining years on this or that intellectual debate. He can believe whatever he likes.

But when Flew is treated as a sort of trophy by everyone from creationists to, well, creationists (since more mainstream believers seem to find the situation sort of icky as well), and presented as a sort of argument from authority for theism, that, like it or not, calls into question the issue of what sort of authority Flew is on the matter.

The whole thing is made even more ghoulish and silly in the face of the fact that if you want to argue that there are intelligent believers, there are plenty of folks in the prime of their lives and careers defending theism. It's not like any of this spectacle was particularly necessary to make that point.

I also threw in my two cents:

I was going to respond, but bad said most of what needs to be said, so I'll restrict myself to two points:

(1) Oppenheimer plainly did talk to Varghese. He first mentions having done so on page 2 ("Varghese told me in August"), and then mentions confirming something Flew said with Varghese on page 5, indicating that he talked to Varghese after talking to Flew, so Varghese would not have been blindsided by Oppenheimer's account of his encounter with Flew. That does not mean Oppenheimer showed him a draft of the article, but nor is that standard practice for journalists. I don't know how that would have changed things, as the most damning parts of the article are matter-of-fact statements about things Flew has said, and I don't see what Oppenheimer is supposed to do to be more responsible there, short of dragging a second journalist around with him through the entire course of writing the article to make sure he wasn't making things up wholesale.

(2) If you care so much about letting people hear both sides, link to the Oppenheimer article so your readers aren't dependent on people like bad and me to tell them what the article said. Wait, never mind, I'll provide the link myself.

Antony Flew's manipulators continue to sink to new lows

Update: For those coming here from The Carnival of the Godless, I have a number of other blog posts on Flew, with I think at least one more to come.

News of Antony Flew scandal is continuing to spread. It's been picked up in a number of places, from God is for Suckers! to Atlantic Monthly blogger Ross Douthat. Brain Flemming has a perfect account of why the exploitation of Flew is reprehensible:

Imagine that in Ronald Reagan's twilight years -- the "long goodbye" of the neurodegenerative disease Alzheimer's -- some opportunistic political hack gained access to Reagan, manipulated a few quotes out of this mentally compromised old man, then penned the book, "The Democrats Were Always Right: Why I Am No Longer A Republican by Ronald Reagan."

Sleazy wouldn't begin to describe this behavior.

Now, the worst/best part of it is that they aren't backing down. Vic Reppert has put up a post passing along something gotten via Gary Habermas: Roy Abraham Varghese's response to the NYT piece. By passing this along with no disputing comment, both Habermas and Reppert are giving this their implicit endorsement. Part of me's saddened to see that there are people so morally bankrupt that they're willing to help in a project like this, but I have to confess to also being thrilled: if such people must exist, I'm glad that they're willing to expose themselves in such a public manner.

Let's look at the details of Reppert's post now, shall we?

I personally thought that the Oppenheimer piece was pretty clearly biased, in that it sounded as if he had talked to the people on the atheist side (like Carrier), but had not spoken to anybody on the theist side.

This is at best sloppy reading. Oppenheimer explicitly says he talked to Varghese. On page two, he says: "'I’ve been involved with him for 20 years or more,' Varghese told me in August." Even if that weren't the case, Oppenheimer's most damning revelations come from his direct interaction with Flew himself (see the first quote in PZ Myers' post). Note that Reppert doesn't link to Oppenheimer's article, making it difficult for his readers to check these things out for themselves. Now let's look at what Varghese himself has to say:

Among those who have personally been most influential in Tony Flew’s pilgrimage of reason is Professor Gary Habermas. Both intellectually and at a personal level Gary has become one of Tony’s closest friends and advisors. I know this from discussing the matter with Tony. As is their wont, the freethinking blogaholics (with their single digit audiences and gnat-sized attention spans) have turned their guns on all those (including Gary) who are associated with Tony. Since they have no interest in truth or even serious debate, there’s no point spending time or energy on their daily diet of diatribe. The Constitution guarantees freedom of speech. These folks interpret this as a continuous obligation. But that’s no reason for the rest of us to share their fate.

"I have no interest in debating them, based on an unsubstantiated assertion by me that they don't want to debate!" Talk about projection; this is one of those times when I think Freud doesn't deserve all the shit he gets.

After that, Varghese spends most of his time bolivating about issues that aren't in significant dispute, so I'll skip to the last paragraph (though follow the link if you're curious--unlike Reppert, I provided one):

Is Tony Flew "all there" mentally? Oppenheimer asks if he is "a senescent scholar" with a "failing" memory. As he himself notes, Tony cheerfully volunteered the fact that he has "nominal aphasia", the inability to reproduce names. Now, starting at the age of forty, the average human being progressively forgets recent names, events and the like. So nothing out of the ordinary there. Is Tony slower to respond when asked a question than a younger person? No question about that – age certainly leaves a mark with each passing year and he is now eighty-four. But then again there are numerous scholars in their seventies and eighties who have trouble remembering recent names and events. And yet in most such cases, the thinkers concerned have been clear and consistent in their reasoning whether or not we agree with their conclusions. The same holds true for Tony. When he sets pen to paper (as will be seen in the most recent issue of Skeptic), he is as cogent and coherent as you could want (and also as terse as he was in his 1950 article). The only reason why people ask questions about his mental faculties is because he dared to change his mind. But let’s not forget that his new view of the world is one embraced by many of today’s leading philosophers in the Anglo-American world as well as most of the pioneers of modern science. This is the dirty little secret that the "new atheists" and their drum-beaters never talk about. It’s so much easier to shoot the messenger!

Pure obfuscation. Again, as Oppenheimer said, "he forgot more than names"--again, see PZ's snippings for details.

On not engaging in real dialog with William Lane Craig

Today, John W. Loftus a post meant to get William Lane Craig to answer a follow up question to something Craig had previously answered. John isn't going to like this, but I have to say that if he thinks he's going to engage Craig in real dialog, he's severely mistaken. Craig's original response to him reeks of saying whatever sounds good, whether or not it really makes sense, something that's true of most of Craig's responses to criticism.

I only partially explained my reasons for thinking this in my initial response to Craig, but rather than going even deeper into the problems with that particular article, let me cite an even more egregious example of Craig's behavior: a post at the Secular Outpost on Craig's response to some of his daughter's friends. Take a good look at it: his account of the encounter begins "I argued..." and launches into a numbered list of six points. The approach is not surprising insofar as this is how Craig talks in his debates, but who talks that way with personal acquaintances? This is not a human being speaking, this is an apologetics bot. "Apologist" is not enough here, my philosophy of religion professor Keith Yandell is something of an apologist at heart insofar as arguing about religion is what really gets his blood pumping. I have to say "apologetics bot" because it is the only way to describe Craig's well-crafted debating persona that is totally disconnected from Craig's real reasons for believing, since he says he would believe even if all the arguments came out the other way. His persona is one he crafted just because he thought it would be effective in winning converts and keeping believers in the fold. The case is made even more disturbing by the fact that when I read Craig's Reasonable Faith, I got the impression the meaning-of-life type issues constituted his real reasons for believing, but in the quoted material at Secular Outpost, that is subsumed into his apologetics bot style.

So it's time to give up hope of dialog with Craig. He deserves public expose for his more sophisticated pieces of fakery, public ridicule for his more transparent ones, and that is all he deserves.

What I know about Josh McDowell

What follows is a post I could have made, in a form, some time ago, but chose not to write for a variety of reasons. I've chosen to write it now because I no longer have much hope of getting a definite answer to my questions, and have decided that the best thing I can do is say what I know and let others make what they will of it. Perhaps someone else will succeed in finding a definite answer where I have not, who knows.

First, for those who don't know, Josh McDowell is an Evangelical Christian who made his career as a traveling speaker for Campus Crusade for Christ, and boasts of a mind-boggling running total for college students spoken to (I think I read somewhere that he has a record for that, but am not sure). In 1972 he was involved in the creation of the book The Evidence That Demands a Verdict, put out by Campus Crusade's publishing arm, Here's Life Publications. The ambiguity in my "he was involved" phrasing is deliberate. The cover of the first edition says "by Josh McDowell," but the title page says "complied by Josh McDowell," and later editions just say "Josh McDowell." What he was "compiling" was quotations collected by a team of eleven college students (and more for later expansions), and the book consists almost entirely quotations that kinda sound like they support the credibility of Christianity, presented with a painful disregard for logical flow of argument. The names of the college students are listed prominently in early editions, but the billing is less prominent in recent ones.

Despite the rather odd nature of the work, it's been enormously influential. It's one of the first books Evangelicals have turned to when trying to claim rational support for their beliefs. As Jeff Lowder once said, "We remember the old alt.atheism days when every other refutation to a post was 'read McDowell.'" A year ago the book was listed as #13 out of the top 50 most influential Evangelical books. McDowell has been cited as a foundational influence by such apologists as William Lane Craig, Lee Strobel, and J. P. Moreland.

One of his main selling points, at least in recent years, is his claim to be a former atheist who set out to investigate the evidence for Christianity, thinking he would discredit it, and was compelled to convert by overwhelming evidence. It seems like half the Campus Crusaders I talk to here in Madison know that and little else about him. When I first encountered this claim I had only a vague idea of it. Then, one day (it must have been nearly a year ago) I was paging through my copy of The Evidence that Demands a Verdict (1999 edition--the date is important) and noticed what struck me as a rather odd claim:

I left the university and traveled throughout the United States and Europe to gather evidence to prove that Christianity is a sham.

One day while I was sitting in a library in London, England, I sensed a voice within me saying, "Josh, you don't have a leg to stand on." I immediately surpressed it. But just about every day after that I heard the same inner voice. The more I researched, the more I head this voice. I returned to the United States and to the university, but I couldn't sleep at night."

This immediately struck me as at odds with what I knew generally about McDowell from other sources, such as Ed Babinski's comments on McDowell's conversion. I contacted Ed about it, and with his help I eventually compiled a list of places where McDowell had given a testimonial of some kind:

*Kucharsky, David. "Josh McDowell Apologizing is his Calling." (interview with Josh McDowell) Christian Herald. Feb. 1981.
*McDowell, Josh. The Evidence That Demands a Verdict. n.p. 1972.
*McDowell, Josh. More Than a Carpenter. 1976.
*McDowell, Josh. The Resurrection Factor. San Bernardino: Here's Life Publishers, 1981.
*McDowell, Josh. The Evidence That Demands a Verdict: Volume 1. San Bernardino: Here's Life Publishers, Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1992
*McDowell, Josh. The New Evidence That Demands a Verdict. Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1999.
*McDowell, Josh. More Than a Carpenter. 2004
*McDowell, Josh. Evidence for Christianity. Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2006.
*McDowell, Josh, and Bob Hostetler. Beyond Belief to Convictions. Tyndale House Publishers, 2002.
*McDowell, Josh. "A Skeptic's Quest: Josh McDowell's Testimony." in Geisler, Norman L. and Paul K. Hoffman, eds. Why I Am a Christian. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2001.
*McDowell, Josh (interview with). "It's No Hoax." Moody Magazine. April 1983.
*McDowell, Josh (interview with). "New Evidence." SBC Life. May 2000.

In the course of this work, an interesting pattern emerged: In every source 1999 and later, McDowell makes basically the same claim about traveling to Europe. However, in every source before 1999, no mention of Europe is made; McDowell still claims to have investigated Christianity but the claims are much less extravagant in nature. As an aside, I found nothing written by McDowell that did not give some kind of testimonial, with the exception of the 1981 book Reasons Skeptics should Consider Christianity, coauthored with a Don Stewart. The kicker is that I also found a full length biography of McDowell written in 1981 by Evangelical writer Joe Musser. In spite of being quite detailed, the book said nothing about McDowell's alleged travels to Europe, and described him as having done his research as part of a term paper and having attended a local church during the process of his conversion. I also noticed a handful of other red flags: the way the 1999 edition of McDowell's book awkwardly inserted the Eurotrip stuff into what was otherwise mostly the same exact version of his story that had appeared a few years earlier, the fact that his "leaving the university" did not keep him from graduating on time from the two-year college he was attending, and the fact that McDowell's background as described by Musser (family suffering financially because of an intrafamilial lawsuit, college funded by work and military) wouldn't have given him much in the way of resources to use traveling.

I sent an e-mail to McDowell's organization, and after a little under two months got McDowell on the phone. The first thing he did was to insist that Joe Musser had gotten his story wrong, specifically emphasizing that he had written no such term paper. Various questions on my part yielded a handful of interesting bits: he said he did not take time off from school but rather traveled to Europe in the summer, he specifically went to England, France, Germany, and Switzerland, he could not name any early sources that mentioned the Europe story, and he insisted that the matter was not important (try telling that to some of McDowell's fans...)

From there I tried to get in touch with people I knew had known McDowell and might have useful information about. One such person was Glenn Morton, author of the excellent essay "Morton's Demon," about his time as a Young Earth Creationist and explaining the creationist mindset. He's described himself as having ghostwritten the section defending creationism in McDowell's book Reasons Skeptics should Consider Christianity (in the book he gets a much vaguer mention in the "acknowledgments"). Morton said he really didn't know much about that part of McDowell's life, though he had "watched controversies swirl about his story" and also made a rather skeptical mention of McDowell's claim to have been "son of the town drunk" (for what it's worth, I haven't myself seen much reason to doubt the "town drunk" part of McDowell's story, but who knows).

I had gotten a response from Morton pretty quickly, but it took much longer to get a response from Joe Musser. My first letter got no response, as did the second, only on the third try did I provoke an annoyed response. Musser said he would take McDowell's word for it, saying "Mr. McDowell has an unquestioned character and integrity [comment: Glenn Morton seems to question it], whose ministry has been endorsed by Billy Graham and other major evangelical leaders," but it was clear he had no real information. The letter ended by telling me not to contact him again.

Those are the facts. What to make of them? The obvious conclusion is that McDowell lied about having traveled to Europe. A somewhat more complicated possibility is that the story is false but McDowell has managed to convince himself of it. As Bertrand Russell once said:

More distant memories are more doubtful, particularly if there is some strong emotional reason for remembering falsely, such, for instance, as made George IV remember being at the battle of Waterloo.

On this hypothesis, McDowell is not guilty of lying, but the falsification is not entirely innocent, either: it was probably not made at random, but as the result of wanting to remember and being pressured to remember things a certain way. The possibility of being pressured is worth emphasizing, as McDowell joined Campus Crusade at a young age and I've seen signs that the organization occasionally behaves in a quite manipulative manner.

For a long time, I had great difficulty conceiving of a plausible scenario on which the story is true. However, I did eventually come up with a decent shot at doing so, and here it goes: McDowell traveled to Europe, but learned almost nothing from it, wasted a lot of time and money and at the end felt rather foolish. The feeling foolish kept him from talking about it much, but after many years he finally realized he could tell the story and most people would never realize how foolish he had been.

To explain this possibility, I need to point out one thing I've left out so far: McDowell's story as given displays an imbecilic approach to library research. I say this as one who has done extensive library research for classes, for a summer apprenticeship in the history of science department, and for personal interests. If I want to learn about a subject, I go first to the university library (mostly) and to the public library (sometimes). There's an excellent selection of introductory texts available on every subject you can imagine. Even as I get deeper in to a subject, any given book I need is going to be there at least half the time. Once I'm far enough in to really badly want a specific title, accepting no substitutes, the library has a miraculous service called Inter Library Loan, which can get even the most obscure titles most of the time. Want a book by an obscure 1950's UFO cultist who's been almost entirely forgotten today? No problem--I've done that. If I'm not satisfied by the ILL for some reason (usually it will be because I want the book to refer back to over a period of more than a month) Amazon.com will probably come through for me: even if the book's out of print, they do a very good job of working with used book sellers to get you almost anything you want.

In order for it to be necessary to travel, you generally have to be looking for the sort of book that they never let out of its climate-controlled building wing and which even professors are only allowed to look at under supervision. For example, my history of science class has spent the last week and a half on the top floor of the main UW-Madison library, looking at manuscripts of an astronomical text produced c. 1500 (and "c. 1500" refers to the manuscripts, not the original text, which was older). During the preliminaries, our guide for the exercise explained to us that scholars from other universities do come to use the collections stored in that part of the building. Obviously, that kind of work is at a much higher level than the kind you do during your first semester of self-education.

Of course, McDowell's situation would have been somewhat different. The internet was not around to support bookselling and ILL systems, but they were definitely around. I've checked a couple librarianship encyclopedias, which have indicated that ILL systems got started well before McDowell was in college. Before Amazon.com, books could be ordered directly from publishers, and if you look closely in many older books and magazines, you'll find advertisements instructing readers to do exactly that. I don't know what the state of the used book market was in McDowell's youth, but that's hardly an essential resource for library research (called "library research" for a reason). McDowell would have been disadvantaged by the fact that he was a two-year community college rather than the main university for his state, but that could have been remedied by a summer trip to a larger library within his home state, or just maybe in an adjacent state (and with a good ILL system, even that would be entirely unnecessary). None of these disadvantages would have provided the basis for taking a trip to Switzerland.

Speaking of Switzerland: can you say language barrier? French, German, and Swiss universities would have had English texts, but almost all of those would be of the sort important enough to also be widely available in the Anglophone world. The main resource of the foreign libraries would have been texts by French, German, and Swiss scholars in the original languages. Academic reading fluency in a foreign language is not easy to attain. I don't have it after seven years of Spanish classes. Immersion teaches you a language a lot faster than classes do, and I can almost-barely-not-really believe a summer of immersion could have given McDowell academic reading abilities in one foreign language. But French, German, and maybe a third (several languages are spoken in Switzerland)? Come on.

So maybe McDowell did something stupid and didn't tell anyone about it for a long time. I'm not really convinced--though college students are often naive, and McDowell doesn't come across as the sort of guy who has such an amazing intellect that he definitely would have known better, I'm not sure he could have really screwed up in such an extravagantly expensive and wasteful way. I suppose it's possible, though. As I said in the introduction, I don't really have a definite answer to these questions. Perhaps someone else will get them--we'll see.

My first Internet Infidels paper is up

Over a year ago, I did a post series critiquing William Lane Craig's apologetics textbook Reasonable Faith. A revised version of the paper is now up at Internet Infidels, for those interested.

Rampant ignorance promoted by Campus Crusade, part III

I now continue my odyssey into the strange nonsense promoted by Campus Crusade, this time foraying into the world of Biblical pseudo-scholarship.

I should start out by saying, again, that I'm trying to stick to the blatant falsehoods, though the line is once again blurry. I've previously written about how some Christian apologists have made clear that they will accept any rationalization, no matter how convoluted, in order to protect inerrancy. Where does denial end and lying begin? However, the creators of this site hath been merciful, and have included claims so nonsensical that I have plenty of fodder even while ignoring questions of who wrote the Bible.

Let's start with the section on extrabiblical confirmation of the Gospel story. Some of it is rather misleading, as with the convenient omission of the fact that the cited passage from Josephus is widely thought to be the result of tampering with the text. Ignore that: what's really silly about this passage is the claim that "This is remarkable information considering that most ancient historians focused on political and military leaders, not on obscure rabbis from distant provinces of the Roman Empire." Shall we also marvel at the fact that Josephus describes several other minor religious figures of the time, and in fact spends far more space on the Essenes than he does on Jesus (even on the assumption that what he says about Jesus is 100% authentic)? What rot.

The second section falls pretty clearly in the "criminal stupidity" category rather than the "dishonesty" category, but I resist the temptation to highlight it: they claim the Gospels fit historian's criterion for reliability because they give us multiple versions of the same story. This is also true of everything from the alleged Betty and Barney Hill alien abduction to the Vanishing Hitchhiker urban legend. Obviously historians use no such simplistic criterion. Next!

Next up, Biblical contradictions:

What apparent discrepancies do exist are more curiosity than calamity. They do not touch on any major event or article of faith.

The author goes on to cite, as representative alleged contradictions, variations on how Jesus is quoted. Know what? I don't care how willing the author is to accept convoluted contradictions, the claim that there aren't even apparent contradictions involving major events or doctrines is a lie. To give just two examples: many scholars think that the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke are irreconcilable, and the Epistle of James appears to contradict Romans on whether Abraham was saved by faith or works (the latter is significant, because it strongly suggests James was written as a rebuttal to Romans).

I've saved the biggest whooper of the night for last, though: "Textual scholarship confirms that the books of the Bible have not changed since they were first written." I am amazed that anyone would even try to tell such a lie post-Misquoting Jesus. And that's all that needs to be said about that topic.

Tags: Bible, apologetics, Campus Crusade for Christ

Hugh Ross Rick Davis lies for Jesus

Correction: On shows like this, it can be difficult to determine who's speaking (especially with four participants, as is the case here). The person responsible for what is described below is the show's host, Rick Davis, not guest Hugh Ross.

A couple weeks ago, John Loftus posted a link to a debate between Hugh Ross and Victor Stenger. I'm just getting around to listening to it, and have only had time for a small part, but I've noticed that Ross Davis lied right off the bat.

Here's what happened: Ross Davis claimed that Ezekiel 26, written in 500 BC, predicted Alexander the Great's destruction of Tyre (Alexander lived 356-323 BC). Stenger's response was that the prophecy didn't sound all that specific, though Stenger obviously wasn't acquainted with that specific prophecy. The truth is that the prophecy was actually more specific than Ross Davis made it out to be: it specifically says that the destruction of the city will be by Nebuchadnezzar, who lived 630-562 BC. Ross Davis lied about the passage.

Tag: Hugh Ross, Victor Stenger, God, Christianity, The Bible, apologetics, prophecy

PZ is wrong on debating creationists, part II

PZ has put up another post arguing we shouldn't do debates with creationists. He didn't answer any criticisms of his position (see my own criticisms of him on this point). He does, however, throw in one new argument for his side, and is the sort of howling non-sequitur that makes me wish everyone was required to take more philosophy to teach them how to avoid bad arguments: "There is almost no creative, original work on the creationist side." Not a word is said as to why this is a reason to avoid only the oral debate format, and continue with online criticism as Myers does. Aside from that, predictable opponents are a debater's dream. There's really nothing more to say about the post, it's so insubstantial. Hopefully, next time PZ will actually deal with his critics on this point, and not make such silly arguments.

Tags: PZ Myers, creationism, debates

Marx's wager

I've happened across an article by C. S. Lewis, never published in his lifetime, replying to criticism of his books by the famous biologist and Marxist J. B. S. Haldane Haldane was important in the modern evolutionary synthesis, though an odd personality: apparently, he had the habit of subjecting both himself and random volunteers to very dangerous experiments. Anyway, the article had a quote I rather like:

Detestation for any ethic which worships success is one of my chief reasons for disagreeing with most communists. In my experience they tend, when all else fails, to tell me that I ought to forward the revolution because 'it is bound to come'. One dissuaded me from my own position on the shockingly irrelevant ground that if I continued to hold it I should, in good time, be 'mown down'--argued, as a cancer might argue if it could talk, that he must be right because he could kill me.

On William Lane Craig's reply to John W. Loftus

I just found out from John that William Lane Craig has replied to his question on Lessing's Ditch. John put up an excerpt and discussion thread at his blog. Before reading what follows, I suggest reading Lessing's original argument, which I quoted in my blog series critiquing Craig.

The excerpt that I found most interesting was different than the one John posted. Here's what Craig has to say on the resurrection of Jesus on this particular occasion:

With respect to the resurrection of Jesus, one needn’t go so far as N. T. Wright when he esteems the historical probability of the empty tomb and post-mortem appearances of Jesus to be so high as to be "virtually certain, like the death of Augustus in A.D. 14 or the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70" (The Resurrection of the Son of God [Fortress: 2003], p. 710) in order to recognize that the evidence is strong enough to establish those facts, as the wide majority of New Testament scholars agree. Whether you accept a miraculous explanation of those facts is apt to depend more on your openness to supernatural explanations than on strictly historical considerations.

It's not even clear to me from this whether Craig understands Lessing's basic point, which was that while we may have pretty good reasons to believe a historical claim is true, that wouldn't give us enough certainty to stake anything of great value on the claim. The quotation of N. T. Wright suggests Craig would simply overcome the ditch by saying we have a lot more certainty about Jesus' life than Lessing realized. The passage John excerpted also seems to suggest Craig thinks that it is only people in previous eras that lacked for solid historical evidence. On the other hand, Craig says "one needn't go as far as" Wright, and then falls back on a mere majority opinion, with no mention of exactly how certain those in the majority are. This misses the fact that Lessing's challenge was meant to apply even when we have pretty good reasons to believe something. This second aspect to Craig's response suggests he either misunderstands or is actively ignoring the point of the question.

In either case, Craig is hoping that if he trumpets the alleged findings of Biblical scholarship loud enough, people will forget that at the end of the day the only evidence we have for Jesus' resurrection is the Biblical books themselves, and then only a limited subset of those, since most of them don't talk about the historical details of Jesus' alleged resurrection. Even on a charitable assessment of their credibility, there is a limit to how much certainty such a small handful of documents could give us. Here, Craig can only hope his fans won't notice this fact.

Nevertheless, the part of Craig's response John quoted does shed some light on Craig's apologetics. In essence, Craig's answer is that it doesn't matter if the evidence is weak because we can believe without it. Furthermore, it should be understood that Craig thinks we should believe Christianity no matter how good the evidence is against it. A consequence of this is that even when doing apologetics, the weakness of the evidence doesn't matter as long as he can convince the target all is well. Lessing's ditch is not a problem for Craig, since apologetics isn't about evidence--heck, evidence isn't about evidence--it's all about persuasion. This needs to be broadcast as loud as possible. I suspect most of the people Craig has wowed in public debates would think twice about trusting him if they knew this was his approach.

Tags: William Lane Craig, John Loftus, apologetics, Christianity, Jesus, resurrection

Norman Geisler's review of John W. Loftus

Those of you who read Debunking Christianity will know that the well-known Christian apologist Norman Geisler wrote a review of John W. Loftus' book and said he was recommending it to his students, in spite of disagreeing with most of it. Both John himself and Former Fundy have responded to the review. After the attention John initially gave the review, I was a little disappointed. If these posts are accurate, Geisler didn't really address many key points: the problem of evil is fended off with the moral argument without any real defense of the argument or common criticisms of it, the charge of bias is tossed off on miracles with out addressing arguments against miracles, the Outsider Test is misunderstood, and so on. I guess I shouldn't be surprised. I've read a fair amount of Geisler's work, I even own his apologetics encyclopedia, and it always feels like I'm reading a historical document from an era where there were no outspoken critics of religion and apologetics was something done to combat rumors of dissent. There's also a sort of scholastic tunnel vision that can't seriously consider whether certain philosophical assumptions might be false. I emphasize that these are criticisms I would not make of most apologists; they seem to be Geisler's peculiar failing. The linked blog posts leave me mildly curious to read Geisler's review, but I don't think I'm going to go to the trouble of ordering the single issue. I've been spending too much money on reading material of late. John, if you know where I can read it for free I wouldn't mind, but otherwise I'll pass on it.

Technoarti tags: Norman Geisler, John W. Loftus,Christianity, Evangelicals, apologetics, atheism

Mormonism vs. Christianity: a reply to Vic Reppert

Tuesday and yesterday Vic Reppert made some posts claiming that the historical evidence for Christianity is better than the evidence for Mormonism. My thoughts in reply:

First, it's absolutely necessary to make clear what we're comparing. If you want to compare our historical sources about Jesus vs. our historical sources about Joseph Smith, Mormonism wins hands down. It is arguably a Phyrric victory, though, because much of what we know about Joseph Smith is rather embarrassing (and makes you wonder what we'd know about Jesus if the historical record were better).

If you compare evidence for miracle claims, the case is more equal. Given that even many fairly conservative scholars deny gospels were written by eyewitnesses, the only thing eyewitness evidence we have for any major Christian miracle is Paul's testimony about his own vision of Jesus. On the side of Mormonism, we have a statement signed by three people attesting to their vision of the angel Moroni, which is supposed to authenticate the book of the Mormon. Mormonism does better here, if only by a little.

What Reppert wants to compare is the general historicity of the New Testament vs. Book of the Mormon. From an historical point of view, the Book of the Mormon is certainly nonsense. Why it is so edifying for Christians to have a semi-reliable record of mundane historical events is beyond me though.

Furthermore, the contest is again more equal when we compare the Book of the Mormon to many events of the Old Testament. Genesis is historically nonsense, and just as much contradicted by scientific evidence as the Book of the Mormon. It is not clear whether the exodus story is complete nonsense, but an event on the scale that the Bible claims would have left archaeological evidence that we simply don't find. The Book of Daniel bears a striking similarity to the Book of the Mormon in that its ending indicates that it was "found" long after it was allegedly written, though Daniel seems to have drawn more on actual events than the Book of the Mormon.

In general, I think claim of Christian apologists that Christianity has better historical evidence on its side than any other religion works only by ignoring modern religions like Mormonism, Spiritualism and UFO cults. As noted above, though, the information we have on modern religions tends to be embarrassing to those religions, but this should only make us suspicious of the less well documented religions. Yet that's a post for another day...

UPDATE: Here's an e-mail I found in my inbox today. I post it for the benifit of Christians who are so ready to swallow the claims of Christian apologists:

You suggested that Mormons have a slight advantage over the Bible because they
have 3 eyewitnesses versus only one for Jesus. If you grant that the gospel
authors and the author of Peter's epistles were eyewitnesses, the number goes up
to 4; but you've left out 9 more eyewitnesses to the Book of Mormon. While only
four claimed to have seen the angel (you didn't include Joseph Smith), 8 more
testified that they held the plates and examined them with their own eyes. That
brings it up to 12 vs. 4 in favor of the Book of Mormon.

As kind of an aside, I've studied Joseph Smith a great deal and I don't find
anything embarrassing--unless I believe everything everybody claims about him;
but I don't do that for either Bill Clinton or George W. Bush. I investigate it
and weigh it with a critical and reasonable eye and find that after you remove
the emotion and bias, the truth is left.

The Heroics vs. Ethics of Belief

As you can see, I've bumped up my Best of Counter Apologetics post and added the famous essay "The Ethics of Belief." I include it because I think it takes the rug out from under all attempts to rationally defend the traditional religions. This post is written to explain why.

Let us grant, for the sake of argument, all the apologetic arguments made in favor of Christianity: that there is reasonably strong evidence that the Gospels were written by their traditionally assigned authors, that their historical reliability on various points has been confirmed again and again by outside sources and never called into question by them, that the disappearance of Jesus' body from the tomb is as well-established as any fact of ancient history, and that this and other facts can only be explained by a miracle.

Suppose we grant all of these things, would it be conclusive evidence for the truth of Christianity? A few objections could be raised, but here is one serious one: no matter how much faith he has in the evidence for Christianity, ever apologist will admit that the majority of human beings are not well schooled in apologetics--or, I should say, Christian apologetics, for every religion has its defenders. The apologist must admit that those not schooled in apologetics cannot be expected to accept arguments which they have not heard made in detail. He must furthermore admit that such persons might have a hard time telling the miracle claims of Christianity apart from those of any other religion.

On top of these admissions, one further admission is unavoidable: if God is truly God, he could have avoided all of these problems by making the evidence far more conclusive. He could have written his revelation in the sky, or made all accurate copies of the Bible indestructable, or simply sent Moses to the modern world to turn some sticks into snakes in front of cameras and skeptical magicians. Why hasn't he done any of these things? After all, if they happened today they would surely be much better doccumented than any event of 2000 years ago. Is God reluctant to have his miracles well-documented? This question will seem to many much harder to answer than the question of what happened to Jesus' body (if it ineed went missing).

The same problem afflicts every religion which claims to have a revelation from God. One could admit, for example, that it is hard to understand how a mere human could have written the Qur'an yet object that this is no evidence of revelation, because the vast majority of humans do not speak the right language to judge the book's literary quality. Why hasn't God given those who cannot read the Qur'an better evidence of its divine origin?

To such questions, there is one answer that gets repeated over and over: if God had furnished better evidence, there would be no room for faith. In other words, God wanted to give men the opportunity to commit the heroic act of believing on imperfect evidence, as well as to commit that mortal sin of having the wrong opinion on religion.

This is where Clifford is useful. His argument consists of noting other examples of where correct belief is of great importance, as in the seaworthiness of the ship or accusations made against respected members of a community. He observes that in these cases, believing on faith is clearly wrong, and evidence is required.

Once we decide to use the same standard of evidence in religion as in other matters, the above explanation for the lack of evidence for religion collapses. There is nothing noble about adopting an unshakable belief that Jones is a murder based on only a little evidence. To say, "he is probably guilty, but the evidence is not enough to hang him" does not deserve eternal punishment. Therefore, anyone who wants to be consistent must admit that there is nothing noble about adopting an unshakeable belief in Christianity based on only a little evidence. Similarly, it must be admitted that it is not wicked to say, "the evidence that Jesus rose seems fairly strong, but it is not strong enough for me to base my life on."

Once this is realized, there is no longer any excuse for the flimsiness of the evidence for the traditional religions, and they must be rejected as gross falsehoods.